Corvax and I get up, but before we leave, I ask him a few more questions. “What was the trial you just finished? I’ve completed two of them so far. One tested my mana control, and the other was a combat challenge. I had to fight a big cat.” I gesture to my wounds and bloody clothes. Corvax nods in understanding.
“It was one of those combat challenges, a cave full of big ol’ spiders. A handful of them came at once, and after killing them, the room was cleared.”
“Did you get a reward from the room? And how many trial rooms have you completed?”
“Yes, I got this,” the four-armed alien says as he takes a small metal vial out from his bag. “I got a red gem and two strange metal coins from the other three rooms I did. I don’t know what any of this stuff is. The gem and metal are unlike any I have seen before, and I’m afraid of drinking whatever is in the vial. It smells terrible.”
I gesture for the vial, and he hands it over without hesitating. I pop the cork out and give it a sniff. It smells just as terrible as I remember. “This is a healing potion. I’ve used one before. It should be able to get you back into top shape.” I hand him back the potion.
He looks me up and down, seemingly examining my wounds before gesturing the potion back to me. “Your wounds look painful. You should take it.”
“They’re just flesh wounds. I’ll be fine. You found it, so it’s yours.”
Corvax's face hardens, and he stares at me more intensely, still offering the potion. “Fine, but I drink half, you drink half.” Is he just a nice guy, or is he using me as a guinea pig?
I take the vial and drink half of it, handing the other half back to Corvax. The mana in the potion settles in my stomach for a moment before starting to circulate throughout my body. I use my own mana to guide the potion's healing effects toward my shoulder, trying to focus it on the wounds there. I feel them start to close as new skin grows, and my shoulder regains its full range of motion.
After the mana from the potion runs out, I’m left far better than before, pretty much completely healed. There is still some lingering pain and a little bit of stiffness, but I’m far better than I was minutes ago. Man, healing magic kicks ass. I see why healers are some of the most valuable people, even if other affinities are rarer. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to heal myself. I would probably need to get another affinity. I doubt space has much in the way of healing.
Corvax takes the other half of the potion and drinks it after he sees my wounds close in just a few moments. A few seconds later a loud pop sounds from his leg, and he lets out a short grunt as the many small wounds over his body close. He stands on one leg and bends the other, checking out his regained field of motion.
“Damn, I wish I did that earlier. My leg was killing me.” He says with a big smile, clapping me on the shoulder with one of his massive hands. “Let’s get moving, find your partner, and get out of this sun-forsaken maze.”
I nod my head and start walking toward the trail he came from, updating the map with what he told me. Corvax walks silently beside me, content with me leading after I told him about how far ahead I can scout. He is skeptical at first, but after correctly mapping out all the paths long before we reached them, he gives in, amazed that a skill could give such an ability. Apparently the two skills he has mostly increase his physical strength. [Berserker Rage] greatlydulls his sense of pain while giving a huge boost to strength. It also causes him to become more aggressive, but he says he can control it pretty well. His passive skill is [Strong Arm], and it’s as simple as it sounds, slightly increasing the force he can output with his arms.
I stop at the trial door Corvax came out of and open it just to peek inside. It has the same black fog walls as the other combat room, so I close the door and move on. Finding Daniel is the priority right now.
We continue wandering the labyrinth while looking for the missing hammer-man. We pass a few more trials, but I just peek inside and mark down what I can on my map before moving on. Most have some sort of pillar or pillars set up inside, like the first trial I did, but I doubt they are all mana control trials. Maybe they focus on other skills. Only about one-third of the trial rooms seem to be combat-related, making me wonder about the purpose of the dungeon as a whole. It seems like a training tool, teaching whoever enters in some rooms and then making them fight in others. I didn’t get the feeling I could quit the combat trial like I could the other one.
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After a few more hours of walking, mostly spent chatting with Corvax, my spatial senses come across something. Ahead of us, at the max range of my perception, I notice a goblin body on the ground.
After waking up, it doesn’t take me long to figure out what happened to it. The goblin has been shot, very obviously, with a fast-moving projectile. Its chest has a huge hole in it, clearly the cause of death. Bloody bootprints lead away from the body and down the tunnel.
“My partner, Daniel, did this. The blood is dry, so this was likely over a day ago, but at least it’s a start.” I say while pointing out his footsteps.
Corvax’s eyes go wide at the damage done to the goblin. “Your partner did this? How can you tell?”
“The weapon he uses leaves big holes like this, and he is anything but subtle when it comes to killing. Let’s follow these prints. I bet he left them on purpose.”
As it turns out, Daniel did leave the tracks on purpose, as once the bootprints faded, they were replaced with the occasional arrow drawn in blood. We follow the arrows past a few trial rooms, which I quickly open and add to the map while Corvax tells me of his home planet to pass the time. Apparently the amount of time in a day and year, as well as the strength of gravity, is all the exact same as Helot. It just so happens to also be the exact same as Earth, making me think that maybe our planets weren’t randomly chosen.
Corvax’s planet is called Serul, and from what he tells me, they are more technologically advanced than Earth, already having set up colonies on some of the other planets in their solar system. The Skrill and the Traxi were at war thousands of years ago, but the Skrill ended up winning pretty decisively after using atomics on the largest Traxi cities. After that they enslaved the survivors and have been forcing them into the planet's many mines ever since, forced to toil day after day underground, never allowed to see the light of the sun.
Corvax’s people seem to worship the sun, and he says that those with the Sun’s Blessing are even able to harness its power. I ask him what that means, but he just gives me a friendly smile and says, “You will see once we reach the light of day.”
We walk for a while longer before coming across another dead body, this one of a hobgoblin. It has a hole just like the other body, but this time it has been looted, unlike the last one, probably because this one had metal. There is another set of bloody bootprints that we follow until it is once again replaced with arrows. This blood is fresher. The bootprints have dried, but the pool of blood around the body is still wet. We push on further, moving faster now that we are close.
Eventually, we find what we are looking for, or who we are looking for, to be more accurate. At the end of a nearly half-mile-long tunnel, Daniel sits next to two corpses, a hobgoblin, and the shaman, right next to a door twice as big as the trial doors. He is working on something in his hands in complete darkness when we walk up. The light illuminates the two corpses, showing us that they died just like the rest, one shot into the chest.
He looks up only when we get close enough for the light to shine on him, revealing the blindfold over his eyes. He takes it off before speaking, blinking as his eyes adjust to the light.
“Good to see you made it here alright, Ray. And you made a new friend?” He stands up, putting the metal coin he is turning into wire into his pocket before turning to Corvax. “My name’s Daniel. I didn’t expect to see anyone else down here.”
“You can call me Corvax, and I’m not here by choice. The goblins captured me and forced me down here. I’ve been looking for an exit for over two days now.”
After they introduce themselves, we all sit down for a bit and talk, mostly Daniel and I catching up on what we did in the dungeon. I tell him of the trials I did and how I was able to ‘solidify’ space and use it to cut off a hobgoblin's hand. He asks me if I could put something like that as an enchantment along the edge of a blade, and after thinking about it for a bit, I just shrug my shoulders. It’s probably possible, but I don't know how to do it yet. I go into detail about my combat challenge and finally show him the map I made. He laughs and pulls out a metal plate with his part of the labyrinth mapped out on it. I copy over his map into my crystal, mapping out what I think is most of the dungeon.
He tells us of his time here next. At first he was using one of the small light stones to navigate the darkness, but after a day it burned out, leaving him in total darkness. Then he spent several hours trying to gain a new skill, something to let him see in the dark, or at least navigate in darkness. After trying and failing a bunch of ideas, he came across one that actually worked. By trying to sense the trace amount of metals in the stone, he unlocked the passive skill [Stone Sense], which lets him feel the vibrations through stone, granting him an awareness of his surroundings.
I give him a few tips on his new sense, mostly about how to deal with a lot of information coming in at once and how to filter out the unimportant stuff. He tells us how he spent the rest of his time hunting down goblins, getting used to using his new skill to navigate. He did a few trial rooms, mostly combat ones unsurprisingly.
After we are all caught up, I bring up the elephant in the room. The large door at the end of the hallway. “What’s up with that door, boss room?”
Daniel nods, “Go up and touch it.”
I go up and place my hand on the door, getting another message as I do so.
[You have found the boss trial room]
[Kill the boss to complete the dungeon and leave]
[Do you wish to enter? Y/N]
I step away from the door and turn to my two comrades. “Well, it looks like we got one more fight before we can leave this place. Do we want to leave now, or do more trial rooms?”
After pooling our crystals together, Daniel and I have four: two rough ones from beasts and two dungeon-made ones. He also has a coin made from some kind of mana-conductive metal, the same as what we found in the dead city. Corvax adds his crystal and coins to the pile as well, after we told him that I can use them to make magic weapons. He asks Daniel to modify his pickaxe into a better weapon after Daniel easily removes his shackles, fully freeing the four-armed giant.
After looking over our supplies, we all agree to wait to challenge the boss until after Daniel and I have finished crafting a few items. With the materials laid out in front of us, we get to work while Corvax is on guard duty, making sure nothing sneaks up on us.