Og turns his head to the side to look at Ace, something a bit hard for him to do as he is sprawled out flat on the floor. “I don’t really need a spear?”

Ace shrugs, “Well, neither does Sammy. You two are just the only ones that would make any use of them. If anything, I would want you to get both of them as I’m sure dungeon loot spears will do a lot more damage when thrown than your lead slugs. Nevermind the potential to pin a monster.”

Sammy nods, “I give up the chance at this to Og. He needs a couple of big guns for his throwing skill. Only so much you can do with pre-system lead.”

Og groans, “Fine, I’ll haul around a couple fancy sticks.”

And he hauls himself up and goes over to the loot portals and pulls out his new spears. Though he ends up happier with them than he expected. Instead of short or long spears, what gets pulled out is a pair of proper throwing spears.

Susan shakes her head, “That is definitely not what I felt when I was fumbling around in there.”

Og shrugs, “As long as we get a clue of what is in there. We got lucky finding out you can check the loot portals out as long as you don’t pull the item out.”

Ruby frowns, “I highly doubt that the same would work for the system reward loot portals.”

Jack laughs, “As if it matters all that much. Not exactly swimming in system rewards at the moment.”

Ace rolls his eyes, “Maybe you might find something if you would check the quest boards in town hall.”

Jack laughs even harder, “We all know that most of those are put up by you. It isn’t exactly a secret yet.”

Ace nods, “But not all of them are. From chatting with Lily, I’ve learned that you can sometimes find personalized stuff up there. You have to actually strive for it. The system isn’t going to just pop up a quest unless you get in a lot of trouble like what happened with Sammy.”

Jack shakes his head, “Whatever. Is there anything interesting in the chest?”

Ace shrugs before digging through the chest. “Well, that’s a lot of herbs. Oh, and a single box. I’ve got to say, Kelly’s theory that it only drops a box if no one in the group had gotten one recently was looking solid. With this one though, that’s out the window as we got one a couple days ago. Though how she even came up with that idea is a mystery. We haven’t exactly been delving this floor all that often.”

Doyle rolls his core at this point. While interesting to listen in occasionally, he had better things he could be doing with two hours than listening in on banter. Though because he looked away, he almost missed when Ace ended the break. As luck would have it, though, Jack wasn’t quite ready for it either and complained enough to attract Doyle’s attention back to the group.

Good thing he looked back when he did as it was just in time to see them step through the portal. The safe room isn’t anything too impressive but Susan isn’t all that happy with the tunnels. After taking a closer look at them, she turns to Ace, “These aren’t dungeon tunnels.”

Ace raises an eyebrow at this statement. “Last time I checked we hadn’t left the dungeon.”

Susan laughs at that, “Fair enough, I guess that wasn’t exactly informative. What I meant was these are tunnels created by the dungeon. One of my skills allows me to estimate how long ago something was done and everything else in the dungeon just comes up as ineligible. Well, almost everything. The other exception is where the kobolds are mining out the ore.”

Ace frowns, “You suspect these tunnels have been mined out by kobolds?”

Susan nods, “I checked both the tunnels and that appears to be the case. Not only that but there are some signs of earth magic being used to smooth out the floor.”

Ace sighs, “I was half hoping that after the last floor we would have a wolf boss. Those kobold traps are too clever for my taste. With a guiding hand behind their nonsense? A nightmare.”

Susan laughs, “Then you aren’t going to be happy about the fact they probably are patrolling the area. Not an hour ago, a group almost three times our size went through here. Not directly, thankfully. Going by the options you have, the first room of each floor is a safe room. Though, of course, the system isn’t nice enough to force it to be a truly safe room. Any nonsense we drag back with us won’t hesitate to come in to chomp on us.”

Og chuckles, “I wish I was as stealthy as you are! The stories you have to tell from following various undersized groups are hilarious.”

Ace massages the bridge of his nose, “Yes, they are funny but we need to figure out what our plan is. This new twist doesn’t exactly fit into any of my plans.”

Sammy shrugs, “Just follow a tunnel and see where it goes. There isn’t really any special strategy to it unless we are dealing with a maze.”

Jack nods, “If they are patrolling we should follow behind them. Either there is a dead end and they are coming back towards us or they are going somewhere.”

Ace sighs, “Fair enough.”

And the group moves out. Though they don’t have far to go before the tunnel splits off. One way continues along the curve with the other tunnel branching off at ninety degrees and through that one the group sees what they are dealing with.

Doyle is quite satisfied at the expressions they make as the giant area opens up. Though he does make note to nudge the kobolds to not put in a straight shot tunnel like that next time. They had apparently wanted to keep an eye on the one area they couldn’t enter. As luck would have it for the group, the previous patrol was recent enough the kobolds aren’t too interested in it.

Ace gestures to Susan before pulling the rest of the group back around the corner. Susan rolls her eyes and walks into the giant domed room. Her stealth skill provides quite the cheat as she takes her time to explore the outer region. While she trusts it to let her infiltrate the inner region of the kobold town. What she doesn’t trust is the dungeon to not cheat and just have the monsters automatically be alerted if someone goes too far in. Doyle makes special note of this worry when she brings it up to Ace and promises to put that in later.

With that worry out of the way, Susan gets down to explaining what she can see. How there are five groups of fifteen patrolling around, herds of various kinds of cattle, and a wolf kennel. Of course, that completely skips the boss but she can only shrug and guess it must be in the center of the town.

Everyone in the group is worried after hearing the sheer number of monsters. Sure, there were a good number of wolves on the last floor, but they had all been spread out. This floor is basically all one big room so who knows how reinforcements will work.

Ace, however, has a plan. “While I don’t think we are completing the floor today we should be able to get in a few skirmishes. Those patrols come through here at regular intervals so we should be able to fight them without attracting too much attention. And if we fight with the safe room to our backs, we can easily run away as needed.”

Ruby frowns, “Going by the last floor the monsters should only be able to call help from a couple rooms away. However, I don’t have a clue how such a rule will interact with the tunnels. Does it take actual distance into account or will we have everyone swarm down on top of us because the big room is technically the next room over?”

Jack sticks his tongue out, “Meh, Meh I say! We fight one of the patrols. Dungeons aren’t impossible under the system and as far as I am concerned if the dungeon could just call down every single monster on us that wouldn’t be possible. Way too much of a jump in difficulty.”

Ace nods, “I sort of agree with that. Let’s retreat to just before the safe room and see what comes our way.”

The answer to that is nothing for a good fifteen or so minutes. While there are five patrol groups, they aren’t all out at once and while it doesn’t seem like much, there are quite a few tunnels along the edge. The area around the safe room is just a bit sparse because the kobolds were a bit suspicious of the place.

Once the next patrol does come by, the first thing the group sees is the front line coming around the corner. While not marching around like a military parade, the kobolds are better organized than expected. The five mace and shield kobolds lead with the four spear kobolds right behind them, ready to apply the bronze covered tip of their weapons to whoever they might come across.

At that point, the kobolds notice the group is there and one of the spear kobolds lets out a squeak. They aren’t exactly expecting to find anyone after all. With how time is a bit wonky, it has been a while since they had first spawned in. Still, they know what to do and with a roar the kobolds form a shield wall with spears poking through.

Ace and his party ready themselves for a charge but these kobolds aren’t the only ones and now that the shield wall is ready the males come around the corner. This is important because those are the ones that get magic and each patrol has a couple mages hanging around.

Ace realizes the problem but doesn’t get much lead time before blasts of rock and fire start raining down on them. There hadn’t been too many caster kobolds who weren’t healers so the slow gain in levels hadn’t been overly noticed. Now though, even before any external bonuses, each of the kobold’s have 29 agility and, more importantly, 31 wisdom.

While this doesn’t necessarily make the spells hit harder, it does increase the difficulty to counter said spells by a lot. With Ruby being the only full time caster in the party, there is no way to lock down the spell casting, let alone do anything about the healer that is with the kobolds. Oh, and that wisdom also means Susan had the right idea to avoid the central area because it greatly increases the chance of her being spotted.

Ace had really wanted to fight them. It isn’t like they hadn’t just fought a similar number of enemies to finish up the last floor. If anything, the stone wolves riding knights were a tougher enemy. But that didn’t involve advancing into ranged attacks against a fortified position. Because while the kobolds aren’t the biggest of enemies, a shield wall can still work if you do it right.

With a sigh, Ace tosses out a couple of mottled green spheres that burst into giant bushes. There isn’t anything special about them and the enemies magic easily penetrates them but they do block line of sight. At least long enough for the group to retreat through the portal and out of the dungeon.

Outside, Ace leans up against the containment wall and sighs. They had barely made it onto the boss floor and got booted out by the normal monsters. Susan sees this and shakes her head, “Don’t let it get you down. We’re still ahead of everyone else by a country mile.”

Ace looks up with tired eyes, “Everyone on the planet.”

Akhier

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