The Outlands

As much as her vacation had been nice, Tess had to admit that it felt good to be back in a dungeon again. She had spent a couple hours in the beginner dungeons farming Attributes, yes, but it wasn't the same. Nowadays, all she had to do to deal with those weak monsters was exist in their general vicinity, and Attributes like Blighted Air and Phoenix Fire would kill them before they could do much. So, that farming session had felt more like a leisurely stroll than it did a proper dungeon delve.

This time, they were being a little…reckless was the wrong term, given how they were perfectly safe thanks to Maven's position as Appointed of Dungeons, but perhaps ambitious was more correct? The dungeon they were raiding was theoretically only recommended for people fifteen levels higher than them, but after taking a look at it they had agreed that they were more than capable of handling it now.

Ellie had stats that rivaled or even exceeded many people fifteen levels higher than her, within dungeons Maven effectively had even higher stats than Ellie, and levels and stats were becoming less and less relevant to Tess and instead her power was drawing from the synergy of her abilities.

The only worry they really had was that it might reflect poorly on the guild's assessment of them if they made such a seemingly reckless move. But, after consulting with The Rumors, they decided that, so long as they proved they were capable of easily handling the dungeon, it would instead show that they could accurately assess their capabilities instead of blindly following general recommendations.

That was the thing about freelancing; as levels rose, the recommended level guidelines became less and less effective. There was simply too much variance between what abilities each individual person had to make something that could be considered a hard and fast "rule". Even among dungeons with the same recommended level, whether or not you were truly capable of taking one on could depend on what sort of hazards the dungeon contained and how they matched up against your abilities.

Really, the guidelines were there to help people get an idea of where to focus their research efforts instead of concrete rule that should be followed in all cases. This was, according to the gods, an unfortunate consequence of the way the system itself was constructed. Tess hadn't quite understood the specifics, but it was something about randomness allowing for greater base power for stats and abilities.

With that in mind, Amy's system had high randomness, which naturally lead to high variance between the individual strength of people. And, with the sheer number of people in Amy's planes, that lead to a relatively high number of very strong people, which in turn gave them a large edge in the battles for planes.

But that wasn't really important right now. What was important was that their break was almost over, and it was time to get to back to work. "Well, I think I'm just about ready, how are you two doing?" Tess asked.

"I'm ready." Ellie replied, standing up and stretching. "My resources are almost done regenerating, and by the time we're in any sort of combat they'll be full. What about you, Maven?"

"Me too." Maven said. "Let's get going."

They stood and made their way to the next floor. The dungeon they were in was a rather interesting one; instead of the traditional journey through an area filled with monsters and traps, it was instead set up as a sequence of standalone fights that took place in colosseum-like arenas. Each fight had its own conditions attached to it, from simple things like Mana and Stamina costs for Skills and spells being doubled, to nastier ones like having to fight entirely underwater or while blinded.

You were able to see what a fight's condition was before engaging in it, and theoretically you could leave the floor to reset the fights as much as you liked. But, after the first ten or so floors, there began to be multiple fights per floor and you'd have reset the entire floor if you wanted to reset a fight.

While some of that sounded like it would make for battles that were straight-up unwinnable, it was expected that, at the level you were tackling this dungeon at, you'd have countermeasures for most of it. For Tess's party, that usually meant Tess would do something about it. Since Tess had access to every type of magic, she was capable of filling in gaps that would otherwise be filled with equipment or types of magic Ellie and Maven didn't have access to.

The real limiting factor was that Tess's Mana pool was still fairly small, and that most of the effects she had to help mitigate that only applied after she had used Mana. Still, she could easily cast a water breathing spell or strengthen her wives' non-sight senses. And, if worst came to worst, there were several fights which Tess could handle on her own.

She could natively breathe water, and nowadays she was perfectly capable of operating without her sight. The flexibility Attributes gave her meant that a situation in which she was well and truly incapable of contributing was rare indeed; at the very worst, simply standing near enough to the action would whittle down her enemies.

As they entered the next room, they began the pre-fight check they had taken to doing. The first thing to do was check the condition for this fight; in this case, it was that damage would increase and decrease in a sort of cycle. Tess and her party's damage would start normal, go up to one hundred and fifty percent over the course of a half a minute, then down to fifty percent over the next minute, and then back to one hundred and fifty percent and so on. Meanwhile, the monsters' damage would take the opposite path, going down to fifty percent then up to one hundred and fifty percent.

They had had that condition a couple of times before, and it was relatively straightforward; they just had to go all in on offense at the start, transition to fighting defensively, and go back and forth. The previous couple of times they had had this, they were able to take down the monsters in just a couple of cycles, so it had been a relatively minor condition.

One thing it did mean, however, was that Silky and Isabella had to stay hidden; Silky in a non-magical pocket Tess had created with her clothes, and Isabella anchored within Tess. Since they didn't level up like people did, they were still lagging behind in terms of stats, and more and more lately they had been relegated to purely using support spells. And, when the monsters' damage output was increased, they ran a very real risk of being one-shot.

They were in dire need of a full rework, and Tess had already begun the process of figuring out how best to go about it. To begin with, there was no way around swapping their memories to different cores; she could only push their current abilities so far, and if she spent the money to get high-level cores, they wouldn't need to do another swap like this for quite some time, if ever.

"We just doing this the same as the last couple of times?" Ellie asked, bringing Tess's attention back to what they were actually there for.

"I think so." Maven replied. "Tess?"

"Ah, right." Tess said. "Sorry, was thinking about my attendants and how they need an upgrade. After we finish up today, I'm going to start researching what cores would fit for them. At this point, I'm considering not sparing any expenses and just getting the best cores I can find that are like what they are now, then we won't have this issue anymore. They'd be a bit overpowered for where we are now, but I feel bad making them sit out and I don't want to make them change bodies multiple times."

Yes please! Silky said telepathically, peeking out of the pocket in Tess's shirt. I want that arachne Attribute too!

"I'll get you that Attribute if we can also get you something lets you change your size." Tess said. "You'd lose your role if you were human-sized all the time, and it might be a little hard to explain to people who don't know about us."

"Silky wants that arachne Attribute, I assume?" Ellie asked.

"Yeah." Tess confirmed. "And, Isabella, if you want any form-changing Attributes, feel free to request them."

"I would like animal parts. I wish to match with you." Isabella said, drifting out of Tess to speak before drifting back inside.

Ooh, me too! Silky added.

"I don't think that'll look like you want it to, but I'll model it for you later so you can decide." Tess looked up at her wives, smiling. "Silky wants animal parts as well." She explained.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

"Silky, you're the only spider I would ever call cute." Ellie said, shaking her head in amusement. "Let's talk more about this once we're done here, though; I want to finish this run before dinner."

"Right. I'm going to start it, then." Tess said. She laid a hand on the small signpost that indicated what the upcoming battle would be like, bracing herself for the teleportation into the arena where they'd do battle. The moment her surroundings changed, she leapt into action, barreling towards the nearest monster and laying into it with her claws.

It stopped charging towards Ellie to turn to deal with Tess, but Ellie swiftly got its attention with an area-of-effect attack, and Tess was on to the next. With this specific modifier in play, it was vital that Tess attacked all the monsters at least once before the damage she dealt started going down; the damage-modifying effect of the fight only applied to direct attacks, and not status effects, and most of Tess's status effects scaled their damage based off of the initial hit.

With those status effects in place, the monsters would still be taking a decent amount of damage when Tess's party switched to fighting defensively. In this specific fight, they were fortunate enough to be up against many weak enemies instead of a few stronger ones; Tess was more than capable of landing at least glancing blows on each of them, and that was all that was really needed to get them to die by the time their attacks were buffed.

The monsters fell relatively quickly, and soon they were on their way to the next encounter. The process was much the same; they took a moment to discuss how they were going to work around the fight's condition, did the fight, then continued on.

And they proceeded in that manner until they got a fight with a condition where the monsters' stats would increase by ten percent for every half a minute the fight lasted. That wouldn't usually be noteworthy, the fights usually ended well before even two minutes had passed, but they had been keeping an eye out for it because they needed it to unlock the dungeon's Challenge.

To get to the Challenge, they simply needed to avoid bringing the monsters below fifty percent health for five minutes, then defeat the monsters. While that was technically a simple task, it was also substantially more challenging. This was because they couldn't really afford to do damage to the monsters for fear of accidentally bringing them below half health. That meant that they couldn't just leave the monsters at death's door while they waited for the five minutes to be up, and had to resort to more nonlethal methods of restraint.

Tess did have some paralysis abilities, but they only lasted a couple of seconds, so they had to play it a bit more carefully. Tess started by paralyzing a monster and drag it towards the next nearest monster, re-applying paralysis when needed. When she got to that monster and paralyzed it, she sat in place and let Ellie and Maven bait the rest towards her, as dragging two monsters at the same time was a little more than Tess could handle.

That was the major downside of her stats being so low; even though her damage output had started to outstrip even Ellie in certain cases, she didn't have many of the physical benefits increased stats would have. The Strength stat's multiplier to one's physical strength wasn't even a linear increase, but the effect was still noticeable. By comparing what Ellie could lift on Mael, where stats didn't have much effect, to what she could lift everywhere else, they were able to figure out that her Strength stat was increasing her physical strength by somewhere in the realm of four times.

Tess, on the other hand, was only able to lift about one and three quarters times more than she was able to on Mael, and the projections she made topped her out at lifting about two and a half times as much at level one hundred and thirty. That was still a marked difference, to be sure, but it wasn't enough to let her drag multiple monster corpses without significant effort, effort that would distract her from making sure that they were paralyzed at all times.

Still, Ellie and Maven were quite competent, and were easily able to bring the other enemies to Tess, and they quickly reached the point where Tess was just refreshing their paralysis and waiting. And, once they had proved to themselves that they were more than capable of handling the situation, they just killed the monsters and used Maven's Blessing to head straight to the Challenge, deciding there was no sense in waiting the extra three and a half or so minutes when they weren't at any real risk of failure.

By comparison the Challenge was refreshingly easy; it was just a fight with five random modifiers slapped on. And, while that could be a problem if they got unlucky, they didn't, and that wasn't even because of Tess; Dungeons had purposefully built these modifiers to not be dependent on the Luck stat. This dungeon was, apparently, a sort of labor of love for her. She had built this dungeon just for the fun of it, and she wanted to be sure that someone with high Luck wouldn't absolutely trivialize the gimmick of the dungeon.

The modifiers they ended up getting were all simple, static, number-changing ones, and, to be fair, those were those most common type of modifiers, so the fight ended up going smoothly, and soon Tess found herself receiving her reward from the crystal.

Tess paused for a moment, then pulled up their chat window, pasting a screenshot of the Skill.

There was a moment of grim silence before the chat resumed.

With that awkward end to the conversation, Tess and her wives buckled down and got back to work. Life was right; worrying at this moment was pointless, and the best thing they could be doing to prepare was what they were doing anyway, so the only thing they could really do was get back to it.