Apinsig
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Chapter 285 Homesteading in a fantasy world
🕑 Added 2023-08-03 15:46:32 +0000 UTCAs I was walking back after having cleaned myself with energy, my mind was on the loot I got. From the different bag designs, I figured that they had also killed another group before they came after us. Perhaps their plan was to roam the 74th floor, collect loot, hopefully find some other parties to kill, and loot them as well. Then the only thing you needed to do to leave was to go down the stairs of a boss room.
I wasn’t going to tell the rest of the party about any of this. the loot I was going to keep and bring back to my home and probably let it sit for a few years until doing anything with it, just in case I could be identified from some of the items I stole.
"Arabella, don’t shoot, it's me Rich," I said when I got back to the doorway that led to our campsite. "That’s not our password," She answered. "Of course it’s not, but this is," I spoke back, after which I heard three knocks and gave two knocks in return. After a bit of silence, I walked in and looked up to see a bow aimed at me. "I don’t think that they will be coming if they were they would already have reached us," I said.
"I believe you might be correct. I will continue to watch, but you won't have much time to make food as I believe they wanted to wake up a bit sooner than usual," she told me, after which I started to walk to the camp to see what kind of food we could make today. "Wait, why are your gloves burnt like that?" she asked me. Damn it, her eyes are way too good. "Just some ability experimentation," I answered while continuing to walk to the camp.
I had a feeling that she wasn’t going to let that go, but this was just another small thing with all the things that she wanted to know. But if she hopes that she will get answers after we escaped the dungeon, she will be disappointed. Arabella will need to search for me afterwards, and reach my home, if she wants any answers beyond the shrugs I’ve been giving her.
After I woke everyone up and we finished eating, we once again started to explore the ruins. It took us six hours to find the stairways downwards, so perhaps we could have finished yesterday, but the boss was an annoying one that was quite resistant to physical damage, and Luana needed to use quite a lot of mana to finish the fight before the thing started to do too much damage. We descended downwards and this time the feeling of escape being just a thought away was a lot stronger, but we all once again didn't accept it.
The place we found ourselves in was nothing like we had seen before. It was a city-type ruins, but it must've been a huge metropolis as the streets were incredibly wide. The bricks that made the streets seemed to be made out of dirt, but they were as hard as any rock.
The buildings themselves were low to the ground, only about two stories, but the walls were made out of intertwined branches. Going closer, I saw that they were grown from the ground and then weaved together to make the walls. To my eyes, they reminded me of the plants that grew at the end of my river's delta.
My inspection was interrupted by the monsters of this area. They were 4 and a half feet tall stick creatures. I rushed in and my sword swings killed dozens with every strike, and after my taunt, it seemed that they were never ending.
About halfway in, when I was completely surrounded and had trouble defending my back quickly enough, I started to swing my sword in a circle and just continued to do that, spinning around and around until I no longer felt any monsters rushing towards me.
My head was incredibly dizzy by this point, but standing still quickly helped me recover my senses. "Shit, what the fuck was that?" I said out loud. "That was a proper swarm, and we might be in trouble here. We might need to fight this quite often, so I need everyone’s resource numbers so we can figure out how often can we keep this going and hopefully find a way to optimize this." Horus explained.
I just knew that that was correct. When I looked at how much experience I had gotten, it almost convinced me that this wasn't going to be too bad. But after letting out a loud sigh, we all understood that this was going to be a challenging situation.
The only reason that we were able to keep going was the large fighting space and my taunt ability working overtime. The spinning maneuver was incredibly effective against them and actually helped me conserve resources a lot better than fighting normally. The monsters also seemed quite susceptible to fire damage, but unluckily if you set them on fire they will eventually go out, so setting one on fire unfortunately didn't cause the entire pack to be set on fire.
After fighting three more times, we ran into trouble as somehow we managed to get the attention of two packs which pushed our resources to the limit. Unfortunately, you can't continuously drink energy-restoring or mana-restoring potions as you will get sick from them. We chose to camp on one of the roofs of the numerous buildings and that saved us from fighting with roaming packs.
In the morning, Horus announced his brilliant plan that we were going to jump from building to building as they weren’t too far away from each other so we could advance without having to fight. This kind of worked as the monsters weren't able to get to us at least not quick enough that we weren't able to escape by jumping to another roof. The problem was the monsters didn’t disappear and continued to follow us. Not wanting to get way too many monsters to follow us, we had to continue to fight on the ground.
I already had multiple notifications waiting for me but because of the type of fighting I was doing and after having expended so much energy, I needed to sleep like the rest of them, perhaps even worse because as soon as I got an opportunity, I immediately fell asleep.
At least everyone wasn’t complaining that I wasn’t doing my part in making food or staying up for night watch. The rest of my party didn't really need to do too much during the fight at least compared to me, so I was glad that they understood that I needed every bit of sleep I could get.
This floor also cost us a lot of time, making us lose almost half of the time advantage we gained to reach the core room before the two-month deadline. When we finally found the boss, we all cursed. We had hoped that it was a singular creature, perhaps a big tree, but no, it was just more of those same creatures although they did look a lot tougher and the way they moved, it looked like they have one mind or a hive mind of some sort.
Even worse, the streets here were a lot more narrow and to engage the boss we needed to enter the building they were in which was a large building but still too small to keep everyone safe. We also figured that the surrounding streets would also be filled with monsters meaning I wasn’t going to be able to keep them safe.
Many plans were brought up but all of them were rejected in the end. We simply couldn’t figure out how to keep everyone safe and even worse we didn’t know how strong our enemies actually were.
“The way I see it, we are going to use the entrance to the boss area to keep our sides safe, leaving only two openings. I will take the one towards the inside and Horus will defend the one outside. Don’t worry, I have an ability that should help you. I will also use my boost to give every one of us more damage and hopefully, we can survive long enough to kill every single one of them.”
This was the first time I revealed 2 abilities that they hadn’t known of. They especially didn’t know what to think about when they found out how much I could actually boost them and then of course came the question as to why I hadn’t done this before.
“That's quite simple, we didn't need it before.” They tried to argue against it but they only got as far as opening their mouths before they figured out that I was correct. We rested until everyone was off potion cooldowns and every resource pool was filled to the top.
