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When I’d first become an adventurer- mostly out of not having any skills relevant to my new world- I hadn’t thought that the destruction of objects would be a useful skill. Not that I really had much Strength at that point anyway. I was basically like a normal person in that area, I just felt strong. It was lucky that horned rabbits were so ubiquitous that they needed to be constantly exterminated and that I could somehow manage to do it. And that I didn’t get myself impaled and die.
I’d never thought I would be regularly destroying dungeons, as regularly as vaguely yearly might be. That took someone figuring out where to aim and then some smashing of dungeon brick- and a whole lot more in the most recent case. My Strength no longer increased daily, but after that I gained a couple of points in Strength. A boss that basically was the dungeon itself was… disturbing. But it was an ancient dungeon, so having some strange things wasn’t really unlikely.
We would never know exactly why the dungeon was the way it was, but it was theorized that the ‘king’ and ‘queen’ that Yuri and the rest had fought were somehow actually restricting the creatures in the dungeon. Maybe the spirits of the actual king and queen had lived on in some way, inhabiting creatures of the dungeon… or maybe the dungeon had tried to replicate their strength or their ability to use equipment, and accidentally caused them to conflict with itself. Sage Norwood couldn’t say which it might have been, and nobody was better off for that.
On that topic, we both shared certain things. Most notably, being from Earth. We’d had bonus points- and while both of us had reached the point we didn’t really need them, I found it jarring to be missing mine. Plus the bonus from All In had gone away, but not the skill. I figured out what that meant as I got a level after everything that happened in the dungeon. I sighed. “I wish my Strength wouldn’t fluctuate so much.”
Kantrilla patted me on the head. “There there. You’ll get over it.” Her semi-sarcastic words actually still provided comfort. “So, you still can’t distribute your points elsewhere?”
“Nope.” I shook my head. “They went straight into Strength… and I got back 1% of my bonus. Or 10% of my 10% bonus or… aagh.” I paused for a moment. “Whatever, I have a 1% bonus now, when I had 10% and then 0%.”
“That makes sense, right?” Kantrilla asked. “So when you get ten levels, you’ll be back to your former bonus. It’ll probably stop there though.”
I shrugged, “I don’t really need it either way. I can train just fine… I do appreciate being able to stand up though.”
—–
We found ourselves back in Ekralas, teaching at the academy and also exploring the second of the two remaining dungeons again. The one with the oozes. All of us had more experience fighting creatures with less form, and it was quite helpful. Halette and I were better at magic, but the one with the most increase in effectiveness was Alhorn.
He pointed his arm at one of the weird blobs- he didn’t need to, but things like that helped with aiming- and shot a laser at it. It wasn’t just a short burst, but a continuous beam- as lasers had to be. Otherwise we probably wouldn’t have seen it at all. Anyway, it pierced straight through the ooze, coming out the other side as just a beam of light- scattered and not concentrated. The ooze moved, but there was effectively no travel time for the laser and oozes weren’t known for their speed, so it wasn’t hard for him to keep his spell trained on them. I smelled something horrendous like burnt garbage before the ooze finally fell apart without reaching us.
“Hmm,” Alhorn pondered, “It’s not the most effective thing in the world, but its accuracy is good. If they had eyes, I could blind them easily. Too bad it wasn’t much good against stones.”
I nodded. “That would require an extremely high output. Though if you could concentrate it enough it might work on anything.” I shrugged, “On Earth lasers were sometimes used in factories to cut things, which meant they were just extremely thin. They weren’t really useful as weapons compared to guns.”
Kasner shook his head, “Guns sound dangerous. Not in the good way either.”
I shrugged, “The explosions are all contained… in more modern guns. I’m pretty sure there were lots of accidents early on. Well, magic is just as dangerous as that anyway. More dangerous, really, since it doesn’t require carrying around equipment. It just helps.” I looked at Kasner’s staff.
Alhorn continued with his observations. “As a weapon, it’s still a bit weak to use with many enemies. The range is only just becoming decent, but that is improving with my skill without requiring more mana. It’s a bit too slow at killing things, though. But an excellent tool for blinding… and more lasting than a flash. Plus I don’t have to worry about blinding any of you.”
I nodded. “The more we fight monsters, the more I want to not fight them… but still defeat them.”
“If you ever get that full adamantine throwing spear you’ve been talking about,” Halette commented, “I don’t know if any of us will get the chance to attack single enemies.”
“Adamantine’s so expensive.” I sighed, “I’m so grateful for the throwing dagger from Khyrmin.” Other materials had the problem of being breakable. Theoretically adamantine was too, but just over a thousand Strength showed no signs of that being a problem. When I threw weapons, it was more difficult to use reinforcement magic on them… and much more taxing, with the distance.
—–
The slime dungeon was good for increasing our level. It wasn’t exactly fast, but over a few months we gained more than an equivalent number of levels. It was technically higher level than us, after all. H-rank, party because of the traits of the slimes. We might have had trouble if we went deeper into the dungeon, but if we just were near the top we could go all out for a few fights and call it a day. The experience was good.
Beyond that, we continued to investigate the heretical attributists. Elyver and the rest of that group had been released from prison on a probationary basis. If they were found to have any intent to cause harm to more otherworlders, they wouldn’t be forgiven. However, as neither Sage Norwood nor I held a grudge against them- well not a big one anyway- their usefulness was determined to be a net positive. They did have some success in the area of hunting down heretical attributists, those thieves of others’ hard work and fortune. They wouldn’t reveal their contacts, but they had some to find information. Sage Norwood and I hadn’t exactly convinced them we weren’t the bad guys… but they knew who would be the first to be suspected if something happened to us.
Technically, they’d already gotten what they set out for with us. Our bonus points were removed. I honestly believed they hadn’t done it for the increases to themselves- not that it made their actions better.
People were still going missing occasionally. That was always true about adventurers and the like but throughout Othya, Fepresil, Astrurg, and even Escait there had been more disappearances of people suspected to have blessings, or just with significant attributes that might have indicated the same thing.
It wasn’t an easy thing to track. It wasn’t as if we got all the information from several countries- Timmy was kind enough to work with us on Othya’s information, but the rest came in from various sources. Even if there hadn’t been more incidents, we had no reason to think we had gotten rid of all the heretical attributists. Even if there were only a few handfuls per country… there were still many yet unknown.
Oridek begrudgingly shared information from his contacts, if not the contacts themselves, and we also had people we knew and trusted through other countries. It wasn’t an intentional thing on our part, it had just sort of happened. Part of them were people we had met on our travels for various reasons and most of the rest were graduates of our adventuring school. After all, not everyone stayed in Othya. I certainly wouldn’t have said all the graduates were worth trusting with even the idea that we were looking for these groups- I certainly didn’t want to chance them having forewarning- but over the years there were more people like Yuri and his group we built good bonds with.
Half of the final contacts came from Sage Norwood himself. He hadn’t exactly been stingy with information before, but he also knew he couldn’t manage all the information himself. The very final ones were from The Guild. While we didn’t have any noteworthy successes in terms of finding the heretical attributists, being involved with the official destruction of dungeons and other such events for the stability of the country were encouraged. That included the archaeological dig- which fortunately had not been as damaged by the collapse of the dungeon as it could have been.
We didn’t have any immediate information to act on, but we were narrowing down places we might yet go visit. Half as investigators, half as bait- since Kantrilla’s and my blessings weren’t exactly secret. First we needed a more recent incident somewhere that we might act on… though I didn’t like to think about the fact that that meant someone else coming to harm before we could do anything.
they literally stole from both of them and can they leave quietly as if nothing had happened? lol