Apinsig
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Chapter 289 Homesteading in a fantasy world
🕑 Added 2023-08-09 10:07:49 +0000 UTCIt had been 20 minutes since we arrived at floor 96, and we were already feeling the pressure. At first, we thought we might have stumbled upon an easy fight, as we were seemingly battling goblins. They were ranked two, but they didn't feel too strong. However, as soon as we attacked them, things took a weird turn, then became outright scary.
My first strike was aimed at three of them, but in an instant, they weren't there. Instead, they were a few meters away from me. The next moment, an arrow was about to hit one of them, but that goblin appeared in front of me, dagger poised to strike.
I kicked at him, but once again hit nothing. Slowly, more and more goblins showed up. None of us could land a hit on them, and they consistently broke my taunt. Nothing we did seemed effective. Similarly, they weren’t able to harm us either. They seemed to have some limitations to their rapid movement, as they only seemed to go where they had been before. "They're not using a movement ability; they're manipulating time," Luana informed us.
Replaying my memories while continuing to attack them, I realized she must be right. Horus began sharing common strategies for fighting time manipulators. However, all of them were resource-intensive or took more time than we had if we wanted to reach the core. Observing the goblins, I noted their weakness. The strategies Horus mentioned were meant for stronger individual opponents.
"There's no need for anything fancy. Just get into a tight formation C, and let’s do some run and find the boss room so we can get out of here as soon as possible," I suggested. After a brief silence, Horus responded, "That might work. They can’t do much damage. Everyone, form up and let's move."
What followed was a chase, with us constantly running from the goblins. Some of them had long-ranged attacks, but Luana easily defended against them. Some had movement abilities, besides time manipulation, they were the most challenging to handle, but we just had to fend them off whenever they got too close.
Like that, we continued our run for about an hour before we reached what looked to be a boss room. "There are also time fluctuations coming from that room," Luana informed us, so we slowed down a bit. I started to recall the strategies Horus had shared. "Adam, use the scroll," Horus instructed.
After a few moments of shock, Adam pulled out the scroll we got from the last floor, opened it, and activated it to go off inside the room. We didn't hear anything, but as soon as we stepped into the entrance, the goblin shaman-looking boss reappeared, ready to fight us. That was all it took for its legs to be gone, and only a few moments later, it was dead.
The unfortunate part was that the item it dropped, the staff it was holding, also melted away, but it was able to resist the substance for a little bit. It was unfortunate, if we had been a bit faster we might have saved it.
After about 5 minutes of keeping the goblins out and waiting until the substance burnt away enough that we could safely get to the stairways. We were done with this floor. We celebrated our small victory as we ran across the boss room and took the stairways downwards. We finished this floor in probably record time, and it gave us some breathing room time-wise.
The environment on the 97th floor wasn't as pleasant as the last floor. It was incredibly hot; the stones that made up the ruins were reddish in colour and quite hot to the touch. The air quality was also quite bad, and we could all smell the sulfur.
"Fiend, switch to cold-type attacks. Don’t let them scratch you. Regular materials don't hurt them much; use silver alloy weapons or blunt weapons," Horus quickly explained. But even before he finished, a fiend popped near us. Out of reflex, I attacked it. It looked like a flying demon, about four feet tall, flying with its wings.
I processed the information Horus told us too late, but I was glad about that. Expecting my attack to do little damage, I prepared to back off. I could already feel Luana weaving a spell. But when my blade got into contact with this monster, even before it touched it, the monster's flesh seemed to part ways, and the horrific scream it let out did some actual damage to my ears. I was easily able to slice it in half, and we all watched as the corpse fell to the ground and quite quickly started to smoke and disappear.
"Wow, I never expected that sword to be a silver alloy weapon and still be this formidable against normal creatures. But this should make things easier," Horus said while he himself took out a beautiful-looking silverish sword. Arabella was looking at me like she wanted to split my skull open and study it. I recalled all the materials I used in making this weapon, but I didn’t put any silver into it. Perhaps one of the unique materials I used has the same effect as silver on these types of monsters.
We took a few moments to readjust to the environment, and Luana cast some defensive spells that should work in this kind of environment. Then Horus started to explain all that he knew about these types of monsters. Apparently, fiends are well known amongst the higher-ranked adventurers.
“They're not a constant threat, but there are huge areas underground where they rule supreme. From what scholars understand, they are not native to this world, but no one knows for certain. There have been many expeditions to try to wipe them out, and huge areas underground have been cleared of them, but never has anyone been able to eradicate them completely from this world.”
"Expect many different forms of these monsters, and unfortunately, from my knowledge, most of them have wings. That means that a lot of our party won't be able to help in most of the fights, but they are weak to cold magic, so we should be able to manage this without too much trouble," Horus finished, and then we started exploring.
The place was horrible. Most of the monsters we came across weren’t melee fighters, so our mages indeed needed to do the heavy lifting for this floor. But the environment was also quite challenging, especially places with lava. Some of the monsters were so far away from us and flying over lava pits that I wouldn’t have any good way of fighting them even if I tried.
The few larger monsters that charged at us, Horus and I finished quickly. Arabella was the least effective in this area as her arrows didn’t do much damage, but none of us held that against her, as every one of us has run into areas where we weren’t that useful.
This place was vast, and unfortunately, because of the lava and multiple collapsed tunnels, we needed to backtrack quite a lot. I still needed to taunt everything, but it seems they were especially susceptible to it. I mostly just had to say, "Hey, you!" and the monster was completely focused on me, no matter what kind of damage they took. That also meant I got to feel fireballs on my face, especially when we were facing multiple enemies, as defending me was a lower priority than attacking because I could handle the low-damage spells.
Even when we reached the boss room, we had only spent around 16 hours on this floor. We were quite apprehensive, as the variety of monsters we ran into on this floor was quite high. The difficulty also went from easy to downright scary. We just had to hope that whatever boss we found wasn't going to wreck us.
We approached carefully. When we saw what we were up against, we all cursed inside our heads. It wasn't a huge monster, only about four metres tall, but the bottom half was a spider with eight legs and a huge body. The top half was a fiend, and it looked quite intelligent, which meant trouble.
Comments
Apinsig
it's been a really busy time for me. I will hopefully have some more time tomorrow.
Thomasaurus Rex
Thanks for the chapter Any info on yhe next dungeon chapter?
