The inner Workings of the Dungeon
We all arrived back at the huge dungeon door exhausted. Carrying all the meat took a toll on our already overtaxed bodies. Iris appeared to be especially tired, once she left the dungeon she fell onto her sleeping back and five minutes later she snored already.
Not that I wasn't tired, but I had a more important duty in mind: finally filling my stomach. We decided to let Iris sleep and lit a fire to roast the meat. Considering the sheer amount, we should last a couple days with this. Well, an ordinary party might have lasted even a week but we were a hungry bunch, especially a certain someone, no names given.
But I wasn't the only one digging into the roasted pile of meat, Julian and Lander also ate a considerable part. We didn't even leave anything for Iris, but she wouldn't be waking up before sunset anyway. She just would have to combine dinner and breakfast. No problems there.
So far we had quite an easy time in the dungeon. Considering how smoothly it went, I wouldn't describe it as a real challenge for us. It was quite the fun adventure for all of us, our initial nervousness disappeared already. Now that we knew how we could find monsters, we could just head for the same room tomorrow and look if those monsters had respawned by now. They are born from the celestial energy of the dungeon itself after all and taking into account how vast the flow of celestial energy was around here, monsters should reappear quite fast.
Overpopulation wasn't a problem either, as only so many could spawn in a certain area. Also those were all cannibals and attacked their own kind without a second thought. Not that those regular
I couldn't overthink stuff any longer either, the exhaustion had gotten the better of me too and I fell asleep…
The next morning arrived and I was woken up by a certain smell in my nose. The smell of freshly roasted monster meat. Actually these tasted way better than I first imagined, although I wouldn't describe them as exquisite food.
Cooking this time was Iris. She was the first one to go to sleep yesterday and was surely hungry as well. But there happened to be one problem with this. Iris couldn't really cook at all, even roasting some monster meat seemed to be too much for her. At least even Iris showed some of her flaws.
I stood up and took over the cooking. I seemed to have gotten there in time, no meat had been burned as of now. With some made up excuse I managed to convince Iris to let me do the cooking. Nobody had wanted to tell her how bad her cooking really was and so someone just happened to volunteer every time. Getting more firewood happened to be rather her type of job, I couldn't really help it.
After a feast of a breakfast the plan for today was clear: get back to the same room as yesterday and repeat the same manoeuvre again. By now we had 1x C grade, 5x D grade and 10x E grade Crystals. Even though we managed to kill a lot of monsters yesterday, not all of them had one inside them. Apparently this happened quite often with freshly born monsters, their crystals hadn't formed as of yet.
Still with the amount of crystals we got yesterday, we were confident we would be on our way home already in a couple days. Of course, we probably should stay longer to get a bunch of those for ourselves as well. Iris and I had some amazing weapons already but nothing in the regard of armour.
We made our way back into the dungeon and even though everything looked a lot alike, we found back to yesterday's location immediately. How did we manage to achieve that, you may ask? Well someone had been clever enough to drop a spare shirt there. We simply had to get back where it lay on the ground.
However to our surprise, the door next to the shirt wasn't as big as the one we entered yesterday. There wasn't even a door at all. A couple of meters away there were some others, sure, but those were different ones: Incomparable in size and only regular doors.
By now I had figured out the grave mistake we made:
The dungeon changed its layout by itself and we hadn't taken notice of it until now…
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I had followed the kids for a while now, trailing in the shadows around them. Although Yoru tried to spot me, she didn't take notice of my presence even when she basically made eye contact with me.
Their journey to the dungeon itself went smoothly, there wasn't a single moment I needed to intervene. The kids were strong after all. Some lousy bandits wouldn't put them into any kind of danger. The bandits were the ones I was more worried about.
The dungeon however was another story. Even veterans died from time to time. Nobody knew which dirty tricks that thing might play on you today. Their first couple encounters happened to be some easy foes and they took care of them quickly.
But yesterday things were different. They managed to find one of the weaker boss rooms with a solid amount of monsters in them. Those monsters weren't that strong by themselves but their sheer amount made most adventurers turn around and look for other enemies.
The kids however decided against that and came up with an admittedly great strategy: Pulling the monsters out one after another and slowly dwindling down their numbers. It looked like the girl, Yoru, came up with this one. Although she lacked behind a bit in fighting skills, she might actually show her worth as a tactician.
Today the kids entered the dungeon quite joyfully. They were naive of course. The dungeon changed its layout all the time, once no adventurers were nearby. Coming across the same room at the same spot rarely happened.
So their journey ended empty handed but all in all they were doing quite well. As long as they didn't go to the deeper floor, they should be able to deal with all the monsters by themselves. Of course we strictly reminded them to stay on the top floor of the dungeon. Going down there would be suicide for them.
But if thing were going so smoothly, why couldn't I shake of this weird feeling I had all the time?
A feeling I only had, when I approached a great calamity….