I called out to Bella and Diane, and the three of us drove off to the new dungeon. I didn’t bother to hide the car this time, instead letting the others see how we drove through the air. It wasn’t as necessary to hide as it was in the past, so I thought that this might be a good time to start adjusting my mindset.
“What type of monsters do you suppose will be in this dungeon?” Bella asked curiously, leaning close to the window to look at the approaching ruins.
Diane looked on with an appraising gaze. “Typically, in ruins, you either fight bandits, undead, or monsters like goblins or trolls that use the place for shelter. However, given the random nature of the dungeon, it’s hard to say for certain. We should be prepared for anything.”
Bella nodded her head in confirmation. “Speaking of which… would the monsters have even had time to fill the dungeon yet?” She asked, causing both Diane and I to hesitate.
“We’ve never been to a dungeon as soon as it spawned…” I answered, shaking my head. “We don’t have any way of knowing if it is populated with monsters, or if they’re still in their spawning phase.”
“If they’re not spawned, free treasure chests.” Diane said with a firm nod, causing me to chuckle as I landed the car just outside of the gates of the ruins. There were clearly no monsters inside, but that was because this was simply the outer shell of the dungeon. The true body of the dungeon could only be entered through the front gate.
Once we were all out of the car and ready, I led the way forward, shield in hand. The interior of the dungeon looked just as ruined as the outside, with crumbling walls and shattered towers. However, unlike the clear skies that could be seen from the outside, there appeared to be a storm brewing over the interior of the dungeon, dark clouds gathered overhead.
At first, there were no monsters to be seen, so we walked through carefully, collecting any chests that we came across. In the second chest we found, there was a skill book for the Lightning Bolt skill, causing us to immediately begin paying more attention to the clouds overhead.
Eventually, we heard a sharp cry from above, the dungeon’s boss monster spawning within the storm cloud. It swept down, a skeletal bird with a five meter wingspan, wrapped in crackling lightning and dark mist.
“Level one-ninety Tempest Bone Hawk!” I called out after appraising it, taking a defensive stance with my shield. I used Killing Stare to get the boss monster focused on myself, wrapping my shield in a layer of projected energy while the other two scattered to the sides.
The monster’s jaws opened, and a thick lightning bolt struck down at my shield, scattering against the energy barrier and pressing down against me. I grunted, activating my dragon form with the Killing Stare skill. My eyes turned blood red, the scales I gained turning a bright silver.
When I pulled my shield aside to stare at the boss monster again, it visibly trembled, the clouds around its wings thinning. That was when Diane appeared behind it, her own draconic form active as she swiped her daggers at the joints of its wings.
The monster let out a low cry, starting to plummet towards the ground. Meanwhile, I heard Bella’s voice chanting from atop a nearby tower. “Sundering breath, guiding light of the stars. Mark a trail from beyond the horizon.”
A thick line of blue light shot out from the tower like a cannon, striking the head of the falling monster. I could hear a dense crack, Bella’s arrow shattering the skull of the dazed boss. With its skull destroyed, the bone hawk fell to the ground in a crumbled heap. Meanwhile, Diane landed next to the boss, looking towards Bella’s sniping location in surprise.
“Your firepower increased.” She noted with wide eyes as Bella jumped down from her perch with a smile.
“I’ve been thinking about different skill combinations I could try, now that we have the mana reduction.” She spoke in a proud tone. “I figured that if I combined Arcane Arrow and Sundering Shot with an incantation, I could build up a destructive arrow. I couldn’t have taken it out so easily without you two disabling it, though!”
Diane nodded her head, suddenly looking more competitive as she clenched her fists. “Let’s check the boss chest, and then head to the next dungeon. The skills we’ve gotten here won’t sell for very well, and undead are notorious for their low-value bodies.”
I nodded my head, looting the corpse as Bella looked around for the boss chest. She soon found it atop another tower, though unfortunately none of us received the dungeon key.
After we left, I sent the information about the dungeon to Nuoda, letting her do with it as she pleased. Meanwhile, I purchased another dungeon ticket… which turned into a second set of ruins adjacent to the first.
The three of us looked at one another with grim expressions, making our way towards this second dungeon. Inside, we were not greeted by a gathering storm, but rather by a sea of flames. The entire interior of the dungeon seemed to be burning, forcing me to erect a barrier around the three of us to protect us from the flames.
Because of the heat, we had to slow down even more than we did in the undead bird dungeon. This allowed a few monsters to begin spawning ahead of us, before we even reached the boss area. And, predictably… they were undead. Worse yet, they were burning undead. Walking, charred skeletons wrapped in auras of fire.
This dungeon was a bad match for Diane, who couldn’t leave my protective bubble without taking damage from the flames, so Bella and I quickly dispatched the few undead that spawned. The boss of this dungeon was a skeleton mage wearing a robe of flames, holding a charred staff. His fireballs cracked my projected shield, but I was able to repair it faster than he could destroy it.
Unfortunately, we weren’t lucky enough to get any skills from this dungeon, though it was easy to guess that they would drop fire magic skills. Diane’s fists clenched as we left the dungeon, looking at me with narrowed eyes. “Can we try a third dungeon? We should still be able to afford the ticket after you set aside the development money for the city.”
I knew that part of the reason she was asking this was because we had gotten yet another undead dungeon. However, a larger reason was likely because she hadn’t been able to contribute very much in these two dungeons.
I nodded my head, agreeing with her request. After all, the whole point of doing these dungeons was to earn a source of income for Fallcry. And as Diane had mentioned before, undead weren’t exactly known to have highly valuable loot. “Alright. We can give it one more try.” I promised, and her eyes practically lit up.
Thus, I purchased another dungeon ticket, hoping beyond hope that a third set of ruins wouldn’t appear. When I saw a distortion at the base of the mountain near Fallcry, my stomach nearly fell. However, instead of yet another ruined fortress appearing, what I saw was a large shrine. Its wooden frame was trimmed with gold, its large gates cracked open in invitation.
“That… does not look like an undead dungeon.” Bella pointed out, and Diane was already looking at me expectantly. With a chuckle, I pulled out the car and drove us over to this new dungeon while letting Nuoda know about the flaming undead one.
When we arrived at the third dungeon, I once again led the way, my shield at the ready. The interior of the shrine dungeon was a large, lavish hallway. The walls were lined with paintings and armored displays, with chandeliers hanging from the ceiling.
“Not exactly how I expected a shrine to look…” Bella commented as we slowly passed through the hall. My eyes swept through the area, using both Observe and Detective Analysis to constantly look for any traps in the area.
At first, it looked like everything was clear. However, as we got halfway down the hall, one of the suits of armor we passed suddenly jumped out and swung its sword. Diane was the fastest to respond, parrying the blow and jumping into the air to kick off the armor’s head with a spin.
Instead of a hollow interior, the inside of the armor seemed to be lined with mangled flesh and teeth, squirming as it controlled the armor from within. “Drake?” Diane asked, jumping back into formation as the armor readied its sword again.
I knew that I had already scanned this armor once, only to not get anything back. However, not that I scanned it again, the results had changed. “Level one hundred and fifty, a mimic!” I said, and Diane’s entire body stiffened briefly.
“Of course it’s a mimic.” She muttered under her breath, entering her draconic form. “Bella, don’t run off to find a sniping point. We don’t know what other mimics are around. Shoot everything with an arrow after we’re done with this one.” She called out, lunging forward and slicing at the mimic with shadowy blades.
Deep gashes appeared on the mimic’s armor, leaking green blood all over the floor. Bella shot her arrows into the armor as well, but they seemed to have little effect. Only when Diane separated all four of the armor’s limbs did the mimic drop to the ground, dead. And even then, she stabbed it in the chest a few times for good measure.
“Drake, see what kind of profit we can get off a mimic.” She said, backing up slowly and sweeping her eyes over the hall. “Bella, be careful not to touch anything.”
“R-right.” Bella said nervously as I collected the pieces of the mimic’s corpse, scavenging it.
Right away, I could tell that the corpse had evolved, as its name had changed. “Seventy gold from this one, though that was after an evolution. If I follow the typical pattern… that should mean fourteen gold per normal mimic.”
Diane seemed satisfied with this number, but I stood up and looked around. “I’m sure that I scanned that armor before it went active, though…” I said, but she shook her head.
“It could be a dungeon mechanic, where random items turn into mimics. Or, perhaps it has a specialized skill that allows it to avoid detection as long as it’s not moving. Bella?” Diane looked at Bella, who nodded her head and began shooting at everything in the dungeon. Whether it was a suit of armor, a painting, even the chandeliers.
However, nothing seemed to immediately react to the arrows, so Diane pursed her lips beneath her face mask. “Either they are really dedicated to hiding, or it’s a mechanic. Let’s go.” She said, gesturing for us to move forward.
Sure enough, another two armors sprang to life before we reached the end of the hall, allowing Diane to come to the conclusion that what we were dealing with was definitely a dungeon mechanic. After all, the dungeon hadn’t been around long enough for so many monsters to already be spawning.
However, the real danger came in the second room. This one was actually a room, and one that made my and Bella’s hearts drop. In the large room was a grand total of twenty golden chests, simply sitting on the floor. As before, my skills swept over them, showing that none of the chests immediately registered as monsters.
“They’re all locked.” I said, and Diane’s eyes went wide. Locked chests were incredibly rare in dungeons, as chests were typically meant to be a reward for players to receive upon reaching them. Thus, there was no reason to lock or trap it. I didn’t actually know what would be different about a chest that was locked, once it was open. Would it have better loot? Would it be re-usable like a boss chest?
Of course, the bigger problem here was that likely only one or two of these were actually chests that could be opened. The others, undoubtedly, were mimics waiting for someone to get close enough to unlock them so that they could attack. And we had already learned that the chests wouldn’t respond to attacks before they were triggered. As for just breaking all of the chests… there was a chance that could simply prevent them from spawning any loot to begin with.
“I’ll handle this.” Diane said firmly, pulling out a set of lockpicking tools from her inventory. I had no idea how long she had had those, but she seemed to know how to use them. “You two be ready to cover me once the chests start to get bitey.”
As she said that, she crouched down in front of one of the chests, slipping her pick into the lock with practiced ease. “Aren’t you worried that it’ll eat your pick?” I asked, but Diane shook her head.
“I’ve got a bunch of them. My old RPG days taught me to always carry around at least fifty spare picks.” She explained, before the chest she was working on opened with a click… and a giant, red tongue shot out from the open lid towards her.
Naturally, Bella and I were both ready to respond. I wrapped a barrier around Diane, while Bella fired a Sundering Shot directly into the open mouth of the mimic. After she was able to recover from the initial surprise, Diane joined the fray, swiftly dismantling the mimic and moving on.
It seemed luck was with her on the second chest, as it opened to reveal a set of actual loot. There were two skill books within the chest. One was the Disguise skill that all three of us had long since learned, but the other one was… Transform?
