My second life as a dungeon

It had been four days since we had set out and we had already covered most of the area that had opened up to me without finding anything interesting. Sure we had run into various low level monsters but other than levelling both me and Val up once each they weren’t really worth mentioning. I was starting to get a bit dejected, while I knew that the likelihood of finding something similar to the goblin village was low I still thought I would find something.

Don’t get me wrong, I was enjoying my time with Valerie, it’s just that I was still getting used to the fact that this world wasn’t exactly like one of the fantasy worlds I had read about when I was young. ‘Hey, what’s that?’ Val said, causing me to stop brooding and look up. It took a while to find what she was pointing at but eventually I saw a reasonably sized hole in the ground.

It looked like it had opened up recently but it was hard to tell how deep it went so we cautiously walked over to it with our weapons out. Even though my excitement was starting to return I knew that I had to keep my wits about me because it was impossible to tell what would happen when out in the wild. We got to the hole without anything jumping out of it to attack us so we tried to look down it but the light quickly faded so we still couldn’t see the bottom of it.

‘I am going to send some light down, be prepared in case I disturb anything.’ I said, warning Val before starting to cast one of my new spells that I had created during some downtime. Hearing this Val brought her staff up and started to slowly cast a spell, casting a spell over a longer time than was necessary would reduce its mana cost, make it easier to hold and would still be able to be instantly finished if necessary.

As she did this I knocked an arrow and sent some mana into it causing a white magic circle to surround it. The arrow slowly started to glow brighter as the magic circle shrunk into the arrow until it was smaller than the shaft and the spell was finished, the arrow now almost too bright to look at. Once I was finished and I was sure that Val was ready in case anything jumped out of the hole at us I shot the arrow into it and watched it fly downwards.

The cave was instantly illuminated, letting us see the walls as the arrow flew down for about ten seconds before hitting something and bouncing out of site. During this time nothing attacked us and we didn’t see any monsters so we knew that the start of our descent would be safe. Ten seconds may not seem too long but due to how fast my arrows were going now it had to be at least a kilometre deep which caused my excitement to come back in full force.

This was it; this is what I was searching for, I started to feel my adventurous spirit scream out at me to just jump in as I couldn’t help but let out a little squeal of excitement. Luckily I wasn’t dumb enough to jump straight in so I took a second to calm myself down. I then pulled on Val’s sleeve while saying ‘Let’s go down there, quick make some stairs for us.’

Val just looked at me with amusement on her face, making me blush a bit before coughing and adding ‘Please.’ Val just chuckled to herself as she did as I asked and used her elemental magic to pull out some stone in the walls to create a spiral staircase that we slowly walked down, while also creating a ball of fire below us to let us see.

The arrow had gone fast but I was still able to see enough as it went by to tell that no monsters were waiting for us on the walls so I wasn’t too worried about getting ambushed on our way down. Over the next half an hour we slowly made our way down the tunnel before landing on the bottom. We looked around but we couldn’t see any monsters so we spent five minutes having a drink, picking up my arrow and letting Val recover her mana before continuing.

The spell she used to create the stairs wasn’t that strenuous so she was able to regenerate most of the cost as we were walking down but she still hadn’t been able to regenerate it all. Before we moved on I dismantled my bow and took out my two daggers. This cave had a lot of twists and turns which meant that one of us would have to be the frontliner. Since I was nimbler and could easily move around thanks to [Minor Blink] that job fell onto me.

If we found a big cavern where we could fight from range then it would only take a minute to put my bow back together, plus it was bad for the bow to have it ready all the time. As we travelled down the winding cave we started to see a few lights dimly glowing in the distance so we went further to investigate what was going on.

Unfortunately before we could figure out what was making the light it reacted to us approaching and let out an ear piercing screech before all the lights started to multiply and get brighter. Soon this was joined by the rapid beating of wings as the lights started to rise with the noise until it got so loud that we couldn't hear anything else. By this point the lights had gathered enough to show us what they were.

Apparently we had accidentally stumbled across a small nest of a kind of giant mutated firefly that was more comparable in size to an eagle than any insect from my world. We didn't have much time to inspect them though as they were already charging at us, in preparation I raised my daggers and prepared for a fight. It was hard to count since there were so many of them and they were moving too fast but I reckoned there were around fifteen insects in this small nest.

Well fourteen now as Val had already sent a rocky javelin at one of them, causing it to explode and spray insect guts everywhere, making it very apparent that they were not tanky at all. I couldn’t wait around doing nothing though as they eventually reached me and I slashed at two of them with my daggers. One of them was cleanly cut in half while the other one was sent flying into the wall before turning into paste.

I couldn’t get them all though as I was slowly getting swarmed forcing me to teleport away from them, and towards Val, before they could try and bite me. It took a second for them to realise that their apparent prey had escaped but when they did they turned to me and started to buzz even more angrily than they were before. As they charged at me Val managed to hit two more with a fire arrow each causing them to fall to the ground as steam rose from them.

I sliced two more into pieces before blinking away again, this time though when I appeared I was still in the swarm as I couldn’t go any further back without risking them getting to Val. This meant that a few of the bugs managed to bite me but it was nothing serious as they were so weak. It also meant that they were all focused on me letting Val send a boulder through the swarm, hitting most of them but only squishing three.

Over the next twenty seconds I blinked three more times, each after taking down another bug, and Val sent two more fire bolts that took down the remaining two bugs. I ended up receiving a few more bites over that time but I had still barely lost any health so we just continued on without worrying about it after collecting some of the corpses. It seemed like they weren’t monsters so they had left behind their bodies which let me have a closer look at them.

The giant beetles had several points on them where some sort of glowing fluid came close to the surface which is how they let off light. I didn’t really know how this substance worked so I was quite intrigued by it, Val had never seen something like this before either so she was also interested in them. Other than the glowing spots they looked like an average beetle that had been grown to be over a hundred times its usual size.

It had six black, scaly legs, a scaly abdomen, two green scales that covered its see through wings and a disgusting head that had huge mandibles. Luckily it seemed that the strength of their mandibles didn’t increase with their size otherwise they would have been able to easily injure me. Once I had finished examining the beetle I dropped it into my bag and kept on going down the cave.

We travelled a little bit further into the cave before coming across something new, it caught my eye due to it reflecting Val’s light into my eyes so we stopped to investigate what it was. I went over to it and bent down before brushing away the dirt so that I could see it better. It turned out to be an oddly familiar gem that I couldn’t quite recognise.

I tried to get it out but it was stuck in the stone so I took out one of my daggers before digging around the gem. As I uncovered more of it I realised that it was a mana gem similar to the ones I had put into our weapons, I hadn’t recognised what it was at first because it was rough and unpolished but as I broke away the stone surrounding it the gem started to shine through.

After digging for a full minute I had managed to dig enough to get my hand around the gem before pulling it out. ‘Hey, look at this’ I said excitedly as I held the gem up for Val to see, since I had scraped away all the dirt she was able to instantly tell what it was, ‘There must be a leyline around here, do you think the villagers will be able to turn this place into a mine?’

‘We aren’t too far away from the dungeon so I don’t see why not’ Val replied with a smile on her face almost as big as mine. This sort of thing is exactly what the heroes in the stories she read would do, go around finding stuff that no one else had seen before that would then be used to help enrich everyone’s lives. ‘I can’t believe that no one has found this place yet.’

‘The hole we found must have recently opened.’ I said giddily, ‘I don’t know what caused it but I am really happy we found it.’ I was so excited because as long as the leyline stayed around here more mana gems would be created so if someone opened a mine here it would be profitable for millennia. Sure some dungeons could create mana gems or items that had mana gems attached to them but this was never as good as the ones mined outside of dungeons.

This meant that more people would move to the dungeon settlement and it would grow even faster than it already was. I had to tell the Guild about this so I pocketed the gem before moving on, even if this had been all we found then it would have already been worth it to come here but that wouldn’t stop me from looking for more. It was impossible to tell what the rest of the cave had in store for us.