GreenerThanGreen

I may have overdone this chapter a little. Well, more for the readers.

I peek inside the first room on the 2nd floor and there are a lot of rock formations in the distance where goblins can hide behind or I can hide to ambush them. There are also a lot of rocks on the ground, which is good for ammunition. I pick a few decently sized ones and put them in my pockets, then proceed carefully deeper in the room, straining my ears in order to hear the enemy before they find me. Getting closer to a rock formation I hear the first goblin from the other side, so I sneak closer and peak from the side. There are 2 of them and they don’t seem to have spotted me. I ready the sling, put a rock in it and start spinning it with my wrist. I don’t spin fast  enough to cut the air, so there is no sound and the goblins don’t hear me. I approach the beginning of the next spin and step around the rock formation. I immediately spot the goblins around 10 meter away and position my body to aim at them. Another spin of the sling and then I release the rock with a swing of my arm for more power. The projectile flies on target and hits one of the goblins in the head. I hear the crack of bone breaking and am pretty sure it is dead. The second goblin starts running towards me and I ready my knife and also start running towards it. This time I don’t have the Emissaries activated, so I am more careful and after side stepping its swing with the stone knife, I slice at the side of its neck. There is a lot of blood spray and some falls on me, but that is the extend of my difficulties as I watch the goblin bleed to death. The extraction of the cores also proceeds smoothly and I continue onward. 

The next goblins I spot are a group of 3 and one of them is wearing armor. It looks like from this floor on there would be both I and H rank goblins. I move at a distance of at least 20 meters from the goblins and arm my sling with a rock. The first shot hits the target in the head and I immediately reload. It only takes me 2 seconds and I am swinging again. The second goblin has found me by now and is approaching me. When it is around 10 meters from me I release the second rock and hit the left side of its forehead. It collapses on the ground and I reload for the second time. The goblin warrior only now decides to approach me, only after it’s lackeys have failed to finish the job. I am much more carefully this time, trying to hit it on a exposed part of the face, not covered by the helmet. When I let loose the rock it hits the rim of his helmet, it ricochets and hits the left eye. It roars in pain and looks distracted by it, so I don’t wait and rush it with my hand now holding the knife. Its reaction looks slowed and I manage to slice my knife between its helmet and armor. By the looks of the bleeding, I severed some major blood vessels. Soon the goblin warrior falls down and dies from the blood loss. I extract the cores and feed them to my shop. Now I have 68 Tokens. Just 432 more to go. 

The rest of the room goes pretty similarly, with my accuracy increasing gradually with each encounter. Another 9 Tokens join the shop and now I have 77.  After I find the door to the next room I have a feeling of Deja-vu. More rock formations and groups of 2-4 goblins bunched together. The group of two is pretty easy, I just have to stay more than 20 meters away when I attack. The ones with 4 goblins are a little more tricky. The first 2 are the same, but then I have to make distance for the 3rd or risk it in close range. Then the leader, a warrior goblin is a hard target to hit precisely in the face. By the looks of it so far, every group of 3 or more goblins had a goblin warrior as a leader. After finishing the entire room I had 8 I rank cores and 2 H, which were another 18 Tokens in my shop. That makes it 95 Tokens Total. 

The next two rooms were also a bunch of goblin groups scattered around. My previous tactic was still working, so I didn’t change anything and after clearing them out I had 22 more I rank and 7 H rank cores. And after feeding them to the shop I had 152 Tokens, which wasn’t even half way to the next booster pack. Except, when I looked at the total, it was 227. Apparently I forgot to add my Magic Regen and that around 2 hours had passed. I also had another goblin under Change of Heart from the last group I encountered. 

The big surprise wasn’t any of that though, but the next room I find myself in. It is the room just before the boss, if the big door on the other side is any indication. And it isn’t full of rock formations and goblins, but beds and drinking fountain, in other words I found water. I still have to check to make sure it isn’t a dungeon trick to lower my guard and trick me into poisoning myself, but I had hope. 

With the play mat on the floor and Dian Keto in hand I proceed to test the water from the fountain. I fill my empty water bottles, wash by hands from all the blood from the dismantling and killing, then wait for any reaction. When there is none after an hour I proceed to gargle the water in my mouth and after a minute spit it out and wait another hour. And when there wasn’t a reaction I finally drink my fill. Also there are now 302 Tokens in my shop. It looks like my regeneration is 37,5 Tp/h. 

With my controlled goblin in front of me I start exploring the room. The goblin touches every bed and they aren’t a mimic. Then we proceed to check every table and chair a little to the side, they aren’t a mimic either. Then the goblin checked the toilet, because apparently there was one here, and it also isn’t a mimic or has some man-eating monster swimming in it. 

Satisfied with the result of the exploration I command the goblin to guard the door and sit to do my business. With my worry about water lessened and my body more relaxed after evacuation, my mind starts to wonder. I have been in the dungeon for almost a day now and have encountered no other people. With my speed of clearing the rooms there should have been at least one group who would have reached me by now. So, is the dungeon under some kind of maintenance and I am the only one in it? Is this a spatial kind of dungeon that works on instances for every group? Or is it just an undiscovered dungeon and that is why there are no other people? Whatever the answer, it means I can’t wait for people to find me and give me food and a way out. I have to continue going deeper. 

I wash my hands and my face, refill all my water containers, eat another energy bar and open the boss room door and almost immediately my goblin was shot by an arrow. I follow the assumed trajectory, I see an archer goblin nock another one and shoot it in my direction. I quickly evade and start running towards it. No way am I sniping it with my sling, as it would shoot me before I can and I haven’t practiced releasing my projectiles while in motion. There is also no cover, so no way to hide and activate cards. I really need to buy that holster and find a way to activate them in heated battle without loosing the cards. That only leaves me with close-quarters-combat. 

I look at where the arrow points and change direction as it is being released. I evade successfully, but the closer I get, the less time I have to react. Gradually I measure the timing of each attack and conclude an arrow is shot every 2 seconds. I take a rock from my pocket and throw it at the goblin archer to distract it or make it miss as I cover the last few meters to it, but the action makes me react late and the arrow it released hits my left shoulder. Luckily, the rock hits it in the face and it winces in pain, which buys me enough time to shrink the distance and stab it in the face. Good thing it wasn’t a goblin ranger or it would have ditched the bow and fought me in CQC. 

With the goblin archer dead and the light indicating victory and chest materializing, I sit down and inspect my wound. It went through my clothes and embedded in my shoulder, but doesn’t feel like it reached any bone. I approach the corpse of the archer and take an arrow from its quiver. I look at the tip closely and see good news, it is not serrated or triangular and it look to be very well secured. When I pull the arrow out, the tip won’t be left inside the wound. Just to be sure, I unroll the play mat and ready Dian Keto, then grit my teeth and carefully, but strongly pull the arrow out. The pain is stronger than I was expecting and the wounds starts bleeding, but the arrow is intact, which is good. I place Dian Keto on the play mat and the woman from the drawing materializes in front of me, followed with an unexpected DING. 

“Restore me to full health, please.” Just because I am in pain, doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be polite to what, according to the card, is a God of Healing. The Ankh, or whatever it is in her hands, starts radiating light and slight heat and I start feeling better immediately. The pain lessens by the second and when I take off my upper clothes to check the wound, it is gone completely. But this is not all. Every small ache from falling yesterday to sleeping on a floor are just gone completely. I feel rested and full of energy. While looking at the place the wound was I glance at my arm where an old scar should have been from a childhood accident, but it is gone without a trace. 

“I should have checked my Status to see how much damage I received from the attack, but I was in a hurry to get healed and now it is too late. And I didn’t see if when my goblin was killed I received any damage to my HP, but since I didn’t feel anything, let’s postpone that experiment for later.” 

While I am checking myself, Dian Keto disappears and leaves only her grey card behind. When I am done inspecting myself all over, I look at the card and place it at the bottom of the deck. Next I extract the 2 cores from the goblins, one I rank and the other, if I had to guess, G rank core. Feeding them to the store I got 6 Tokens, I guess it wasn’t G rank, and when I look at the Total, there were 345 Tokens. Now, let’s see my ”Notifications.”

After checking the notifications I walk to the chest and open it up, this time without checking if it is a mimic. I have decided to believe that the dungeon can’t spawn creatures while I am in a room and this is a reward chest. Let’s hope I don’t regret that decision. What I find inside is another health potion and I immediately face-palm. Somewhere in my mind I have linked the potion to emergency water supply and completely forgot I have a healing item. Well, at least I learned that Dian Keto does amazing healing. Next to the potion is another pouch with coins an next to that shoulder armor. The dungeon is making fun of me, isn’t it? That would have been good to have before I fought the archer, not after. I take all the loot from the chest and toss it in my backpack, then proceed to go down the stairs to the next floor. 

In the new teleportation room I decide to wait 4 hours, for my Tokens to become 500. I unbox the solar charger and connect it to the smartphone to confirm if it will work with the dungeons light or not. To pass the time I unroll the play mat and Equip myself with the Book of Secret Arts. It is a book, maybe it will be good reading material. It turns out, it actually is. It explains in great detail the study of alchemy and the process to learn and understand it. It doesn’t explain specific recipes, but it teaches some basic magic spells, if I could understand the magic language it was written in, how to harvest plants, how to apply magic to chemistry and more. I will have to read it cover to cover and study the methods, but I will learn it’s knowledge. For now I don’t know too many thing to make effective use of the book, so I will have to first study the magic language of Spells, herbology, harvesting and Magic Control. I put down the book and it disappears and leaves behind a gray card. It looks like when you put down the equipment from an equipment card, it deactivates. I wander if I can hold the equipment indefinitely or is it until midnight only? 

I still have some waiting to do, so I take a look at some of my Skills while I am not doing anything. Skill List.

I concentrate on Knife Handling, Throwing, Accuracy, Observe, Magic Sight and Magic Control for now and 6 Skill Windows appear before me.

4 hours pass and I check my Token count, it is 501, just enough for another Booster Pack. I enter the shop and purchase another LoBE.

Enchanting Mermaid, Spike Seadra, Magical Moon, Cyclops again, Wild Raptor, Dragon Treasure, Mountain again, Demon World’s Thorns and Goblin’s Secret Remedy. 5 Normal creatures and 4 spells. Might use the Moon as illumination on dark nights until I can summon some Beast-Warrior creatures. I could activate one copy of Mountain and throw it into a room, but at my level it would either grow a hill and be useless or fully manifest and possibly damage the dungeon, squash all the creatures in the room, costing me their cores and probably blocking my path. Dragon Treasure might be useful in the future when I can summon dragons. What is immediately useful is Goblin’s Secret Remedy. I can eat it as food, heal myself and others and in the future may even be able to plant it and make potions to sell, if it also stays after midnight like Last Will. I exchange one sleeve from Mountain to Remedy and start injecting Magic in all the gray cards. I also transfer a charged sleeve from Great White to Mermaid. It takes me around 2 hours to fill them then wait for my Magic to recharge. I didn’t bother wasting Magic on cards I wouldn’t use any time soon. 

I disconnect the charger from and turn on my smartphone and immediately after seeing 11 o’clock and something and battery at less than 10%, I turn off my phone. I guess the lighting in here doesn’t work. I think I can clear a room in 1 hours. I can even conduct an experiment in that time. I place Remedy on the play mat and a herb with its roots intact and some liquid drops on it appears from the card. I hear the familiar DING. Beside Remedy I also place Last Will and when the paper appears I tuck it in my backpack, then I place the now grey cards at the bottom of the deck and roll the mat. I take a bottle of painkillers from the first aid kit and drop all the pills in the first aid box, then carefully transfer every drop of liquid from the herb to the pill bottle and to be sure it won’t leak I seal it with duck tape. The herb itself I place with the potions in the backpack. Next, I check what my leveled up Occupation means.

I can now summon rank H creatures. That should be 2 stars, right? 

I pack what needs to be packed and open the door to the next room and gaze at the sight before me. It is grassland, wide open space without any cover. This floor is without a doubt made for the archers to snipe targets from afar. I may have a way to beat it without needing to test the creatures I can Summon. Didn’t my sight skill mention something about seeing through my illusion spells? Let me see if Darkness is an illusion or something else. 

Actually, do all Spell casters have Magic Sight? And Fiends probably have some kind of dark vision, and that is why the field Spell Darkness actually increases their ATK. I enter the room that is one big field of grass and unroll the play mat, then place Darkness in the Field Spell zone. The card sticks to the mat like it is held there by a magnet and stays in place, even when I move the mat around. Five seconds after placing the card, smoke like darkness starts materializing in the room and it soon darkens like dusk or stormy day. I honestly expected something a lot darker, but maybe the Skill Magic Sight dials down the effect for me? 

It takes me a while of searching through the room to find the first group of goblins and as I approach them I can see them look restless. One of them looks right at me, our eyes meet for a second, but there is no reaction of recognition on the goblin’s face. It can’t see me. I observe them a little longer and my suspicion is confirmed when several other goblins, including the 2 archers look in my direction, but don’t react with hostility. 

I approach as silently as I can and start slaughtering them one by one, starting with the archers and then the warriors. There were 2 warriors in this group, 2 archers and 2 normal goblins. I guess this is the difficulty of the 3rd floor. I couldn’t kill them silently and when the goblin’s death gurgle were heard, the rest started looking around, but I was fast enough to finish them before any of them ran. I even tried to see what kicking some of the normal goblins did – they died from one hit. In the future I should learn a more silent killing method. The core extraction also went without a problem and I was off to the next group. 

The search of the room for every group and the exit took the longest, and when I finished the entire room, all my cards had already regained their color. But, there was also a problem. I couldn’t remove the Darkness Field Spell card from the mat. I am sure I placed it there before midnight, so it looks like Field Spells don’t deactivate at the end of the day or End of Turn. Come to think of it, in the game the Field Spells stayed until another Field Spell was activated or it was destroyed by an effect. Does this mean the room will be covered in Darkness until I destroy the card? Let’s wait for another day and if I can’t remove the card I will use Magic Removal. 

When I enter the next room, another grassland greets me. I think the entire floor is going to be this troublesome. I unroll the play mat, Play Emissaries, activate Reinforcements and Castle Walls on me, then check if the Remedy herb has disappeared. When I find it where I left it, I play Remedy and Last Will and collect the liquid drops, then stash the herb and paper in the backpack. I then put all grey card at the bottom of the deck, roll the mat and look at my status.

Oh, hey Summoner leveled up again. Let’s see if there are new changes.

So, Levels 1 and 2 are 1 star creatures, spells and others, then Level 3 and 4 are 2 star. Is the next star at Level 5? And the only thing that I am sure happened between Level 3 and 4 was a new Summoning Skill. So the more and the higher the level of Summoning Skills I have, the higher the level of the occupation. 

Now, let me take a look at what creatures I can Summon that are 2 stars. I take my deck and start searching for all 2 star creatures I posses and only find 1 and it has an effect.

FLIP: Target 1 creature on the field; destroy that target. 

Hmm, for flip effects the card has to be set on the field face down and either be attacked or flipped on the next turn. Let’s see how it works in this world. I go in search of a group of goblins and soon find one in the distance. Before they spot me, I unroll the play mat and set Man-Eater Bug face down on the field. It sticks like a magnet and for a second a card materializes and then blends in with the environment around it, turning invisible. There is the DING again, and I know I have earned another Summoning skill. I only see a vague outline of what I think is magic energy where the card is, probably the effect of Magic Sight. I also ready Pitfall and start slowly and carefully, crouch walking, shortening the distance between me and the group of goblins, while pulling the play mat along. 

My eyes are constantly on the archers, because if anyone will react to me first, it would be those particular goblins. I see them reaching for an arrow and I immediately place Pitfall on a trap zone, then wait for the first and second arrow of the goblin archers to be shot at me. I evade them and confirm they are shooting at the same speed and tempo as the boss of the 2nd floor. I grab the mat and start running back towards Man-Eater Bug, while changing direction every time it is time for an arrow to fly at me, then spin full 360 degrees to check the enemy and then continue running. A more intelligent enemy will see what I am doing and change the timing of their shots, but goblins shoot as soon as they can, which is to my advantage this time. At one of my spins I find myself outside the goblins arrow range and see them start running after me in order to be able to shoot me again. A small smile graces my face as the goblin archers approach the Pitfall and it activates, creating as the name suggest a giant pitfall that swallows the archers and one of the warriors. So it isn’t just a spell effect that just destroys an opponent, but actually creates a pitfall that stays on the field. When I reach the place where Man-Eater Bug is I flip the card on the mat and a window with available targets appears in front of me. I select the other goblin warrior and watch as it falls on the floor dead. I command my creature to attack the remaining 2 goblins and watch in macabre fascination the insect do its work. 

When the battle finishes I inspect the cards on the mat. Darkness still stays unmovable in its zone. Pitfall is gray, so I put it at the bottom of the deck. Man-Eater Bug looks a little worn out and I don’t mean the creature, but the card. It also has DEF of 450 when previously it was 600. I think back to the fight and it did receive a few glancing blows from the two goblins, so that is probably the reason. I try to take the card from the mat and succeed without a problem. The creature disappears from the room as I take its card from the mat. The card color dims, but with every second that passes it recovers little by little, so I probably can use it multiple times in a day, after some cool down time. But, that decrease of DEF bothers me. Is this the reason for the Binder? To recover DEF and HP of the cards? Will the card be destroyed if it’s DEF reaches 0? Better yet, I didn’t fell drain on my HP, but what if it is destroyed? Let’s only use the flip effect and not have it battle enemies for now. I extract the cores from the 2 goblins, then the warrior and go to see what happened with the pitfall. 

When I arrive at the place, the hole is still there and at the bottom lay the skewered bodies of 3 goblins. Apparently there are spikes at the bottom. And I don’t see a way for me to climb down there and extract the cores. There goes 15 Tokens. 

The rest of the room goes relatively smooth. I set Bug, approach the enemy, flip it over and eliminate the 1 archer then use my sling to finish off the rest of the enemies, rinse and repeat. The second archer in every group is always a problem, because I have to dodge the first arrow while swinging the rock. But when I finish the last enemy and inspect the card again it has DEF of 250, even though it hadn’t received any more blows from enemies. For now I place the card in the deck and decide not to play it again today. 

I look at a backpack pocket full of cores and start counting. 16 H rank and 8 I rank cores from the first room. 16 H rank and 8 I rank from the second. 13 H rank and 8 I rank from the one I just finished. I look at the Tokens Total and see 176. I then feed my pile of cores and have a Total of 425 Tokens. I think I can get another 88 cores from the 4th room. Right now I need a Binder to restore my cards, but it costs 2 000 Tokens. That is what, 5 floors cleared? No, there are new enemies on the next floor with better cores, so 2 floors and the Tokens from my Magic Regen? Better buy a Booster Pack in preparation for the boss as soon as possible. 

But I now have a serious problem. One room is between me and the safe room, but I don’t have any cards to play. I could probably take the room with just Bug, but will it survive until the end? I think the safest bet is waiting for my Regen to generate enough Tokens to buy a Pack and hope it has something useful, before risking the strategy with Bug. 

While waiting, I take a look at some of my other Skills and what exactly they do. 

When the Tokens become exactly 500, I buy the next Booster Pack. 

Dark Napoleon, The 13th Buried, Shien’s Body Double, Louise, Grassland, Darkness Energy, Forest, Protective Seal Swords of Light and another Dragon-Tribe Seal Jar. I definitely hit a jackpot with this draw. I wouldn’t use the Napoleon, since it was a Fiend, but Shien’s Body Double is 2 star and a trained warrior, so he would be helpful. There is no reason to use Grasslands in this room, but it is a good card to have for the future. Darkness Energy is Fiend support, so I would probably leave it out as well, but Forest and Seal Swords are immensely useful. If the Forest is not just a spell, but summons an actual forest I could find actual food in there, plant or animal. And the Seal Swords work similar to the Emissaries, so that was another weapon in my arsenal. 

My strategy decided, I enter the next room and plan to activate Emissaries, but see it is gray. I change my mind and put Seal Swords on the play mat. I feel my Magic leaving me and after 5 seconds the card activates, materializing shiny swords of light in the distant sky. I hear the DING, and know I have a new Summoning skill to look at. I feel a connection with the Spell and when I concentrate on it, I look through every light sword and see the enemies they shine their light on. I then proceed go towards every sword and slaughter every goblin inside. 

With them not being able to hurt me, and the one goblin warrior I took control of using the Change of Heart, it took a lot less time than the other rooms. I also have a plan for an experiment with the goblin warrior. When I am done, I check all my cards and put sleeves on Forest, Shien’s Double and Grassland and then see if I removed the sleeve from Wight. Apparently I did not, so I remove it, now that I have 2 star creatures that are not Zombies or Fiends. 

With the checks done, I enter the door to the room with beds and water and again proceed to check if everything is safe and not a trap to kill me. I eat some energy bars, drink a good amount of water and then take out my notepad and pen, write in Common a sentence, then give the pen and a Last Will paper to the goblin warrior and tell it to copy what I wrote on the paper in front of it. Things proceed well, the paper folds itself without a problem, but when the goblin warrior drips a few drops of blood on the back, the paper disintegrates. 

What I asked the goblin warrior to copy was “When I die, my body will be teleported outside the dungeon.”. I think a little on why the paper disintegrated and take out another one, my last one. I write another sentence in Common and ask the goblin warrior to copy it. This time the paper disintegrates just as the writing finishes. What I asked it to write was “When I die, my body will transform into an invincible, goblin killing weapon.”. So my theory is the first thing was possible to achieve, but something in its blood proved the task impossible, so the paper destroyed itself. The second task was quite impossible, so the paper destroyed itself after the task was written. I write what happened yesterday in my journal a.k.a. notepad and then lie in one of the beds and almost immediately fall asleep.

GreenerThanGreen

There were a lot of editing and some chapters were heavily rewritten. Some of my math just didn't come out right. I either was pulling imaginary numbers from nowhere or have been using some variable that I forgot about during editing and screwed my math. I thing I even forgot to add some of the Tokens from Regen in the beginning of the chapter. And of course some tables still turn out wonky for some reason. Plum is Epic, because Purple is unreadable with dark background.