(A/N: Errors. Help.)

 

Ird was apparently on a solo mission yesterday, which was why she hadn’t accompanied Voran’s plus Leuen into the dungeon. Leuen hadn’t asked directly what it was, but Ird had mentioned offhandedly to Lucius and Essandir that she finally got approval for something or other.

 

Followed by the fact that she and Cole shared a kiss when they thought no one in the group was looking, Leuen suspects the issue is her not having her noble house’s approval of her choice of partner. Understandable, he supposes. Ird’s mood is positively radiant, and Leuen is quite happy to just enjoy the cheerful atmosphere her presence has created on the walk to the dungeon this morning.

 

“Right. So, clearing the dungeon. How do?” Leuen asks Essandir at his side, who giggles a little, but responds by handing over her staff for Leuen to temporarily hold.

 

“Dungeons all have a keystone, sometimes a core, sometimes a powerful dungeon monster, sometimes it’s less obvious, but when you destroy it, the dungeon collapses a few days later. Won’t spawn any monsters until it does, either. Here.” Essandir offers Leuen a glass potion bottle filled with green liquid, something that looks like it’s straight out of a video game, in exchange for taking her staff pack. “Thought I’d make one for you, since you’re a temporary member of the party. Took me four hours last night.”

 

“Well- Thank you for spending so much time on it… but what is it?” Leuen pointedly ignores the dumbfounded look Cole is giving him once again.

 

“Healing potion, my own recipe. Everyone here can attest that they work on wounds, just as well as Lucius’s magic in fact, but the more important part is that it can stave off dungeon sickness for about a dozen hours, something I thought you might appreciate.” Essandir seems to cozy up to his side, as if expecting something, prompting Leuen to look up to Cole’s dumbfounded face for advice. After not receiving any, he looks back down at Essandir and pats her head once.

 

“I truly do. I- How expensive are these? Should I even accept it as a gift?”

 

“Stop chatting, you two. It’s about time we make full prep.” Lucius interrupts the confusing but sweet moment Leuen was having with Essandir by setting one of the massive packs shared between himself and Ird on the ground in between all five of them. “Cole, two quivers, a bomb, plus whatever else you need for lockpicking and trap disarming. Essandir, spell components, for everything you’ve prepared. Ird, do you have the-”

 

Twenty minutes of meticulous prep later, the four main members of Voran’s party look like they’re ready for a full blown war. Essandir is carrying pouches and vials of various substances on every belt and in every pocket of her robes and pants, Cole looks like he’s carrying at least a dozen different concealed weapons and gizmos, and Lucius and Ird are armed to the teeth. Literally, in Ird’s case, as the metal mask on her helmet is shaped like a roaring lion.

 

For his part, Leuen spent the prep time standing around and accepting anything thrown at him. He’s got a spare quiver and arrows for Cole on his back, he’s got one of Lucius’s spare leather breastplate-things thrown over his body, and he’s carrying a good quarter of Essandir’s total inventory of spell supplies stuffed into his pockets and tucked into his belt.

 

A pack mule, basically. The extra weight is definitely pushing his CC way past its limit, which he doesn’t like, but he understands that the success of the group may well depend on whether or not Cole has thirty more arrows or Essandir six more spells, so he’s ok with it.

 

The plan was explained as they prepared. Basically, efficiency is king. If Lucius, Ird, and himself can kill a group of enemies without expending Essandir’s magic, they will. If Cole can line up shots, they’ll sit back and let him shoot for a bit. If there’s multiple different rooms to clear, Lucius will go with Essandir and Leuen, Ird and Cole go off on their own.

 

Lucius and Ird estimate it should take a good five hours to fully clear the place, but Cole said that means clearing it out of monsters after shattering the keystone, which should take about two if it’s not a particularly big dungeon. Because of that timeframe being larger than acceptable fighting durations, they’re bringing canteens, multiple each (Leuen is lucky he remembered to buy one of his own, and was given a second to borrow), plus some dried meat and other preserved food in Ird’s pack for rest breaks, of which they’ll probably need two.

 

That prep work and planning all done, they’d entered.

 

The dungeon only had two gremlins in the entire first hallway. Of the three times Leuen had cleared it previously, this fourth and hopefully final time was actually the most interesting. Not because of the fight, that had been three seconds of Ird swinging both of her swords once each in a different room that Leuen couldn’t see. It was interesting because it reminded him of his first experience with dungeons, walking around and checking rooms, speculating on why certain things are where, and so on.

 

Pushing past that initial hallway is when the fun began.

 

“What do you say, Cole? Trapped room, ambush room, or barracks?” Lucius asks Cole, who’s fiddling with a lock that looks like iron on the front of two double doors blocking the path forward.

 

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

 

Leuen pulls his hand off of the wall. Yeah, even if I touched the lock, it would probably just be identical to Material: Iron except it would be Iron_Dungeon. No point.

 

“Um, Leuen? While he works, can I talk to you about something for a minute?” Essandir asks from behind him, prompting Ird to detach from her position next to Cole and take a supervisory position across from Leuen and Essandir.

 

“Go ahead, though I can’t promise I’ll be able to answer any questions.”

 

“Right… I wanted to ask, are you secretly a mage? Or maybe a nascent one? I could’ve sworn you just tried to use mana when you touched the wall, and there are times where you seem to space out and it looks like you’re trying to do magic.”

 

“I don’t really know what a nascent mage is, but maybe? I was just wondering what the lock is made of, and touched the wall since stuff in dungeons feel sort of… fake.” Leuen wasn’t going to disclose that much, but he figures Lucius would call him out for lying if he didn’t admit a little bit more than necessary.

 

“And there’s your eyes again.” Ird taps her foot against the faux-stone floor for a moment. “Again Essandir, I don’t think he’s a mage, I think he’s a warrior with a budding aura. Not unheard of among people as inexperienced as he is, but I don’t see what you see when you say he’s ‘trying to do magic’.”

 

“It can’t be an aura! Yours only works when you’re in a fight and in your stance, all auras are like that, they require conditions to be met before they can be activated, his eyes just sort of… do that.” Essandir waves her fingers in front of his face, prompting Leuen’s patience to finally die out completely in regards to that particular issue.

 

“What! Do! They! Do? I’ve had so many experiences since getting to this town of people refusing to make eye contact or saying my eyes are weird or whatever, what is wrong with them? I wish you’d just tell me that I look like a psycho or murderer or something so I can at least attempt to dispel what it is you think of them!”

 

Silence falls over the group for a moment, before the soft metallic clinking of Cole fiddling with the elaborate lock continues.

 

“Um… I’m sorry…” Essandir weakly offers, before stepping a few feet away from his side. Ird, who he was actually looking at when he’s had his little outburst, is pale in the face and still visibly recovering from the shock of him being pushed too far without information.

 

“Ah… Leuen… please try to calm down. And close your eyes or stop looking at her. I think you just answered your own question.” Lucius’s voice is accompanied by a hand on Leuen’s shoulder, but when Leuen turns his gaze to the man, he flinches backwards. “Yup. Definitely a nascent mage. Psion.”

 

Psion? Leuen questions, before beginning to search his brain for every mention of a term like that in all of the media he remembers from earth.

 

“And there he goes…” Lucius mutters, before offering a token explanation seemingly just to snap Leuen out of his thoughts. “Psions are the fifth type of mage, Elemental, Faith, Descestration, Blade, and Psion. Don’t know how it works, since they’re so rare, but what we’ve been experiencing isn’t your fault. Your emotions or… something or other, is manifesting as a ‘pressure’ people you’re looking at feel. That’s all.”

 

“Essandir said it felt like looking into your eyes occasionally felt like the spiky pain of limbs that have fallen asleep and are waking up, but just now… For a moment I thought I’d just been crushed by a rock…” Ird helpfully supplies.

 

With an explanation and the knowledge that his ignorance of his own status as some form of mind mage had been hurting the people around him, Leuen’s cheeks heat up and he shrinks backwards a little.

 

“I- Uh… I’m sorr-”

 

“I got it! Fuck yeah! I’m da best!” Cole shouts while frantically putting away his lockpicking tools and preparing to actually open the door.

 

As the door swings outwards from Cole’s hasty yanking on its handles, Leuen gulps. In the excitement and emotion of the moment, both the intense ‘discussion’ and Cole’s own personal battle with the lock, it had been forgotten that the group is still in what is in essence a live combat zone. One in which they’d been loudly talking and had yelled multiple times in.

 

“Earthshield!” Essandir reacts first, erecting a stone slab in front of the group that very helpfully prevents Lucius, Cole, and Leuen himself from being pincushioned by the squad of at least twelve gremlins with ranged weapons of various types.

 

The big fucker, which is what Leuen decides he’s going to call the gremlin shaped monster twice as tall as he is, manages to get its foot stuck on the lip of the rising stone and trip, leaving its leg hanging over the makeshift barricade.

 

“Bomb! Now!” Lucius shouts at Cole, who hastily begins fumbling around his pockets and belts for where he put the thing.

 

For Leuen and Ird’s part, their task is pretty simple, as the two immediately take up positions closest to the stone wall as Lucius, Cole, and Essandir fall in behind them, huddling close up to avoid the arrows, crossbow bolts, and thrown spears that manage to fly over the wall.

 

“On three! One! Two! Three!” Cole shouts, and the whole group, minus Cole and Lucius, cover their ears as best as possible while Lucius puts his hands on Ird and Leuen’s shoulders.

 

The instant the bomb goes off, shaking what feels like the entire dungeon, Lucius activates a healing spell, something Leuen only notices because he watches his HP go up by 1, the amount of damage the deafening effect of the bomb had just dealt to him. 

 

“Terminate. Wavebreak!” Essandir’s first word drops the stone wall, and her second summons up a wall of water that immediately pushes itself into the room, forcing the big fucker (which is still flailing about on the ground) into the wall, though unfortunately not killing it.

 

The scene is pure mayhem. The bomb, which is actually just an improvised fragmentation grenade, must’ve done what it was supposed to do, because the line of ranged weapon wielding gremlins is more of a ‘wall splatter’ of gremlins. Several melee gremlins, at least five, were in the ‘splash zone’ and are now black paste on the ground, plus a further ten or so that are fully shredded by the blast and the shrapnel but that didn’t get outright obliterated. They’re dead, but, less dead, something Leuen recognizes as being significant purely as a means of coping with the chaos.

 

That isn’t even half of the enemies he’d seen originally. Most of them had taken cover in the corners or in the hallway dead ahead or up the stairs to both the left and right where the dungeon presumably branches off. There’s at least fifty still left, and Leuen is seriously doubting the odds in the few seconds it takes him to rush up to the nearest gremlin and decapitate it while it’s still in shock from having had its eardrums nonsurgically mutilated.

 

“Ird! Right stairs!” Lucius shouts from behind Leuen as he dispatches the next totally helpless gremlin. At a glance, he knows what Lucius is asking of the superior swordswoman, and it doesn’t paint a very flattering picture of his own role in this encounter.

 

“I’ve got the big fucker!” Leuen shouts before he can be ordered, and immediately runs up to the recovering big fucker, aiming a slash as the massive gremlin’s achilles tendon. He connects, but the impact is less than telling, only managing to scratch the surface and send a bit of oily black blood onto his own chest. The big fucker’s recovery to a standing position is slowed, which is good, because it led to Cole landing an arrow straight through the creature’s chest and out the other side.

 

It didn’t stop moving, though, the shock of the arrow passing through only seemed to piss it off enough to yell, but it gave Leuen the time he wanted to set up a proper killing stroke, a two-handed slash with his entire body pushing into it crashing directly on the big fucker’s skull.

 

Level Up

Most recent action: Combat

Level: 5 -> 6

Dura: 15 -> 16

Stamina: 15 -> 16

Optional Rewards(Choose one):

--

+1 M.Fusion

+0.10 TA

+1 Cogni

+1 Hive

No time for that now! Leuen curses his system’s interruption as he spins his head looking for the next threat. A group of five gremlins, recovered from the shock of the blast, barreling down the leftmost stairs at him. Fortunately, another arrow dispatches one before the group reaches his striking range, but unfortunately a second group from the lower hallway is approaching on his periphery.

 

“Windlace!” Essandir’s shout spurs Leuen to action, as he simply trusts that her spell has done something about the enemies coming from the hallway.

 

Not sensing any good opportunities to manually utilize P.K.S., Leuen instead opts for a riskier tactic, lunging forwards and thrusting his sword at the closest gremlin. He impacts the creatures by skewering it through the middle and body-checking its now limp corpse, before activating his cheeky idea.

 

Activating the P.K.S. Meta.Stat.Skill really is like pressing a button and having his body do something on autopilot. He’d been about to fall over after having lost his balance mid strike, and yet in under a second and a half, he’s standing perfectly ready in his combat stance after having kicked and stabbed the nearest living gremlin to death faster than he ever could have by doing it manually. Killing the remaining two of that group is a simple matter from there, manually using P.K.S. followed by a quick slash.

 

He doesn’t have time to truly appreciate the raw efficacy of his custom skill, as the next group is upon him, though this time he notices something odd about the gremlins. Two of them have silvery bands around their joints, and two more have golden crownlike inlays on their heads.

 

“Warriors and Nobles! Lucius!” Ird shout is heard over the chaos of arrows, swords, maces, and Leuen’s own heartbeat and breathing. As Leuen blocks a strike from one of the silvered gremlin’s spear, Lucius shouts.

 

“Virtue of Patience: Stunning!” At the completion of his spell, a wave of indescribable pressure washes over Leuen harmlessly, yet locks his adversaries in place for long enough for him to slash at the front two four times with precision. It is not lost on Leuen that these variants of gremlins take as many as three slashes, or nine ‘hits’, to kill. As one falls, he grabs its falling wrist to confirm as much.

 

Monster: Gremlin_Warrior_A

HP: 20/20

--

Phys.Stat

Hard: 2

Tough: 2

Dura: Unknown

Regen: Unknown

Grit: Unknown

Absorption: Unknown

Stamina: Unknown

Regen: Unknown

CC: Unknown

M.Conductivity: Unknown

 

A variant with more health and tank stats. Much more durable than simply double health, because of the damage reduction. Annoying. Leuen thinks as he drives his sword up to the hilt through one of the gold variants while it’s still stunned.

 

Monster: Gremlin_Noble_B

HP: 0/10

--

Phys.Stat

Hard: 0

Tough: 0

Dura: Unknown

Regen: Unknown

Grit: Unknown

Absorption: Unknown

Stamina: Unknown

Regen: Unknown

CC: Unknown

M.Conductivity: Unknown

 

I assume you’re supposed to do something special, but just didn’t get the chance to. Sucks to be you! Leuen throws the corpse off his sword while dodging the clawstrike of the remaining gold variant. Immediately, Leuen understands the special property they command, as a trail of comic book style lightning follows the path of the claws. Magic variant. Got it. It dies just as easily as the first, with an admittedly awkward uphill (or up-stairs in this case) P.K.S.

 

“Flameblast!” Essandir, having now entered the room proper, sets her flamethrower spell on the downstairs hallway, freeing Leuen to check his stats while Lucius and Cole ascend the stairs to cover the remaining undealt with entry into the room. Ird isn’t anywhere to be seen, but the trail of sheer carnage between where Leuen had last seen her and where he stops being able to see in the hallway she’d been sent after is answer enough.

 

--

Leuen (no surname)

Bio Age (Chrono Age): 19 (19)

Health: 20/32

--

Level: 6

Exp: 157/1000

--

Phys.Stat

Hard: 3

Tough: 3

Dura: 16

Regen: 1/Day

Grit: 3

Absorption: 2

Stamina: 16

Regen: 2/Hour

CC: 60

M.Conductivity: 1.00

--

Mental.Stat

TA: 0.00

Cogni: 1

Hive: 0

H.Limit: 10

Cooling: 1

Analyze: 2

M.Fission: 0

M.Fusion: 0

--

Meta.Stat

Meta.Stat.Skill.Maximum: 1

Meta.Stat.Skill.Custom: Id= [P.K.S.] (Delete Skill?)

Create New Skill?

 

He’d used twelve of his now 16 stamina, a metric shitton, approximately, considering the rate of expenditure he’s used to. He’s also carrying twice as much weight as normal, and manually spent a point on using P.K.S. as a skill. Totally worth it, though. That’s so much more effective than doing it manually. I suppose because the skill is using my body as efficiently as it can, regardless of if my brain would ever be able to actually signal my muscles fast enough?

 

As Essandir’s flamethrower peeters out, Leuen eyes down the hall while covering her with his body. Not seeing any new threats, but not seeing any obvious chokepoints like doors or anything either, Leuen opts to take the safest possible course of action for the party.

 

“Go help Lucius and Cole, I’ll guard this way.” Leuen tries to command Essandir, but the green haired mage doesn’t respond verbally, instead leaning herself against Leuen’s side for a moment. “I’ll catch up if Ird doesn’t come back this way in two minutes. Go!”

 

The gesture Leuen now recognizes as an awkward, one-way hug ends, and Essandir runs off up the left stairs and down the path Cole and Lucius took. Now then…

 

Optional Rewards(Choose one):

--

+1 M.Fusion

+0.10 TA

+1 Cogni

+1 Hive

 

No physical stats, or any stat whose effect Leuen understands, is on offer, meaning he’s making a blind choice no matter what. Except, that isn’t quite true. The knowledge that Lucius thinks he’s some sort of nascent mind mage colors his perception of a lot of his stats. What if, for instance, the reason he’s only a ‘nascent’ psion mage, is because two of the necessary stats for such a class are at 0? A stat like M.Fusion, perhaps, could be what he needs to understand his own powers. Could also be Hive, of course, but M.Fusion makes more sense.

 

Fusion is the combination of things, yes, but it also implies a certain amount of creation or generation, especially when used in the sci-fi or fantastical context, so he could easily see it being the ‘how much magic can you use’ stat. Which would make fission the ‘how strong is your magic’ stat. Or Cogni is the magic strength stat, and he has no magic because Hive is the Mp stat. A true fifty fifty, in Leuen’s eyes.

 

Which is why he’ll be taking the stat that has nothing to do with either. The offering for TA this time is a full ten times greater than normal, which actually does make him feel better about picking it. The moment he does, however, his world gets… Weird.