Isekai Terry: Tropes of Doom (An Isekai Adventure Comedy)

"Oh, my gods, these things are so gross!" shouted Kelima.

"Less chatting and more killing!" bellowed Terry, as he punted a cockroach the size of a great dane into a nearby wall.

Watching the vile thing explode into a gooey mass of shattered chitin was almost enough to make him gag. Yeah, whatever he might have said to Kelima, she was absolutely right. These things were disgusting. Fucking dungeon insect swarm trope, he cursed internally. He lifted a hand and sent a fireball hurtling into an approaching mass of the awful monsters. He'd been practicing that on every floor of this dungeon and, as was often the case, repetition bred competence. Once the fireball struck one of them, it burst like a big incendiary balloon, and fire washed over half the group. It was effective, but it came with a downside.

"Fucking hell," growled Terry through clenched teeth as a thin wave of smoke washed back down the tunnel toward him. "That stinks!"

It wasn't quite as terrible as the hellstench from the goblin and hobgoblin blood burning, but that was a high bar to exceed. It was still exactly as bad as one might expect from setting fire to creatures that, back on his original world, routinely consumed garbage. I'm going to have to work on making the fire hot enough to turn them to ashes, thought Terry. It might at least cut down on that stomach-turning smell. He supposed that this was his penance for some of the earlier floors. While he mostly tried to have Kelima do the fighting, he did make some exceptions.

There had been a floor with what he thought were salamanders. For some reason beyond his understanding, those things were always fire monsters in the books. The monsters on that floor were four-legged lizards that tended to spew or emit fire, so he drew the inference. Since getting burned was always a shitshow, no matter how well or fast you heal, he'd taken it upon himself to tackle that floor. With his much more advanced ice magic…qi…cultivator…stuff, he'd blown through that entire floor in about twenty minutes. It had given Kelima a break to catch her breath if nothing else.

There had been another floor with what he thought were minor rock golems. They were vaguely person-shaped rock monsters. Golem seemed like the right conclusion, although he supposed that they could have been weak rock elementals. He decided it probably didn't matter, except as an academic question. Again, they were a bad matchup for the weaker noble girl. So, he'd burned off some pent-up aggression by Hulk-Smashing his way through that floor. It had been really cathartic to have something he could punch in the "face" without even the slightest smidgen of guilt or moral uncertainty. Granted, they didn't really have faces, just a rocky protuberance the size of a basketball above their shoulders, but that was close enough for him.

Now, though, he was paying for those easy rides. It had been obvious from the very beginning that Kelima would be overwhelmed if he made her fight by herself. It wasn't a matter of strength or skill. They'd get her with pure numbers. So, he'd stepped in to do the whole dungeon party thing and play something between a damage dealer and a tank. Terry had figured out pretty fast that even if these things managed to get at him with their vile mouth parts, they couldn't deal any damage. Not to his body, at any rate. Maybe if they spewed clouds of poison or something, that could have been a threat. Of course, his clothes looked a little worse for wear. I need something sturdier to wear, he thought.

Even with all the advantages he brought to the table, this wasn't turning out to be an easy floor for Kelima. While he might be impervious to their bites, he doubted that she was. And some of the monsters were getting by him. Not a lot, since he was basically a one-man extermination squad, but enough that she rarely got a chance to regroup or even just rest for a few seconds. That kind of relentless fighting wasn't sustainable, even if she had been absorbing most of the source stones on each floor. He got the feeling that while some of the improvements from those might be instantaneous, some of them weren't.

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It also followed that the person experiencing them would need some time to adapt to those changes. Time Kelima wasn't getting. Not because Terry didn't want to give her time, but because they were on the starvation clock. They had found water on one floor. That made dehydration less of a concern, but there was no guarantee they'd find water again. That meant that they had to keep rationing it. Terry had feigned taking the occasional sip just so she wouldn't try to be noble. While he didn't know if he could go without indefinitely, he was certain that he had a much bigger margin for error than the girl did.

Summoning enough ice to coat everything in front of him for the better part of a hundred feet, Terry stopped the latest wave in its tracks. He jumped back, drew a sword, and bisected all the monsters that had been trying to flank Kelima. Her sword arm dropped immediately, and it looked like she was only keeping a grip on it through pure instinct. She actually swayed from side to side. There was a glassy sheen to her eyes that he found a little concerning.

"Take a break," he commanded, pointing back the way they'd come.

Kelima didn't muster a single complaint. She compliantly walked back the way they'd come, leaned her back against the tunnel wall, and slid to the ground. Her eyes closed and, within seconds, Terry could hear soft snoring from the girl.

Is she going to make it? Terry asked other-Terry.

How should I know? asked the construct.

You sure like to act as though you know everything.

Okay. I guess that's fair, but this is different. I get fed a ton of information about you and the environment because of everything your meatware processes. Just because you don't consciously register it, it doesn't mean it vanishes. That gives me a lot of advantages, but it doesn't make me omniscient. I have no idea what condition she's in at the moment. Especially since she's been absorbing those source stones by the bucketful. That she's sleeping is pretty telling. How inclined are you feeling to take a nap in this monster-spawning hell-hole?

Not very, admitted Terry.

There you go. If nothing else, you need to give her a chance to get some real sleep before you go to the next floor.

Will this floor stay cleared if we don't move on?

Based on what I've seen so far, yes. As terrible as these places can be, they also follow rules set out by deities. In a dungeon this extensive, it's expected that you might spend days or even weeks in here. Nobody can fight nonstop for that long. Well, maybe you can, but not the normal adventurers who come to these places. That generally means a floor will stay cleared while you set up a temporary camp.

But you don't know for sure?

I'm as sure as I can be with the utter absence of information we have about this specific dungeon and who made it, snapped other-Terry. Find me some blueprints, and I'll start handing out guarantees.

Sorry, said Terry when he realized that he had been getting unreasonably demanding.

He didn't know anything about dungeons except for what he'd read in books. While the magical construct did seem to have a lot of general knowledge, and some very specific knowledge about cultivation, it wasn't an encyclopedia.

It's fine, muttered other-Terry. Dungeons don't bring out the best in people.

Do you have any idea how much of this floor we have left?

It'd be more of an educated guess than a good prediction.

I'll take it, thought Terry.

Thirty percent, give or take.

Alright. I'll let Kelima sleep for a few more minutes, and then we'll finish this floor.

You know there's going to be a giant cockroach queen, right?

Terry sighed internally and answered, Yup. I knew that.