My second life as a dungeon

We had been walking for a while since finding the mana gem with nothing happening so I started a conversation with Val to pass the time. ‘Do you think the miners will be able to get down that shaft alright?’ I said while keeping an eye in front of us, ‘It is quite a long way down and they will have to carry quite a lot of heavy loads up and down it.’

‘I am sure it will be fine,’ Val replied, happy to not be in complete silence anymore, ‘They will probably just commission an artificer to make them an elevator to make the journey easier and quicker. It’ll be incredibly easy to build as, other than the slight curve, it is a straight drop down.’

‘Oh that makes sense, I didn’t realise you had those here.’ I said, a bit embarrassed. I was learning everything I could about this world but it was going incredibly slowly so there were still tons of areas that I was completely missing. ‘I shouldn’t have assumed that you didn’t, we had elevators in my old world but they were relatively new and didn’t have any magic involved so I thought they weren’t a thing here.’

‘Yeah elevators have been a thing here for a long time.’ Val said, ‘Admittedly not many places have them as they don’t really need them and stairs work fine most of the time. They are only really used in mines that go deep, like this one will, or other special circumstances.’

I was about to reply when I was interrupted by another enemy showing up. This time instead of small insects it was some kind of undead monster. If I had to guess I would say some poor soul fell down here and died, then the leyline soaked their body with mana until they were eventually turned into this nasty creature.

Its skin had lost all of its colour and was now a sickly white, its side was severely caved in, its hands had mutated into long thin tendrils, the nails now foot long claws that scraped across the floor as it walked. It was covered with scraps of what was once clothes and it stank of decay so badly that I could smell it even from far away making me want to throw up.

I brought my daggers up and waited for it to charge us as I didn’t want to get close to it and have to smell it. Val, however, didn’t need to wait so she quickly created a thin strip of water that she sent at the monster. She hit it right in the jaw which caused it to become slightly dislocated and was now hanging off of its face by a thin strip of skin.

This caused it to finally notice us as it looked up, let out a terrifying scream and started charging at us. While I was getting ready to dodge its attack, Val sent out another water slice, this time hitting it on its chest, leaving a huge mark but not slowing it down. That was all we could do before it reached us and took a swipe at me, it was incredibly slow so I easily managed to dodge out of the way.

Unfortunately in doing so I got a good whiff of its stench which caused me to retch and almost throw up. I tried to fight through it but my stomach wouldn’t listen to me which left me open to its second swipe. It found a gap in my armour, went straight through it and into my side before sending me flying into a wall as my HP dropped drastically and Val screamed in shock.

Angry at seeing this thing wound me, Val sent off another water slice but in her haste she didn’t put enough mana into the spell so it dissipated before it could reach its target. The undead monster ran over to where I was crumpled on the floor, blood pouring out of me, before raising its claws for another attack. Luckily I managed to roll out of the way and, between retches, somehow manage to dig my daggers into its shoulder before pulling them down, ripping its arm off.

Unfortunately, due to its undead nature, the monster didn’t bleed out right then and there but with one less arm it was severely weakened. It let out another scream, more from being angry at losing its arm than any actual pain, before leaping forwards to try and bite me. However, the attack was heavily telegraphed so I managed to blink behind it. Its desperate attack had managed to get it severely unbalanced which let Val get a clean shot onto it, taking its other arm off with a rock javelin.

It wasn’t dead quite yet but by this time I had finally gotten over its stench, and my wound had stopped bleeding thanks to my HP healing it, so I quickly and cleanly beheaded it with my daggers. The monster immediately fell to the ground, no longer a threat, but it took a full minute for the head to lose all the mana that was keeping it alive before disintegrating into dust.

HP can only do so much so I still had a pretty bad wound in my side but we were planning on having a rest now anyway so I just let it be. We had found this cave quite some time after noon and we had been exploring it for hours so it was definitely time to set up camp and rest. Val cooked our rations for us without complaining as I was in too much pain to help, plus they weren’t particularly complicated to cook.

Once I had a full belly I curled up beside Val and in front of the fire and fell asleep dreaming of what treasure and relics we might find down here. I woke up what felt like the next morning snuggled up to Val, who had walled off both sides of the cave so no monster could get to us without waking us up and was still asleep.

I had subconsciously taken advantage of this in my sleep and moved to cuddle her which made me a little embarrassed. Still, it was nice to be close to someone like this and she was still sleeping so I decided to stay still and just enjoy it. I didn’t know when exactly Val woke up but about thirty minutes later she decided that it was time to get up and that we could cuddle later so we had breakfast before packing up our camp and going on our way.

As we were walking I did a few stretches to test my injury and to my surprise it was as if I had never been hit at all, I didn’t even have a scar. I knew that this system used HP to heal wounds faster than they would normally but I still expected it to take a while to fully heal. This didn’t mean we were immortal though, if your HP ran out then you would still bleed out if no one came to your aid.

There were also a few wounds, like decapitation, that would kill someone instantly no matter how much HP they had. Unfortunately HP wasn’t strong enough to stop people from ageing but it was able to slow the process down. How well it did this was proportional to your constitution so the higher your level the longer you would live. Val had told me about a legend where some humans had managed to increase their level to the point that they had outlived some elves who had lifespans of over a thousand years.

I was thinking about this while we travelled down the cave for another hour without coming across anything except a few more mana gems and were just chatting when the cave suddenly opened up into a huge cavern that made me lose my train of thought. There were mana gems practically everywhere, all of them reflecting light from Val’s orb to create mesmerising patterns. We both stood there for a few minutes admiring them before moving on.

Now that we were in a huge cavern I had retrieved my bow and we were looking all around us. The cave was too big to just search blindly so we decided to keep one of the walls on our left as we walked the cavern's circumference. We had been doing this for about five minutes before a noise caused my ears to twitch, well it was more a set of noises as I heard thousands of skittering footsteps that were distinctly bug-like.

I told Val about the noises and since neither of us were particularly scared of bugs in general we decided to investigate what was making the noise. This turned out to be an incredibly bad idea as when we got in range to see what the bugs were the colour on my face drained away as I barely stopped myself from screaming and running away. It hadn’t been wrong to say that most bugs don’t affect me, unfortunately the operative word there was most with the exception being earwigs.

Which these bugs just so happened to be, my fear of them wasn’t usually too bad so if they had been the same as back on earth I may have been a little creeped out by them and asked to just go around but I wouldn’t have freaked out. They weren’t, however, the standard earth variant, no, instead they had to be giant ones the length of my arm.

They were also completely white and had bumps where their eyes should be due to living in a cave but I wasn’t paying attention to that side of them. Even giant, hairy, tarantulas would have been a hundred times better than these abominations. I may have barely been able to keep some sense of composure but I was still frozen, causing Val to turn around as she checked on me.

This meant that she didn’t see one of the bugs turn and look at us before doing something that notified the rest of the hoard to our presence, causing thousands of giant albino earwigs to charge at us. The small part of me that was still conscious of the outside world knew that if I stayed frozen like this then both of us would die and I didn’t know if we would be able to run away from them.

This only left one option out of the fight/flight/freeze trio, fight. As soon as I came to this conclusion I felt adrenaline pump through my whole body as I went into auto pilot. My body drew an arrow from my quiver, imbued it with acidic mana as I was knocking it and as soon as the bow was fully drawn I let it fly. I didn’t even aim it as no matter where it hit bugs would die, causing a huge splash of acid to cover dozens of bugs, killing them all.

I didn’t pay attention though as I was already knocking my next arrow without thinking of anything, it was like I was in a fear induced state of pure meditation. A part of me that was somehow able to think a little bit knew that Val would have started her own barrage on the bugs but I didn’t have the spare capacity to find out. Hopefully her spells were more tactical than my acidic arrows were.

Arrow after arrow flew out of my bow until I had eventually run out of arrows to shoot, I didn’t stop however and just started creating more arrows like I had at the goblin colony. Although I did this much faster than before, to the point that, if I had been cognizant at the time, I would have been impressed at myself. Unfortunately this had the side effect of causing me to use up my mana reserve faster than before.

This meant that I eventually also ran out of mana, I only realised this as I went to create another arrow and nothing happened. I still wasn’t thinking properly so I just tried two more times before the mana exhaustion finally pulled me out of my state and I realised that I was out of mana. All I got out before I fainted was a small ‘oh no’ and then the world disappeared.