I approached the entrance of the bridge, and stepped foot on the wood to test if it was rotten or not. It was slightly soft, but not in a dangerous way. It seemed the bridge itself was made of pieces of Roughcap mushroom hewn into boards and lashed together into a bridge. They were sturdy, but they had a unique texture not unlike velvet, and would compress slightly when stepped on. I could see gaps through the boards of the rope bridge, but it felt secure enough to cross. The bridge path with lit with hanging urns with more glowing mushrooms planted in them. It is obvious that the bridge was intended to last for a long time, though I didn’t know if things actually could rot in a dungeon. It was more likely that the whole floor would reset as soon as I left it.

Without further ado, I started on my way across the divide. As I walked the bridge swayed and shook with each step. I was being as careful as possible, and I made sure that each plank was safe to step on before moving forward. Standing on the bridge over the gap was like floating in space. All around me there was nothing but black, and the meager light provided by the sparse mushroom urns barely let me see my footing. Twice on the bridge as I crossed, I encountered planks that were intentionally weakened in order to collapse, but uncanny sight and my carefulness let me pass them without much hassle. It felt strange to be forced to stick to the ground, but my instincts forced me to take no chances, and so I was as careful as I possibly could be during the crossing.

Looking down through one of the cracks, I decided to try and identify the darkness, just in case I could find out what was giving me those feelings.

After an excruciating ten minutes, I crossed the bridge. When my feet touched down on the other side, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Let’s… not worry about whatever the hell was in the abyss. It made sense that the reason my instincts were going crazy was that there was a significantly stronger monster, and my brain warned me to stay the hell away. The monster was placed there to make the abyss a truly unpassable obstacle, and it was unlikely that I would encounter it again, so it was best to focus on what was ahead of me.

This side of the abyss was very different. While the front half was a mushroom forest, this half had only sparse Roughcap moshrooms, and the rest was massive stalagmites and boulders. The trail still progressed through the area, but it was constantly hidden by rocks and bends in the path. Flying only a couple feet off of the ground, I started going down the pathway, just a bit faster than my top running speed. Considering my agility, that was still incredibly fast, but nowhere near my limit while flying.

It only took one minute of travel to reach the first encounter. I identified the monsters that I was to face.

More of the same, though there was a single new variety of spiders. The Rocky Spiders were large and had a bearing similar to tarantulas. All of their legs were wide and plated, and covered in what looked like shields of rock. Their carapaces were the same light grey of the lesser warriors. If I was to guess, those would be the tank units. These were the first support spiders I had encountered, but I could imagine that later on I would be encountering more varieties of supporters, making combat a bit more complex. I thought I could still manage though, so I wasn’t terribly concerned.

As always, first off, I needed to take down the ranged units. The tanks were split, one guarding the spitters, the other guarding the warrior posse. In my left hand, I charged a lightning channel, blasting the warriors as I moved towards the spitters. The tank guarding the warriors darted with unexpected speed, placing himself in the way of the channel, locking his front four legs into a solid wall of stone. When my lightning hit the wall, it reflected off at an angle.

That wasn’t good. These guys were resistant to lightning. It made sense, in a way, that rock beat lightning. I would need to take them on from a different angle, as ranged attacks seemed a bad idea. I cut the lightning channel and focused on the ranged units who were preparing their acid attack. As I moved towards the spitters and their guarding tank, I cloaked the spider longsword in a sheath of water, giving it the sharpness of my water blades.  I was only five feet away when the spitters launched their acid globs.

I lightning stepped five feet to the right, sacrificing 50 stamina, but managing to dodge the two attacks, and conserve my momentum. The acid splattered on the stone behind me, and I could hear it sizzling as I reached my quarry. The tank was doing everything it could to protect the spitters, but it was not an attacker, and could not get me to back off. I launched myself over it, and destroyed the green spiders, one with claws, the other with a quick slice of my spider blade. The tank made an annoyed sound at the death of it’s comrades, and retreated to join the other spiders, the whole time continuing to face me, defending itself with its armored plates.

This was… different. The tanks seemed smarter than the other spiders. I had never seen one retreat before. The spiders had only showed me a modicum of intelligence, but now they were actively using tactics to fight back. The most advanced the warriors had gotten was leaving to get the larger warriors, but I thought that was what they were tasked to do in the boss fight. Was that how this worked? The higher the level monsters got, the more sophisticated they acted. I would have to ponder this later. For now, I needed to kill these spiders, and get down to the fifth floor. Now, more than ever, I wanted to see just how far I could delve into this dungeon, and what I could learn about the true enemy of humanity.

It was a bit stupid of me to allow the tank to rejoin its comrades, but I was too taken aback at the use of tactics to notice my misplay until it was too late. I could see one major weakness of the tanks though, and I didn’t think there was any way for them to stop me. I took to the sky, hovering in the air 20 feet up, directly above the warriors. They hissed at me, their gross spider mouths opening, desperately wanting me to drop to the ground. Too bad for them.

I began launching lightning at the spiders. While the Rocky spiders had armored legs, their backs were still vulnerable, and the lightning left them charred and smoking. It would take a very large amount of lightning to kill the warriors, and I wanted to save as much mana as possible, so after 100 mana worth of lightning blasts, I rapidly descended, plunging my blade into the head of one tank. The other spiders were distracted by the pain of the shocks, so their movements were slow, and I could clean them up easily.

Now that I knew what I was dealing with, I could take on the rest of the level without worrying. As I moved along the path, I encountered three more groups of spiders, each with the same distribution of roles. There were no skullback drones on this part of the level, and now that I understood how the tanks worked, I was able to make short work of them using my flying tactic. Unfortunately, none of the tanks dropped anything more interesting than a small silver coin. I wanted to see if I could get some of the chitin, but I guess it would have to wait until the lower levels. Besides that, my pack was already bulging with items, and I didn’t have much more room for loot. I had already started to have to leave drops behind as I couldn’t carry them. I yearned for a storage item.

After 30 minutes of fighting and travel, I reached the far wall of the cavern, where I was greeted by yet another large spider. This time though, it was a new variety.

The spider was between five and seven feet tall, and had a huge thorax, probably to aid in the production of the natural acid. The Heavy Spitter was a sickly neon green, and had eight black beady eyes, though unlike the warriors, the eyes were much larger, and separated further apart on the head. They would allow it a 180-degree range of vision, with minimal weaknesses. The front two legs were longer as well and features flat hooks on the ends.

As I entered the spider’s range, it began to spit out globs of acid rapidly. As the mouth produced the acid, the front limbs would scoop it up, and fling it my way. I was still 70 feet out, and this spider was sending an attack at me with precise accuracy every second! I fired off a lightning blast at it, but the bolt twisted in the air, missing the mark. The problem with lightning was that while it was instantaneous, it was unruly at long range. Anything even mildly conductive could cause the attack to twist, protecting the intended target, and this spider was no exception.

I needed to be quick, get close, and end this. I started my approach, but every inch I advanced, the accuracy of the acid attacks increased again. Soon, I was dodging and weaving back and forth, doing everything I could not to get hit. I was 20 feet out from the spider when I made a mistake. The Heavy Spitter had backed itself up to the door to the next floor, and I had thought I saw an opening when I tried to take a step back and failed. Unfortunately for me, it seemed the spider was adept at multitasking, and when I lunged, it sent a glob of acid right into the center of my chest.

The goo stuck to my shirt and began sizzling. As it started to burn my flesh, releasing putrid smoke, I quickly ripped the shirt off of my body. My clothes were destroyed, and my skin had a nasty acid burn on it, slowly seeping my white glowing blood. This was the first time I had ever been hit by the spitters, and it was a good thing too. The goo they were throwing out was hard to get off, and damaged continually. If it had hit my flesh, I would have had trouble dealing with it. It was lucky I had water magic to clean myself up, but anyone else would be screwed. That one attack had dealt 30 damage and the acid was only touching me for a few seconds.

The spitter did not stop after my injury. It continued to attack, throwing glob after glob. At a certain point though, I got too close for it to accurately throw, so it started wildly puking up green acid, hoping to melt me away. I dodged back as it did and used a lightning step to get right next to its side, unleashing a massive sword slash to its thorax after charging the blade with all of my elements. The wound seeped with the green blood of the spiders, and the big arachnid stumbled at it tried to turn towards me.

Before it could, I unleashed a lightning channel into the open wound, hoping to end the bug’s life before it could continue its attack. The lightning struck, and as it wasn’t hindered by the insulated spider skin, it was terrifyingly effective, charring the internals of the bug and leaving them popping and broken. The spider stumbled a couple of times, but quickly fell down to the ground, dead. From the wound leaked a combination of acid and blood, and I watched with relish as the monster vanished. I healed myself using a couple of aqua heals and used some summoned water to clean up.

After the blue particles faded, two items were left behind, both kept in glass bottles. Thankfully, one was a health potion like before, and I stored it safely in my backpack next to the one I got from the second floor. The other was far more interesting.

An excellent rare drop, though to me, the price was steep. This big neon asshole just destroyed my last shirt, and now I was here, stuck in a spider dungeon, wearing only a bra. My first shirt was barely rags after surviving the fight with the lesser warriors on the first floor, and now this one was a smoldering pile of goop. Lamenting my fate, I turned towards the door, and placed my hand on it. With a hum, it began to open, and I waited for the alerts and possibly for the thumping of a chest onto the ground.

With a pop, a chest appeared a few feet in the air at the entrance to the next floor, where it then clattered down in place. This is what I needed. Maybe, just maybe, there would be a shirt in it. I had 19 luck, which seemed pretty good to me.  With hope and trepidation, I opened the chest, and found… a rough leather sack, and a recipe scroll. I was jazzed that it was probably a storage item of some kind, but also a bit upset that it wasn’t the new shirt that I wanted.

 That wasn’t too bad. I had lost plenty of drops during my grinding, and while it was annoying that I didn’t have this before, it was nice that I had it now. The mouth of the pouch opened up to the size of a breastplate, so it could hold plenty of things. Looking in, this bag was just like my money pouch. It was a black abyss, and you couldn’t see anything in it, but by putting your hand in, you could will a specific item out. I quickly dumped all of my spools of drone silk, my warrior armor plates, the phial of spider acid, and my growing bundle of spider blades into the pouch. By holding the bag, I could sense that there were 58 items within, leaving plenty of space for more adventuring.

I took the chance to rearrange my backpack and take inventory of what I had. My pack now had a single pair of pants, a change of underwear, socks, a small bedroll, a bottle for water, a pack of beef jerky, a bag of dried apricots, some nuts, a wrapped bundle of edible mushroom, my survival knife, a flash light, a solar charger (though that wasn’t particularly useful in a cave), the money pouch, the monster pouch, a mess of copper coins, two minor health potions, a bundle of paracord, and the spider silk weave recipe. I had plenty of gear to make it even further into the dungeon, but finding more food was going to become necessary.

Well, I guess killing tons of monsters does pay off. I was lucky that it hadn’t yet been three full days since entering the dungeon, because I still had the experience bonus. It seems like the Large reward chest is the reason for the multiple drops as well. It looks like that was a gift from Onor, who I believe is the god of battle. Makes sense to me, considering the sheer number of monsters I hunted on this floor. Getting the rare drop also seemed to have increased my luck, proving that the only way to increase the luck stat was to get lucky in the first place. How weird.

In other news, hitting the second rank milestone has aggravatingly bumped my status maximums back up again. I liked the improvement, but all of my wonderful round numbers are fucked up once more… I guess I need more unassigned points to distribute.

The next thing I needed to consider was the sheer amount of experience necessary in order to level up to this point. It took two days and hundreds of monsters killed solo, with a combined total of 55% experience bonus, in order to level from 13 to 20. If I remember correctly, it took around 4000 experience to reach level 13. If this trend continued, I would need something like 50,000 experience to get to level 40 and rank up. It was good that I had gotten to the point where I could fight more difficult monsters easily, but it was still going to take an extremely long time to do. Gathering my things, I started down the steps to the fourth floor. I had a long way to go.

Falc0n

If you have any questions or comments, leave them in the discord HERE please. I'm working on getting an editor through Patreon funds, but for now, I'm focusing on editing my stuff more.

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Writing a story while not being a full-time writer is hard! I’m doing what I can to keep things going, but it all depends on whether or not I can make Ideascape at the very least a part-time job. To help finance this, I've decided to set up a Patreon. The Patreon tiers are below. If you want me to continue to write as I go into grad school or the workforce, that's how I'll be able to do it. Euros and Pounds are automatically transferred into USD through Patreon, so you don’t need to worry about currency exchange if that was a concern (I've had people ask before).

 

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