Serenity ignored the new sense telling him everything about the area around him as best he could and focused on what he could see, hear, feel, and unfortunately smell. The Silver Blades had mentioned that the first level was a swamp with primarily frog-like enemies, some of which were poisonous. They’d also mentioned that it had a lot of heavy, sodden mud.
They hadn’t mentioned that it was a saltwater swamp filled with mangrove trees. They also hadn’t mentioned that the entrance led into mud covered in four inches of water. It was a good thing Serenity’s boots were water-resistant, but he wasn’t confident they were water-tight. He also didn’t want to squish through the mud; if this was like other “swamp” environmental hazards he’d seen, it would be all too easy to end up thigh-deep or even waist-deep in mud that acted like real-world quicksand. You’d float, but without tools, outside help, or magic it could be extraordinarily difficult to get out.
The Footwraps of Air Glide looked like an even better investment than he’d first thought; they’d remove a lot of the difficulty of the environment. Sure, it was mostly annoying, but simply being high Tier wouldn’t get you out of a mud pit. Serenity activated them and found himself lifted up to about a half-inch above the water’s surface.
His socks were already wet. Clearly his current boots were insufficiently water resistant. New boots were going on his shopping list to be acquired for as soon as he got out of the dungeon. He should probably get them for both his human form and his chimera form; he wasn’t sure how waterproof his no-longer-magical Boots of Far Step were. Realistically, he should just pick up some boots with enchantments to keep him comfortable and maybe help preserve the life of the boots themselves; he had the footwraps, after all.
Serenity wrinkled his nose and looked over at Gabriel. “It feels like you left a few things out. Or maybe I should say it smells like.”
Gabriel laughed at Serenity’s irritation. “Yeah, we never mention that part until you’re in the dungeon. Most of the levels aren’t this bad.”
“Most?” Serenity didn’t really want to think about some of them being worse. The smell of sulfur was strong and unpleasant. It wasn’t going to hurt him, but that didn’t make it fun.
“This is the worst,” Naomi said, “Because it’s the whole area. The dying tidal pools aren’t great and the volcanic areas can be deadly, but they’re limited areas. At least the monsters are easy here; just don’t touch the frogs and you’ll be fine.”
They’d said that several times. The brightly colored frogs were supposed to be especially nasty. Serenity figured he’d probably be able to manage, but he didn’t want to find out the hard way that he was wrong about having all the necessary resistances at a high enough level; even if it wouldn’t kill him, hallucinating while in a dungeon was never positive.
Serenity expected the first level to be a rush to get through the level and leave the unpleasant conditions behind. He was correct about the rush but completely wrong about the goal. The Silver Blades took the time to hunt down each and every monster frog they could find. The frogs didn’t even try to hide, but it was still a horribly inefficient use of their time; killing the entire first floor was probably about the same amount of pressure relief as a single monster on the fourth level.
They had to pull each of the Silver Blades out of the thick, gloopy mud at least once. Daryl managed to get himself in too deep three times, simply not watching where he was going. Naomi was the best scout of the three, while Gabriel was smart enough to only step where others had already been; his one mistake was forgetting that Serenity wasn’t actually walking in the ground.
Serenity wasn’t sure how many frogs they killed, but it had to be well over a hundred. Aide was keeping track, but Serenity wasn’t. There wasn’t even a boss for the floor; the goal was simply a circular platform of stone about an inch higher than the water level. It was a thoroughly wet, muddy, and miserable group that finally made it to the end of the level and accepted the teleport to the next level.
The moment they reached the second level, Serenity checked for threats. He didn’t expect any, but he was trying to reestablish his old habits. Earth’s dungeons seemed to all grant a certain level of safety right after a teleportation; many even had actual safe areas or safe rooms. That wasn’t true in all dungeons. Admittedly, he didn’t expect a Tier Two floor to be problematic, but counting on that was a bad habit.
Once he was certain that they were simply in the middle of a desert, hot and dry with a bright bun in the sky, Serenity pulled a bucket out of his Rift and started filling it with water using Call on the Origin. None of the others had mentioned carrying a way to get clean, and he wanted to at least get the salt off his boots; he was certain a chance to remove mud wouldn’t be dismissed, either. He was carrying both soap and towels, as well; even if he still couldn’t warm the water, the trip through the Dead Swamp on Zon had taught him that a few extra things were useful.
“You shouldn’t waste water like that,” Naomi scolded Serenity. “We’re headed into the Desert area, we need all the water we’re carrying.”
Serenity filled the bucket anyway. “This is summoned water; it’s temporary. I don’t think I’d recommend drinking it, who knows what happens as it degrades?” It probably just vanished, but Serenity didn’t know what that meant if it had been incorporated into something else chemically. Did the something else just fall apart? It seemed safer not to test that; breaking chemical bonds abruptly could be explosive.
“It’s perfect for washing; it just takes mana.” Well, it also required a little Potential, but Serenity didn’t think that was a bad thing either; Potential was, as far as he could tell, unlimited. More than that, it returned to the Origin when the Skill ended. At least, he thought it did. He still wanted to test if he could make longer-lasting items using essence in addition, but that was going to take more down time than he’d had lately; he’d been doing other things with his time.
“In that case, do you have another bucket?” Naomi seemed really interested in getting the mud caking her armor at least mostly off. It had to chafe.
Daryl and Gabriel were less vocal, but they also happily took Serenity up on the water, soap, and towels once they knew the water wasn’t potable.
They’d all brought significant quantities of water, enough that if they were for some reason stuck in the desert for several days, they’d be fine. The Silver Blades had also brought salt; Serenity hadn’t. He’d somehow managed to forget that little detail, probably because undead didn’t sweat. He suspected that he didn’t, either, but he tried to accept the scolding in good grace, along with the salt Gabriel pushed on him “to keep you healthy”. If he’d thought of it, he would have brought something to replenish electrolytes, just in case.
It seemed to make the three Silver Blades feel better that he’d forgotten something so basic. Serenity didn’t quite understand that; wouldn’t it be better if he were actually competent?
The desert wasn’t exactly a classical desert composed entirely of sand dunes; instead, it was rocky, with a significant amount of gravel at the surface. There were plants; they weren’t common but they weren’t all cactus, either. They were, however, all definitely dryland plants.
There was sand, even sand dunes, but it was possible to choose paths that stayed on the rockier ground and avoid walking on sand. That was exactly what the Silver Blades did. Not only did it avoid the harder to walk on sand, it avoided most of the burrowing monsters. It was apparently not traditional to search those out and kill them, unlike the first level’s frogs.
Instead, they traveled down the winding paths to an oasis. It was over an hour’s walk, but Serenity knew that had to be because the “desert” was truly a dungeon; oases in real deserts could easily be farther apart than that.
Before any of them got closer than ten feet from the water, Gabriel pulled something out of his pocket and tossed it in the water. After a moment, Gabriel nodded. “It’s water, this one’s safe.”
Serenity tilted his head and looked at Gabriel. He’d seen tricky traps in dungeons before, but the Silver Blades hadn’t mentioned a possibility of a fake oasis; instead, they’d said that oases were where the monsters were. That made sense, so Serenity hadn’t thought about things that might pretend to be an oasis. “What were you expecting, an acid-plant?”
“That’s the most common,” Gabriel agreed. “On this level, they’re pretty obvious; if you throw in anything edible, like that nut, the acid-plant will react. The other nasty options are all other monsters, but they don’t pretend to be water; they just hide in it.”
That actually sounded like a really interesting way to get new seeds donated to a dungeon. The problem with it was that after you’d gotten the easy to get local ones, you probably wouldn’t get any new ones.
Serenity shook off the thought and tried to get his head back where it belonged. “So what monsters are we looking at?” They hadn’t talked about the low-Tier monsters other than the frogs; they’d concentrated on the higher-Tier options since they were more likely to be problems.
“Anything that comes in waves,” Gabriel answered. “Insects are the most common, but we had desert hares once. They were surprisingly nasty, because of how many there were.”
Serenity smiled at that. “I think I can handle low-Tier hordes. I have a Path for that.”
The first oasis had waves of scorpions. As Serenity had suggested, he had the perfect Path for that; Zonal Evocation Mage specialized in taking out large groups of weak enemies. Very few made it through the gauntlet of spells he pushed out, and even those few were generally because he didn’t want to spend the mana on one or two stragglers.
After six waves, the scorpions stopped coming and the group headed on to another oasis. There were five oases with monster waves and one acid-plant on this run; from what Gabriel said, four or five was normal so this was a little high but not the highest they’d seen. The other three oases had waves of sand-colored foxes, giant poisonous spiders, lizards that Serenity thought resembled Komodo dragons, and then snakes. The snakes were the oddest, since unlike the others, they didn’t seem to be only a single species.
Once the last snake fell, the option to teleport to the next level appeared. Gabriel had already told Serenity to turn it down; they’d spent too long in the swamp and the desert. They’d camp “overnight” in the desert at the cleaned-out oasis. For whatever reason, as long as you were at an oasis, the only attacks in the desert section were from the waves, no matter how long you stayed. The environment could still be dangerous but there weren’t even the normal small desert critters to bother you.
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