[NR] Just A Bit Of Poison - Chapter 479 (Patreon)

With a name like “trapsmith”, you might expect it to be purely a crafting skill. After all, being a smith doesn’t automatically mean you’re good at swinging a sword that you make. A trapsmith, on the other hand, is almost the exact opposite.

After all, part of what makes a good trap is how well you set it up. It doesn’t matter if the trap is assured to catch whatever walks into it, if the trap is so obvious that no one triggers it. Of course, there are skills focused on one aspect of another of traps.

You can make traps that don’t need to hide and more than enough people who don't know the first thing about setting them up can still find them. The skill trapsmith, however, is all-encompassing. That does mean that compared to more specialized skills the results won’t be quite as good. However, for what Rosha needs, it will be perfect.

Also, there is some synergy between bushcraft and trapsmith. To survive in the wild, it is helpful to know how to trap small game with snares and what have you. On the other hand, there are some things in nature that can act like a trap. Together, the two skills create the perfect combo for not just living out in the wild, but delving into this dungeon.

After all, while the traps are more artificial, they seem to be taking a lot of cues from nature as well. The spear trap was actually a perfect example. The tripwire was a vine.

While the skill trapsmith would help notice the trap. With the addition of bushcraft to point out that the tension it was under was unnatural, Rosha’s chance to notice it would have skyrocketed. Maybe not a full magnitude more, but certainly better than double.

So, with gear figured out and skills learned, the team was ready to give the dungeon another go. Of course, the first few floors aren’t exactly any easier. Jason is safer overall, but their preparations were for stuff that only showed up in the deeper floors.

Though Courtney’s antidote spells ends up being useful on the arena floor. A nasty variant ended up exploding into a cloud of poison gas when it died. It didn’t even leave any loot behind as the entire mass of the monster converted into gas. Suffice it to say, the entire arena was packed with poison.

In an ironic twist, this ended up making the arena easier. While the trio were in no way immune to the stuff, though Jason did get good at digesting the stuff. Neither were the enemy tardigroids either and it took a good while for the dungeon to remove the poison.

Mind you, after that fight, they needed to rest. Courtney was running on fumes when it came to Mana and Jason felt the strain of using his poison resistance skill actively for so long. Even Rosha wasn’t doing too hot as it isn’t like Courtney was able to keep her poison free or anything.

Courtney was only able to keep an eye on how many stacks of the poison was on her and clear it when the damage over time got too high. The only one still in top shape was Lily and that was just because Jason had to put her in the harness once the poison spread. There had simply not been enough Mana to cover three people and her smaller size meant the poison stacked up quicker.

In the end, they take three days to get back to the eighth floor. They could have managed it in two and a half, but decided they would rather face things fresh. A good idea as they’re greeted with a rather nasty trap right off the bat.

With one trap, the dungeon proves that crude doesn’t mean it can’t be clever. The trap was set up so that when triggered, a distance behind it, right up against the floor border, a bunch of spiny bushes would swing out from the side. That doesn’t sound too bad, except the back of the group is where you find healers or at least ranged attackers.

This means the trap is specifically targeted at taking out the more vulnerable members of a party. Not only that, but by using the natural fauna for the trap, it became much harder for normal rogues to find. Of course, with Rosha having just gained skills that you could almost say we’re specialized for this sort of thing, she noticed right away.

The fact that the bushes weren’t anchored to the floor like the others. How there seemed to be branches growing along the side that weren’t tangled with the rest of the stuff. And, of course, how the dungeon had used a thin plant bladder as a pressure plate.

Now, with only three people in the party, the trap would have had a little less oomph as they don’t extend as far back as a six person party would. Plus, they’re all about equally armored, so targeting the back of their group isn’t super effective. Still, it would have hurt.

Thank goodness the trap is stupidly easy to disarm. Those branches along the side? The arms of the trap and a weakness.

They needed to handle any wandering tardigroids and thus would not trigger the trap if cut. That meant all the party had to do was cut each branch one by one. Though once that was done, Rosha still triggered the pressure plate from a distance.

While she was mostly certain the spiky bushes were the only dangerous part of the trap. The plant bladders had tubes extending into the dense flora that made up the pseudo-walls of the floor. In the end, it turns out that those tubes went to the plant’s roots and not more traps to trigger, but better safe than sorry.

At this point, some groups might decide that was just how the trap worked and let their guard down. Certainly, after the trio had gone through a few more traps and a bunch of monsters, most would get a little sloppy. Rosha didn’t. Not because of some inherent drive, but rather Peter did a really good job of laying down the foundation of a good ranger.

So, when a very similar trap ended up not having roots, but rather another section that released a poison cloud, they were ready. The three of them stood well back from the trap itself, with only a wooden arrow being close enough to get engulfed.