“What do you think Alice wanted to talk to Maven about?” Ellie asked idly, tapping away at her phone as she did.

“Dunno.” Tess replied. “I guess we’ll just have to ask when we see her next. Chances are it’s not really our business, though, otherwise Alice probably would have just talked to her with us there.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.” Ellie said. “Anything you wanna do while we wait for bedtime?”

“I was in the middle of looking at the core for the boss of this dungeon when everything went down.” Tess said. “I think I’m gonna take a minute and look over that now. After that we can play a game or something, I guess.”

“Sounds good.” Ellie said. “Let me know when you’re finished.”

Tess nodded, and pulled up the log of past windows. It was a feature she tended not to use much, since combat windows were rarely useful outside of combat, and she only ever really got non-combat windows in safe situations, but it did have a couple of niche usages like this.

In this instance, it was nice to be able to look at the initial core absorption message, as it helpfully listed out new Attributes and Skills, as well as showing her what the degraded versions she got were without her having to rifle through her Skills to find ones she didn’t have before. Fortunately, she hadn’t received many windows since that time, so it didn’t take too long to find.

Heeding her mother’s advice, Tess took the opportunity to shove two Attributes onto the core, waiting the minute or so it took for them to actually leave. Once they had, she put on Base Neutralizer and Bountiful Bases, waited for the combination window to pop up, then initiated the combinations.

“Alright, I’m done.” Tess said. “We have an hour or two before bed, so I’m sure we can fit a game or two.”

Ellie smiled, looking up from her phone. “I have a couple of handhelds in my bag, let’s take a look and see what strikes our fancy.” She reached into her bag and pulled out a pair of consoles. “Catch.” She said, tossing one to Tess.

Tess deftly caught the console, giving Ellie a shocked look as she did. “What if I didn’t catch it?!” She exclaimed.

“If you didn’t catch it, I would be absolutely shocked.” Ellie said, turning on the console she still had. “We’re basically superhumans, and you do way harder stuff without breaking a sweat. And, even if you did fumble it, I could just catch it with magic, not a big deal.”

“I guess.” Tess replied, turning on the console she had been given. “When’d you get two of these, anyway?”

“I got them just before the expedition, because I figured we’d be in a situation like this.” Ellie explained. “There should be a bunch of multiplayer games on there, pick whichever strikes your fancy.”

“And you got the money where?” Tess asked idly, thumbing through the games. “There are a lot of games here and we don’t exactly have much income on Mael.”

“Death hooked me up. I paid her the equivalent amount of gold, which…honestly was surprisingly little compared to how much we make nowadays, and she got me the console and the games.”

The group took a bit to browse the list of games, chose one, then booted it up and began to play. They spent the next couple of hours relaxing and enjoying each other’s company, using the group chat to communicate with each other in lieu of voice chat or the barebones in-game quick chat.

It was a nice way to unwind and wash away all the stress from the very long day they had had. And, as it turned out, Tess was more tired than she had realized; it seemed as if one moment she was playing games with everyone, and the next Ellie was shaking her awake. “Wake up, sleepyhead.” Ellie said, giving her a smile. “If you want to sleep, you should do it in bed and in your PJs, not in a chair in your normal clothes.”

“Mm, yeah, sorry.” Tess mumbled, absentmindedly transforming her gear into a set of pajamas and giving Ellie a hug. “Guess I was more tired than I thought.”

“It’s nothing to apologize for, silly.” Ellie chuckled, giving Tess a kiss on the forehead and then scooping her into her arms. Ellie carried her over to the bed, then gently placed her down. Ellie walked over to the other side of the bed, got in, then pulled the covers over the two of them. “I love you.” She said, cuddling up to Tess.

“Love you too.” Tess replied, then drifted off to sleep once again.

“Alright, let’s see what’s so important that we needed to spend another day here getting it for you.” Alice said eagerly, rubbing her hands together. “Not that I’m complaining, mind you, we’re getting stuff out of this too, I’m just dying to know.”

The group was currently standing in front of the dungeon’s Rewards Crystal, having just finished their fifth run of the dungeon. Unfortunately, Maven wasn’t able to bring them straight to the Rewards Crystal or change the number of runs needed to get a reward without changing the dungeon for everyone, so they had to do things the normal way. Maven had offered to disable all the monsters and traps to allow them easy passage through the floors, but if they were going to be moving through the floors, The Rumors wanted to actually have some stimulation in the form of fights.

The four runs they had done that day had been a lot faster than the ones they had done the previous day; now that The Rumors had gone through the dungeon and knew what to expect, they took significantly less time going through it, pausing only briefly if an unexpected situation turned up. And, as a result, it only took them a few hours to reach the Rewards Crystal again.

“Alright, let’s take a look…” Tess said, placing her hand on the crystal. As always, she received a window a moment later, displaying her new acquisition.

“Ah.” Tess said. “I think I see.”

“What?” Alice asked. “What’s it do?”

“It makes it so any multi-target debuffs that include me in the target have to successfully debuff all my allies they target or none of my allies get debuffed. And if any of us wouldn’t get the chance to resist, we do. The last Skill I got makes me share all buffs, debuffs, passive Skills, and the like with my attendants, and so if they got targeted for the debuff, and it hit them, I would get it, even if it normally couldn’t affect me.”

“Oh, it’s just plugging a hole that last Skill introduced, I see.” Ker said. “I can see why it was so important you got it.”

“Fortune says that if you’re willing to go through this dungeon enough to get the reward again then there’s another Skill for Tess that she wouldn’t otherwise be able to get for a long time.” Ellie said. “It’s apparently not as powerful as these first, though, so we don’t have to stay if we would rather do something else.”

Jin paused, thinking on that for a moment. “Maven, how many more times would we need to run through this dungeon to fully clear it? He asked.

Maven was silent for a moment before answering. “Seventy.” She said. “Five more to the next reward, fifteen more for the reward after that, and twenty-five more each for the last two rewards. And, like I have mentioned, there is no Challenge for this dungeon, so no need to worry about that.”

“I think we can go through five more times.” Alice said. “We’re going to have to finish this dungeon eventually, and if we go five more times, we should still have enough time to make it back to the expedition camp before nightfall.”

“I agree.” Ker said. “Though…Maven, are there any other dungeons reasonably close to the expedition camp? If not, we might as well continue working through this dungeon, instead of exploring normally.”

“Will that not reduce your evaluation for the coming rank changes?” Maven asked. “While we have found this dungeon, and that is indeed a good look on your resume, I worry that failing to do more exploration and focusing on yourselves will be a negative point. Yes, you can provide information on this dungeon, but…that’s not the main focus of this expedition, mapping and general exploration is.”

“Ugh, she’s right.” Alice said regretfully. “That’s unfortunate, really. I would rather just continue working through this dungeon with you guys but this is kind of important for us.”

“This is only a negative if there are no other dungeons we can find.” Jin pointed out. “So, Maven, are there?”

“Give me a moment to check.”

“There is one relatively nearby.” Maven relayed. “The rest are at least two days’ journey out. Dungeons estimates that, if we wish to maintain a good evaluation for you, we can visit the nearby one and perhaps two of the others, provided we spend no less than a day at each.”

“Better than nothing, I suppose.” Alice said. “Alright, let’s get to work clearing this thing again.”

With that decided, they began the process of running through the dungeon again. The runs themselves were much the same as the ones they had done earlier in the day, but, on their second run after decided to go for the next Rewards Crystal, they bumped into another group of freelancers in the lobby.

“Hey.” One of them said, stepping forward. “You’re The Rumors, right? Anything we should know before running this dungeon?”

“That’s us.” Jin confirmed. “We’ve logged everything we know in the guild’s app. If you study up on that and be careful, and if you’re within or above the level range of the dungeon, you’ll be fine.”

“If you say so.”

“We do.” Alice said, hurriedly shepherding Tess’s party into the first floor. Once they were safely inside, Alice turned to the girls and began to speak. “Be careful when freelancers ask you for something.” She said. “Sometimes they’re just trying to get their foot in the door to ask you for something else. Given the circumstances, these people could be legitimately seeking for advice, but like Jin said, everything we know about the dungeon is on the app now, they don’t need to ask us for anything.”

“As callous as it may sound, you need to remember that your time is valuable.” Ker said. “Even if you only end up as famous as our party, which I find highly unlikely, you’ll get a lot of requests for advice or for help with some problem or another. If you get a reputation as people who will help any freelancing party, you will get people trying to take advantage of that, and clients for prospective jobs will want to pay you less.

“If you become as famous as The Titans, which I could see happening, you wouldn’t have time to do anything if you helped out everyone. You’d just spend all day doing meaningless things, and the three of you have much, much more important things to do. You don’t need to be rude about refusing people, just be careful with how you act.”

“We will keep that in mind, thank you.” Maven said.

The rest of the day went without incident. They didn’t run into any huge variations in the dungeon, no monsters snuck up on The Rumors and caused them to get hurt, it was just…normal. And, soon enough, Tess found herself laying a hand on the Rewards Crystal yet again, waiting anxiously to see what she would get.

Tess frowned, trying to make sense of that. “Um…one sec, let me make sure this does what I think it does.”

Tess gave a nod. “Yeah, okay, that’s what I thought. Basically, if a buff that would increase stats by a percent or a heal that would heal a percent is applied to me and an ally at the same time, all allies involved in that buff or heal get the most benefit out of it that anyone would. So, if Ellie would heal one thousand and I would heal one hundred, we both heal one thousand.”

Ellie’s eyes lit up. “And that’s less powerful than the first one?” She asked. “Are we sure?”

Tess nodded. “This is just numbers go up. The other basically allows me to have extra slots for Attributes, and that opens the door to a lot of things.”

“Well, either way it’s super strong.” Alice said. “Now…why don’t we go start the trip back? I’d like to be back before they stop serving food.”

“We have our own food.” Jin said, smiling slightly. “It won’t be a huge deal if we miss out.”

“Yeah, but that’s our food.” Alice countered. “And everyone knows that food someone else is paying for tastes better. We’re not doing anything important here, so we might as well move, we’re burning daylight!”

Fighterman481

It has been a hot minute since we've seen merged Attributes. It just...hasn't really been relevant for a while. And Fortune's offer here is my way of helping keep story pace up; it'd drag things on to write out every combination, and it would feel awkward to jump into scenes that would normally be glossed over if she was manually testing everything, so this helps introduce things as they're relevant.

That's all I have to say for now, though, next time we're getting back to camp, and we'll see how things go from there. We might do a bit more expedition, we might do some skipping over things, either way, I hope you look forward to it!

And, as always, thanks for reading!