Chapter 71: Alone In The Dark 1

POV Eliza

I entered the dungeon in the middle of the night without being spotted by the guards. I had come up with a plan in advance as to what goals I wanted to pursue with the visit. The two most important items on this list were gaining experience of all kinds, be it in the form of EXP or combat experience. The second point was defeating the individual floors and bosses and thus obtaining development points. An additional point was improving skills, especially resistances and senses. So right at the beginning I tried to just rely on my senses and not turn on any lights.

I first had to get used to the surroundings. I noticed that I could faintly feel the cave walls. Was it because the dungeon was magical in nature and therefore there was magic everywhere? In any case, I didn't complain because that gave me a basis for orientation. I moved slowly through the first floor. I avoided the skeletons I encountered because I didn't want to waste time on the simplest monsters and I didn't do much damage to them with my daggers anyway. On the other hand, the damage the skeletons dealt was so low that my regeneration replenished my HP almost instantly. I spent the first day on this floor to sharpen my senses and gain confidence in my movement. So my Sense Mana skill increased very quickly. I briefly wondered why he hadn't done this before, as long as I'd been running through dungeons. I suspected that I hadn't paid attention to the sense before and it only rose when I actively used it. Maybe the increase was so small that it wasn't noticeable.

By the end of the day, I had gotten used to the darkness enough to be able to fight with relative ease. At least with the spear. The daggers had a significantly shorter range, which meant I had to get closer to the monsters. Neither my skills nor my courage was high enough to make me feel comfortable. Anyway, I was confident enough to fight my way further into the dungeon with the spear. But first and foremost I needed supplies. I would found it in the camp right outside the dungeon. The guards' attention had diminished again, especially after midnight. I equipped myself with as many supplies as I could comfortably carry and immediately went back into the dungeon.

The second day started with me going to floor 2. I had spent the rest of the night in the dungeon. To do this, I cleared the area in front of the stairs of monsters. I spend as little time as possible on this floor for the well-known reasons. I also noticed that now that I was nearing level 30, I was hardly getting any EXP from the weak monsters. So I moved quickly to floor 3. I already knew the route.

On floor 3 my approach changed. I wasn't particularly interested in zombies themselves, but I could practice fighting here. I found a single zombie and fought it first with my spear and later even with my dagger. Fighting blind was much harder than I imagined. To be honest, it was extremely difficult. If it hadn't been a slow, weak zombie, I almost certainly would have died. But even so, he gave me a lot of trouble before I could defeat him. I was really happy that I had good equipment and regeneration.

It felt like it took me an hour to defeat the zombie. Overall, I was very dissatisfied with the fight. Though I was able to improve blind fighting through practice because I could sense the zombie. But wielding the spear feels wrong. The spear wasn't magical, so I couldn't sense it with my sense mana skill. And because I didn't see it or feel it, I didn't see where the tip was. As a result, my attacks missed very often even though I would hit normally. For the next fight I chose the dagger. It did less damage, but the blade was right on my hand. This made fighting much easier as I always knew where my hand was.

So my next time against a zombie I took the dagger. At that time I was unable to take advantage over the spear. The dagger was significantly faster, allowing me to carry out more attacks in the same time. Unfortunately, I couldn't use my speed at the moment because I was still too busy getting used to moving in complete darkness. My night vision didn't help me when there was no light at all. My eyes also needed a little bit, but I was confident that with each fight and each day I was getting better at it.

I spent the rest of the day on this floor fighting zombies. At the end of the day I can even survive against 3 zombies at the same time without being in serious danger. From then on I used floor 4 for further practice. There were still slow zombies here, but they were stronger than those on floor 3 and therefore gave more EXP. At the moment it's the ideal training ground, even if you don't get a lot of EXP out of it. For this I had to go to deeper floors.

On the fifth day I went to floor 5. The wights here were a different challenge than the zombies before. I wondered why the difficulty level increased so significantly. The first four floors were almost too easy and floor 5 was significantly more difficult, but still easy. But it could also be due to my level being almost 30. I had to fight my way through this floor more slowly. Here I could no longer risk activating too many monsters at once. But I had to admit, I felt a slight thrill at the prospect of fighting. I was never someone interested in martial arts or war games in my old life. But the combination of the darkness with the noticeable progress I was making, along with the prospect of exciting battles, felt surprisingly good. My motivation increased significantly.

The day flew by. In the middle of it all, I even picked up both daggers at the same time, hoping that I could deal damage more quickly. I immediately noticed that I was fighting much worse with my left hand than with my right. Not surprising since I was right-handed. Even though I attacked faster than with just one dagger, I didn't do more damage. My coordination was too bad for that. But I liked the feeling of fighting with both hands. It felt good and right.

Then I stood in front of the boss room. I felt safe enough to enter. Especially since I knew that it was illuminated on the inside and therefore the disadvantage of the darkness was eliminated. Since only one wight appeared, that must be the boss. Since he only had skeletons and zombies as minions, all of which were slower than him, he was well ahead of the other monsters with me. The wight was an easy opponent on his own though. I was also able to use my support spells again.

I fought the skeletons with my spear, while I switched back to the dagger for the zombies. The chest and the stele then appeared in the middle. I first devoted myself to the stele. I looked at the selection of possible skills. I now recognize the system of skills that are available to choose from. Apparently there are always certain resistances to choose from, although elemental resistances were never among them. I asked myself again whether these could even be learned. I now had several resistances to choose from. In addition to Paralysis, there were also Mind, Sleep and, surprisingly, Light. Did I also have those to choose from among the heroes? Not as far as I remembered. I probably didn't have enough free EXP back then to raise the skill to tier 10. I didn't have any other skills to choose from. I decided not to upgrade this time either. So far I haven't seen any rush to upgrade one of the skills.

Then I turned to the chest. As before, the trap presented no challenge and the chest was quickly opened. The only interesting thing inside was a ring that I couldn't analyze at the moment. I felt like the ring was special, so I put it on. I had already learned that artifacts had an effect even if they had not been analyzed. But there was always the risk that the effect would be negative. I quickly checked to see if I was losing life or mana, but I wasn't. So it couldn't hurt to keep the ring on.

Then I went down to floor 6, where the ghosts were waiting for me. Now that I had the time and was alone, I wanted to train my mind resistance. To do this, I wandered through the floor and tested what the spirits could do to me using their fear spell. It seemed that they could do nothing else to harm me. I found the ghosts while i was part of the heroes disappointing, but then I recognized the same opportunity I had with the butterflies. I would set up camp in a cave with ghosts and got the Mind Resistance increase for free. However, I wasn't sure how long I would remain sane around them. They are creepy as hell. I decided to test it out. So I cleared the part of the floor that I didn't need of ghosts and then went to the cave where I wanted to set up camp. The night was scary because I was surrounded by a dozen ghosts, but somehow I got through it. However, I couldn't sleep and, not for the first time, I wondered what was wrong with me.