11 – Dungeon diving

“I don’t know what you did, but you got yourself quite the protector.” Goddard, who had joined me as soon as Lisette left, said.

“I saved her back in the forest, from two Sycoraptors. Then gave her the cores.”

Goddard’s eyes grew wide.

“I can see now how that might have looked to her eyes.” I continued. “Especially because, it turns out, Sycoraptors are strong monsters. Liù oneshotted one, and I the other.”

At the mention of her name, the small pixie showed up. She saw Goddard, flipped him off, stuck out her tongue and vanished in my armor.

“She hates me.” Goddard drooped.

“You did a number on her just this morning. I know near-death, or should I say…” I lowered my voice. “Actual death. It can be a profound change to the psyche. But she doesn’t know.”

“How can I get her to forgive me? And Lisette too! You saw her predatory stare. I don’t want to die again.”

“Time. It takes time. And actual effort. Be a better person.”

“Right.”

“So, did you want to tell me something or was it just random chatting?”

“There’s a rumor… a new Guild Master has been dispatched to Noctis. He will arrive in two days. He is going to be Tier 15. Very strong. You might want to watch out.”

***

Some rituals are more gruesome than others. I just didn’t realize how much gruesome a ritual could get when I browsed through the possible things I could do to raise my strength in my mind earlier, the reality only settling in now that I had to actually do it.

I was on the fourth level of the Labirintine Dungeon, staring at a pile of 25 goblin corpses neatly stacked on top of each other at the center of a magic circle, their bodies mangled and broken, oozing blood and viscera and sighed.

Earlier at the guild I asked Lisette if she wanted to so some questing together. She in turn asked me what I wanted to do, and when I said that I needed to gain power and money she suggested we go check out the dungeon. It was a good idea, and a good way to see how strong I was without using ready-made scrolls and rituals. She said that the first floor was Tier 5, and each lower floor was one tier higher than before. Fourth floor was Tier 9, about as far down as I could comfortably go without having to ask Liù for overtime work.

Our fighting style was interesting. It took a moment to figure out the best strategy, and we had to adapt to each different environment that the dungeon threw at us. Lisette said that every time you enter the dungeon, its layout changes. As do the monsters, the only constant thing being the difficulty tier of each floor. This also meant that it was nearly impossible to find any lost adventurers who got trapped in there. However, despite the ever-changing layouts, the floors were in need of constant culling. Hence why there were loads of quests at the guild about killing monsters in the dungeon.

Pest control IV Kill 25 monsters in the fourth level of the Labirintine Dungeon. Reward: 10 gold pieces.

“Why is the reward so low?” I asked Lisette back at the guild.

“You get to keep the cores and sell them,” she replied. “They can sell for five pieces or more each, depending on the quality.”

I nodded. That explained it. It took a while to convince Lisette to split our loot equally, just as we were supposed to put in the same amount of effort in our attempt at killing things in the fights. She just wanted to give everything to me, the company and chance at pushing her limits more than enough for her.

“Nonsense, we split everything equally.” I insisted.

“I will concede to it, then.” She said with a thin smile. Her canines showed.

“Good!” I beamed back.

This is how we ended up here. Our fighting style was, as I said, interesting to say the least. The tools at my disposal were the Pebble sword, my magic sight (granted to me by the helmet), a gargantuan health and mana pool as well as stupidly strong resistances (armor), and my telekinesis.

The fights went something like this: I stood stationary, attracting all attacks while in turn attacking like a turret with my sword and Liù’s beams. Even at Tier 9, the monsters barely damaged me, and my regeneration was so fast that any damage could be brushed off very easily. While I stood at the center of the room, Lisette weaved through the mass of mad beasts with her absurd mobility, mowing them down with her blades and even her bare hands sometimes. Whenever something got too close to her, I just flexed my new telekinetic muscles and froze it in place.

The telekinesis was not very accurate or precise yet, I was still at the early stages. This meant that rather than being frozen in the air sometimes the monsters exploded in showers of blood and guts, while some other times they just went back and forth like a pendulum because I couldn’t control them. Lisette didn’t mind. She just kept killing, without caring for the blood that washed on her like a tidal wave.

She also seemed to have complete trust in me. She was so reckless, attacking everything without ever defending or dodging. She just relied on me to keep the attacks off of her.

“You need to be more careful.” I tried to say.

“Did you reach the point where you can’t keep them off of me?” She asked.

If I didn’t know her better, I would have assumed she was taunting me. However I knew that she was simply asking a genuine question, to see if she needed to change her strategy.

“No, I just…”

“Good,” she said. “Then we keep going like this. I can finally let loose and push myself to the limit. Do tell me when you can’t keep up anymore.”

I just nodded.

It took some time to kill the 25 goblins. The issue was that, being on the fourth floor, they were tanky as hell and very agile. My Pebble Sword only provided suppressive fire by now, not hitting anything at this distance with how fast the goblins were. Truly different than the goblins I was used to. Liù sometimes killed one with her tremendous beams, but she quickly got tired and her fire rate dropped considerably. I left it to Lisette to be the damage dealer, but she was only Tier 10 against 25 top tier 9 monsters: it took a while for her to whittle a monster down and kill it.

My initial assessment of Tiers was that each tier meant that the user was ten times as powerful as someone in the previous tier. However, these fights were teaching me that at least as far as the monsters were concerned, this wasn’t the case. It wasn’t that clear-cut. There were resistances, synergies, and many other factors to keep track of.

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“How strong do you think I am?” I asked Lisette after we were done. We were just piling up the corpses for the Appropriation Ritual, the ritual I had decided to go for.

“At least Tier 11 with your current equipment. That is without counting Liù and your inventory. I do not know what you have in it, and I do not know the upper limit of your summon’s strength.”

Liù protested against being called a summon. I pat her head. Despite the weird faces she was making, she was beginning to warm up to Lisette, I felt.

“How can you tell? I was beginning to take damage from tier 9 monsters!” I said.

“Yes, however you were standing stationary against a mob of 25 top tier 9 goblins.”

“Point taken.”

“My assessment is that if you push yourself, you can 1v1 a top tier 11 without need for help. That is why I say you are tier 11.”

I nodded. “I see. I think I understand now. Thank you, Lisette.”

The adventurer blushed as I smiled at her, and quickly looked away. Melina told me of the conversation she had with her the other day, and I wasn’t worried about Lisette falling in love with me anymore. It was more like… I was her first and only fried. At least in her eyes. I was sure Melina saw her as a friend, but I don’t this Lisette saw it that way.

Back to the matter at hand: the Appropriation ritual. A simple ritual, at least in theory, that grants the caster a part of the attributes of the monsters he sacrifices. In truth, the ritual is not as simple as it seems. Like all rituals, it involves a great deal of steps and preparation, materials, and a performance. To my great dismay the performance in question was to bathe in the blood of my enemies, quite literally. I needed to walk in the middle of the pile of corpses and let their energies flow into me. I would be lying if I said I didn’t take it into consideration when I chose the ritual, however now that I was looking at the steaming pile of warm bodies, green skin and red blood staining their dirty clothes… I didn’t want to do it anymore.

I took a deep breath of stale dungeon air. Lisette was watching me from outside of the magic circle and was very interested. I couldn’t back out now, not in front of her. I stepped in the pile.

The bodies began to melt around me, and their energies flowed in me like oozing fluids crawling on my skin and entering my bones.

It felt gross and bad, and I had to hold my breath in order not to taste the thick air reeking of blood and iron. When it was over, I wanted to vomit but held it in. Never in my thousands of years of life had I felt this filthy and horrible. But I couldn’t say that the ritual was a failure, on the contrary the results were so good that I was tempted to perform it again.

Ritual successful: Appropriation. You consumed the bodies of 25 Tier 9 goblins and gained the following:

• Health +12%
• Defense +31%
• Magic Defense +7%
• Strength +4%
• Mana +2%
• Health Regeneration +55%
• Mana Regeneration +1%

“Nice.”

“What did you get?” Lisette asked.

“A whole lot of attributes!” I said, then told her what I got.

“Oh. That is indeed very good. I have never seen such an easy way to grow in power.”

She seemed jealous. “I can perform this ritual on you too, if you want.”

“How much do you ask in return? I have 100 gold pieces on me.”

“Nothing!” I laughed. “Why would I ever ask you for money? You are my friend!”

“Friend…” she echoed. “I do not wish to do it for free. I do not think it is fair.”

“Okay,” I said. “I am running low on materials to do it. How about this: you acquire the materials yourself, and I perform the ritual for free. How about it?”

“That is better. Can we…” she paused.

I egged her on.

“Can we also keep adventuring together? I enjoyed the time we spent fighting together.”

I smiled. “Of course. I enjoyed it too.”

On the way back to Noctis, I gave Lisette a list of ingredients she would need to gather in order to perform the ritual. I only included common things that could be easily found nearby in the list, without including the rare stuff that was surely going to cost her a pretty penny to purchase. Besides, I had a lot of the rare stuff and only small amounts of the common stuff in my inventory, since in my old world I always assumed I could fetch the common ingredients very easily and only stockpiled on the rare ones. Here it was the same, basically, just that with me being so weak most of what was common before was rare and hard to find now.

“I will be taking a detour. I would like to do the ritual tomorrow, if you are available, so I will be gathering the ingredients tonight.” Lisette said.

I frowned. “At night?”

She nodded. “I am not scared of the dark.”

“Be careful, okay?”

She stammered. “I—I will, thank you.”

***

Lisette didn’t miss the fact that Liù waved her goodbye for the first time ever as they parted ways. She also made plans to go back to the Dungeon with Ishrin again tomorrow after lunch, which left her with a wide smile on her face. It was totally involuntary, of course, she didn’t even know she was capable of smiling naturally, but she was aware of the strange and alien feeling of warmth in her chest after Ishrin asked her if she wanted to team up again tomorrow. She liked it. She liked it a lot.

She also liked that she could finally grow in power again, thanks to this mysterious good samaritan who had somehow appeared in her life barely a couple days ago and already was doing more for her than anyone ever did before.