Chapter 62 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

POV Carl

A slash of my glaive, and I was finally able to take the bear's head off. "Damn, that was a hard fight," I gathered my breath as much as I could, but a quick look at the time-keeping device on my belt told me that I was only 5 minutes ahead of the best time to beat the 16th floor.

"Shit," I had two more rooms to go; fortunately, none of them were hard fights. Well, they were, but not for me, that was if I was in the best condition. The rush through this section was not my best and did not help with my exhaustion.

Still, I took a deep breath in and checked the clock again. I had enough mana, so I should be able to win the fights easily. Covering the distance in 45 minutes to beat the current record was another question.

Damn, why did the rooms have to start being so big? I didn’t even look at the loot as I couldn’t afford the extra weight, and I didn’t want the temptation that the loot might give me. After a few steps of full-out acceleration, I dropped to a more comfortable long-distance run and kept to the edge of this room so I wouldn’t have to fight the two other groups of monsters in this room.

I was about to check the numbers again but then stopped as I needed to focus on my footing. There sometimes were stealth monsters, so I still needed to be ready for everything. This run has been interesting, and I’m glad that I can now at least understand numbers.

Everything's so much easier because of that. No wonder city folk were so much better at understanding the world around them and how to make coin. That damn orphanage manager, he should have taught us so much more.

I let the rage flow into my skill, the one that no one else has, and I could feel a burst of clean energy revitalizing me a little bit. I need to be careful; if I channel too much into it, it could trigger a berserk rage, and while wonderful for last-ditch stands and coming out victorious against stupid odds, for my current needs, it was the opposite.

Numbers have changed so much for me. It brought a smile to my face that I can now properly add and subtract without having to use my fingers. In the past, I didn’t know that I was so close to the records, and it was quite devastating to learn that I had top ten results for almost all of the fastest floor clears.

No wonder why the other members of the Runner Guild treated me so well. If only I had the courage to ask for the results and explained that I didn’t understand numbers properly.

This was also why I was pushing so hard. If numbers changed my world so much, how much would letters change it? If I get the fastest run, I get the best information available from the Runner Guild, and with it, I would be able to convince Tristan, even if he doesn't need me for protection, to teach me letters.

He was the person who almost instantly noticed that I couldn’t count when he hired me for a protection detail, and I was willing to waive the coin for that particular job if it taught me numbers while I protected him. Best decision of my life.

He helped me understand that I had problems reading properly, as things got too messed up if I focused on them too much, and that I had a hard time focusing on a singular thing if I wasn’t too interested in it.

Then he explained all that could be done with numbers, and less than a week later, I had what he called the basic necessities. For me, it was everything, and those damned merchants had been taking advantage of me for so long. On the earlier floors, this wasn’t a problem as the amount of coins we got I could easily count on my fingers, but on the later floors, a piece of loot could cost hundreds.

The face of the merchant when I told him he had given me 24 gold coins less still makes me smile. Now they haggle a bit more, and that’s the reason I wasn’t furious at them. They just gave me a high price and didn't give me all the coins. While I make more now, the haggling did bring the price close to what they were giving me before. It's also a wonderful emotion to use when I need some extra energy to keep going.

Finally, I made it to the next room and, thankfully, my memory was good enough to remember which path I needed to take so I could quickly get through this room. There are many trees in this room, and there were snakes on the branches that dropped down, so in most cases, you could just run fast enough to skip almost all of them.

You still needed to choose the correct path; otherwise, you might cause a chain reaction, and the path forward would be filled with snakes. At least that was the information another runner gave me.

The problem area was halfway into the room, where the snakes were still present, but there were also a few mountain lions whose fur was perfect for keeping hidden in the trees. Apparently, outside the dungeon, their fur was quite valuable for its strength and unique coloring.

Unfortunately, I wouldn't be able to gain that coin because if I stopped for long enough, I might have to fight a horde of snakes. When I noticed the tree shape that should indicate a mountain lion, I started to use my two skills to make my glaive sharper and another for piercing depth.

The combination of those two skills made most of the fight trivial, but I also learned it was because of my mana capacity and how much I could channel into the skill. Apparently, this was learnable, but it seems that I was particularly good at it.

My danger sense skill was not the best, but fortunately, it was fast enough to alert me that something was approaching from above and to my right. One swipe later, I had to jump and roll so the falling body of the mountain lion wouldn't crush me. My aim was a bit off as I just wanted to take the head off but ended up taking half of the front leg and shoulder plates as well.

I needed to do that five more times over the course of five minutes, and then I could keep running through the forest of snakes. The sound of them dropping down just behind me was unpleasant, but the fact they weren’t catching up meant that this room would be easy to finish.

I needed to kill three more mountain lions before I got out of this room. Fortunately, the snakes didn't follow me through the tunnel. Here, I needed to slow down a bit, as the dungeon sometimes changed up the traps.

Traps had become so much of a problem that I actually spent quite a lot of gold purchasing a unique skill stone someone had for sale up above. Activating it allowed me to see trap triggers a lot better, and sometimes even the whole trap itself. It didn’t work that well at the start, and I thought that I had been ripped off, but as I learned more about the traps and ranked up the skill, the easier everything got.

Unfortunately, I still couldn’t run through this tunnel, but getting first place wasn't more important than my life. The last room was easy; it was just a bunch of wolves and a few other monsters that I could go around.

When I reached the gate room, I was relieved when I heard the click of the timekeeping device, indicating that my run was finished. I was super nervous, but I looked down to see that I was 2 minutes and 46 seconds faster than the previous fastest time.

I almost celebrated out loud, but before I could, I noticed the tunnel leading off this room. The tunnel looked eerie, but what was even more dangerous was the three skulls above it. That was the current talk of the dungeon: what did those skulls mean?

It didn’t take long for more of them to appear: one skull for floor guardians and raid rooms. Only a few brave souls have entered the tunnel with three skulls on it, but none of them dared to go into what seems like a water level. Just the idea of it made me shiver.

I centered myself from the feeling I got and walked towards the gateway, all while mentally selecting the 16th floor's first hub station as my destination. There, I can verify my best clear time for this floor, get the information I’m after, and then hopefully make a deal with Tristan where I would share this information and in return, get him to teach me letters.