Unbound Soul Chapter 164: Counter (Patreon)

The boss turned out to consist of a level twenty prismatic serpent brood-mother, a pair of level fourteen prismatic serpents and ten level eight prismatic serpent spawnlings. No individual monsters stronger than the anaconda emperor we'd already beaten, but this one had backup. As with the goblin leaders back in Dawnhold, the brood-mother gave a passive buff to the others while alive. They all relied on light, but not on eyesight, covered in iridescent scales through which they could somehow perceive colours and movement.

Pondering strategies, the best I could come up with was simply to shut down their vision.

"If you spam [Darklight] to cut off all light in the room, do you think you'll be able to rely on your sensory skills to fight?"

"Asks the person who tried to send me into a dungeon blindfolded," complained Cluma. "Yes, I can manage. And with my new mana sensory abilities, I can keep an eye on you, too."

"Okay, so we'll blind them all, then use our respective mana sensing skills to engage. You have [Monster Perception] too."

We stepped through the portal, the group of rainbow-coloured serpents staring at us, but not yet moving. As usual, they wouldn't take any action until we either attacked or entered the designated arena. The combat area wasn't visible, unlike the circle of differently coloured stone in Dawnhold, but we had no intention of starting the fight in that manner, so it didn't matter if we didn't know exactly where it was.

My friendly neighbourhood [Darkness Mage] held up a hand and the lights went out.

The snakes started hissing, twisting themselves, but not moving towards us. Nor did they respond when Cluma edged towards them, using [Stealth] despite the darkness to take advantage of her armour's silence enchantment. Their blind writhing prevented accurate shooting with Cluma's bow, or even my [Far Reach], but they didn't have any obvious soft targets like eyes to aim for anyway. Cluma jumped, timing her leap to land on the head of the brood-mother as it swung past, then driving her daggers through its skull. I followed up with a [Far Reach]-powered stab of my own, Cluma jumping clear as the serpent swung its tail across the top of its own head.

The surprise attack hadn't killed the brood-mother, and I couldn't follow up with lightning; the brightness would overwhelm Cluma's [Darklight]. Since they'd given no evidence of being able to detect us, I preferred to keep that advantage.

Cluma made an opportunistic attack against a spawnling, slicing deeply into it, but her daggers didn't have the reach to fully sever the body of even the smaller enemies in this room. As I'd been concerned about, they lost a lot of their effectiveness against large enemies. On the other hand, armour was nothing to them, slicing through the scales with no apparent resistance. The bleeding wounds enchantment was still going strong, too, and the rivulet of blood flowing freely from the wound would likely drain the spawnling in minutes.

I'd been complaining about the System's unphysical effect on my cereal, but that enchantment was equally weird. It didn't merely have an anticoagulant effect, causing wounds to bleed for longer, but it caused them to bleed faster. How was that possible? It would have to induce their hearts to beat faster or harder, or dilate blood vessels, or something even stranger, pulling blood towards the wound.

The brood-mother stopped writhing, lowering its full length to the ground and curling into a tight coil, then hissed. The other snakes moved blindly towards it, resting their heads on the coils, then waving their tails around. It was an interesting strategy that would indeed prevent us from closing in, but I doubted they could keep it up forever. They'd tire with all the constant movement.

Besides, we didn't need to get close.

I continued making attacks with [Far Reach] while Cluma switched to her bow. Her arrows did far less damage than her daggers, but they still did some.

Actually, the threat reduction on my own weapon did nothing here, when none of these monsters had any sort of threat perception ability. I jumped to Cluma with [Far Step] and gestured at her belt before making stabbing motions, not wanting to say anything to avoid giving our position away. Thankfully, she successfully translated my poor attempt at charades despite [Darklight] forcing her to rely on her new species' innate mana sight, and handed me a dagger.

I scattered stab wounds among the monsters, and blood poured from them all. Adding [Backstab] made the wounds even more devastating, and within minutes, every spawnling had fallen unresponsive. I returned Cluma's dagger, and she took advantage of the downed monsters to re-engage the brood-mother. Meanwhile, I went after the pair of adults, slicing them to ribbons. The monsters didn't last much longer.

"That was easy," commented Cluma as the final monsters fell.

ding
Skill [Backstab] advanced to level 5
Skill [Superimpose] advanced to level 6
Skill [Mana Sight] advanced to level 12

Multiple skill levels from a fight! The deeper dungeon was worth it just for that, although I'd earned three from the anaconda emperor, too. Maybe it was just the novelty. Nothing for [Armour Break] or [Mighty Swing], though, despite using them extensively, presumably because they'd made no difference. My enchanted weapons could cut through those monsters without the aid of artes.

The anaconda emperor had given me [Armour Break]. No wonder they used its scaly skin for the local armour.

"Because we completely shut down their perception. We could hard counter them. If you didn't have [Darklight], that would have been far harder."

Cluma hummed as I grabbed the contents of the chest and we departed back through the portal to let the next team in. I noticed a few cheers; apparently not everyone that was part of this miniature silver-mining village shared Caleb's belief in empirical evidence.

"Do you think we should do that again?" asked Cluma. "Without [Darklight] this time."

"What for?"

"Because countering them like that didn't tell us anything about how ready we are for the lower floors. We can't counter everything."

"True... But then, that's a stronger group than anything we'll see for the next few floors. Maybe we should come back when we finish floor seventeen or eighteen?"

"You don't have a spare [Detach] link left for that."

"Also true... Bah. Nah, given how busy it is here, let's not get in their way. I think we can fight our way to the bottom of the dungeon now, although the final boss can wait until Grover is finished with my new upgrades."

"Okay," said Cluma, sounding unconvinced.

"You think we should stay here for a while?" I asked, still determined not to trample over her opinions.

"No, it's not that. More like, I don't want to stay anywhere. So far, we haven't reached a point we couldn't handle, so the thought of reaching a dungeon floor that I'm not strong enough to beat, and getting stuck clearing the same floor for ages, is depressing."

"We spent a large chunk of winter clearing the Dawnhold dungeon repeatedly," I pointed out.

"Yes, but we could clear it. You were holding back the entire time, to let me learn. Now, even the two of us together are in serious danger of losing, even if we go all out."

I could see where she was coming from. If the pair of us were thrown, right now, into the twentieth floor boss chamber, we would almost certainly lose. Even against the floor twenty mobs, we'd probably lose. We could both use some upgrades.

We'd stupidly continued on from floor ten without letting Cluma solo the boss and earn [Victorious Underdog 2], and this one had too many underlings to risk her fighting solo. While her mana and stamina were fine, the fifty percent boost to her health pool and regeneration would have been useful. She hadn't even taken the rank one health pool skills, given that she wouldn't get them for free, unlike me, nor did she have an additional soul point supply. Perhaps I should talk her into buying them; it would only be two soul points for the pair.

She could still get the title from floor twenty, once we reached it. That wouldn't be long. But what then? She could advance to rank three before facing the hydra without missing out on [Proficient Delver], but how long would that take?

But if all she wanted was to shake things up a bit, instead of grinding levels of the same floor for weeks on end...

"We could visit other dungeons if we get bored of training in this one," I pointed out. "I've got teleport beacons at Synklisi and the Emerald Nest."

"That's a good idea, as long as it doesn't take hours to walk across one floor like here. The great dungeon would be perfect, thanks to the option to teleport to whatever floor we want without you needing to leave a link there. What's the Emerald Nest dungeon like?"

"I have no idea, beyond knowing it's fifty floors deep, but I'm going to need to drop my teleport beacon from there to free the link up for Grover's next experiment."

"Okay, we'll keep going here, then, and have an occasional day out in Synklisi if we want to mix things up. But for now, home time. We must have been here for more than six hours by now."

"Almost seven," I replied, checking [Clock]. The tougher monsters on the couple of floors had slowed us down slightly compared to what we'd managed higher up, but we were still doing far better than the projected three hours per floor.

"Yeah, I need to sleep. Maybe I can evolve [Hyperactive] into something that stops me needing it."

I smiled, remembering my first year in this world, and how I'd wished for a trait like that.

"You can set up camping equipment over there," said Caleb, walking up to us and pointing to where we'd seen a team on bedrolls earlier. "Glad to see you proved me right."

"Actually, we're heading back to Dawnhold," I said, plucking out my usual tooth and tossing it to the floor.

ding
Skill [Detach] advanced to level 10
Skill [Shelter] advanced to level 7

Oh, more skills! More links were just what I needed right now, and perhaps my level in [Shelter] was finally reaching the point I could make use of it in combat. I activated it again, on my real body, and managed to shift my entire hand out of reality.

"Heading back to Dawnhold? You're quitting this dungeon already? Didn't you say earlier that you'd only recently arrived?"

"No, just to sleep. We'll be back tomorrow."

Caleb blinked, and a sizeable chunk of the delvers in the room started staring. I tapped Cluma, sending her back to my house, then lowered myself to the floor, ready to invoke [Redistribute].

"What?" said someone.

"That's..." muttered someone else.

"You can teleport out of a dungeon?!" exclaimed a third, rushing over.

"And back in, too," I answered.

"What class do you need for that?" asked Caleb. "Can you carry stuff?"

"[Eldritch Mage], the complex affinity of space and body. And since I've gone through [Spatial Mage], I have [Item Box] to carry stuff."

"Hmm, not a perfect method for logistics then, given the size limitations" he said.

"I can teleport things from where I am to where I'm teleporting, like I just did with Cluma. Although she's a special case, and I can't normally do that for people." [Skilled 2] also meant my [Item Box] was far larger than most, but it probably still wouldn't beat a backpack full of item bags when it came to ingot-carrying capacity.

"Who cares about logistics!" complained a human female mage. "I thought we had a pretty good camp set up here, for being fifteen floors deep in a dungeon, but I'd never even dreamed of going home to a soft bed and a shower every night."

As I activated [Redistribute] and sent myself back home, I smiled. For a while there, I'd been worried that I was the weird one, but nope, it had been Kikrizzik that was abnormal. Of course most delvers would want to be able to sleep in their own beds instead of camping out in a dungeon.