Jake had to question if it all was just one cruel joke that everyone but himself was in on. Had Villy put them up to his? Was he the one who had tipped off Draskil to choose this dungeon? Maybe influenced Irin? There had to be more to this than pure randomness. Because what Jake saw was just a hellscape.
The expansive cavern Jake stood before contained a large forest, but it had massive mushrooms rather than trees. The underbrush was just moss and mushrooms, mushroom spores covered the sky and floated in the air, and there were even mushrooms growing on the mushrooms.
And if that wasn’t enough, then the first movement Jake saw was of a large mushroom with mushroom arms and mushroom legs, holding a mushroom shield and wielding a mushroom stalk as a club. The figure was about three meters tall and on the bulkier end, but was overall clearly a low-tier creature, even if its level was decent.
[Mushroom Man Warrior – lvl 171]
“I hate this place,” Jake said as the first person to speak after entering the dungeon.
“Smells like shit,” Draskil snorted, clearly not enjoying the mushrooms either.
Irin looked a bit confused while Reika understood Jake’s hatred. Not because she carried it herself, but because Jake had ranted plenty of times to her about the evil shrooms. Bastilla was even more confused than Irin and just asked.
“Why? Aren’t mushrooms great for poisons?” she spoke in her infinite ignorance.
“Great for poisoning people who don’t know better too,” Draskil muttered before looking at Jake. “We kill everything?”
“Wait!” Irin cut in. “Please do not destroy the corpses too badly as we may need them for materials or to get their life cores. Do we have anyone here with scavaging or dismantling abilities, by the way?”Bastilla raised her hand. Jake was a bit surprised but didn’t show it. Irin looked at Jake momentarily with approval before nodding. “Very well, then you take care of dismantling all the corpses.”
“I will begin to collect materials and search for them then,” Reika said, but Jake decided to cut in as he looked at Draskil.
“Will killing any of these mushrooms even give you any experience worth mentioning?”
“No, but I would enjoy it,” Draskil answered bluntly.
“Totally fair. I was just thinking that we should have Reika and Bastilla kill those here on the earlier floors while we collect stuff and pass the test. Besides, we have four whole weeks total, and we both know we won’t need that time, and if we do need the time, it is due to the far more time-consuming alchemy aspect and not due to killing things slowly, so better you help me out,” Jake said.
Draskil clearly didn’t like the idea but grunted in approval anyway. “Fine… but if any of those damn mushrooms get in my way, I kill them.”
“Again, totally fair,” Jake nodded with a smile before turning to Bastilla and Reika. “Time for you two to put on your hunting boots and get killing.”
“Alright,” Reika agreed without arguing.
“I… I’m not really the fighting type of gal?” Bastilla said, seeming a bit shy for the first time since they met. She was obviously not a fan.
“Too bad, but sometimes you gotta fight to survive. You are a beastfolk. You are innately a fighter. Just tap into some of that primal instinct and go rip those damn shrooms to pieces,” Jake said encouragingly.
It wasn’t like it would be dangerous either way. Jake had a very good feel for the mushroom warrior, and it was clear it was damn weak, just as one would expect from a mushroom man. Mushrooms all sucked, after all.
“Okay…” Bastilla agreed after a comforting look from Reika.
“I shall help guard them while they hunt,” Irin added.
“No,” Jake shut the sentiment down. “Unless some hidden boss or a horde of those shroomy fucks pops out of the ground, it is their fights, and no one interferes.”
Bastilla looked like she wanted to protest, but Reika spoke up first. “I must agree. It is no proper fight if we have someone constantly guarding us. I have not fought for a while, and it is about time I get in some proper practice. Without a true element of danger, it wouldn’t be as worthwhile.”
Jake nodded in approval, seeing some of that Noboru blood leak through. Irin looked a bit concerned, but Jake wasn’t. One had to remember that while Reika was not considered a peak fighter on Earth, then she was considered a single tier behind. And the peak fighters of Earth were out of the ordinary, to say the least.
They all watched as Reika pulled out a white scabbard and pulled out a sword. Jake felt the immense cold emanate from it as her mana stirred and infused the blade further. “I am ready.”
Her aura had changed and was now both colder and sharper than before. Irin looked surprised, while Draskil seemed far more approving than before. Bastilla was the most surprised as she just stared before collecting herself. “Fine… let’s go.”
They all watched as Reika took the lead and approached the mushroom man. White cold air revolved around her as she stepped forward and charged. It looked like a simple charge, but Jake saw how the concept of ice enveloped her feet in icy mist, making her footwork faster and far more unpredictable.
The Mushroom Man Warrior turned to the human twenty or so levels below himself… itself… whatever. The mushroom swung his club, displaying a respectable amount of Strength and speed. Reika didn’t even flinch as she dodged the attack and swept her blade upwards, leaving a cold trail. The mushroom man was cut deep into his mushy flesh and made an odd roaring sound as he just kept swinging the club haphazardly.
Reika took a bit to really get in the zone, and Jake saw noticeable improvements in her movements with every exchange. Having seen her fight before, Jake knew she was just getting into the swing of it. The mushroom man was nothing more than a training dummy for her to refind her fighting instincts after a long time of just doing alchemy and living in safety.
It took her only five minutes until Jake saw she was done with her opponent. She took a single step back from her opponent and fanned the sword in a circular pattern as it left afterimages behind. These afterimages froze in the air and turned into blades of ice that Reika sent barraging towards the mushroom man. It was impaled by dozens of them before Reika sheathed her blade again, and the moment she did, all the frozen blades exploded, blowing the body of the shroomy fuck apart into seven frozen parts.
“That felt refreshing,” Reika smiled as she walked back to them, not a single trace of dirt on her clothes.
“You know how to fight. You are skilled,” Draskil said, speaking to Reika for the first time.
“I try my best,” Reika bowed. “But I still have long to go before I would call myself skilled.”
“Don’t compare yourself to the old man,” Jake joked.
“Who is this old man, if I may ask?” Irin asked curiously.
Jake gave Reika a look, signaling that if she wanted it to be shared, it was up to her. She nodded and chose to answer.
“My great-grandfather and a true swordsman,” Reika answered with a smile, clearly proud.
“Is he strong?” Draskil asked again.
“Yes,” Reika just answered. “He taught me just a little bit of swordsmanship, and it has served me more than well.”
Draskil looked like he wanted to ask more, but Jake cut in. “Anyway, how about we actually do the dungeon now? As you can see, then Reika knows how to handle herself, so let’s leave the two roomies and go find out how to pass this floor and get to the more exciting parts of this accursed place. Hopefully somewhere with no mushrooms.”
Irin nodded in agreement, even if she did throw a few more curious glances at Reika. “Let us. We should look for the passageway to the next floor. The requirements to pass must be there.”
They better be, Jake thought. So far, all he had seen in the dungeon was mushrooms, and he wanted to pass this floor fast. The system message when he entered the dungeon wasn’t very useful either.
You have entered the dungeon: Nine Floors of the Indigo Caverns.
Objective: Pass at least four floors of the Indigo Caverns within the 28-day limit.
The only new information here was that you only needed to pass four floors to complete the dungeon, meaning everything after that was optional for better rewards. The time limit of four weeks was likely there to ensure that people couldn’t just enter, find out what they needed to do, and then leave the dungeon to make detailed plans or spend insane amounts of time testing and experimenting until a solution was found. Sure, one could leave the dungeon, but Jake knew that time kept passing inside even after one left. At least it did so for a period of time, making it unfeasible. There was also one more thing… Jake couldn’t find any exit. Not that he planned on leaving, but he had kind of gotten used to there being an exit from where they entered, while in this dungeon, there was just a cave wall.
Leaving Reika and Bastilla behind, Jake, Irin, and Draskil flew further into the dungeon floor. The first floor wasn’t actually as big as Jake had initially thought, but only a few dozen or so square kilometers at most, with two kilometers to the mushroom-covered ceiling.
With that in mind, it didn’t take them long to find the passage to the next floor. It was a gate like the one they had entered the dungeon through, and in front of the door was a large cauldron with a lid on it. Furthermore, on the wall beside the gate, an inscription could be found.
An inscription with pretty easy instructions.
Create three different kinds of poisons of at least inferior rarity from the materials found on this floor and place them all in the cauldron. In order to open the lid of the cauldron, at least one hundred Mushroom Man Warriors must be slain.
Progress: Mushroom Man Warriors killed: 3/100. Poisons placed in the cauldron: 0/3
As expected, the first floor was easy peasy. They just had to kill a hundred Mushroom Men, and with Reika and Bastilla already killing three, it would get done pretty quickly by itself. So all Jake had to do was to make the three poisons.
“Well, this is easy enough. Just get some different ingredients, and I will toss them together and make a few different poisons,” Jake said.
None of them had expected much difficulty to begin with, and all set out again. Draskil and Jake both had Sense of the Malefic Viper, and Irin also had her own skills to search for valuable items. Amidst the many normal mushrooms spread throughout the forest were many special ones that counted as items, and Jake also quickly noticed how peculiar the fungi were.
The spores in the air all around them at all times weren’t just for ambiance and released from the mushrooms – it was a unique feature of the dungeon and something all the ingredients there relied on. Nothing could be taken out of the dungeon without wilting, and Jake noticed how these spores even seemed to “enter” his spatial storage whenever he put a mushroom in it.
Jake also became aware of this from eating a lot of mushrooms. He hated mushrooms, but he still recognized that eating them was a good idea due to their uniqueness. Every single mushroom inside the dungeon could not be found on the outside but was specifically made for the dungeon.
Pulling out some old tricks, Jake made mushroom soup and went around just eating as he collected stuff. In the distance, he heard fighting, and at times a dark green pulse of power went through the floor when Draskil killed a Mushroom Man Warrior that got in his way.
What was a little disappointing was that all the mushrooms were common rarity at most, but it had to get better as they progressed through the floors, right? He damn well hoped so, as finding nearly only inferior rarity stuff sucked.
After an hour of eating and searching, Jake headed back to the passageway and plopped his ass down to do some alchemy. He had already gotten some ideas, and quite frankly, it was an easy job anyway.
If this had been before Jake had ever gone to the Order, it would have taken him a lot longer to confidently say he could successfully create three poisons that easily, but his general knowledge had come far. Taking out some mushrooms and some of the moss, Jake tossed it all into the cauldron along with some purified water and a few drops of his blood to act as a catalyst.
Irin returned and checked in on him ten minutes or so later as Jake sat there and let the cauldron simmer. She clearly didn’t want to disturb him, but that was a needless worry.
“Found good things?” Jake asked.
“Not really,” Irin answered after getting the go-ahead to talk. “This is the first floor. There aren’t really ingredients I think anyone would consider good.”
“Fair,” Jake said.
“Are you confident in making the three poisons by yourself?” she asked.
“Well,” Jake said as he dispelled his Alchemical Flame. “Got one already.”
He opened the cauldron and nodded as he took out a few bottles. Once everything was in them, he inspected the final product.
[Weak Necrotic Mushroom Poison (Inferior)] – A poison created from the unique mushrooms of the Nine Floors of the Indigo Caverns dungeon with necrotic properties, infecting and killing off biological material in the affected area. Wounds caused by necrotic poison are somewhat difficult to heal. The poison takes effect upon any contact with any biological material.
Jake instantly knew that even if it had added a bunch of things about the dungeon, this was really just normal necrotic poison. He also knew he could bring it outside no problem and use it like normal.
“That was fast,” Irin exclaimed.
“Of course,” Jake laughed a bit as he began his second concoction. Looking at the engraving, he saw that the hundred Mushroom Man Warriors were already dead, and the dungeon cauldron was open. To test, Jake tossed a bottle in the cauldron and saw the progress tick from 0/3 to 1/3.
“Well then, second poison,” Jake smiled as he threw in the ingredients. “In the meantime, can you do me a favor?
“What is it?” Irin asked curiously.
“Can you roast the mushrooms or something to eat? The taste is driving me nuts,” Jake said spitefully.
Irin surprisingly smiled as she took out a small canister of sorts along with a large bowl. She then deposited all her collected mushrooms in the bowl and opened the container as an orange liquid covered the mushrooms. She tossed the mix a bit before nodding.
“Try one now,” she offered, and Jake promptly responded by extending a string of mana. He swooped up a mushroom and put it in his mouth as his eyes opened wide. How could he have forgotten the secret to making horrible salads edible?
Tasty dressing.