Spending My Retirement In A Game

Chapter 946: To the top of the Anthill

One after the other, everyone in the group stepped into the large box. It was like a bus-sized carriage, just without wheels. Instead, it had hooks that the old man could attach to a harness, which he was currently wearing. He was at his regular size right now, but of course it was going to grow together with him in a bit so that he could actually hook things up.

"Everyone settled in?" the old man asked, "This is going to take a while, so just relax and get ready for a spike in difficulty when we get to the end of all this. Brody, you get ready to face the flying monsters around the mountain once we get there, I want to fly as high onto it as we possibly can before landing."

"Aye aye, cap'n," Brody replied, settling into his seat in the back of the box.

Eisen quickly increased his size to the max and added his true demonic transformation on top, making him even larger and stronger. He spread out his wings, and then grabbed the box. Each seat inside the carriage could rotate on its own so that it was always upright, meaning that Eisen could hold the box however he wanted without disturbing anyone inside.

Since this entire thing was made to just be hooked up to Eisen, that was something he basically had to add, since otherwise, there was nothing keeping everyone inside from being tossed and turned around. After attaching the harness to the box he lifted off the ground and started flying. For the time being, as he said, this was an opportunity to relax. Even Eisen would be able to just chill for a while. Right when he first got his wings, flying was a pretty streinous thing, but at this point he could fly with as much effort as it took to breathe.

Of course, since he was carrying quite a bit of weight, it wasn't quite as easy as it usually would be, but it was just at that perfect level of difficulty for as Eisen to be able to do it mindlessly. Like going on a good run. When he still used to do that, he would always be able to get a lot of thinking done while out on the go.

As he was flying, Eisen looked down at the canyon below him. There were tons of monsters all over the place, and he was making sure to fly around in a way that Bree could properly map out the entire floor. Of course, they weren't quite able to get as much detail as they usually would. For one, the only thing that Bree could figure out about the monsters in this area were their types and size. It wouldn't exactly be the most useful thing for the other exploration group, but that should be fine.

That group was exploring far and wide, while this one was going deep and narrow. Eisen and Brody's group was actively trying to get as deep into the dungeon as they could, so it was pretty unclear whether or not the others were going to even get to this floor by the time that Eisen and his group made it down to the boss monster. At that point, they were going to have hopefully killed the dungeon master anyway, at which point they would have access to all of the dungeon's information on the first place.

Anyway, just as Eisen had planned, it only took a few hours for the group to get close to the mountain. The flying monsters that were buzzing all around it immediately tried to attack Eisen. Now that they had come close enough, it was clear that this place wasn't just any other mountain – it was a mountain-sized anthill. And the monsters that had been flying around it were wasp-like ants. They even had massive stingers and seemed to have quite a bit of venom to play around with. For a moment, Eisen hoped that Melissa would be able to influence them somehow to at least get them to stop attacking, but sadly that didn't work. While ants, wasps, and bees were all pretty closely related, these were unequivocally not bees, so her skills and abilities didn't take hold.

By the time that Eisen got here, Brody had climbed the outside of the box that everyone was carried in and was shooting the ants with one of the bows, to just keep blocking them for as long as possible. It didn't work forever, since even Brody wasn't able to shoot arrows fast enough to take down hundreds of these ants in one go, but he was able to buy enough time for Eisen to ascend a good distance up the ant-mountain before he had to land.

The old man placed down on a relatively stable path and let everyone out of the box, before making it fold back up. Before Eisen could even get everything back into his item storage, the others were in the middle of fierce battles against the monsters roaming this place.

It was mostly different types of ants that were attacking them. Swarms of smaller, dog-sized ants that were dripping with acid that tore apart the soil it fell on, or truck-sized ants that were trying to plow through the entire group. There were different elemental, magical ants as well that were using magic. Like hurling rocks at the group or spewing flames, things of that nature.

But this wasn't anything that was all too hard to deal with. Each of these monsters, while particularly strong in one specific field were extremely weak in others. Those small swarms had weak defence and individual health, while that truck-sized ant had low mobility beyond running in straight lines. The elemental ants were strong against a particular element, but weak against their counterparts as all elemental beings were.

Even so, the issue here was just that the level of these monsters was so high that even when considering these weaknesses, they were hard to deal with as fast as the monsters in the earlier floors could be dealt with. The jump of difficulty was quite extreme, as was the expectation after skipping what was essentially twenty floors just now. There was a bit of time needed for adjustment, but once they managed to do just that, the group managed to keep climbing the mountain more and more.

The dungeon's intended path spiralled around the outside of the mountain, and if they had followed that, it would have taken hours and hours. But by having Eisen simply supply some stone stairs with his magic that was going along the outside of the mountain, they were able to just climb up in what was essentially a straight line.

It just took a few more hours until they got to the end of this special, massive zone spanning thirty floors. At the top of the mountain, were there would usually be a hole for the ants to enter or exit through, was a stairway spiralling downward. From the stable mana that was surrounding this stairway, Bree was immediately able to tell that this was the stairway leading into the next floor, as in floor 51. They had crossed hundreds of miles and climbed this mountain in just a single day, and were now at the dungeon's halfway point.

"Really, we need to make sure that the others have some air defences and flight ready so that they can come here as fast as possible," Eisen stretched as he followed everyone downstairs. Brody turned around toward him and scoffed.

"What, you think the others will struggle with that? They'll fly on Jyuuk's birds, Xenia is going to blast all the flying monsters down to the ground by making them extra heavy of freezing their wings or some shit, and Evalia is going to recruit all the other monsters for their cause. They might get down to the bottom floor faster than we can," the half-orc pointed out with a laugh, and Eisen nodded in agreement, smiling along.

"Right, you've got a point there. Well, whichever is the case... how close are they by now?" the old man asked, and Brody quickly checked out his messages. Since Eisen was avoiding using the system, he couldn't do so himself.

Brody scrolled through the system screen and quickly turned to Eisen, "They're in the Dark Forest now. Should be able to enter the dungeon in an hour or so. They said they're already fully prepped."

"Hm..." Eisen thought for a moment, "I'm sure if it's just those three pushing through, they should be able to get down here in about two days, so at the pace we're going we'll meet them in... four days?"

With a loud scoff, Brody shook his head, "four days? It's going to be two, tops. They'll get down here in just a day, and then catch up to us in another."

"I mean, I know they're strong, but they also tend to get distracted pretty easily. Especially Jyuuk will want to take a moment to look at the monsters."

"Nah, they know how important all of this is to you, so they'll hurry."

Eisen raised a brow, "Are we betting?"

"Hell yeah we are. 1 Gold they'll be here in less than two days."

"Then I'll match you with 1 Gold that it's going to take them longer than those two days."

"Deal."