My second life as a dungeon

The other side of the portal was exactly the same as the previous floor except for one difference, a huge lake was in front of us that probably took up 90 percent of the floor. ‘What should we do?’ Nethy asked, a hint of nervousness in her voice. ‘We can’t breathe underwater, not to mention my fire won’t work either.’  

‘Well, not exactly.’ Hele replied ‘I can cast a spell that will let all of us breathe underwater. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to also buff you and Taren since the spell takes up most of my concentration.’ 

‘That solves one of Nethy’s issues, but it also creates another one.’ Taren said, joining the conversation ‘We heavily rely on your buffs, Hele, to let us fight above what we usually can. I am not sure how strong we would be without them.’ 

‘I personally don’t have an issue with it.’ Baer said, ‘My spells aren’t really affected by being underwater so we might lose a bit of strength from you two not being able to fight at peak strength but as long as Brior and I pick up the slack I don’t see why we wouldn’t be able to beat this floor.’ I agreed with this so I just nodded my head to show my assent. 

Nethy still looked like she wasn’t fully on board with the plan, Taren saw this and said, ‘Look, the portal might not even be underwater let’s look around the perimeter of the floor and if we don’t find anything then we can try the lake.’ 

Hearing this Nethy looked a bit better but still not a hundred percent convinced and said, ‘I have a feeling that the portal will be in the lake, but I agree that we can at least try another solution.’ Everyone else agreed so we started walking around the lake with it on our right. 

It was rough hiking through the jungle since there were no neat paths to follow anymore, which is the first thing that hinted that we weren’t supposed to be going around the lake, so it was slow going. Eventually, about half an hour after we entered the floor, we came across a pack of five hobgoblins going around the jungle. They were quite big, so we noticed them before they noticed us, but we weren’t expecting them, so they quickly noticed us. 

Taren had been leading us through the dense jungle, so he was first to react, running ahead of us and letting out a loud roar taunting the hobgoblins into attacking him. Next Baer quickly fell into her role of protecting everyone by creating arcane shields in-between each of us and the archers. The shields were quite small so the three soldiers would be able to sidestep them but at least it would let our two front liners give them more focus instead of also having to be worried about the archers. 

The large goblinoids were still all close together so I opened the fight by shooting a huge fireball at them. The warriors managed to get their shields up in time to stop most of the blast from reaching them but the scorch marks on them told me that they still received some damage. The archers on the other hand had no way to protect themselves so they felt the full brunt of the fireball, one of the archer’s armour had even set alight and they were desperately trying to put it out. 

Next the hobgoblin warriors finally started retaliating by rushing Taren, surrounding him and slashing at him. The first waves of attacks were expertly blocked and parried but the second wave managed to get past Taren’s defences, leaving him with two gashes across his right arm and left leg. Before the next wave of attacks could assail Taren, a bright white light enveloped him and Nethy, Hele had finally finished her buff spell.  

You could see the change immediately as Taren started to have a much easier time blocking their attacks and even managing to attack them back. While this had all been going on Nethy had been quietly flanking the archers and had finally reached them. Unfortunately, when she enveloped her Guandao in fire the archers noticed her and dodged her attacks.  

This was also when we realised that the archers somehow managed to resist Taren’s taunt as instead of attacking him, they attacked Hele, the obvious source of the melee fighters’ buffs. Luckily, even though Nethy hadn’t been able to land any hits on the archers, she was able to get in the way of one of them so that her plus Baer’s shields managed to stop that one’s attacks. 

The other archer, on the other hand, wasn’t hindered at all and so was able to hit Hele with both of their shots, one going through her left thigh and the other one going through her abdomen. While I was casting my next spell I looked over at Hele and it seemed like she was in a lot of pain and barely keeping focus on her spell, out of everyone she had the lowest constitution so I was worried that she could take any more hits like that. 

I could tell that we were all thinking the same thing as both me and Baer started focusing on the archers, I sent a wall of earth at them that would both block their line of sight and deal some damage to them. They obviously weren’t expecting it as the wall flung one of the archers through the air until they crashed into a tree a few metres behind them. Baer used this opportunity to attack them while they were stunned, sending a water cannonball flying at it. 

The cannonball hit the archer square in the chest, winding it and doing some major damage to the archer. As this was going on I saw the arrows fall out of Hele as she healed herself back up to full strength and Nethy rushed the downed archer before stabbing her Guandao into its chest. The fire then started to expand until it engulfed the archer’s whole body, eating it as it went and leaving nothing but ash. 

Unperturbed by their comrade’s death the other archer sent more arrows at Hele, although this time she was expecting it so only one of the arrows hit her. Seeing that Hele wasn’t in as much danger anymore I took a second to see how Taren was doing and it wasn’t good, he had a few more wounds and he hadn’t even managed to take one of the hobgoblins down yet. I wanted to help him as soon as possible but he would be in even more danger if he lost Hele’s buffs. 

With this in mind I sent another spell at the last archer, I had intended it to be another earth spell but instead it turned into a wall of psychic energy that passed straight through the archer. Luckily it still did something as I saw the archer grab their head in pain as blood started to leak out of their nose and eyes, soaking into their orange fur. Nethy and Baer then finished off the archer with a slash to the chest and a water cannonball to the forehead. 

Hele had also noticed that Taren was struggling and started to heal him, it wasn’t enough to reverse all the damage he had taken but it was still going to keep him in the fight. The wounds that Hele just closed were immediately reopened by a few lucky slashes from one of the warriors. With the archers both dealt with everyone, other than Hele who was focused on keeping Taren alive, started to focus on the warriors. 

Baer sent water cannonball after water cannonball, I sent a multitude of spells at them, Nethy slashed at their undefended backs and Taren tried to slash back at them whenever they left an opening. While we had been fighting the archers, Taren had been focusing down one of the warriors so that one went down fairly quickly, making Taren’s job of protecting himself just that little bit easier.  

The second warrior took much longer to take down though as they were practically untouched. And the last warrior was the quickest to go down as Taren could focus fully on attacking instead of just blocking attacks from all around him. As the last warrior fell we all let out a long breath as we were exhausted. ‘Well, I think we can say that the exit to the next floor is definitely in the lake.’ Taren exclaimed clearly exhausted. 

No one said anything as we all knew he was right. That pack of hobgoblins was way too difficult to take down compared to the monsters on the last floor and while it wasn’t unheard of for dungeons to have huge difficulty jumps, those were usually found either every fifth floor or the floor after that as they unlocked higher tier monsters. But that was mostly found in dungeons that weren’t sentient as they were essentially just doing everything by luck. 

Sentient dungeons, on the other hand, usually knew what they were doing so huge difficulty jumps were much more rare. The only option this left was that the encounter was built to be optional, and delvers were supposed to go a different route, in this case that is into the lake. But before that we were all exhausted from the fight, so we had a ten minute rest to get our breath, mana and health back.