I was breathing heavily and sweating after the last battle. Too many of the monsters had been fire resistant. The longsword truly was cursed. The dungeon was adapting in a way that normally didn’t happen.

What was even worse, was that we still hadn’t reached the passage back up to the 11^th layer. It had been a month, and we were still slogging through the 11^th layer. I knew that I wanted the exit at the White Wastes.

Unfortunately, the skill Compass Of Desire didn’t give me any other information except a direction to head. The passage up could be in the next chamber or a hundred chambers. With the way the dungeon was acting, I was concerned we wouldn’t reach a higher layer.

When I requested the nearest passage up, I got the same direction. There was no other choice but to keep fighting wave after wave of monsters that were difficult to deal with. Thankfully I had a stone plate prepared with lightning and had managed to salvage the fight with Ozy’s help and Lanner’s excessive wand use before we were overrun and killed.

“That was too close,” Lanner muttered. “You sure you can’t just leave that thing behind?”

“No. I can’t,” I replied while getting my breathing under control. The monsters would rip open the sheath covering the blade and I would die.

“Let’s start getting the cores,” I said. I wasn’t about to leave orange Mana cores behind. Also, it gave us a chance to mentally regroup and recover.

After resting for the night, the next day, both battles, were brutal. The monster composition were blocky slow physical attacks with strong resistances. They eventually burnt and melted, but it was clear my usual strategies were starting to fail.

It was incredibly frustrating not to have any idea how close or far away I was from our goal. “There is no choice,” I finally declared.

“What?” Lanner asked as we ate dinner after the end of long and hard day.

“I need to create a passage to the next layer up,” I said.

“You can do that?” he asked.

“With a ritual, yes. I have the necessary components, but there are risks involved. Specifically we need to prepare a ritual circle and then capture monsters to use as part of the ritual.”

“Capture monsters,” he said with disbelief.

“Yes. Its either that or keep slogging through monsters like we just fought,” I replied.

“Rituals are dangerous. Us…I know this,” he said with a lot of hesitation. I let out a long sigh.

“I agree they are incredibly dangerous. But there is no other option.”

“How many monsters do we need, like three or something?”

“Fourty nine,” I answered.

“Fourty nine? That isn’t happening,” he replied.

“With Sleep I could knock them out,” I said.

“Does that skill even work on them for long enough?” he asked.

“Not really. But Ozy could restrain them and I could cripple them as well,” I said.

“For a couple, yes. But forty nine. I know you are capable Justin, but after adventuring with you, that isn’t possible,” Lanner countered.

“Then what do you suggest?” I asked.

“I don’t know. But I know we aren’t getting 49 monsters to cooperate with this plan,” he said.

“But we could do it,” I said without much conviction.

“And if it goes wrong? If the dungeon reacts even more than it is? I don’t have a good answer except pushing forward, but a ritual…” Lanner trailed off and shook his head.

The monsters were too resistant to our methods. “Push forward it is then. But we are resting for a day.”

We needed a day to rest. Two large battles a day were wearing us down. Before we could have cleared 4 or 5 chambers a day. But with all the nearby chambers sending monsters as well, the battles were much more difficult.

I didn’t regret my choice to take the cursed longsword and the skill I had received. But it wasn’t going to be an easy quest. I was starting to realize the heaviness of the burden I had taken up.

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The rest day, I took time to carve more monster cores and stone plates. I really wished I had some actual tags. But that would have to wait until I got to the Eldarin continent.

I also didn’t check if there were any nearby natural treasures or other routes. While it seemed highly unlikely, since the curse skill kept pointing the same way, I didn’t want to risk going off course in the slightest by desiring different things. I wanted to get to a higher layer in the dungeon no matter what at this point.

Fighting like this on the 12^th layer was brutal. It also made me realize I could have probably gone to the 15^th layer on my own if I hadn’t been worried about Lanner. But I wasn’t about to head deeper into the dungeon any time soon. And the risk would be too high.

I might win one battle. But getting ground down like this was how adventurers died. They wanted to keep pushing themselves. This was probably the hundredth time I had thought of this issue, but it was something that one couldn’t be allowed to forget.

It was all too easy to think that since I won a few fights that I was doing okay, while not paying attention to my deteriorating condition. Sure there were dangers, but the biggest danger of them all was complacency. That was something I needed to remind myself about constantly so I didn’t make a mistake or overestimate myself.

The day of rest helped a bit, but the punishing battles continued. The mix of monsters by the dungeon in nearby chambers was always creating one group that would be resistant no matter what my large scale initial attack did.

My Reforged Beginner’s Blade parried a spear thrust from a red scaled Reptilian Humanoid and cut off its head with a single slash. I transitioned into a parry and dodge from two more spear thrusts as the dead monster released a fountain of blood from the stump of its neck.

An explosion boomed out to my side in the tunnel as Lanner took out a monster threating to rush behind. I noted two others stumbled in the blast. Ozy capitalized on that by rushing in and biting the back of their heads.

I shoved a spear to the side with my offhand and thrust into the head of another monster. I twisted and freed my blade while jerking my hand to move the monster’s whose weapon I was holding into the path of others.

My sword skills were getting a workout. I needed to preserve as much Mana as possible, that meant my melee combat skills were being pushed to the absolute brink.

A body check, another couple of slashes, and the monsters from this battle had been killed off. “Let’s go,” I said as I put away my weapon and collected the far too heavy tier 7 cursed longsword. I also had a new plan, a rush forward. We weren’t going to take the time to collect the Mana cores.

We would push forward through 4 chambers today in the hopes of reaching the passage. It was a gamble and we were leaving a lot of wealth on the ground, but I was hoping that changing things up would allow us to get out of here. There was no point to Ozy staying behind like before since there was no fixed point or passage we were trying to get away from.

I also needed his help in these fights. They were absolutely exhausting. The next battle I opened up with an ice barrier with some gaps in it. If the monsters were completely cut off, but knew where we were, the dungeon might create alternate routes or do something more aggressive.

But by creating a narrow one monster path in a tunnel, the monsters were easy to manage as they rushed through it. The moment the monsters had all piled up, I had a stone plate waiting to incinerate them all.

Thankfully none of the monsters were immune to the flames. A small mercy as we gathered ourselves and rushed towards the next chamber. I used a different strategy. Creating bursts of lightning for a minute to use the monsters to block their fellow monsters as their bodies locked up.

I then incinerated all of them once again. That was three chambers down and my Mana was down to two fifths. But I wanted to try and clear four chambers today. We chose the tunnel that led to our destination. It was frustrating not being able to tell the distance to the passage up to the 11^th layer, but there was nothing I could do about that.

Making the ice barriers and a narrow path, the battle quickly went wrong. Ethereal monsters floated through the thick ice.

“Lightning Beam! Fire Blade!”

I fended off the closest one with a spell skill and began swinging my sword at the rest that came through the ice. Thankfully the spell skills allowed me to hit them. But then they began to come out of the tunnel walls.

Lanner kept his head about him, quickly rotating wands while Ozy retreated back to help. The sheer number of monsters didn’t give me a moment to get out and activate the stone plate to create a blast of fire.

“Fall back,” I ordered as we began to retreat from the tunnel we had entered. Ozy had the strength necessary to wrap around the cursed longsword and fly it away. That gave me more breathing room to keep taking down monsters as they broke through the ice barrier and the ethereal monsters.

Exiting back into the previous chamber, Ozy froze the monsters at the exit with Petrifying Gaze and Lanner used up the last of his wands. I got the stone plate out and turned the tunnel into a cremation furnace.

Another hard battle won. The ethereal monsters had been a nasty surprise. “Okay there?” I asked Lanner.

“Alive. But that was close, too close,” he said. It was far too close. I picked up the cursed longsword as we made our way to the next chamber.

A grin couldn’t help breaking out across my face. It was the passage up to the next layer. I had thought there had been slightly more monsters than usual and that one larger ethereal monster was probably the Champion monster from the 11^th layer.

Climbing up would expose us to a three dimensional fight instead of a one dimensional fight, but that was fine. We had found the passage up. The monsters would only get easier from this point onwards.

We would rest for a day and then go up to the next layer. This day had been exhausting. Too many fights one after another, pushing my reserves dangerously low. My regeneration was coming slower and slower as well.

While regeneration of one’s reserves was affected by many factors, sleep, food, mental state, constantly draining one’s reserves had an effect as well. My stamina was struggling and while my health points hadn’t dipped that much, they weren’t maxed out either. I took many minor wounds in these fights and those wounds added up.

My heavy armor was getting incredibly worn down. Even with Ozy helping to maintain my gear, there was a lot of accumulated damage that was building up. Being a fraction slower, not blocking as quickly, allowed monsters to land more impacts on me and deal more damage.

Like a stream wearing down a large boulder. A storm might move the boulder, but the stream would wear it down over time regardless. I was that boulder in the metaphor. At least we were finally leaving the 11^th layer.

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