Wuxia - Mtl
CH.177 Alice and Ria vs. TinaWood Dungeon
CH.177 Alice and Ria vs. TinaWood Dungeon
“Is this it? I thought a dungeon would be cooler looking.” Ria commented as she looked at the dungeon entrance.
“Well, that’s because I never built anything here. It was a cave and it still is a cave. Now it just has a dungeon inside of it.” Not that I know what this thing was before it became a rogue dungeon.
“I just always heard that dungeons are these great places with tons of monsters and where you can get amazing items.”
“That part is true, but you’ll see for yourself. Now, how do you two want to do this? I can summon something and clear the dungeon by myself, or do you two want to try?” I asked.
“Eh? May we?” Alice asked.
“Sure. I don’t mind. We have all day. And if it is too much for you, I’ll summon something to help. Oh, but Alice, don’t summon Dark Magician Girl or Getsu Fuhma. They might make it boring. Pitch-Dark Dragon is alright though, as it isn’t that strong.”
“Yes. I can do that.” Alice agreed.
“Brian? What are you speaking about? A dragon? What is that?”
“Alice summoning monsters. I just said she shouldn’t summon anything too strong.”
“Oh. I didn’t know she was also a summoner.”
“Well, you did just meet her yesterday. But I guess this dungeon trip will double as a bonding exercise.”
“And I’m not a summoner. I just use the cards Brian gave me.”
Ria turned to look at me. “Can I do that? Lua also does it, right? So I can do it, can’t I?”
“Well, you can, but not really. You need an extra skill called Card Summoner to use them.” I answered. “Alice and Lua both have it, so they can use the cards better than you could.”
“An extra skill? I see. Well, I guess not then.” Ria seemed a bit down after she heard that.
“So, I’ll use my dragon to draw the monsters and cast spells from the back. Could you get the monsters that won’t focus on the dragon?” Alice had come up with … a plan. Which might work.
The problem with the plan was the reliance on the tanking power of Pitch-Dark Dragon. Sure it is a dragon, but it only has 600 def. It should hold up to the first two or three floors, but after that, might be asking too much.
While they were thinking about their strategy, I looked over some of the cards Laura got me last night. The Creator is a monster that can resurrect other monsters. I don’t know if he can resurrect people, but it is possible. Perfect Machine King is kind of cool looking, but I don’t think he is an actual mecha, so I can’t drive him around like a gundam.
Serial Spell I feel like would make a good install onto Alice. If it allows her to chain her spells together, it might increase her power a lot. But it could also do something we don’t want, so I’ll have to ask Laura to test it out first.
But the duo that I’m interested in at the moment is Mystic Swordsman LV2 and Silent Swordsman LV3.
Yes, I know I didn’t actually get Mystic Swordsman LV2 last night, but I did get the LV6 version of it, so that reminded me of the LV2 version. And I think I can use the dungeon monsters to evolve both Mystic and Silent Swordsmen to their highest level versions.
And they’ll also double as my body guards.
I let the girls go in first and followed behind them.
“Ria, on your left.” Alice called out.
“On it.” Ria responded before ripping the skeleton that was bothering her into two pieces.
After the fighting began, Alice had taken on the commander/support role of calling out targets and focusing her magic onto the bigger threats. Ria was punching or ripping the skeletons to pieces. Pitch-Dark Dragon was just rampaging around, getting the attention of every monster.
It worked ok, as the dungeon was quite empty at the moment. Using Dungeon Founder, I found out that Diamond Sword had been here doing the difficulty assessment for the last two days. They had cut down a lot of the monsters, and the numbers haven’t built back up to where they were before that.
We cleared the first floor with my Swordsmen doing nothing, but now on the second floor, the girls occasionally let a monster slip through and my Swordsmen had to cut them down. Alice also ended up having an attack sufficiently targeted at her for Threatening Roar to activate. Luckily Ria had already experienced it from the time she was on the receiving end, so she didn’t think about it for too long.
After the girls successfully cleared the second floor as well, we took a short break in the corridor between the rooms to rest. This break also let both of my monsters evolve into their next forms, so now my bodyguards were Mystic Swordsman LV4 and Silent Swordsman LV5.
“Brian, I’m starting to run low on mana. Do you have any mana potions?” Ria asked. I was expecting something like that from Alice, not her.
“Wait a sec. I’ll check.” I answered.
Obviously, I don’t have any actual mana potions, but I might have a card that does something similar. First I checked all of the increase life points cards, but I don’t think any of them would increase mana. Maybe if I had Blue Medicine.
Then I noticed a card that might work.
“I don’t have any mana potions, but I have something that might work. Do you want to try it?”
“... is it safe?”
“Is anything I do unsafe?”
“Yes.” Alice said. “You ride dragons. That can’t be safe.”
“Says the one that asked me to bring her somewhere where she can ride a dragon.”
“...” Alice didn't respond to my quip.
“But yeah, it should be safe.” I said to Ria.
“Then let’s.” She agreed.
“Good. Pitch-Black Power Stone.” I said as I activated the card.
Now in Yugioh, Pitch-Black Power Stone can give cards that hold Spell Counters said counters, but I think it might recover someone's mana. That was my theory.
As the card activated, a small black stone with something like a triforce appeared in my hand.
“Here.” I said as I handed the stone to Ria. Then I returned the grayed out trap card back to my collection.
“What do I do with this?” Ria asked.
“Not sure. Try passing some mana through it and see what happens.” I instructed.
She did as instructed and one of the triangle corners of the stone lit up. Then the shine from it entered Ria’s body, before fading away. One of the corners on the stone had gone dark.
“Wow. It really worked. I think my mana is full.” Ria said, still holding the stone.
“Really? Let me try.” Alice said as she practically stole the stone from Ria’s hand.
She then did the same before I said anything and another corner of the makeshift triforce went dark.
“It really did. Brian, this thing is amazing. Can you give me that card next time you give me one?”
“I’ll think about it.” I answered.
I wouldn’t mind otherwise, but I actually only had one at the moment, so I would have to get more before giving one away. But as Pitch-Black Power Stone is common in both Magician's Force and Dark Revelation Volume 1, I should be able to get more copies of it.
Actually, why do I have only one of them if it is common? Could just be my common luck, or maybe I sacrificed some for sleeves before I thought about using it to recover mana.
“Brian? And Miss Alice?” I heard a male voice from the direction of the corridor leading to the second room.
A party of five male adventurers had come in and were now looking at us.
“I told you someone is here.”
“Yeah. And no one said there wouldn’t be.”
“But why is Brian here? He shouldn’t be in town?”
“No clue. Why don’t you ask him?”
The party talked to each other. They were a party I knew. Well, kind of knew. Diamond Sword. The only B-ranked party of Alewatch.
“Oh. It’s you guys. I didn’t think you would come here after being here for the past two days.” I said.
“How did you..?”
“He is the founder. Of course he would know.” Their leader answered that question. “But Brian, what are you doing here?”
“I just came to get a few things. And I thought I would use the monsters as training targets for Ria and Alice.”
“And that dragon?”
“Mine. Well, Alice summoned it, but still.” As Diamond Sword already knew about Card Summoner from the sprite incident, I don’t care if I say a little too much. Few of the members that stayed in town heard of it when they were coming up with the search strategy when the sprite attack happened. “What about you all? Didn’t you complete the difficulty assessment already?”
“Not quite. Part of it is checking how quickly the monsters respawn, so we came again. We planned to go all the way to the end again, what about you?”
“I have to get to the core, so all the way for us as well.”
“Then would it be alright if we go together?”
And that is how our three person, three monster party evolved into an eight person, three monster party.
“Brian! Can’t you do something?” Alice was crying a little in front of me. No, nothing too bad had happened, but she was a little down. Because as we had been going through the fourth large room, Alice’s Pitch-Dark Dragon had died.
“I told you to have him hang back a bit more. This is on you.”
“But he died. I killed him. You have to save him.” Alice argued.
“Or I won’t and you will have to learn responsibility.” I said.
No, the dragon wasn’t really dead. Well, it was, but as it had a toploader, it would come back tomorrow. Alice was just a bit too distressed to realize that. Sure I could just use a Monster Reborn to instantly deal with that cooldown, but I won’t. Not because I’m evil, but because Alice has to learn not to be overly reckless. JackDiamond Sword Leader had already warned her that being that aggressive is not good.
“I’ll summon Mana and kill them all.” Alice declared.
“No, no you won’t.” I said. “You didn’t listen to others and your dragon went down because of it. It isn’t the fault of the monsters. This is on you. And if you don’t accept that, you’ll be in timeout for the rest of the day. So what will it be, accept that you didn’t listen or stay back with me while the others fight?”
“... I … Can I just stay with you?” Alice asked.
“Sure. If you don’t feel like fighting anymore.”
“Brian. I think we might need a hand with this.” Jack said after we reached the final part of the seventh room.
On our way here, Ria had gotten some good advice from Diamond Sword members. Her main weakness was definitely pointed out to her. Her fuel efficiency. She uses too much mana too quickly and will be left dry in no time flat. And after her mana is gone, she gets sluggish and would be almost useless in a fight. She had drained the last of the mana from the Pitch-Black Power Stone, but had again ran out, so she had to tap out after the sixth room and was with me and Alice in the backlines now.
Also, my two swordsmen had evolved again. They were now Mystic Swordsman LV6 and Silent Swordsman LV7.
Now, as for the monster Diamond Sword was asking for help with. It was a skeleton mage dressed in what looked like an imitation of Dark Magician’s robes. In a word, a lich. This was the first time the final boss had been something small like this, so definitely an interesting encounter.
“Sure. My swordsmen go fourth. Silent Swordsman, focus on stopping those attacks. Mystic Swordsman, well, you can do as you wish.” I ordered my two swordsmen.
The reason I made sure to order Silent Swordsman LV7 to be the one in charge of stopping the lich’s attacks, was because he has an effect to ‘Negate all Spell effects on the field’. In reality, it didn’t seem to be quite so powerful, but he could still easily cut magic spells with his blade.
With the two new challengers in the fray, the lich didn’t last for long. Mainly because all of its offensive spells got cut by Silent Swordsman’s blade. And while the lich moved its barriers to block all of the attacks by Diamond Sword coming from the front, Mystic Swordsman snuck behind the lich and ended the fight.
“Are you sure? Isn’t it dangerous to let outsiders into the core room?” Jack asked after I asked if they would join us for a late lunch in the core room.
“I think I can trust you guys enough.” I said. “Or are you planning on doing something stupid?”
“No, no. Of course not.”
“Then it is fine. Come on, let’s go.”
“Why is there a full table and chairs here?” Alice asked as she saw the core room.
“For sitting and eating. There are also beds here. It is a fully functional house. Well, almost.”
“So you weren’t kidding when you said you were going to hole up in here.” Ria said.
“I actually was. I just said I could. Now then, what shall we eat today?” I asked myself as I opened my collection to search for something to cook with Mystik Wok. I had unsummoned my swordsmen after we got into the room, btw.
7 Colored Fish? Nah. I just ate fish yesterday, so something else.
Ancient One of the Deep Forest? That’s an option. It’s just a multi-tailed goat.
Armed Dragon LV3? I kind of want to try dragon meat, but I think his meat might be a little too tough.
Baby Dragon? He looks a bit better, but he is a baby. I can’t eat a baby.
Basic Insect? No. I don’t want to eat bugs.
Blade Rabbit. Yeah. That will do. It is a beast on the smaller side, so it should be something that we can eat. And it doesn’t have too much attack, so it won’t over heal us too much.
I cooked the rabbit for us and we enjoyed our lunch.