I wake up to someone pounding on my door and push my spatial senses outside to see it’s Daniel and Corvax. I yell that I’ll be down in a minute, and they leave. I must’ve overslept from my late night of training. I get dressed in clothes fit for moving around a lot, put on my jacket and arm, and make sure everything else I need is in my storage core, ready to go.
I meet my two comrades in the main room of the inn for breakfast, right at the ass crack of dawn. Corvax is in his usual battle gear, pants and a shirt, with his axe sitting next to him. Daniel is in his set of enchanted half plate, the crystals glowing with stored mana, and his hammer is at his waist. Both of them have their bags of holding on their backs as well. We eat our breakfast mostly in silence and leave the inn to go pick up Stella as soon as we’re done. Everyone seems pretty excited for this, and if I had to guess, they probably also have some new tricks up their sleeve from our week off of combat.
I open a few portals to get us to the medical compound where Stella is waiting for us, noticing that my mana moves around my body just a bit quicker and snappier after I put those points in mana capacity. Stella is waiting for us at the front gates, a smile plastered on her face as she sees us stepping out of a portal. She’s wearing full leather armor with dark blue scales on it and has a two-handed warhammer strapped to her back. The scales of her armor tingle at my [Mana Sense] slightly, not like an enchanted item does, but more like the material itself is inherently magical.
Corvax and Stella introduce themselves to each other, and soon Stella is leading us towards the dungeon she picked out for us. It takes us about twenty minutes to walk to the building containing the dungeon entrance. It’s a plain one-story building made from dark gray stone bricks and solid metal doors on the front. The magical protections on the building are some of the best I’ve seen in the city, too. It would take me a while and be very noticeable to get through them, but I think I could, not that I’m going to.
Walking into the building, we’re met with a long table that stretches across the room with a young man sitting behind it. Stella leads us right up to the receptionist.
“Dungeon access for four.” She says it as though she’s done this dozens of times.
“Forty gold is the entrance fee.” He says in a practiced, slightly bored tone.
Stella takes a palm-sized emblem out of her pocket and shows it to the man, who just nods and mutters, “Never mind.”
The receptionist takes a look at all of us before writing something down on a form in front of him. I’m pretty sure he just used [Inspect] on us. After he finishes writing, he points us to a doorway with two city guards on either side.
“The dungeon entrance is through there. Good hunting, and may fortune favor you.” He says before pulling out more paperwork.
The guards, who just watched the whole transaction, open the door for us and let us pass into the room. Inside is a staircase leading down. At the bottom is the familiar black fog wall that stops my spatial perception. After passing through the fog wall, all four of us end up in a small room with an array on the floor just like the entrances to the other dungeons.
Reaching down, I place a hand on the array.
[You have found a dungeon]
[Obelisk Defense]
[Minimum level: 25]
[Maximum occupancy per instance: 4]
[Do you wish to enter? Y/N]
Obelisk defense? Defending against waves of enemies, maybe? That’s definitely different from the labyrinth we did.
“This is a defense-type dungeon, which means that the monsters will come to us, and we just have to stop them from getting to the obelisk. The monsters start coming in a slow trickle but ramp up in number and level the longer we last. At the end of one hour the normal monsters stop, and the boss comes out. Everyone ready?” Stella asks with clear excitement on her face.
After a few grunts of confirmation, Stella accepts the entrance invitation, and all of us get teleported inside together. We all appear spaced out around a five-foot-tall pillar of crystal in the middle of a massive cavern. The area is pretty dark, but it looks like each of us has our own solution to that. Corvax glows with the light of the sun, Daniel has a few lights built into his armor, and Stella has a bracelet that lights up the area around her. The crystal, which I suppose is the obelisk we have to defend, is glowing slightly and letting off a small amount of mana. Touching the crystal, I get a notification.
[Preparation time remaining: 29 minutes 53 seconds]
[Do you wish to end the preparation time early? Y/N]
“Ooh, prep time, very nice.” Daniel says after touching the obelisk. “I should be able to work with this. What kind of monsters are coming?”
“It changes based on the environment it selects for you. I’ve never done the cavern one before, but I’ve heard that it’s mostly insects or reptiles in underground environments.”
Daniel nods his head a few times before responding. “I’m going to set up some basic defenses before prep time runs out.” He sits down next to the obelisk and places both hands on the ground between him and the giant crystal. I feel mana reach out from him and into the stone, sleeping in for a few seconds before a wall of stone starts rising up around the obelisk.
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It takes Daniel a decent chunk of the prep time to create a circular wall around the obelisk, creating it one quarter at a time and merging them after they are raised. By the time he finishes, the glow on his armor is slightly dimmer, but it still looks like he has plenty of mana left.
During this time I expand my spatial perception until it’s stopped by more of the black fog, about one hundred feet in all directions. It seems we’re surrounded by the stuff everywhere except up and down. I’m assuming the monsters will just walk out of the fog, as there are no other entrances or exits that I can notice.
Corvax quietly sits and waits, and in this dark cave I finally notice something different about him. His sunlight energy is slightly dimmer on his skin, almost like he’s pushed it deeper into himself rather than having it just under his skin. If we were out in bright sunlight, I don’t even think I’d notice he was glowing.
Stella spends the time stretching and warming up like you would for a marathon before she takes out her massive warhammer and starts doing practice swings with it. I decide that’s not a bad idea and do some stretching myself before taking my sword out and making sure it still works. I need to upgrade it soon. It still uses my old [Condense] skill instead of my new [Concentration] for the spatial edge. I put it on my belt, in a spot that’s easy to grab.
By the time Daniel finishes, there’s only about ten minutes left in the prep time, so we all make a plan based on our strengths. Daniel creates some walls about twenty feet out from the obelisk, leaving three gaps in it where he, Stella, and Corvax will make a triangle formation around the obelisk with the walls there to funnel the monsters to them.
My job is a bit different. I’ll be hopping to help out wherever I need to, while also monitoring the entire cave and also being ready to swap out with Stella in case she needs to heal someone. As long as my new gravity-launched mana projectiles idea works out, we should be fine. Stella mentioned that dungeons will scale based on your level and won’t give you a fight you have no chance of winning. It seems like they have to follow some kind of rules and regulations, which makes sense given the purpose of this planet as one big training ground.
I teleport to the top of the stone cylinder that Daniel created around the obelisk and sit down with my legs dangling off the side. I remove the [Gravitic Generation Array] and hold the cube in my skeletal hand. I form a few projectiles out of mana in my other hand—nothing complicated, just some small and narrow cones packed densely enough to last about a dozen seconds outside of my control. After about a minute of waiting, the first monsters crawl out of the black fog that surrounds us.
I activate [Mana Stabilization Field] and apply it to my entire spatial perception field, making my mana far more stable outside of my body. Thankfully the skill only affects my mana and the ambient mana, so even if these lizards use mana, they don’t get any freebies from me.
Six lizards all scurry out of the fog at the same time, equally spaced out around us. They’re about one and a half feet long from nose to tail, with their tail being another foot or so. It’s too dark to [Inspect] them, but that doesn’t really matter. I’ll know what they are soon enough. I call out the lizard's position to my teammates based on the directions and callouts we agreed on earlier.
I open a rift in front of me, the same cheap and short-lived rift that I always open for Daniel’s shots, but this time I launch my own projectile through it with the power of the [Gravitic Generation Array] in my hand. My mana dart leaves my hand and enters the rift silently, exiting in front of one of the lizards and hitting it in the leg before it can react, taking off the entire limb. I quickly send another one to finish it off.
[You have slain a creature]
[Level 1 Red-Bellied Lizard]
I notice that despite hitting the lizard on my first attempt, my projectile was far from perfect. It veered off target and barely managed to connect despite only traveling for less than twenty feet before hitting its target. I add some fins to the next projectile to see if that helps with stabilization.
I open another rift and launch another projectile as the lizards reach the halfway point to the obelisk, scoring another kill and proving the fins work as I intended. As my teammates take care of the rest of the lizards with ease, more lizards step out of the fog, eight this time.
I pick a target, open a rift, line up the shot, and then launch the projectile, ignoring the kill message. I do this twice more before the lizards reach the others, just to die to their weapons. Ten more lizards crawl out from the fog next, and I call this out as Corvax smashes a lizard under his foot and readies himself for the next wave.
I launch projectile after projectile through rifts, honing my aim and rate of fire as I take down lizard after lizard, weakening each wave before they can make it to my allies. The lizards have moved up to level two and three now, and the waves are spawning a bit quicker each time while still going up in number. I estimate that it will be around the thirty-minute mark before we have any real trouble, however, as I’m certain I could deal with this many lizards alone if I didn’t have to defend the obelisk. My guess is that’s the point of this dungeon, to teach people that a weakness can be many things, like a crystal pillar, for example.
At one point one of the lizards manages to slip past everyone else, mostly because they don’t notice it due to the number of lizards they are stomping and smashing, but I track it out of curiosity. It moves to slip past Stella while she is both occupied with other lizards and beelines it for the obelisk.
Well, that answers my question. Their goal is obviously the obelisk, but the first lizards will fight in order to give the later lizards a chance to get there. Interesting. They have some semblance of intelligence. It dies just a few feet from its goal, intercepted by my mana projectile.
The ten-minute mark is where we go from mostly casual killing to having to put some effort into it. None of us have any free time between the waves now, as they come every few seconds, forcing us to continually act to keep up. I notice three lizards running side by side next to each other, charging directly at Corvax, and shift my strategy slightly in order to save mana in the long run.
I position a rift and ready the [Gravitic Generation Array] for a thrust more powerful than any I’ve done so far. I create a longer and thinner dart, using [Concentration] on the tip to bring it to a deadly sharp point. I position the dart in front of the rift and wait for the lizards to run into position. Once in place, I launch the most powerful attack I’ve made in this dungeon yet.
[You have slain multiple creatures]
[Level 5 Red-Bellied Lizard]
[Level 6 Red-Bellied Lizard]
[Level 6 Red-Bellied Lizard]
The dart rips through the rift and pierces into the first lizard with no resistance, quickly passing through and entering the middle lizard before repeating the process and stopping in the last lizard, killing all of them with one blow.
Now this is what I should’ve been doing the whole time, fighting from a distance. What even is distance to a space mage, after all? Whether something is here or there makes no difference to me. If it’s within my spatial perception, it’s within my reach.