Before either of us could react, two of its eyes lit up before shooting a ray each, one was dark red and was aimed at me and the other one was light pink and aimed at Val. Val managed to roll out of the way of the ray targeting her while I blinked out of the ray’s path so neither of us got hit. We then sent our own attacks back at it, I imbued my arrow with [Critical shot] before letting it loose causing it to shoot straight for its centre eye.

It was on the perfect trajectory to hit its target but some sort of forcefield altered its path so that it hit the side of the eye instead of the centre. It still did a decent amount of damage but as much as it would have otherwise, meaning I had wasted my skill. Meanwhile Val had been channelling a water slice before sending it hurtling at the floating monster, hitting it at the base of one of its eye stalks and leaving a gash that bled a sickly black colour.

Our attacks had left visible damage but the creature didn’t even react, as if it didn’t even realise that it should be in pain. Instead it just kept on sending rays our way, this time it sent another pink ray while replacing the other ray with a yellow one. Neither ray found their mark though as we were both focused more on not getting hit than doing damage.

This was starting to get on this thing's nerves as it was visibly angry while shouting why won’t you two stay still, you are like flies into our heads. It wasn’t moving around all that much so I used [Quick Shot] to send three arrows at it in quick succession before a second red ray came my way, forcing me to stop before dodging out of the way.

Each shot managed to hit the monster but I was unsure how much damage I actually did since it wasn’t reacting at all. By this time Val had circled around so that we were on opposite sides of this thing before sending out a rock bullet. Unfortunately it could use each eye separately which let it see the spell and dodge out of the way.

It dodging the attack was annoying but we were slowly whittling it down so I wasn’t too worried. That was until the forcefield that had pushed my first arrow off course grabbed the rock bullet and made it circle around the monster before shooting it back at Val. Since neither of us were expecting this it struck Val in the arm causing her to scream in pain before the pebble fell to the floor, leaving a small bleeding hole where it had hit.

This distracted me enough to let the monster hit me with one of its red rays. As the ray hit me the room around me started to close in as if it was going to crush me. I tried to shake the effect off by telling myself that it was fake and that if the monster could do this then it would have at the start of the fight. Unfortunately it didn’t work and the room just kept on getting smaller and smaller until I was being completely crushed and everything went dark.

When I opened my eyes again it was as if I was back in the core room of the dungeon but something was wrong. Usually my core was able to move around slightly as long as it didn’t leave the core room but when I tried to move I was stuck in place and couldn’t do it no matter what I tried. What made this situation worse was that ever since I had created my avatar it was as if I had two minds that were linked, kind of like the world’s smallest hivemind.

One mind inhabited the dungeon core and was focused on keeping it running while the other mind, my main one, inhabited the avatar. I usually tried to block out the dungeon side since I didn’t like to be reminded that I was no longer human but I could still feel it at the back of my head. Now, however, it was as if my whole existence was swallowed by the dungeon as that was all I could feel.

This made me start to panic as all I could imagine was being stuck like this forever. Before I lost all composure I tried to create another avatar but nothing happened, the system didn’t even give me a notification, causing my panic to set in further as I was starting to feel true terror at my situation. The only reason I had taken Shonu’s offer was because she told me that I would eventually be able to permanently inhabit my avatar while cutting my tether to the dungeon core, meaning that I wouldn’t be an inhuman dungeon core anymore.

But if I couldn’t create another avatar I would be stuck as a dungeon forever. As this realisation struck me, along with the fact that Val was alone with that thing, I started to shut down while calling out for Val and Shonu. No one answered though which made me feel incredibly lonely. I felt like I would be trapped as a dungeon core for the rest of time but something in the back of my head was still shouting that this wasn’t real.

I don’t know how it happened but I started to listen to the voice more as it got louder until the spell broke and the scenery slowly changed until I was back in the room with the monster and Val. In my magically induced state of terror I had fallen onto the floor so I slowly got up while looking around the room. The monster was around where it had been when it had hit me except it had a few more gashes and brushes on it now.

Val, on the other hand, was trying to get over to me while dodging its rays and shooting it whenever she could. The arm that got hit looked healed and I noticed the remains of a glass bottle on the floor, indicating that she must have used one of her health potions to heal up her injury. From the scene in front of me I was probably only out for twenty seconds so the situation wasn’t too bad but the monster had forced Val into a corner, I had to get back into the fight quickly.

Now that I have gotten the gist of what had happened while I was out I slowly got up and prepared another arrow. I had been out long enough for my [Critical Shot] to come off of cool down so I imbued it into my arrow before sending it off. This time the monster wasn’t expecting it so the arrow found a weak spot on its back before embedding into the monster until all that I could see was the fletching.

This caused the monster to let out a head splitting scream that left me with a pounding headache. I wasn’t done yet though as I used [Quick Shot] to send out all five shots as it was still too distracted to stop me with a ray. Four of the arrows hit but one went wide and bounced off the wall on the other side of the room.

I had done a lot of damage in a short amount of time which caused the monster to start dipping as it was struggling to keep itself afloat. Seeing this Val charged one of her bigger spells as all the loose rocks in the room flew towards the air above her until there was a huge boulder floating above her. She then sent the boulder flying at the monster, the spell was too big for it to alter its path in any way.

All the mad monster could do was watch and scream as it watched its death quickly approaching. As the boulder hit the monster it exploded into tiny pieces of shrapnel that hurt it even further and the screaming stopped as the monster fell to the floor dead. ‘Are you ok?’ I said with tears in my eyes as I rushed over to Val before checking over her arm.

When I had been in that nightmare I thought that I would never see her again so finding out that what I saw was fake had left me a complete mess. ‘I am so sorry that I wasn’t able to keep you safe.’ It looked like her arm wasn’t too bad and would heal in time so I was happy my failure hadn’t caused any permanent damage to her.

‘Yeah, I am fine’ Val said, looking at me with a concerned look of her own, ‘What about you? All I saw was one of the rays hitting you and you just stood there for a second before falling over and start screaming. I was worried that it had done irreversible damage to you or that you were going to die.’

‘It just showed me one of my worst nightmares,’ I said, telling her a half truth, by now I had finished bandaging her arm so we started to embrace each other while we were sitting on the floor and talking, ‘I really don’t want to talk about it, please.’

‘Ok, I won’t force you to talk about it.’ Val replied before embracing me in a hug while stroking my hair to calm me down. ‘Let’s just take it slow for a while, I can tell you are still a bit shaken by what happened.’ We stayed like that for a while before I had calmed down enough to continue on, we then looked around the room but we didn’t find any more exits which meant that this was a dead end and we would have to go back.

I wasn’t too upset about this because I wanted to go home and rest anyway, before we left though we found a mana gem about the size of my hand except it was different. It contained far more mana than a normal gem would and the gem wasn’t opalescent but shimmered a dozen different shades of brown. The dungeon part of me that I was trying to ignore gave me the answer, it was most likely an extremely old mana gem that had been condensed, like a mana powered blackhole.

This forced it to expel most kinds of mana except any that was attuned to earth due to the stone around it, considering the other kinds of gems we had found up to this point this one was definitely out of place. We quickly pocketed it and gathered the loot that was left behind by the monster. It left behind the usual monster crystal but we also found its big eye and a few teeth.

I was unsure what it could be used for but it had been pretty strong so I was sure that they had to be useful for something. I also got a bit of satisfaction from carrying around its’ eye after it had hurt Val and showed me such a terrible vision. With that done we left the room back the way we came before slowly walking all the way back to the cave entrance.

I wasn’t fully paying attention but on our way back I didn’t see any remains of the bugs we had killed, even the bits that hadn’t fallen into the acid. When we got back to the cave’s entrance it was almost night-time so it was too late to travel back to the dungeon and we were tired anyway so we decided to camp there before making the rest of the journey the next morning.

When we got back to the dungeon I noticed that the area around it was slowly turning into a small village. Even a few farmhouses had been built, although it was too late in the year to plant most crops so they were pretty limited on what they could grow. I had no doubt that it would start to expand more rapidly as more people came to see if they could start their career while using the dungeon to help boost them.

This was helped by the fact I had found a very profitable mine that would attract many miners to settle down here. I cut my line of thought off as we arrived at the guild to tell them about the cave we found and sell the monster parts we had collected. As they were processing the parts we had brought back I asked the receptionist what the floating monster was.

He wasn’t sure so he quickly left to go into a small room before returning a minute later with a huge book that stored information on practically all monsters that could be found in this world. It took him a while to find an exact match but we eventually found out that it was something called a spectator, a kind of beholder-kin that had similar abilities and origin as them but were much weaker.

I thanked the receptionist for their help before receiving six bronze coins for the monster parts and twelve bronze coins for the mana gems and the information and leaving the guild. I then headed back home with Val, before we could split off to go to our separate rooms I asked if I could stay with Val for a while as I wasn’t entirely over what that spectator did to me. Val didn’t mind at all so we went to her room where we spent the rest of the day together and I eventually fell asleep in her arms.