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1025 Words
As the body dissolved into a skill shard, they moved on without picking it up. Tier 8 skills were quite literally beneath their notice. Essence stones and items were the only rewards they bothered to collect on this floor.
They walked for another two hours until they finally found a circular clearing in the woods with a single massive tree standing alone in the center.
Irene, their nominal leader and the other frontline fighter with Alvin, stepped forward and said, “Standard formation. Don’t f**k this up and watch out from s**t dropping from above. Don’t f**k this up.”
As she advanced with her shield at the ready, Alvin stepped out to the side and readied himself to deal damage to the boss.
Bernard, their mage, loosed a volley of [Mana Bolt]s that took the mound of monster in the side when they were halfway across the distance.
Bernard was the only one on the team Alvin actually liked, as he basically never talked and did his job competently, which was exactly what he wanted in a teammate for this delve.
The monster stood, and Alvin cursed.
The boss was thirty feet tall and had the lower body of a lobster with the upper body of a minotaur.
It also wielded a massive axe that screamed of an enhancement to his spiritual perception.
Irene [Dash]ed forward and took the hit on her shield without flinching, and Alvin took the opportunity to thrust his sword forward, using the extension enchantment in his blade to make it grow longer.
Now equipped with an extra ten feet of blade, he thrust forward and pierced a gap on the monster’s armor, just where the fur of the upper half met the shell of the lower half.
Twisting, he opened the monster up, but was unable to finish it off. As he pulled his blade back, Bethany appeared on its back and slashed with her twin daggers before jumping away just as quickly as she appeared.
The two s***h marks gathered mana until they exploded, rendering the bottom half of the monster little more than dinner.
As the monster fell, Jimmie shot one arrow, which took the monster in the eye.
It was an easy fight, as those things went.
All of them were seasoned delvers, and could delve Tier 15 rifts without much issue, so fighting at their own Tier was nothing to them.
Things would get harder, but the first three layers of Minkalla were just a warmup that could kill them at any minute.
The real issue was the other delvers, and they all knew it, which was why none of them used more than their most rudimentary skills. You could never know if others were somehow hiding in Minkalla and observing you, just waiting for a chance to cut your throat and take everything you gathered.
Bernard was walking over to the reward distortion when he paused.
Alvin was about to ask him what he was doing when a burst of energy expanded out from the mage.
Power oh so familiar.
Power he craved to have for his own.
The bastard had created his Concept.
Alvin clenched his fist as anger and envy overcame him.
Still, he didn’t attack or do anything so stupid.
He wanted what the man had, but attacking him would do them no good.
Irene was the first to speak. “Congratulations. Are you taking the first exit, or are you going to go deeper with the rest of us?”
Bernard laughed easily, but Alvin thought he heard a note of worry in the noise. Still, that might have been his wishful thinking. “Of course, I’ll stick with you guys until the fourth floor. I’m no ingrate after all.”
Alvin sneered upon hearing that. It was too polite and political. He had no doubt that the man would be exiting when the rest of them descended to the second floor. The fact that he couldn’t even stop Bernard from doing so stung even more.
Their team was carefully crafted to be a rounded unit with no weakness. Bernard was their mage and all-around knowledge expert on enchantments and formation.
Without him, things would only be more dangerous.
Alvin cursed the man for his luck as they entered the last level of this floor.
It should have been him.
He deserved to create his Concept. Not the other useless waste of Genesis Energy.
Alvin wished he could go on without them, but knew it was better to play nice for now.
For now.
Eara was lost.
The first two layers of Eternal Darkness had been fairly straightforward. Annoying, yes, but straightforward. Her team had spent centuries preparing for Minkalla, after all, and they’d put in the time preparing for Eternal Darkness just as surely as they’d prepared for all the other floors.
And it had gone well. They’d harvested Genesis Energy and amassed a veritable vault of skills, natural treasures, and items. They’d killed monsters, navigated tricky labyrinths, completed challenge rooms, and made their way through two layers of the floor.
When they appeared in the third layer, they had arrived in a dense wood where space and distance seemed to fold in on themselves. Mists occluded their already-limited senses, illusions sprung up, even the most innocuous of fallen logs revealed themselves to be mimics, and a thousand and one other strange tricks and traps conspired against them. Still, they had prevailed. Naya pushed back the fog with her magic, Brian dispelled the illusions with his arrows, and Eara killed the mimics with her axe.
They were doing well, countering everything Minkalla could throw at them.
But then, Eara had taken a wrong step, tripped and stumbled between two crossed trees, and now she couldn’t sense any of her teammates. The mists crowded in on her, the trees loomed unsettlingly over her, and while she knew it was just her imagination, she could practically hear her team yelling for her help.
At least the mimics and specters were easy enough to deal with, so she wasn’t in immediate danger, but a simple fact remained.
Eara was so, so lost.
- Writer
