My second life as a dungeon

My train of thought was disrupted by the whole area descending into chaos, explosions from spellcasters echoed everywhere, shouts from multiple people mingled into a single sound that made it impossible for me to tell what was being said and the clangs of swords clashing joined the discordant sound of battle. Hearing the chaos made me relieved that I wasn’t a part of the vanguard as I wasn’t sure if I would be able to keep up and pay attention to everything that was happening.

Unfortunately it also told me that monsters would soon be coming our way so I concentrated on the battlefield in front of me with an arrow knocked and the string lightly pulled back, waiting for the monsters to arrive. I didn’t have to wait long as I saw a wave of goblins running towards us and I pulled the arrow back fully before letting it fly, killing my first goblin of the day.

There were plenty of adventurers near me so we easily dispatched the first wave with an array of arrows and spells. We then spent the next hour taking out more and more goblins as they slowly started to overwhelm us. Luckily we had been grouped with two adventurers who didn’t have any ranged abilities and so hadn’t done anything yet but were ready to fight, they couldn’t go too far ahead of us as they might accidentally let a few goblins past.

The first one was a medium sized human that was wearing standard leather armour and was using a short sword and shield combination. The second one was a short gnome that also wore leather armour, except it was thinner, and used a dagger. As soon as they realised that we could no longer hold the goblins back they both started to charge their abilities so that as soon as an enemy was in range it went off.

The human spun 360 degrees with his sword out as far as it could go and it went through three of the goblin’s necks, instantly decapitating them. Meanwhile the gnome jumped on top of a goblin before quickly slicing its neck and jumping to the next before the first one even reached the floor, also taking out three goblins. They then decided to conserve their stamina by not using any of their other abilities as the human started to block attacks with his shield before stabbing the goblins while they were weak.

Meanwhile the gnome would wait for a goblin to attack before dodging out of the way and striking the attacker in a weak spot. Thanks to these two we started to push back the goblins again but I had now ran out of arrows and so had to start using one of my new spells to grow more. This not only made me start to go through my mana reserve but it was also much slower than before as I had to wait for the arrow to finish growing before I could shoot it.

After another half an hour of non-stop fighting the goblin wave stopped, the colony must have finally ran out of the basic goblins that were the weakest monster here. I could hear that the main battle was still going on and the next wave of goblins would soon arrive as the concentration of mana in the air got to a point where they would be forced to run away. Knowing this I took a few minutes to catch my breath before going around and collecting any arrows that clearly looked reusable.

As I went about my business I concentrated on my energy well, I had been fighting for well over ninety minutes so it was no wonder that it felt very close to expanding which would push me to level 10. I was incredibly close to finishing my quest which made me really excited as I would be able to travel further away and find a lot of new stuff.

After ten minutes of looking around the monsters and collecting a ton of arrows I felt like it was time to head back up to my post and wait for the next wave to arrive. I decided to check how much mana I had left and found that I still had half of it left as, luckily, creating arrows didn’t cost a lot of mana. I looked over to Val and saw the remains of one of the mana potions I had given her when we left.

This wasn’t too surprising as she was a mage that heavily relied on spells so she would be going through her reserve incredibly fast. I just hoped that she would be able to last long enough to fight for the rest of the battle. I had chosen a good time to go back to my post as I heard the sound of goblins getting closer so I stood back up and got ready for another long fight.

This time half of the goblins were warriors and the other half were archers. Unfortunately they were fighting back instead of just running away so I had to focus on the archers while letting the warriors through, this meant the melee adventurers fought this wave from the start.  Even though the other ranged adventurers were also focusing on the archers they still managed to get a few shots off so we had to start actually dodging instead of just focusing on attacking.

I now had plenty of arrows and I could tell that we would be overrun much faster than previously so I used [Quick Shot] every time it came off cooldown and I didn’t need to immediately dodge an arrow. Val had also started to cast bigger spells, both fireballs and huge tornadoes shot from her staff one after the other before smashing into a bunch of goblins and exploding.

This meant that we had managed to keep the goblins at bay for the full hour that they had run at us but we were exhausted. I ended up using my first mana potion and Val had ran out of hers, I wasn’t sure how well we would do if another wave came our way. I was out of breath, sweating a ton and felt like I might pass out any minute so I sat down and rested for as long as I could get away with.

Sometime during that fight I reached level 10 and the system sent me a notification congratulating me and asking me to choose a new skill to gain. I was busy so I instinctively dismissed it at the time. Now that we were able to rest I thought about bringing it back but I wasn’t sure if I had long enough to look through all my options and even if I did I was too tired to think about it so I decided to leave it for when we got back to the dungeon.

The sounds of battle were much quieter now than it had been before we fought the second wave so I could tell that the battle was almost over. No monsters weak enough to be forced to flee by the mana density were left so we didn’t have to worry about that. Unfortunately we couldn’t let our guard down yet as stronger monsters might end up stumbling across us. I hoped that everyone else was doing fine, we all knew that adventuring was a dangerous job but we still didn’t want to see anyone die.

My prediction came true half an hour later when I saw three squads of hobgoblins charging at us, each squad had six hobgoblins in it. Four were the standard warriors that we had fought previously but two of them were shamans that I had no experience with. There were enough scouts around so that the four in my group would only have to deal with one squad but I still knew it would be a hard fight as we were all extremely exhausted.

Because we had been allowed to rest for half an hour we had recovered almost half of our mana meaning we didn’t need to immediately use our last mana potions. I started the fight by using a [Critical shot] to take down one of the hobgoblin shamans. It had tried to dodge the attack but the arrow followed its movement, still hitting its target. Val followed my lead by extracting a boulder out of the ground and shaping it into a lance before shooting it at the other shaman.

The lance went into its shoulder and looked like it dealt a lot of damage but it didn’t take it down. The shaman retaliated by sending a bubble of acid at Val but it barely missed, a bit got onto her but it didn’t do much damage. I managed to get another shot off before the warriors reached our frontline, the arrow hit the wounded shaman in its belly causing it to fall over dead thanks to losing so much blood.

The other two members of our group weren’t sitting idly and as soon as they clashed with the hobgoblins both used an ability on the same monster. The gnome stabbed it in its arm causing it to drop its weapon and the human used this opportunity to hit the hobgoblin with an upward swing that cleaved it in half. They then quickly engaged with the other hobgoblins but they couldn’t do the same thing twice so the melee came to an impasse.

The hobgoblins were entirely focused on the other two so I used [Quick Shot] to send five shots at one of the hulking monsters. One of the shots went wide and the hobgoblin warrior managed to hit another one out of the air somehow but three shots still hit it in its chest. It looked like I hadn’t done enough damage to finish it off but it slowly crumpled to the floor as the last shot barely finished it off, Val then followed this by sending a wind scythe at one of the hobgoblins.

The invisible wave of air easily hit the monster, giving it a huge gash across its belly and causing it to recoil. The gnome then finished it off with a quick stab in its thigh that hit an artery. The last hobgoblin wasn’t going to go down without a fight though as it managed to smash into the human with enough force to push him off balance before slamming him with its huge club and sending him flying.

Seeing this I was worried that he was dead so I used my other spell that I had created over the past week while I had spare time. I concentrated mana onto one of my arrows as I focused on how nature can heal many injuries while imprinting it onto the arrow, causing it to start glowing light green. With the hard part done I aimed my bow straight up and let the arrow loose.

As the arrow shot up a cloud started to form around it until it reached about fifty metres above me. At this point the arrow dissolved into nothing, consumed by the spell, and the cloud started to grow wider and wider until it covered the whole area around us, including the other two battles. Once it had finished growing, light green water started to fall all around us and everywhere it landed nature flourished.

Flowers slowly started to grow everywhere the water touched the ground, anyone that was underneath the cloud was slowly healed and their exhaustion was alleviated. With my spell out of my hands now I ran over to the human to check on them, they still had a pulse so they were still alive and any serious injuries would be healed. I had barely managed to save them.

While I had been casting my spell Val had been casting her own and as I lay next to the human three beams of fire shot out of her staff and into the hobgoblin causing it to be set on fire despite my rain. Once the flames stopped nothing was left of the monster other than a pile of burnt ashes. Our battle had finally finished and as I looked around I could see that the other two battles had also finished.

I couldn’t hear anymore battling so I knew that the overall battle had also finally ended, although I didn’t know if the Red Rubies had found and killed the leader yet. I knew there were probably a few stragglers around but other people could deal with those, I was incredibly exhausted and barely staying awake. That last spell had taken everything out of me so I decided to let other people worry about that, instead lying down and quickly falling asleep.