Just stepping into the dungeon with his party earned Leuen a level.
Level Up
Most recent action: Challenge Dungeon
Level: 1 -> 2
Dura: 11 -> 12
Stamina: 11 -> 12
CC: 50 -> 55
Optional Rewards(Choose one):
--
+1 Hard, Tough, Grit, and Absorption
+0.01 TA
+1 Cogni
+1 Hive
+1 Analyze
It isn’t really a choice. He picks Analyze instantly the moment he sees it offered. Sure, the first option offers 4 different stats in one single choice, but Analyze has the chance to tell him why that option is better going forward, making it superior to any amount of undefined numerical increases.
Discreetly, he puts his palm on the sword on his belt while the group takes the first steps into the dungeon.
Item: Sword_Long_Messer_A (Material_Iron) (Material_Oak_Wood)
HP: 10
Hard: 5
Tough 15
Flammable: Yes (Grip only) / 1.00
Conductivity: Yes / 3.00
M.Conductivity: Yes 0.75
--
New
--
Mana.Resonance: 1
Mana.Storage: 0/10
Enchantment: None
Weapon.Level: 1
Not much more information on that front, but the confirmation that M.Conductivity and magic have little to do with each other is interesting. He supposes that mana based things fall under Meta stats, whereas whatever ‘M’ is, it’s a purely mental thing. Maybe psychic stuff?
His actual character sheet didn’t outright change when his Analyze went up, but he gets a vague sense of having mental buttons to press. Still, he decides it wouldn’t do to be so distracted right now, he did just enter a dungeon.
Snapping back to focus, he looks over his shoulder to check that the little green haired mage is still barely a pace behind him. A look to his right shows that Ird is still on the opposite side of the hallway with Cole behind, and Lucius is walking between Essandir and Cole.
Passing his hand over the wall to his left, he checks if he can analyze dungeon walls. While it doesn’t appear as though he can check what type of Terrain it is, he does get a Material.
Material: Stone_Dungeon
HP: Item_Null, as terrain base times 10
Hard: 10
Tough: 5
Conductivity: No
M.Conductivity: No
Mana.Resonance: 0
Mana.Storage: 0/0
“What type of dungeon is this?” Leuen asks no one in particular as he eyes the torch posts on the wall, just out of reach of his hands. The torches do give off light, sure, and there aren't any blue crystals in the ceiling like in the previous dungeon, but the orange light on the stone is far too even to actually be coming from the torches themselves.
“Probably Gremlins. Torches and clean, so something in here can use tools and is smart.” Lucius answers without any signs of continuing, so Leuen decides to let it be.
Gremlins are supposed to be the Goblin/Kobold/Dubious little creature equivalent for dungeons, based on Lucius’s earlier explanation, so I guess that means traps and skirmishes followed by horde tactics?
The path doesn’t fork like the previous dungeon, instead it just curves to the right, and Leuen can see various doors and passageways veering off of the path after the curve straightens. When the group gets past the curve and halfway to the first door, Leuen sees Ird stop out of the corner of his eye, and takes it as a cue for him to stop as well.
Essandir seems to have not gotten that particular memo, as Leuen stumbles a little to catch his footing when she walks into his back.
“...Sorry…” A quiet voice squeaks from behind him as Leuen tries to make out why they’ve stopped.
The answer comes quickly when Ird draws her sword, prompting Leuen to do the same, though it is only hindsight that he realizes why. Before he could react, Ird’s blade flashed in a horizontal arc, and Leuen heard a crack followed by a clatter, and only at that sound did he realize what had happened. An arrow. She cut an arrow out of the air.
Leuen tries to trace the path the arrow must have taken, and only sees an ajar door ahead. Assuming it must have a Gremlin behind it, or a similar sort of monster, he puts his sword up in a guard and does his best to block Essandir’s body with his own.
“Archers, two of them I think.” Ird’s normally polite and feminine voice takes on a parade ground half-shout as she points to a door on Leuen’s side of the passageway. “There, go!”
Leuen spots a flash of movement near the ajar door down the hall and decides to obey without question, stepping forwards as fast as possible and throwing the door open, only to look inside and realize what Ird probably actually meant.
“That door will have the rest of the ambush, cover it” would have taken too long to say, huh.
Two things become apparent in the seconds Leuen has to react to his new situation. The first is that the specific type of dubious little creature gremlins are is ‘short red thing with yellow eyes’. The second is that he probably shouldn’t have opened that door, as twelve gremlins immediately rush to attack him.
Some have just their own nasty-looking claws, some have crudely made knives or big rocks held in their hands, but to Leuen, it doesn’t matter. The closest one to the door has a knife, and so Leuen immediately tries to swing his sword at the creature’s mid-chest height, hoping against hope that the creature will either stop charging or will receive a grievous cut.
Neither thing happens. Instead, Leuen misjudged the height of the creature, and how close it was, and ended up smashing the edge of his sword into the creature’s face at a very awkward angle and without as much power or structure as he’d intended. The end result is a spray of blackish blood, a blood curdling screech, and the vicious creature rolling on the floor clutching its face.
That was only the first of an entire room of the things, though, and the second creature, a shorter one with a rock in its hand, lunges at him the moment before he could get his sword to a ready position. Not having another option, he risk stepping forwards and pushing it away mid-jump with his palm, impacting the creature’s chest and shoving it to the floor. The rock in its hands barely misses his foot as he pulls his hand back, though he’s distracted momentarily by a popup.
Monster: Gremlin_B
HP: 8/10
--
Phys.Stat
Hard: 1
Tough: 1
Dura: Unknown
Regen: Unknown
Grit: Unknown
Absorption: Unknown
Stamina: Unknown
Regen: Unknown
CC: Unknown
M.Conductivity: Unknown
Heh? Leuen’s brain exclaims as the popup almost prevents him from batting away the third gremlin, this one with nothing but its claws, using his sword. The blood that spills from its chest after his instinctual defense is proof that at least the theory behind his defense stance works, though he still has no idea what he’s doing beyond trying to make sure the blade has as much support as possible when he swings it.
The one he pushed to the ground looks as though it’s about to get up, and since the one rolling on the floor seems to have prevented the others from getting to him as fast as he thought, he tries to stomp on its head.
Monster: Gremlin_B
HP: 6/10
--
Phys.Stat
Hard: 1
Tough: 1
Dura: Unknown
Regen: Unknown
Grit: Unknown
Absorption: Unknown
Stamina: Unknown
Regen: Unknown
CC: Unknown
M.Conductivity: Unknown
Pops up as his heel impacts the creature’s back, accompanied by a painful sounded squeal and the crack of a bone breaking. From behind him, Leuen feels a sudden rising temperature, and only manages to avoid turning around to face a new threat by the fact that gracefully, Essandir’s voice cuts above the chaos in his ears.
“Sidestep left! Blazing Lance!” Essandir commands, and Leuen obeys literal milliseconds before a lance of orange fire rockets through the door frame and sears a bowling-ball sized hole through four different gremlins. “Earthshield!”
A barrier of seemingly conjured stone sprouts up from the ground in the doorframe, up to Leuen’s diaphragm, firmly blocking off the gremlins’ path out of the room, but also breaking the hinges on the wooden door Leuen had been taking for granted as cover from the rest of the dungeon.
Fortunately, it seems he needn’t have worried, because as he checks on the rest of the party, he sees Ird and Lucius have pushed all the way to the next door on their side of the hall, roughly thirty feet away from Leuen and Essandir, and are currently covering for Cole as he fiddles with some sort of round glass bottle filled with-
“Cover your ears!” Leuen shouts the instant he realizes why the door the trio is covering is only kept open just enough for Cole to throw something through. He follows his own advice, briefly forgetting the fact that gremlins are currently trying to climb over Essandir’s makeshift wall.
He’s lucky he did, though, as the boom is loud enough to be heard even with his hands fully blocking almost everything else he was hearing. When he pulls them away to check on the barricade, he notes that the soft ringing in his ears would probably be full deafness if he hadn’t done so. He assumes, then, that using explosives inside of the dungeon is considered some sort of last resort, meaning this situation they’re in now is abnormal.
Regardless, a gremlin seems to have just about gotten over the barricade before Leuen stabs his sword through its skull, knocking it backward. Checking on Essandir, she’s still got her hands over her ears, and is leaning on the wall for support. With a glance at the trio, he spots Lucius clasp his hands together before pressing them to Ird and Cole’s backs, and assumes the healer will be running back to help him and Essandir soon.
Either way, with the much more experienced pair of Ird and Cole having just fully cleared a room, Leuen looks at the black blood on the edge of his sword and decides that it’s time to get to work stabbing away at the gremlins blocked by Essandir’s wall.
-X-X-X-
Collapsing against a wall of the last room in the hallway, Leuen wipes a bit of the black gremlin blood off of his face as he looks at the rest of the party.
“That’s not how it usually goes, is it? Ha… Ha…”
Level Up
Most recent action: Combat
Level: 2 -> 3
Dura: 12 -> 13
Stamina: 12 -> 13
Grit: 1 -> 2
Optional Rewards(Choose one):
--
+1 Hard, Tough, Grit, and Absorption
+0.01 TA
+1 Cogni
+1 Hive
Leuen looks at the level up pop-up for a moment, then immediately dismisses it, resolving not to look at any system nonsense until he’s sure he has time.
“No… Not really…” Essandir says from her place as his side, and Leuen questions why he didn’t notice her holding onto his left arm for support.
“How many were in the ambush room?” Lucius asks Leuen after checking over Ird and presumably deciding she doesn’t need any more healing.
“Eleven, I think. Then there were the five that came out of the connected room…”
“Hmm… thirty or so total in only one passageway and its connected rooms. That’s… Too many.” Cole observes, though Leuen has no idea what that means. It’s apparently Ird’s turn to speak, as everyone, Lucius included, turns to look at her.
“Only the archers had complex tools. This dungeon probably has multiple groups this size, and there weren’t any traps, they just relied on sheer numbers. Probably means the tactics and gear will get better the deeper in we go.”
Leuen decides to tune out the conversation between Lucius, Ird, and Cole as he and Essandir catch their breath. Checking his character sheet, he notes that Lucius’s little healing magic only restored him to sixteen health out of twenty six, all but confirming to him that healing magic only fixes damage dealt to durability or Dura, not to stamina. It also means he’s at three stamina left out of a maximum thirteen, which would explain why he feels so tired, but could probably still put up with the same level of exercise right now.
At some point in his musings, Essandir stopped using him for support and joined the conversation, which seemed to in turn prompt Leuen to be noticed by the group again.
“You good, rookie?” Lucius asks while offering a hand. Leuen doesn’t take the hand, but does stand and stretch to show that he isn’t down for the count.
“Yeah, just my first time being in a fight like that.” Leuen wipes his sword against his right leg before putting it back in its sheath. “So what now? Ird and you look like you’re ready to go, but Cole used his little bomb already, and…” Leuen trails off as Cole and Essandir start giving him a strange look. “What?”
“You knew what I was doing from just a glance, and you knew it was called a bomb…” Cole says quietly, almost under his breath, before a little bit of anticipation creeps into his voice. “Are you sure you’re a rookie?”
“You knew that it would damage our ears because we were indoors, you shouldn’t know that about something so rare, if you’re a rookie adventurer.” Essandir’s tone is much kinder, probably because Leuen has been fighting side by side with her for the past half hour.
“But he’s weak and barely knows what he’s doing, he hasn’t been trained.” Ird supplies, eliciting confused looks from Cole and Essandir.
“And his eyes…” Essandir trails off as she makes eye contact with Leuen.
What?
“What about my eyes?” Leuen tries to think back on his stats, on his appearance, on everything he’s done since he got here, but comes up blank on what they could be talking about.
“You mean you don’t know?” Lucius is the one to break the awkward silence by stepping between Essandir and Leuen’s shared stare. Setting his gaze on Lucius now, Leuen cocks his head slightly when Lucius immediately averts his gaze.
“The receptionist, Kara, she also didn’t want to make eye contact with me. Is there something wrong?”
Before anyone can answer, Ird’s eyes go wide and she whips around to face the door.
“Patrol, six.” The blonde swordswoman declares while drawing steel.
“We’ll talk later, but you seem to genuinely not know, so…”
