My second life as a dungeon

It had been about a week since the dungeon had opened the fifth floor to the public and told the guild that it was a raid floor. Since then adventurers wanting to be the first to clear it had started to gather. We were now finally ready to have a proper go at it as the fifth, and final, party had arrived two days ago. We had then spent yesterday getting acquainted with everyone else as well as going over the plan for the raid, which I would go over when the time came.

This was because, up till the last floor, we would be taking on each one in our original parties so I didn’t have to worry about the plan. I really wanted to be a part of the first successful raid as if we managed to beat the floor then we would get pretty good rewards and our reputation would be boosted. Some naive delvers had tried to take it on by themselves but no one had succeeded so far as the final boss was just too tough for them.

They didn’t leave with nothing though as some of them were willing to sell us the information they had gathered while on their attempt, letting us make a more solid plan. Again that would be saved for later, for now we had entered the dungeon and got to work like we usually did. We had been through the first four floors so many times that we had gotten into a routine.

This was that each encounter would have the same number of participants as the floor the encounter was on. For example each of the encounters on the first floor would be taken care of by one person, then each of the encounters on the second floor would be taken care of by two people and so on. Each encounter would be decided via rock paper scissors until everyone had had a fight and then it would switch to a rotating turn system to let everyone rest as long as possible in-between each fight. 

This strategy has always let us get through the early floors very fast as everyone was always able to fight at their best up until the fourth floor. As we were approaching the first encounter we had a game of RPS, which Yuvus won. Yuvus Forgehammer was our dwarven cleric tank that kept everyone alive mostly by making sure that no enemies got past him and that any damage they did was quickly healed.

He was average height for a dwarf at about 134 cm tall, he had a very round body covered in a set of heavy plate armour that he had created himself, his skin was very hard and was light brown, similar to the stone that he grew up surrounded by. He wielded a gold and white giant two headed hammer that was his final project that he made in order to finish his apprenticeship.

As he walked into the small room that only contained seven slimes the head of his giant hammer ignited with a holy white light as he tightly gripped his shield with his free hand. He then quickly charged at the nearest slime before smashing the hammer into it causing it to instantly burst before the goo boiled into nothing due to the hammer’s heat.

He may have been the slowest out of us but he was still much faster than any slime could ever hope to be. His hammer instantly reignited as he charged at the next slime quickly, repeating his previous actions. This then repeated five more times over twenty seconds before all the slimes had been killed without being able to do a thing to Yuvus. 

Sure, a few of them had managed to attack him before he got around to finishing them off but nothing got past his shield or armour. Yuvus had never liked to show off when he was fighting but he never went easy on anything either as he had the strict belief that fighting was always a matter of life or death and shouldn’t be taken lightly. 

I kind of agreed with him in certain situations but these were barely level 5 slimes, something would have to go terribly wrong for him to even get hurt let alone killed by them. With the fight over we quickly moved on to the next room before using the tried and true method to figure out who would be taking the next encounter on. I ended up winning the game so it was my turn next, I was a fire genasi mage that focused on close quarters combat. 

Now you might be thinking aren’t mages usually squishy and supposed to be protected by the rest of the party while they dealt massive damage from afar and usually you would be right except I was different from the standard mage in two ways. The first way was that I specialised in protection magic that I used to mitigate most damage that I, and my allies, took. 

The second way was that I had specifically trained to raise my con attribute to make it so that I could take any damage that got through my shields. Sure most mages didn’t like to get into the middle of the fight and it would slightly decrease my damage output but I hated to be protected by others, instead wanting to be the one doing the protecting.

So I opted to learn how to wield a sword at the same time I learnt how to use magic and I excelled in both pursuits. There had always been someone telling me that I was wasting my talent and that I should have been a pure mage. They were wrong though and I proved that to them when I became one of the top students in my year, only being slightly out done by one person.

I was pretty tall for a female genasi at almost two metres tall, my skin was made out of obsidian with rivers of lava flowing through it. I wore plain leather armour which was the heaviest I could wear while still having enough field of movement to cast my spells with the help of my finely made dark iron staff. my eyes had the usual white sclera and black pupil that most hominids had but my iris was a literal flame. Finally, my hair was made out of fire that would change depending on my mood.

Before I walked into the room space around me shimmered as I created my first ward, I then used what I had learnt in school to take the energy put into creating that ward that escaped and recapture it to create a second ward around me. I was so used to doing this by now that I was already on my second spell, this one was a little flashier as two flames appeared at the end of my two index fingers, they were, however, different to usual flames as instead of emitting light like usual they sucked it in.

I then brought them together before slowly separating them while drawing a semicircle with each one until they met below where I had started. This created a dark circle of nothingness about 50 cm in diameter that I stuck my hand into. I then physically grabbed the darkness and shaped it into a short sword as I slowly pulled my hand out until all that was left was a sword about the size of my lower arm.

None of my skills helped with this spell so it was quite mana intensive and hard to control but it was my favourite spell and I found it to work better for me than an actual sword so it was worth it. With all of my necessary preparations finished I charged into the room before striking at the nearest slime causing the sword to go straight through it with no resistance.

At first it did no obvious damage until the sword left the slime’s body and the core suddenly broke in half and the slime turned into a puddle. I then proceeded to charge at the next slime while nimbly dodging all the attacks that were coming my way. I had to deal with three more slimes than Yuvus, and I was forced to dodge their attacks which slowed me down.

This meant that it took me a full minute to take care of all of them but at the end of the minute they had all turned into puddles and I didn’t have a single scratch on me, just a bit of sweat rolling down my forehead and a smirk from a job well done. With all of them now dead we once again moved onto the next encounter, looting the first chest of the dive on the way there, as we decided who was going to fight them. This time it was Aerith that won so it was her turn next. 

Aerith was a young human woman, in fact she was the youngest out of the four of us, about 180cm tall, wore ill-fitting lightweight leather armour painted red, carried around a magitech gun and sword as weapons and was incredibly thin to the point that we were worried about her health. This was because when she was growing up she didn’t know when the next meal would be so she ate the bare minimum to survive while hoarding food.

Over the past year since we had found her we had slowly managed to get her to eat more so she was much healthier now but she still had a ways to go yet. Before she met us she had lived with her family in a scrapyard, in order to afford food she had learnt how to turn the scrap into things that she could sell. This is how she had made her rifle and sword, although her armour came from bandits she had killed in self-defence.

Speaking of which, both weapons had been made out of scrap metal but it was hard to tell due to them having been polished extremely well before being painted neon red similar to her armour. The gun had a long barrel with small, but powerful electromagnets embedded into it, the barrel went straight into the stock that had its middle missing where the trigger was. When not in use the sword attached to the bottom of it and was just a finely made red handle with runes that I didn’t recognise carved into it.

When it was in use however, the sword’s blade would swing out while being engulfed in lightning that would jump to a nearby enemy so that even if Aerith was blocked or dodged she would still do a little damage. They were easily her most prized possessions although she was still working on and improving whenever she had the time.

Unfortunately the next encounter was in a small room so she would be unable to use the rifle which she prefers, instead being forced to rely on her sword. As Aerith went into the room she ran some mana through the gem that had been embedded into the handle causing the sword to come to life, filling the room with a low buzz sound.

She then walked into the room but, unlike me and Yuvus, instead of charging at the slimes she stood still with both hands on her sword and yelled, using [Taunt] to force the slimes into attacking her. The slimes quickly advanced on her before either jumping at her or shooting a spell at her forcing her to dodge out of the way as her sword cut through two of the slimes.

Both attacks had just barely nicked the slimes but when the longsword was in the slime the lightning leapt from the blade and into the core, causing it to instantly shatter. She didn’t get a chance to stand up fully as she had to dodge more attacks coming her way but every time a slime got close to her, if she was able, she would swipe at it with her sword.

This would then make the lightning arc into a different core each time until two minutes later no more slimes were left alive. It had taken so much longer than me and Yuvus since she really wasn’t used to fighting in melee, much preferring to fight at range. The only reason she had a sword was because she used to travel alone and her gun wasn’t good at close proximity so she had decided to cover for her weakness by using a sword.

Except she had no skill with a sword so she made it even when her attacks missed. This wasn’t a fool proof plan though as if her enemy had a thick enough armour or hide then the lightning wouldn’t be able to do any damage unless the sword actually penetrated them. Due to this over the past year Yuvus and I have been training her in how to wield swords properly, she had even shattered four cores without relying on the lightning. 

We then moved onto the next room with only one person left to fight an encounter, Thejeon Yelris, so it was his turn to fight. He was a young, male wood elf, although him being young meant pretty much nothing as he was still almost double my age. His weapon of choice was a finely made longbow from his homeland, the fae wild, he wore a cloak made out of autumn leaves over leather armour.

The cloak made it as if wherever he went the forest also went, like he was a part of it which I guess he was. He didn’t really like to talk about his past and even after travelling together for over a year the only thing we knew was that he was here to get rid of any threats to his home as well as to find his older sister that had disappeared a few years before he left his home.

A new addition to his look happened when he hit level twenty and shadows started to cling to him. These made him harder to see to the point that you could still see him if he was in the light but as soon as he went into a shadow he would become invisible, even for people that could naturally see in the dark extremely well. 

This turned people’s first impressions of him from them thinking that he was just a friendly elven guide here to help them out to them thinking that he was a terrifying assassin that would kill them if even slightly provoked. Honestly, I had known him for long enough now to know that he was sometimes one, sometimes the other and sometimes, weirdly enough, both at the same time, it all depending on who you were and how you treated him and his friends.

When we reached the next encounter he used [Umbral Sight] to blend into the shadows cast by the trees to become invisible and move around to the other side of the room. Once he was ready he used [Quick Shot] to shoot an arrow at five different slimes, each hitting the slime’s cores and shattering them before they even had a chance to react. This caused the slimes to bounce around and try to look for him where the arrows had come from but he had already moved.

Once he had moved far enough away he shot at another slime, killing it, before moving and shooting again. This process repeated three more times until, less than thirty seconds later, all of the slimes had been killed. This hardly surprised me as, if the fight was in Thejeon’s favour he was easily the deadliest out of all of us. He had even almost been faster than Yuvus even though he had to deal with more than double what the tank had to deal with.

Speaking of Yuvus, now that everyone had had a chance to fight an encounter the next fight would go to him. The fight went pretty similar to his other one except that it took slightly longer due to the addition of three more slimes. The next room was the second chest room and then we were quickly entering into the boss room.