Chapter 102 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

Pov Carl

I walked into the tunnel, taking a few steps before I stopped and slumped against the wall. From the pouch on my side, I pulled out the hovering glowstone. It immediately started to shine, giving off a bluish-white color. The person who made this is making so much coin. They are now basically one of the required pieces of equipment for a delve that is past the 18th floor.

Not only are they incredibly useful because they follow you around, but the light they give off also helps to find traps in these tunnels. They are less useful in the rooms because many monsters like to target them, but the distraction is usually better for you, as it helps you come out of the fight alive.

If it weren’t for the bird-type monsters, I think most would be more willing to use them inside the rooms. But then again, not fighting when it's nighttime outside is good for keeping a schedule.

The 20th floor is way harder than anyone expected it to be. There are routes that seem to be the proper difficulty, but even then, it's too much for most. It's been an entire month since the 20th floor was opened, yet all of us haven’t even found the hub station yet.

I know that some already want to say that perhaps there isn’t one, but when we started to pool our information, we figured out that we had barely made any progress into the floor. At least we are starting to find way stations.

It's been a bit over a week since the big shadow guilds made an agreement to loosely work together until the first hub station was found. We believe that we know the general location because this floor is quite similar to the 19th floor. The problem is that the tunnel systems connecting the rooms are way too complex and completely different.

I have been lucky, the path I’m currently following has been straight forward. It seems to be only one route, but I’m quite certain I will not find anything like a way station or a hub station if I continue.

The last four rooms have all had the twin monsters. Some call them paired monsters, but whatever you call them, they are a nightmare. Getting through just four rooms of them made me need to take a break. I’ve also heard there were entire areas filled with rooms that only had twin monsters. That made me shiver.

Because of the 19th and 18th floors, we somewhat know where these rooms are located, but because the tunnel system is completely different from those floors, it's a bit hard to figure it out precisely. I would have liked to stay and rest for a while longer, but my runner's brain didn't accept this, so it was time to get going.

I started my jog because walking down these tunnels would have taken way too long. It was not unheard of for you to have to rest inside these tunnels before you could make it to the other side.

It didn't take long for the tunnel to slope downwards. Fortunately, I had my skills active, scanning for traps. Not too far in front of me, I noticed some pressure plates extremely well hidden. It was also quite clear that on the 20th floor, if you weren't an expert in finding traps or didn't have a skill to help you, you weren't going to progress alone.

It was easy enough to dodge these ones, but there were also traps within traps. The slope of the tunnel came to an end, and I now had to climb an almost vertical cliffside. When I got past the halfway mark, I heard the distinct sound of gears starting up.

“Damn it.” It took 5 seconds for the other side of the wall to shoot out quite large bolts. It took another 5 seconds, and different holes fired another volley of bolts. Okay, that's not too bad, and it seems that the bolts are buried deep enough into the rock that I can use them to climb faster. It's still annoying to constantly have to shift my location.

Like this, I continued for four more hours; fortunately, two of them I didn’t have to deal with any traps. The room that opened up wasn't that big, so there only should be a few monsters inside.

As soon as I stepped onto the crash, I heard the wet squishing sound. “Please don't be a water room.” When I got to the top of the small hill, I saw a large pond in the middle of the room and the creatures I was going to fight.

Thank the dungeon, there were three monsters. One was a giant lizard enjoying the water, and then there were two birds - I did not recognize the kind - who were cleaning its scales. I approached carefully, but the birds were always moving around and noticed me almost immediately.

They screeched quite loudly and then simultaneously took flight. They moved around each other in perfect unison. "Oh no," they then worked perfectly together to shoot an air twister towards me. I started to jump away, but then the lizard roared.

Numerous vines that were growing on the pond's edge jumped at me and bound me up. That damned lizard was controlling them. Were the three of them all paired together? Then I saw it; there was also a fish that slapped its tail towards me, sending a water slash.

I activated my defensive skills and put my halberd into position to block both attacks. I was still blown back and tumbled before I got back up. Now I’m mad. I roared back, which made them stop for a moment, and then I charged.

Pov dungeon core

Carl was way more durable than I expected him to be. He sprinted into the pond, and to his credit, it wasn't actually that deep, so it won’t be too big of a hinders. Perhaps I should fix that, but that would be a point in the floor fix meeting. But it would be some time before that would actually happen because the adventurers were progressing slower than I expected. The main reason seemed to be that many were still stuck on the 19th floor.

Carl didn’t seem to be scared of getting wet and happily jumped and rolled around in the water to dodge the numerous attacks. The fish then went in for a close-range attack, but it never got a proper attack off before it was bisected.

The giant lizard now started to chase after Carl, who, instead of rushing in, now started to back off. During this, he would use a skill that allowed him to use his halberd for long-range attacks.

Because of this, the birds needed to dodge and couldn't get any proper attacks in. It seems that that was exactly what Carl wanted. He let the lizard get close to him so he could use multiple skills to deliver a truly devastating attack.

It didn’t finish off the lizard as it had pretty good defensive skills, but he definitely left a decent wound. It took him about four more minutes and five strikes to finish off the lizard and another seven minutes to finally finish off both of the birds. He seemed to be completely exhausted.

Eventually, he finished collecting the loot and then searched the rest of the room before leaving and entering the tunnel that led further in. I enjoyed the cursing that followed when he saw a three-way fork.

I think he might have hoped it would be a dead end soon. He was quite wrong. There weren't many dead ends because of the extensive tunnel network I made. If you weren’t careful, you could actually get lost in some of the more complicated sections that intersected with many other tunnels.

I, however, have gotten a good feel for the 20th floor. There aren’t any major changes needed as everything is going according to my plan. The adventurer should finally find the hub station and eventually find the long route that the adventurer guild, would call the recommended path.

If you wanted to shave off weeks of travel, you better be willing to challenge some of the paired monsters. Anyone who's going to reach the 21st floor needs to prove to me that they are worthy of it.