Chapter 7: Chapter 6 – Finishing the dungeon

The next room we entered was clearly the boss room, I could tell since it was much bigger than the other rooms and only had one creature in it, which I didn’t recognise, the room still had some smaller trees and flower patches in it however it had completely given up trying to look natural instead being a perfect square. ‘Does anyone know what that thing is.’ I asked since I needed to know what it could do to formulate a plan against it, it had a feathery body on top of thin legs that were covered in lizard scales, its tail was quite long and scaly, it had leathery wings that reminded me of a bat and a head covered in feathers that ended in a beak.

Everyone came up to the corner to look at it but no one said anything for a minute until Shizu quietly said ‘I think it’s a cockatrice, they are pretty rare and are only usually found in or around deserts, so it is understandable why none of you recognise it. They are quite fast and can temporarily turn people to stone through multiple methods, this one looks to be low level so it will most likely only be able to do that via bite.’

‘Thanks Shizu, that’ll help me with coming up with a plan.’ I said gratefully, I went silent for a minute to think of a plan before saying ‘It sounds pretty tough, but we should be able to win. Moso you use [Taunt] to make sure it can’t attack our backline while keeping your distance, you may have a high constitution, but it won’t matter how much health you have if you get turned into stone. The rest of us will use hit and run tactics, just hit it whenever you see an opening while staying behind cover so that it can’t charge at you.’

With the plan made we prepared as much as we needed to before we went into the room and started the boss fight. As soon as we entered the room the cockatrice turned to us preparing to charge, but before it could start Moso used [Taunt] on it causing it to shift its attention to him before he started to run away from the group to get it away from us.

Bill pulled back her bowstring and concentrated for a second, activating both [Trueshot] and [Critical strike], before letting the arrow fly. It flew through the air faster than I had ever seen one of her arrows go before hitting the Cockatrice in between the eyes dealing a debilitating strike. The Cockatrice was going too fast for Shizu to grab it using [Vine grasp] so instead they used it to grow a tripwire infront of the boss, unfortunately it just ran straight through not even slowing down.

The Cockatrice soon caught up with Moso and tried to peck at him but just before the attack hit he activated [Tough Skin] which caused his skin to become as hard as bark stopping the attack pretty affectively. Unfortunately the skill required a lot of mana to activate and was only up for a few seconds so instead of using it again he started to use his sword as a shield to block the attacks as running away wasn’t an option anymore. While they were clashing I rushed behind the cockatrice and used [Clean Cut] as I swung my sword through the creatures leg so fast that the blade came out without touching a drop of blood.

I kept on running to the nearest tree before it could retaliate and turned around to line up my next strike, as I was doing this Bill shot the bird two more times, one going into its wing and the other going into its back just above the tail. Shizu recast [Vinegrasp] to try and hold its legs still, getting some affect as it couldn’t move its legs while clashing with Moso but if it decided to run then it would tear through the vines pretty easily. All the while the cockatrice kept on pecking at Moso, most of the attacks were barely blocked by either the great sword or castings of [Tough skin] but two of the pecks managed to get through and hit Moso on his chest slowly petrifying him.

As I went to attack it again I saw the arrow that Bill shot at its head fall onto the floor, confused I looked at my slash I had just made to see that it was healing much faster than it should. I quickly realised that something had to be healing it so I called out ‘Shizu, something in this room is healing the boss, find it while me and Bill try to keep it busy and do some lasting damage to it’ angry at myself for not thinking that a boss would have any minions with it.

‘There are two life slimes in the trees there and there’ Shizu piped up after about a minute while pointing them out for us ‘As well as something on the other side of that tree, I can’t tell what it is as all I am sensing is an absence of anything from that area.’

‘Good job Shizu.’ I said, before I had a chance to say anything Bill had already started shooting at the life slimes, making quick work of them. During that minute Moso had been trying to keep the Cockatrice back but unfortunately he wasn’t quite fast enough, getting pecked one more time. He was also slowing down from the petrification moving through his body, if we were going to do this then we had to do it fast.

As soon as both of the life slimes had been taken care of the Cockatrice’s regeneration slowed down as my next slash didn’t disappear and the cockatrice lost some of its energy. Unfortunately Moso’s [Taunt] had ended just as I struck the Cockatrice so it was able to retaliate this time giving my wrists a nasty scratch.

Even though the [Taunt] had ended the cockatrice kept on attacking Moso knowing that he was close to succumbing to the petrification. We only got one more attack off each before Moso was fully petrified and fell over before smashing into thousands of tiny pieces causing me to wince a little, I may know that anything that happens in the dungeon will be reversed given enough time but it still hurt to see one of my friends ‘die’ infront of me.

With Moso down the cockatrice started to target me making me switch to defensive, keeping my shield between us as much as I could. Bill and Shizu kept on doing as much damage as they could and just about I felt like the Cockatrice was slowing down it switched its attention to Shizu. It had realised that it couldn’t get past my defence and it wanted to take down one more of us before we defeated it unfortunately I didn’t have [Taunt] so I couldn’t stop it. The only thing I could do was swipe it on the back of its left leg as it started to charge but it didn’t seem to care as it just kept on going.

In a panic Shizu tried to put up a tripwire made of vine in its way, but it was at this point that the thing they had sensed before made its move. To our horror we watched as the mana that was going to be used for the vine was sucked up by a null slime, which most have been what Shizu had detected before as anything that used mana to try to detect wouldn’t work, instead just finding a dead zone. With nothing stopping it the cockatrice hit Shizu, knocking them down, before pecking them in the throat, instantly killing Shizu. Now all that was me, Bill, A highly damaged cockatrice and a null slime.

In a rage I charged at the cockatrice without thinking, luckily it was turning to charge at me. A few seconds later we clashed, it raked its claws across my chest, leaving me with a big gash, but I had managed to stab it with my short sword. It started to stumble before falling on to the floor dead. I looked around for the last slime, but I couldn’t see it anywhere. ‘I already took care of it’ Bill said seeing me looking around, still in fight mode. Seeing as the fight was over I slumped to the ground tired as the adrenaline started to leave my system, a notification appeared in front of me but I was too tired to read it straight away.

As it takes the dungeon about an hour to revive anyone that died in it the two of us that were left decided to sit next to each other with a tree to our backs as we took a much-needed rest. After about a minute I had regained enough energy to read the notification, it said that I had levelled up. I was happy for the level but would deal with it later when we could all chat about it together so I just closed the notification for now.

10 minutes went past before the catgirl I had noticed earlier came up to us, looking nervous but also a little angry, and asked, while still walking to us ‘Is that it?’ I looked up at her confused as she continued ‘It only took you roughly thirty minutes to go through my dungeon that took me the better part of a week to make.’

‘Oh, you must be the dungeon master.’ I said as things clicked in my head ‘to be fair that boss of yours took down two of us before we beat it and that slime trap was very smart.’ I didn’t know why I was trying to console her but some part of me didn’t like seeing her so upset. Now that she was close enough to properly inspect I got a proper look at her, she was quite short, even being smaller than Shizu, had the typical ears, tail and claws of a catkin, her fur was a deep shade of purple that I hadn’t seen on anyone before. She just wore a plain brown toga, not even wearing any shoes

You are reading story My second life as a dungeon at novel35.com

‘Mm, Meg’s great, isn’t she? And that slime trap was something that I thought of while I was waiting for you to turn up.’ She said, cheering up a bit although I wasn’t too happy that she was gloating about killing two of my friends ‘but you blasted through the slimes in the other two rooms. Oh, also it would be more accurate to say that I am both dungeon and master although I try to forget the part about how I am actually the dungeon. Just call me Liz please.’

‘I’m Bill, this is Hugo’ Bill said in a stony tone, obviously sharing my sentiment ‘The one ‘Meg’ ripped the throat of is called Shizu and the pile of rubble is called Moso. Now, what do you want with us?’

‘Well I am new to this whole being a dungeon business so I wanted to see what you think of this place and how I could improve it.’ Liz said, sitting down about 5 feet away from us ‘Once your two party members are revived I have a request for you as a party and then you can be on your way. While we wait for those two to be fixed I wanted to have a chat with you two about how to improve my dungeon.’

‘I hope you know this is very unorthodox, usually dungeons don’t talk to anyone even if they are awakened.’ I said, not fully opening up to this strange person ‘Also, why should we help you at all, it’ll just make this place harder for anyone else, maybe us if we come back in the future, to get past.’

‘From what I understand the whole reason I am here is to be unorthodox, you don’t have to help me with anything if you don’t want to.’ Liz said, looking a bit down ‘Even if your help does make my dungeon harder it will only help you. I am sure you know that the system gives a reward based on the difficulty of what you do so any increase in difficulty will just mean that you will get a bigger reward for completing it’

‘I suppose that is true but I still don’t fully trust you’ I said, deciding to help her as we had nothing else to do for the rest of the hour ‘First you should know that this is just the first floor so very few people are going to struggle with it. Secondly I think that this place is very pretty, but it is very dark so you should make the canopy a bit thinner to let some light in.’

‘I agree with Hugo, but I would also like to add that an easy way of making it harder would be to make it longer and test people’s endurance.’ Bill said, deciding to trust my gut feeling and also letting her guard down. ‘You’ll need mostly easy fights with a few hard fights sprinkled in to make sure that the adventurers don’t get complacent. A good benchmark for the first floor is between 4 and 6 fights before the floor boss with a third of them being difficult fights.’

‘Thanks for the advice!’ Liz said, happy to have some feedback ‘I didn’t realise it was too dark in here for you and it is nice to know exactly how big I should make my floor. By the way how does floor size progress? Like, how big should I make my second floor?’

‘Usually each floor increases in size by about half of the previous floor so the next floor should have between 6 and 9 fights before the floor boss.’ I said, getting comfortable talking to Liz ‘Another thing is if you add in more loot chests then that will help entice more adventurers to enter and try to get it.’

We spent the rest of the hour like this, just chatting about different ideas for the dungeon and before we knew it Moso and Shizu gasped for air as they were respawned at the same time. Both of them walked over as Moso said ‘hey.’ they had been fully aware while being revived so they were able to listen in on the conversation, they just couldn’t be part of it until now. Shizu just nodded their head at Liz, too shy to say anything.

As soon as everyone had joined the circle Liz exclaimed while clapping her hand ‘Now that you are all here we can move on to the next thing I want to talk about, rewards. You did a great job defeating my first floor so I think you deserve a reward on top of what you already got from your quest’ Liz was silent for a minute to think of appropriate rewards to give to each of us.

First she went up to Shizu and materialised a book out of thin air before handing it to them and said ‘I will give you a book containing general details of the organs that are common among all the races that should help evolve your [Minor healing aura] to [Healing aura]’

Next she turned to Bill giving her another book ‘This book contains various traps used for hunting which will help give you the [trap maker] skill.’ Turning to Moso she materialised a steel bangle ‘This will help you fight any status effects like poison or petrification.’ Lastly she turned to me handing me a metal shield ‘Lastly, I will give you a better shield that is capable of using the [Taunt] skill once a day.’

‘Thanks for this’ I said, saying the gratitude that all of us felt ‘these will greatly help us get stronger’

‘It’s no problem, it used up a lot less power than what you generated for me. Anyway, onto the main reason I wanted to have this conversation. As you all know I am a new dungeon and so few people know of me yet, so would it be possible for you four to ask the local adventurers guild to set up a branch near me and talk about me as you are travelling around. I would be incredibly grateful to you and would give you some more loot the next time you are here.’

‘If that is all you want from us then it shouldn’t be any problem.’ Bill said, looking around at her party to make sure that no one had any issues before turning back to me when there weren’t any issues raised. ‘The guild already knows about you but we can tell them that you want to build a relationship with them and we’ll just tell any adventurers we come across about you.’

We chatted for a bit longer as we headed to the exit together and then said our goodbyes when we left to continue our journey.