Chapter 16: Chapter 15: Unexpected Discord

The next couple of floors went by without incident. It was mostly just Eyfura giving advice and Tess clumsily trying to disarm traps. She failed as often as she succeeded, especially towards the beginning, but even when she did fail there was still a little bit of time to get out of the way of whatever the trap did.

Not that that stopped her from getting whacked a few times when she misjudged where the trap was coming from, missed a trap completely and tripped it on accident, or simply reacted too slowly to dodge in time. Fortunately, her parasites were able to heal the damage from these missteps relatively quickly, so the damage wasn’t an issue.

Kobolds showed up on the third floor, and they were, mercifully, much less nasty than the goblins. They were short reptilian humanoids, and though their clothing was as tattered as the goblins’ clothing, it was generally much cleaner, as was their scaly skin. They were a bit tougher than goblins as well, but they still fell

Finally, the floor before the boss, Tess’s instructors told her it was time to do the Challenge. They had chosen to hold off until now to give Tess more time to get used to disarming traps, but they wanted her to get the reward before she fought the boss.

The Challenge was pretty much exactly how she had expected it to be; a long hallway filled with traps that she had to slowly work through. It was slow and tedious work, but eventually they were able to make it to the end with no more than a few bruises on Tess’s end.

She didn’t waste any time claiming her reward, giving it a quick look-over and letting the others know what it was before moving on.

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