Chapter 10: Chapter 10: Dungeon Delving

She stood in front of the entrance as it loomed over her, a pair of matching stone doors set directly into the cliff face, easily fifteen feet tall at minimum. The rock was rough to the touch as she ran her hand over it, tracing along the intricate carved lines covering every inch of the entryway, weaving back and forth over itself. It almost looked like writing, but it wasn’t any language she’d ever seen before.

Her immediate guess had been proven right, and pressing against the doorway had displayed a notification screen overtop of the doorway.

[Ancient Riverside Ruins] (Dungeon Lv. 5-12)

- Undiscovered.

She really was the first person here, then. Apparently skydiving hadn’t been the preferred way to leave town for any other players so far.

A brief explanation of dungeons popped up alongside the first notification, detailing how this game handled them. Dungeons remained listed as “Undiscovered” until the first player in the game had successfully found and entered it, after which they list how many players had successfully cleared it. The enemies within would scale between the dungeon’s listed levels according on the levels and party size of the group attempting the dungeon.

More importantly though…

The message mentioned that each dungeon would have unique loot, exclusive to the first group to finish it. One-of-a-kind, irreplaceable, and exclusively first come first serve.

She was only Level 2 still, and this dungeon at it’s weakest would still be over double her level. Worse still, the only way they would be able to kill anything they found inside would be Silk slowly nibbling it to death, which she was sure would even do anything to something that wasn’t as pathetically weak as herself.

But… the unique reward was still available. If she left this place for later, it was only a matter of time before someone else found this and claimed it themselves. And if it really was some impossibly special unique reward, what better way did she have of getting out of her own self-afflicted uselessness?

She took a long while weighing her options, but she eventually settled on the only reasonable choice.

She’d simply figure out how to be the first player to complete a dungeon.

...Solo.

…...Underleveled.

……...Without a single attack.

What could be easier than that?

Silk was practically bouncing in place, swinging their front legs like they were shadowboxing against the door.

“Well, I can’t say no if you’re this ready, hm?”

“Chkhk chk!!!”

“Ehe, then I’ll let you carry me through this one then while I sit it out, alright?”

“Chk…!!”

“I’m kidding, I’m kidding… mostly.”

“Chkkkkkkk…”

She sighed as Silk kept trying to pry the gate open themselves, hovering her hand over the Confirm button on her screen while the spider kept at it.

No time like the present, then.

Not waiting for herself to think better of it, she slammed the button down, and with a flash, Monica and Silk vanished into particle effects as they were whisked into the dungeon proper.

----------------------------------------

The next thing she knew, the area around her shifted completely. The river and pond were gone and, the massive doorway they’d been staring at was now behind them as the dungeon had teleported them directly inside the entrance.

The insides were much the same as the outside had been, all the interior walls and floors made of the same old, cracked, moss-covered stone. Massive pillars lined up in rows stretched out from the entrance and towards the main hallway straight ahead, with a number of side paths scattered along the other walls, the whole area littered with torn carpets, smashed furniture and pottery, and countless evenly-spaced torches glowing with a flickering purple flame.

She hadn’t expected much, but it could have at least looked as nice as the wonderful little pond right outside.

“Well… it could have been worse?”

It wasn’t exactly homely but, she wasn’t expecting a dungeon to be very welcoming to begin with anyways.

Shrugging it off, she quickly snapped herself back to attention, skittering off behind one of the pillars and peeking around the massive room while trying to stay hidden. Now wasn’t the time to be letting her guard down. While the trip here had been… effectively harmless (despite her almost dying), this was a dungeon. There was no telling how many traps and monsters would be lying in wait to ambush clueless adventurers like her.

Silk simply looked around in the middle of the room, not feeling quite as threatened by the empty room as she was.

“What, do monsters not get afraid of dungeons? You’re just as much of a target for the things in here as I am, even if you were an enemy before.”

“...Chkhk?!”

They clearly hadn’t put two and two together until now, realizing they were going to be attacked just as much as the useless witch they’d been adopted by. The spiderling skittered after her, shivering as it sat itself back on her shoulder again.

“Glad to see you’re still feeling as brave as before, hm?”

“C-Chkchk!”

“Fine, I’ll do all the exploring myself, you big baby.”

It’d only been a day together, and the pair were already bickering like old ladies with each other.

Monica, carrying a newly terrified Silk, slowly slunk her way across the room, headed for the nearest of the side paths off to their left.

The trailed wove and wound for a long ways, the passage lined with huge old photo frames, torn pieces of canvas clinging to the insides of them, long since losing whatever art they’d held before.

Fortunately, this passage had seemed relatively safe for a first choice to explore, and her sizable AGI made the trip down it go by much faster than if she’d been stuck with her real life speed.

The duo quickly reached the other end of the hallway, opening up to much smaller room than before, but still plenty massive. And that size was almost entirely unoccupied. Save for a multitude of skeletons, humanoid and otherwise, littering most of the floor.

It… would have been a bit more terrifying if the sign out front hadn’t literally said she was the first person to ever be here, confirming these skeletons were all just props, and not the rotted remains of other players.

Past the skeletal forms occupying the empty space however, something else caught her attention right away. She squinted, making out some sort of sparkle across the room…

...a chest!

A real, proper treasure chest!

The excitement made her want to break out in a sprint just to take her first ever spoils already, desperate for something new to take with her and get her build back on the right track!

She rushed forwards a few steps… and stopped dead in place again.

This seemed… easy.

Way too easy.

She had to be missing something here.

Her eyes explored the room, not daring to move an inch further in.

But there was nothing she could find that seemed off at first glance. The walls were all the same cold grey stone, as was the floor below them. Mossy patches covered most every space not already covered by scattered bones-

...Except… they didn’t, actually.

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The moss and bones covered most all of the floor, sure.

But this close to the center of the room she noticed the middle of the room seemed remarkably bare. Almost distressingly so, like someone had made sure to come polish it each and every day, even after the place had been abandoned.

She didn’t like how out of place it seemed. If this was meant to be a dungeon, there should logically be plenty of traps hiding all over like this.

The fox ducked down, collecting a few stray pieces of rubble and debris.

Wanting to test her guess, she took one of the smaller stones, hefting it in her hand a few times before giving it a short toss ahead of her.

Clack.

It struck the hard stone floor noisily, making Monica grimace a bit. Attracting the attention of any nearby monsters was the last thing she wanted right now. But she needed to be sure before she explored any more of this death trap waiting for her. She lobbed another stone ahead of her, a bit further.

Clack.

It went a few feet further this time, sliding a bit as it landed on some moss.

Clack.

The next went further still, repeating it over and over, adding a bit of distance each time.

Clack.

Clack.

Clack.

Clack.

…

…?

At about the eight foot mark, the loud clack of the rock against stone failed to come, and the stone itself was nowhere to be seen. Curious, she threw another, aiming for the same spot again.

The stone sailed true through the air, reaching the same spot she’d tossed to before… and continuing to fall, passing right through the ground like it wasn’t even there.

Aha. Clever.

Watching her step, she carefully edged closer forward, prodding the ground with her staff. And sure enough, as she reached the point her stones had passed through, her staff did the same, phasing through a nonexistent floor that seemed to start perfectly in line for where the moss stopped.

A clever little illusion, meant to catch anyone greedy enough to see an easy treasure and sprint right for it.

She carefully made her way around the edge of the pit, making sure to keep a mental note of roughly how large the pit seemed to be even though she could only estimate based on the local plantlife. It was massive, taking up most of the room, but still leaving plenty of room to walk comfortable around it on either side.

And as she reached the other side, she quickly checked the back of the room for anything further. Luckily, the invisible pit seemed to be the only obstacle this room offered, meaning the sealed chest was now properly reachable, the kitsune wasting no time before throwing it open and digging into the contents.

- 200g

- 15x Ancient Alloy

- 3x Ancient Concoction

A pile of seemingly rare crafting ingredients… not very exciting now, but maybe she could make something worth caring about out of them later. For now, they were piled into her inventory like everything else.

A bit disappointed but still motivated to keep going, she carefully edged herself around the other side of the hole, and headed back down the passage she’d come from, quickly reaching the main room once more and heading down the next side path in order, wanting to leave the main hall for last.

This hall was much more of a straight shot than the last had been, the empty picture frames entirely absent as only the flickering purple torches stretched out in perfect, even lengths from each other.

However she could tell much sooner what this chamber’s threat was than the last’s, and she carefully hugged the wall, peeking around the edge as the reached the entrance to the next room.

The clattering she’d heard on the approach had already made it obvious, but now she could see it up close.

A half dozen insectoid creatures filled the room, idly patrolling the large space. Each one stood about as tall as her, maybe a bit taller. They looked similar to praying mantises, four spindly legs emerging from a bulky abdomen that looked more like it belonged on an ant, with the last two limbs attached at the middle of a squat thorax, each of those arms being replaced with long, razor-thin blades that stretched at least three feet in length. A rounded head sat on top of that, a pair of bulging black eyes peeking out from either side of their head, with long antenna hanging over the fronts of their faces like long hair. The entire body was wrapped in a glossy black exoskeleton, giving them the appearance of knights more so than bugs.

[Insectoid Soldier] Lv. 5

Sure enough, they’d all been scaled down the maximum amount to try and sync up to her level… even if the gap was still impossibly large from where she was standing.

With how much trouble Silk alone had given her before, walking right in here would kill her before she could get a single Shock off on just one of them. She could have turned around and simply tried another path, but… sure enough, there was another shining treasure chest in this room, beckoning her in.

She was nothing if not easily bribed into poor choices.

So she was going to figure out some way to solve get past them. Preferably without getting beaten to death the second she walked in.

The group mostly seemed content to wander around the middle of the room listlessly, not really straying too close to where she was hiding, but also never getting far enough away from the chest for her to make a dash for it either. She tried to watch for any kind of pattern to their patrols, but it mostly became a few minutes of staring blankly at them without making progress.

She’d have to initiate somehow, unfortunately.

But how she needed to do it was another story. If she could separate the group up, maybe she could pull the same trick of setting them on fire like she’d done before. Not exactly a glamorous solution, but it would definitely work eventually. It wasn’t like she had many other options…

Monica backed down the hall a ways, collecting more loose stones for tossing to get their attention while staying out of sight until she was ready.

She took a deep breath, looking at her haul. About twenty or so smallish rocks, mostly all the size of her fist, perfect for throwing. Hopefully she could draw them out one by one and lure them into a fire in the main hall, and keep this all nice and slow and safe.

The trip back to the mantis room’s entrance was fast, and picking a largish rock, she got ready to start the operation.

She bounced it in one hand a few times to get a feel of the weight, before rearing back, aiming the shot carefully before-

…

-before she took a bit larger of a step forward than she meant to, losing her balance as another of the rocks fell from her arms, directly onto her toes.

Instinctively, she dropped the other rock she’d been trying to throw, the momentum sending it soaring between the bugs, conking one of them aside the ahead hard enough to illicit a surprised buzzing noise.

And as she stumbled, as if she hadn’t failed spectacularly enough already, the roughly twenty other rocks falling from her grip and clattering to the noise with an incredibly loud banging noise, the small room almost deafening to be inside.

…

...Maybe they hadn’t heard?

Picking herself up off the floor, she peered up nervously.

…

All six of them were staring directly at her, blades reflecting the torchlight.

Well, she had her fallback plan still. She scooped up Silk in her arms, the tiny spider shivering nervously.

And once more, she turned on her heel, sprinting full speed back down the hall as the mantises rapidly pursued after her.

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