READ NOVEL ONLINE Chapter 6 – Finishing the dungeon
The next room we entered was clearly the boss room, it was much bigger than all the other rooms and only had one creature in it, which I didn’t recognise. Like the other rooms we had been through this contained some smaller trees and flower patches however it had completely given up trying to look natural, instead being perfectly square. ‘Does anyone know what that thing is.’ I asked, I needed to know what it could do to formulate a plan against it.
It looked like an amalgamation of a chicken, lizard and a bat that had been created by some mad wizard. My first reaction was to think it was an abomination against nature but then I remembered all the freaky stuff I had come across on my travels that were completely natural and calmed down. Everyone came up to the corner to look at it but no one said anything for a minute as they tried to come up with what it was.
The silence was eventually when Shizu quietly said ‘I think it’s a cockatrice, they are pretty rare and are only usually found in or around deserts, so it is understandable why none of you recognise it. They are quite fast and can temporarily turn people to stone through multiple methods. This one looks to be a juvenile so only its bite will petrify you.’
‘Thanks Shizu, that’ll help me with coming up with a plan.’ I said gratefully, I went silent for a minute to think of a plan before saying ‘It sounds pretty tough, but we should be able to beat it. Moso you have the highest constitution out of all of us so your job will be to keep its focus on you while the rest of us deal as much damage as we can. That said petrification can’t be healed easily at our level so try to take as few hits as possible. The rest of us will use hit and run tactics, just hit it whenever you see an opening while staying behind cover so that it can’t charge at you.’
With the plan set we prepared as much as we needed to before we charged into the room and started the boss fight. As soon as the Cockatrice realised we were in its room it turned to us and prepared to charge. But before it could Moso used [Taunt] on it causing it to shift its attention to him as he was already splitting off from the group to get it away from us.
Bill pulled back her bowstring and concentrated for a second, activating both [Trueshot] and [Critical strike], before letting the arrow fly. It flew through the air faster than I had ever seen one of her arrows go before hitting the Cockatrice in between the eyes dealing a debilitating strike. Shizu tried to grab it with one of her vines but it was going too fast and just tore straight through the vine, they quickly changed tactics though and instead five vines shot out of the ground and into the cockatrice.
This only slowed it down a bit but it still dealt quite a bit of damage as there were five holes in its body all leaking blood. The Cockatrice quickly caught up with Moso and tried to peck at him but just before the attack hit Moso activated [Tough Skin]. This caused his skin to become as hard as bark just in time to stop most of the attack pretty.
Unfortunately the skill required a lot of mana to activate and maintain so it was only up for a few seconds. Luckily he now was in a position to use his sword as a shield so he wouldn’t need it for a while. While they clashed I rushed behind the cockatrice and used [Clean Cut] as I swung my sword through the creature’s leg so fast that the blade came out without touching a drop of blood.
Before the Cockatrice could retaliate I jumped back, out of the reach of its talons, before lining up my next strike. As I was doing this Bill shot the bird two more times, one going into its wing and the other going into its back just above the tail. Now that the boss was standing relatively still Shizu was able to restrain its legs slightly with vines. This slowed the Cockatrice down but if it decided to run when the taunt wore off them it wouldn’t be able to stop the boss.
All the while the Cockatrice kept on pecking at Moso, he managed to just barely block most of the attacks but two pecks managed to get through and hit Moso on his chest. As I struck it again I noticed that the area around the hits were slowly going grey, a sure sign that the petrification process had started, we would have to end this fight fast. Unfortunately at the same moment I saw one of Bill’s arrows get forced out of its head and fall on the floor.
This confused me as nothing at our level should be able to naturally regen this fast, but then I realised that it wasn’t alone like I had thought when I initially looked through the floor. As I had this realisation I shouted, ‘Shizu! Something in this room is healing the boss, find it and deal with it while the rest of us try to keep it busy.’
It may have come out a bit angrier than I intended but I was angry at myself for being so complacent just because the rest of the floor had been so easy. After about a minute of fighting I saw two sets of vines wrap around something in the trees before goo exploded out of them. ‘I found them,’ Shizu shouted as soon as they were dead.
‘Good job Shizu.’ I said during the minute that Shizu had taken to find the slimes Moso’s petrification had spread throughout his chest and a bit into his shoulders. This was slowing Moso down, causing him to get pecked an additional time which was speeding up the process slightly. We were running out of time. Luckily I noticed that the boss’s regeneration had slowed down considerably so we still had a chance.
Unfortunately Moso’s [Taunt] ended just as I struck the Cockatrice and I was too slow to react to it striking at me so it got a nasty scratch onto my wrists before I jumped away. The Cockatrice could tell that Moso was almost finished so even though the [Taunt] had ended the cockatrice kept on attacking him. We only got one more attack off each before Moso was fully petrified and fell over, smashing into thousands of tiny pieces.
I had to take in a few deep breaths and remind myself that he wasn’t dead as I never liked seeing one of my friends get hurt or ‘die’ infront of me. With Moso down the cockatrice started to target me making me switch to defensive, keeping my shield between us as much as I could. Bill and Shizu kept on doing as much damage as they could and just about I felt like the Cockatrice was slowing down it switched its attention to Shizu.
It had realised that it couldn’t get past my defence and it wanted to take down one more of us before we defeated it and, unfortunately, I didn’t have [Taunt] to stop it. The only thing I could do was swipe it on the back of its left leg as it started to charge but it didn’t seem to care as it just kept on going. In a panic Shizu tried to put up a tripwire made of vine in its way, but this was when a third slime leapt out from behind a tree and at Shizu.
Somehow the slime absorbed the mana for Shizu’s spell as it was being formed leaving the cockatrice a clear path to them. With nothing stopping it the cockatrice hit Shizu, knocking them down, before pecking them in the throat, instantly killing Shizu. Now all that was left was me, Bill, A highly damaged cockatrice and a null slime. In a rage I charged at the cockatrice without thinking, luckily it was turning to also charge at me. A few seconds later we clashed, it raked its claws across my chest, leaving me with a big gash, but I had managed to stab it in its throat. It started to stumble before falling onto the floor dead.
I looked around for the last slime, but I couldn’t see it anywhere. ‘I already took care of it,’ Bill said, seeing me looking around, still in fight mode. Now that the fight was over the adrenaline that had been pumping through my body slowly left causing me to feel drained so I sat down. A few notifications appeared in front of me but I was too tired to read them straight away so I dismissed them for now.
As it takes the dungeon an hour to revive anyone that died in it, the two of us that were left decided to sit next to each other with a tree to our backs as we took a much-needed rest. After about a minute I had regained enough energy to read the notifications, the first one said that we had levelled up while the second one said that we had completed the Quest. This meant that we were now level eight and had received the blessing of growth.
I was happy that we had succeeded but I was still angry at myself for almost failing, if I had told Shizu to check for any hiding enemies from the start then we could have beaten the cockatrice without anyone dying. I planned on having a chat with everyone once they had been revived but until then I wanted to rest so I dismissed the notification and closed my eyes.
About 10 minutes passed before I heard someone approach us, I opened my eyes and saw the catkin I had noticed earlier was nervously walking up to us. Before they reached us she asked, ‘Is that it?’ with quite a bit of disappointment in their voice, causing me to be slightly confused. ‘I knew I shouldn’t have been expecting much for my first go at this but I expected it to take longer than thirty minutes.’
‘Oh, you must be the dungeon master.’ I said as things clicked in my head ‘to be fair that boss of yours took down two of us before we beat it and that slime trap was very smart.’ I didn’t know why I was trying to console her but some part of me didn’t like seeing her so upset. Now that she wasn’t hiding up in a tree I was able to properly see what she looked like.
She was quite short, even smaller than Shizu, had the typical ears, tail and claws of a catkin, her fur was a deep shade of purple that I hadn’t seen on anyone before. All she was wearing was a plain green dress that went just below her knees, she wasn’t even wearing any shoes.
‘Mm, Meg’s great, isn’t she? And that slime trap was something that I thought of while I was waiting for you to turn up.’ She said, cheering up a bit although I wasn’t too happy that she was gloating about killing two of my friends ‘but you blasted through the slimes in the other two rooms. Oh, also it would be more accurate to say that I am both dungeon and master although I am more master than dungeon. I think. Just call me Liz please.’
‘I’m Bill, this is Hugo’ Bill said in a stony tone, obviously sharing my sentiment ‘The one ‘Meg’ ripped the throat of is called Shizu and the pile of rubble is called Moso. Now, what do you want with us?’ I could tell that she wasn’t happy with Liz but didn’t want to upset her in case she could decide not to revive our friends.
‘Well I am new to this whole being a dungeon business so I wanted to see what you think of this place and how I could improve it.’ Liz said, sitting down about five feet away from us ‘Once your two party members are revived I have a request for you as a party and then you can be on your way. While we wait for those two to be revived I wanted to have a chat with you two about how to improve my dungeon.’
‘I hope you know this is very unorthodox, usually dungeons don’t talk to anyone even if they are awakened.’ I said, not fully opening up to this strange person. ‘Also, why should we help you at all, it’ll just make this place harder for anyone else, maybe even us if we come back in the future, to get past.’
‘From what I understand the whole reason I am here is to be unorthodox, you don’t have to help me with anything if you don’t want to.’ Liz said, looking a bit down ‘Even if your help does make my dungeon harder it will only help you. I am sure you know that the system gives a reward based on the difficulty of what you do so any increase in difficulty will just mean that you will get a bigger reward for completing it.’
‘I suppose that is true but I still don’t fully trust you’ I said, deciding to help her as we had nothing else to do for the rest of the hour ‘First you should know that this is just the first floor so very few people are going to struggle with it. Secondly I think that this place is very pretty, but it is very dark so you should make the canopy a bit thinner to let some light in.’
‘I agree with Hugo, but I would also like to add that an easy way of making it harder would be to make it longer and test people’s endurance.’ Bill said, deciding to trust my gut feeling and also letting her guard down. ‘You should have mostly easy fights with a few hard fights sprinkled in to make sure that the adventurers don’t get complacent. A good benchmark for the first floor is between 4 and 6 fights before the floor boss with a third of them being difficult fights.’
‘Thanks for the advice!’ Liz said, happy to have some feedback ‘I didn’t realise it was too dark in here for you and it is nice to know exactly how big I should make my floor. By the way how does floor size progress? Like, how big should I make my second floor?’
‘In most dungeons the first ten floors all increase by half of what the previous floor is and then after that the floors can vary in size but they won’t expand so rapidly. If they did then deeper dungeons that had dozens or even hundreds of floors would never be cleared.’ I said, getting comfortable talking to Liz ‘What this means for you is if your first floor has between four and six non boss fights then your second floor should have between six and nine fights. Also you should add at least one more chest as it will entice more adventurers into your dungeon.’
We spent the rest of the hour like this, just chatting about different ideas for the dungeon and before we knew it Moso and Shizu gasped for air as they were respawned at the same time. Both of them walked over as Moso said ‘hey.’ they had been fully aware while being revived so they were able to listen in on the conversation, they just couldn’t be part of it until now. Shizu just nodded their head at Liz, too shy to say anything.
As soon as everyone had joined the circle Liz exclaimed while clapping her hand ‘Now that you are all here we can move on to the next thing I want to talk about, rewards. You did a great job defeating my first floor so I think you deserve a reward on top of what you already got from your quest and what the boss dropped’ Liz was silent for a minute to think of appropriate rewards to give to each of us.
First she went up to Shizu and materialised a book out of thin air before handing it to them and said, ‘I will give you a book that teaches a couple advanced nature affinity spells and should help you reach the next stage of [Minor Nature magic]’ Next she turned to Bill giving her another book ‘This book contains various traps used for hunting which will help give you the [trap maker] skill.’
Turning to Moso she materialised a steel bangle ‘This will increase your constitution and help you fight any status effects like poison or petrification.’ Lastly she turned to me, handing me a metal shield. ‘Lastly, this shield will give you the ability to use the [Taunt] skill once a day while being more resilient than your current shield.’
‘Thanks for this’ I said, saying the gratitude that all of us felt ‘these will greatly help us get stronger’
‘It’s no problem, it used up a lot less power than what you generated for me. Anyway, onto the main reason I wanted to have this conversation. As you all know I am a new dungeon and so few people know of me yet, so would it be possible for you four to ask the local adventurers guild to set up a branch near me and to talk about me as you are travelling around.’ Liz said, ‘I would be incredibly grateful to you and would give you some more loot the next time you are here.’
‘If that is all you want from us then it shouldn’t be any problem.’ Bill said, looking around at her party to make sure that no one had any issues before turning back to me when there weren’t any issues raised. ‘The guild already knows about you but we can tell them that you want to build a relationship with them and we’ll just tell any adventurers we come across about you.’ Liz thanked us and we continued chatting for a while after that until it was time for us to leave and we said our goodbyes while promising to come back one day the next time we passed through this area.
