Chapter 18: Chapter 18: Speeding Along

Thanks to the wonderfully remote part of town the store sat in, Prim had somehow managed to drag the trio out through the gate leading outside fast enough that no one had really noticed the bewildered kitsune or the spider trailing after them.

Past the gate, through the woods, down several hills, her employer(?) excitedly taking her on a high speed wilderness exploration as the fox eventually resigned herself to her new fate.

“What happened to wanting more of that Ancient Alloy? The dungeon is down past the river, not this way!”

“Well I know where that stuff is now, so I can get as much of it as I need once the idiots camping it for player farming decide to move on somewhere else. Right now, I need someone to help escort me for something much more important!”

“I don’t remember saying I could do escort duty!”

“That makes sense, I don’t think I ever actually asked!”

Totally oblivious to her newly acquired friend’s plight, the halfling kept up her trek off into the wilds, a nearby mountain range slowly coming closer into view as they approached.

By the time they finally stopped, Monica felt about as defeated as Silk had, limply crashing into a tree as she failed to stop herself whatsoever, slowly skidding down the side of it with half-lidded eyes.

“R… Restore…”

Gentle green light enveloped her, the small hit to her HP being refilled, but her stamina and motivation remaining critically empty.

“Here we are! Graff’s Quarry!”

The smaller girl panted, smiling and clearly the only one having survived their trip unscathed.

Silk rolled off of her back, shuffling into a shady patch beneath a tree and promptly falling asleep.

“A quarry…? You can’t sell rocks, I don’t think there’s much of a market for them.”

“We’re not here for rocks, my unelucidated compatriot! What we’re here for is riiiiight over there, set into the hillside.”

She gestured over at the almost sheer cliff face ahead of them, Monica scanning for anything at all. And sure enough, a small passage opened up behind a large boulder, just barely big enough for either of them to squeeze through.

“I found that cave yesterday not too long after character creation. But, damnedest thing, as soon as I went in it was too dark to see anything, and something really felt like making a meal out of me before I could get up any kind of light.”

“So I’m guessing you want me to cover you while we go back in there, hm?”

“Eh? No, no, of course not! You’re no tank, I’m not expecting you to protect me!”

“Oh… oh! Well, glad to hear it, I’m not exactly much of a fighter, so that’s-”

“Yep, seeing as I’m probably the tankier one between the two of us here, you’ll be going in first, while I cover you!”

“-...so kind of you.”

Sighing, the fox begrudgingly took the lead, her new friend(?) following close behind.

“Oh! Wait, right, now that we’re far enough out that we won’t run into other players, I can just…”

She popped her menu open again, navigating her inventory and popping back into her significantly more impressive Arachnomancer attire once more, happy to ditch her starting equipment yet again.

As if on cue, Prim shot forward, her specialized monocle whirring noisily as she investigated the impressive new outfit she’d changed into, poring over her from every last possible angle she could reach.

“This is… mmhmm… oh, wow… I see…! So this is what those first clear rewards look like, hm? I’d love to get a look at what other uniques there are… but all that MAG on this stuff should mean we’re safe for you to just blast a hole through anything in there, right?”

A lightbulb in her head went off, realizing she’d failed to elucidate a rather important note in her introductions.

“Oh, well, actually you see I don’t really-”

“Ah, none of that ‘being humble’ nonsense when you look like that, just get in there before we lose anymore daylight!”

Shoved bodily ahead without a chance to explain her ill-fittedness for the role she was hired for, the two of them departed, squeezed tight through the hidden entrance into the tiny quarry cave.

The inside was incredibly spacious… or, at least it felt like it was. More relevantly, it was as absolutely pitch black as described, the few scant rays of sunlight leaking through their entry passage being the only light in the chamber.

“I don’t suppose you brought a light this time? Y’know, so we don’t both get eaten alive?”

“Right, right, it’s somewhere around here…”

Prim rummaged through her inventory momentarily, before digging out an oversized metal lantern and flicking it on. Both of them were blinded momentarily, needing several moments before they could open their eyes again and take a look at the cave around them.

The main chamber they were in was just as large as it had felt like, dark brown stone around them in every direction as it extended out past where their light reached in several directions.

Perhaps more immediately important than the cave itself however, were it’s denizens. Four monsters waiting inside had instantly taken notice of them both as the light marked their positions very neatly. They were all vaguely dog-shaped, though without any fur or recognizable dog-based anatomy, as each one was composed entirely of the same piled and broken chunks of grey stone animated to move like an actual animal would.

[Mountain Stonehound] Lv. 8

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“Guess we’ll get straight to work-”

The tiny crafter was stopped by an outstretched arm before she could even draw a weapon, her companion smirking in the smug way only someone with a terribly bad idea really could.

“Ah ah ah, I’m the hired muscle, correct? Well, allow a professional dungeon champion to handle this for you~”

Monica stepped forward, radiating an aura of confidence several degrees above anything that someone with her stat spread could reasonably justify, staff dangling beside her as she made no attempt whatsoever to threaten anything but an impossibly smug grin.

The golem dogs hunched down, clearly wary as this strange new adventurer simply walked straight towards them, their danger sense flaring up immediately.

The tension in the chamber kept every single occupant frozen in place, save for the lone Gloom Mage, sporting not a single point of defense but clearly not terribly worried about it as they advanced.

Eventually, one brave enemy dared to break that cold tension, barking out in a deep, gravelly voice as they rushed forward, leaping from several feet away at their prospective prey, stony maw gaping open, jagged, rocky teeth fully on display.

It was fast, possibly as fast as any actual player Monica had seen thus far. But unfortunately for it, she was a level of fast beyond any kind of normal player. And right as those massive stone teeth ripped into where she once stood, they bit into nothing but air as she’d already dropped below the airborne attack, the early leap only making that much easier to tell the timing to dodge through them.

But even as the first of the hounds sailed over her head, clattering noisily against the floor of the cave as they skidded to a halt, two more of them had already launched forward after her, emboldened by their packmate’s attack.

The duo attack came at her head on, the smug fox quickly kicking off to the side at a forward angle, neither attacker having the turning radius to adjust in time as they were simply dodged harmlessly by a target who clearly held no intentions of counterattacking.

The first three returned for another round of attacks as the last rocky wolf remaining in the back half of the chamber joined in with its brethren, all four of them ignoring Prim entirely as their focus was locked entirely on the evasive mage amidst them.

Leaps and bites and all manner of attacks were thrown out with increasing desperation and frustration both, the clattering of animated rocks making the room almost deafening to stand in. And yet still, even as the attacks came in faster and more frequently, not a single one managed to land on her, showing no signs of tiring or slowing down at all.

And as tiny, almost impossible to notice wisps of blueish light dusted off of her on every dodge, it seemed as if each evasive motion was only getting easier for her.

After a minute or so her subtle ducks and weaves had been replaced with bouncing from one wall of the chamber to the other, laughing maniacally as the beasts struggled to even keep up with her, claws raking against the floor as they struggled to catch up.

Prim was stuck watching the entire exchange completely flabbergasted, clearly expecting the mage to have some kind of trick that had let them solo an entire dungeon blindly. But this something else entirely, the fox moving like a trained performer as increasingly frenzied attacks met only the dust left in her wake, cackling laughter drowning out the clattering footsteps of the golems pursuing her as she moved more like a wisp of sunlight than a living being.

And Monica herself couldn’t have felt much more at ease with her seemingly miserable situation, the enemies appearing to move like a slideshow presentation as she wove between them all, taking her time to add in indulgent flourishes to her evasive maneuvers for her own sake as she danced maniacally with them.

Another quiet ding from her UI marked her buff trying to add yet another stack as she dodged another seemingly lazy swing, though by now it had long since maxed out already.

[Dancer's Weave]

- Unlock: Passive Skill Scroll, requires AGI 20+

- Evading attacks raises user's AGI, up to 300%.

- Effect lost on using a basic attack or attack skill.

Currently, Monica had a base AGI stat of about 30 or so. A rather high number for anyone who had encountered her thus far, but by no means insurmountable on its own.

Her armor, however, had the wonderfully overlooked Arachnomancer set bonus, a simple skill that mainly seemed to serve the purpose of making her own Silkshots not slow her down. Flavorful more than anything, really…

...or it would have been, had she not realized earlier in the day while she was running for her life, the webbing already incorporated into her armor was accounted for in the skill, ramping her already above average speed higher still, the armor and staff together doubling her to a hair above a massive 60 AGI when fully geared.

And as if only to exacerbate the glaring disparity in speed further, a simple niche escape skill no one had ever actually bothered to try and use due to its immediately noticeable was now being used strictly offensively alongside that.

“Blowback…!”

A staff slammed into one of the stonehounds with all the momentum of a freight train behind it, the spell itself only adding even more force behind the blow as it launched the unfortunate target airborne.

Exactly as expected, Blowback itself dealt not a single point of damage. And since it didn’t, there was no reason to classify it as an attack.

“Blowback! Blowback!”

Two more of the beasts sent flying the moment her weapon met any part of them.

And since it wasn’t an attack, there was no reason for it to interrupt the buff from Dancer’s Weave whatsoever, leaving her zooming circles around her incredibly dazed enemies as she sent them flying one by one.

Despite legally not being hit by an attack of any sort, the golems themselves seemed less interested in the in-game skill designation semantics and their interactions in regards to niche and unconsidered skills the playerbase hadn’t fully explored, and more interested with the solid rock wall they had been catapulted directly into at the speed of a car driving at full tilt.

As three of the stonehounds were rapidly rendered into piles of unrecognizable debris and craters on a wall, the fourth and final of them wisely made the decision to turn tail and flee down a side tunnel, realizing it was at no point the predator in this scenario.

It didn’t get very far, a feral, manic fox almost teleporting in front of it as it ran, the last thing it saw being the head of a staff crashing down towards it as it was launched like its comrades before.

Just above 60 AGI put her at speeds rivaling that of a particularly talented professional sprinter, and not much could hope to outrun someone like that to begin with.

But as she currently stood at an insurmountable AGI of nearly 200, it had become less of a matter of outrunning an athlete, and more akin to trying to race a bullet train on foot.

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