The closer Ajax got to the dungeon the more he started to run into these small gatherings of sentient races. So of them were living more like humanoids did by adapting the environnt to better house them while others didn’t change anything about the forest. What was clear however was that all these communities were at most the size of a small village back in Gryndor. The variety of races was large and he almost attacked reflexively when a fox reached out to him telepathically.
None of the interactions with any of the races had turned out violent, there were a few unpleasant and hostile beginnings but every one of those instantly backed away the mont they caught a whiff of his Aura.
“There is nothing?” Ajax was very surprised when he could finally see the dungeon arch and realized there were no monsters escaped from the dungeon living around the entrance.
Not one to waste ti Ajax quickly entered the dungeon and couldn’t help but find the idea funny that entering the dungeon was now seen as a vacation and a ti couldn’t finally allow his guard to drop a little.
Ajax knew the dungeon had a eighteen level jump but he didn’t know what level it started at. He had asked HelSotHein but the hydra hadn’t bothered to rember since for them it didn’t matter.
The explanation of how dungeons worked did make it easier for Ajax to understand the power of the creatures found inside. Since humanoids scaled everything relative to themselves it was hard for them to see it but according to HelSotHein the dungeon did have a power increase for the creatures that populated its floors that was quantifiable.
Up until level one hundred the dungeon floors would be filled with weak variants. Past level one hundred and all the way to level two hundred and fifty there would be average variants of creatures. From two hundred and fifty and up to four hundred it would be strong variants. From four hundred to five hundred and fifty there would be peak variants of Awakened, there were rumors that past five hundred and fifty the average creature in the dungeon floor would be at the level of an Ascended race but it was a hard rule nobody was to push past that. With how large the floors would get, a dungeon break at that magnitude could be disastrous.
It wasn’t hard to see why humans didn’t see the pattern, the only jump in power they saw was the one going from one hundred to above, it was a little humbling to learn that the majority of the humanoid population had issues dealing with the weakest of variants but it was also understandable since most had gained little or no Stats at all from their racial ability.
As he entered the dungeon Ajax also changed his plans of pushing as far as he could before just getting out of the dungeons. Clearly there was an understanding of not allowing dungeon breaks to happen and he didn’t want to find out who would co to ask him questions about what happened if he caused one.
Taking a look around the desert that was the first floor of the dungeon Ajax was pleasantly surprised to see that the first floor started with a level forty two floor. This would an that he would be able to get two floor clear bonuses, unfortunately he would have to call it quits at level ninety seven as while he would be willing to risk clearing one a level one hundred and thirty three floors he wasn’t willing to face its floor boss.
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The first floor of the dungeon ca as a nice break for Ajax. The intense heat during the day ant nothing thanks to his [Heat Resistance] and the chill of the night was but a relaxing breeze thanks to his [Cold Resistance].
The monsters on the floor weren’t interesting, a few chaleons, so scorpions and even a giant trap spider variant all called the desert the ho but none of them proved to be able to do anything to Ajax. Ajax had initially gotten a little excited about the scorpion as he hoped to get a feel for his newest Epic Skill [Venom Refining] but the Venom was simply too weak, his [Poison Resistance] was now so strong that his body simply rejected and resisted the venom to the point where it couldn’t latch onto him at all being simply removed from the body like any other waste.
While the monsters didn’t do much to gather Ajax’s attention the sa could not be said for the plant life. The desert plants were a perfect complint to the plants he had gotten from the salamanders, getting the plants to actually fuse together pushed his [Alchemy] Skill with more potions failing than actually being a success but the challenge and the novelty was exactly what Ajax was after.
Following the journey here that took weeks Ajax decided to spend four days on the first floor, fully clearing it out and deciding to take the body of a cactus treent for his reward, he knew it was a long shot but maybe it would prove valuable to one of the races outside the dungeon as trade, at worst he would simply use it for his own alchemy.
The lack of challenge inside the dungeon persisted throughout the second and third floors. The swamp and jungle respectively both brought him plenty of interesting finds for his [Alchemy] Skill to really sink its teeth into and get a good workout for his newest threshold upgrade but the monsters were a joke. His one hope for a halfway decent fight had been for a floor boss on the third floor but one hadn’t spawned. None of the creatures he found there could asure up in any way to the wolf pack he had faced previously, let alone HelSotHein.
In an attempt to give himself at least a bit of a challenge Ajax triggered the obelisk on the third floor without clearing out most of the floor beforehand. Managing his Mana and Stamina for such an extended period did co with its own challenges that he hadn’t experienced before and they were a good learning opportunity but in terms of actual excitent not even the massive wave was anything interesting. Ajax always knew he could get away and he would have no problem hiding until he regenerated his Mana and Stamina.
Clearing out the creatures on the third floor took more than ten hours but Ajax didn’t once feel in any real danger, one thing the fight did help him finally make a decision on was what his choice for [Mana Syphon]’s threshold should be. Refuel was the clear option.
So far Ajax had only looked at Refuel as a long
term benefit and not so much a current upgrade because most of his recent fights hadn’t been so stringent on his resources, while he had been emptying his Mana and Stamina that had been done in very short span of ti where Refuel wouldn’t make much of a difference. Going forward however he could see himself casting larger spells more frequently especially as the ambient Mana in dungeons continued to grow as he went up in floors he would be constantly refiling his Mana pool and thanks to his boon his Stamina as well, that wasn’t to ntion the drawn out battles that would last for days if a war broke out in Gryndor in the way the royal family was expecting it would. Having a much faster regeneration for his resources would an even more than countering a physical fighter with Mana Steal.
If there was one regret he felt after making the selection for Refuel it was that he wouldn’t be getting any deeper insights into the dungeon floors. Ajax suspected the Mana steal would have let him get a much better idea of what the future floors would be and with the clear step up in difficulty once the dungeon floor passed level two hundred and fifty Ajax made a ntal note to start practicing so more with that aspect of Mana Syphon.
As the final stragglers made their way towards the obelisk on the fourth day Ajax didn’t outright kill them but instead trapped them and started pushing Mana Syphon to steal Mana directly from their bodies via contact. He knew he wouldn’t be able to push the Skill to drain them without contact without the threshold upgrade but he could still work on improving it this way.
He had slowly drained the Mana of three creatures before he had to take a break. The process was obviously extrely painful for the creatures, more than that this pain seed to bypass the [Pain Resistance] most dungeon animals seed to have. While Ajax’s wasn’t squeamish by any ans he also wasn’t cruel. Trapping and torturing creatures that were so much weaker than him made his skin crawl. He ended up taking four hours to ditate and calm himself after it before he went to sleep in preparation of exiting the dungeon after he woke up.
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