On the second floor of the dungeon Ajax couldn’t be happier to see a sun moving in the sky. He had tid it and it seed to go through an eight hour day and four hour night cycle which worked perfectly for Ajax to train his new casting style without overstressing his Mana channels.
The problems for Ajax however beca pretty clear on day one now that he was fighting monsters that were around the sa level as him. Even if he did dwarf them in stats Ajax now needed multiple spells to kill his enemies.
“So there is so give and take…” Ajax couldn’t help but sigh. For the past two days he had been working on creating a fighting style that would allow him to mix his [Mana Augntation] infused weapons with the movents required for [Spell Direction] but he was having a very hard ti of it.
On the previous floor the monsters were all too slow and Ajax had plenty of ti to make his movents, especially once he realized that he could speed them up to keep up with his physical stats. On this floor however Ajax found that he was currently forced to choose between his [Mana Augntation] or his newly empowered free form spells.
A small compromise that worked was switching over to a single one hander while using his free hand for spell casts but this heavily limited his movent. This odd limitation forced Ajax to swap which hand was holding his weapon. An entire day was spent on getting the hang of switching his stance.
Ajax had trained to wield swords, axes, hamrs, daggers and many other weapons with both hands since he was young, one thing he missed however was that he clearly had a favored side. He was able to use weapons in both hands skillfully yet he found his right hand was always the dominant one. Now that he had to be able to use both of his hands as the casting off weapon he found his own movents odd as he swapped his fighting style to a dominant left hand.
The reward for this new challenge ca about eight hours in when he finally got the Uncommon Skill [Ambidextry], the Skill helped a lot as he got the hang of wielding weapons with his left hand while using his right hand to increase the power of his [Mana Augntation] swing. The training even gave him two levels in [Battlemage Style], though he was very much hoping that once he gained [Spell Direction] he would be able to fuse it into his fighting style to gain an Epic or maybe even Legendary style Skill.
By the end of the third day Ajax had cleared about a quarter of the floor. The increased power of the monsters he was dealing with as well as the increased size of the floor ant that it would take him a lot longer before all of it was cleared. Since he didn’t have to hurry up he decided three days back to back was enough and he would spend the next day working on his alchemy.
Ajax had plenty of reagents from the past three days. Not only from killing the monsters he found but he also took every chance to work on all of his gathering skills. [Skinning],[Dismantle],[Lumberjack] even his [Mana Farming] went up a level from the careful gathering of reagents. Sadly for his [Mining] Skill there were simply no ores to be found on the floor.
The limited variety of ingredients for the floor however ant that [Alchemy] didn’t see an increase even after a full day and two nights of dedicated crafting. There simply wasn’t all that much that could be done with the reagents he found on this floor as plentiful as they were. He did see one level increase in [Mana Milling] from preparing so many sets of reagents as well as one in [Mass Production] as the only challenge he could find was in seeing just how quickly he could go through all his reagents by increasing the batch size.
Once he was done with his alchemy Ajax took a two hour nap before he started clearing the floor once more. Having only cleared a quarter of the floor Ajax repeated the sa pattern three more tis. He would train for about three days taking the nights to use [ditation] to consolidate his gains and sooth his Mana channels. Following that he would then craft for one day to get rid of the reagents he collected and take a short nap before starting again.
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His clearing ti slowly decreased as his proficiency with his new fighting style grew yet for so reason he wasn’t able to gain [Spell Direction]. By now Ajax was sure he was doing sothing wrong and that he would have to wait until after he left the dungeon and found the elental hawk in order to find out what it was and finally gain the Skill. Deep down he hoped that what he was missing would also allow him to more easily integrate the Skill with his combat style making it so that he wouldn’t be forced into keeping a free hand if he wanted to increase the power of his [Mana Augntation] attacks.
WIth the first floor taking one day and another two weeks on the second floor even with the small ti dilation Ajax was sure at least ten days had passed outside. Hopefully anyone that was waiting for him out there was getting bored and decided to leave before he left the dungeon.
Looking to put his [Mining] Skill to work a little on the last floor Ajax selected an arch that led to a floor with a little more Earth and tal Mana for the third and final floor. As he entered the floor Ajax was being a lot more careful than he had been previously. The levels on this floor ranged between eighty three and eighty eight. Not sothing that would cause him issues in a straight up fight but now the monsters could really do so damage if they got the drop on him.
“Another one of these floors.” Ajax had quickly figured out what was going on with the floor when he found himself in a maze of tunnels and had found a giant ant around the corner. It was pretty clear that he was in a similar floor to the oversized beehive he had found previously during his dungeon delves.
Knowing what he knew about ants however and the tal Mana he had felt when examining the floor Ajax was sure he would be able to find a deposit in one of the tunnels if he kept exploring for long enough.
As he took out the first few groups of giant ants however Ajax quickly found himself falling back on his old style of fighting. His free form spells had definitely gotten stronger, he had even started to feel a small difference in power when he used the movent for a power boost even if he hadn’t gotten the Skill yet but his spells were simply not enough to get through the tough carapace of the ants, at least not without putting a lot more Mana into them.
Two hours into the floor and Ajax had no idea how much of the floor he had cleared. Unlike his previous floor it was hard to go through the tunnels here systematically he was pretty sure he would have to find the obelisk and trigger it to ensure he had fully cleared the floor before he left.
“That must be the queen.” Ajax said as he entered a much larger open chamber where he saw an ant about one and a half tis the size of the others he had found. “But it can’t be a floor boss. I haven't cleared enough of the floor yet for one to spawn, if one even will spawn. I wonder how that works?”
Ajax knew it would take a long ti to clear this floor even if the individual fights were ending faster then they had been on the previous floor now that he was back to his regular fighting style.
Attacking the queen was different from all of the other fights he had faced on this floor so far. For one thing the queen was a ranged fighter and the guards surrounding her seed to prioritize her safety over their own. With the difference in power between them however Ajax had no issue dispatching of the five guards before pinning the queen to the wall with a spear throw.
That spear throw however was Ajax’s mistake as while it did pin the queen it didn’t kill it. A high pitched squeal was all the warning he was given before sothing that felt to Ajax’s high Perception like a stink bomb.
“What kind of ant are you?” Ajax wondered as he moved and finished off the queen. “It’s not poison, or maybe it's just too weak and it didn’t even get through my [Poison Resistance].”
The answer to Ajax’s question ca in less than a minute however as ants started flooding the chamber from every entrance. It was only as he saw dozens of ants doing their best to squeeze themselves into the room that Ajax rembered sothing he learnt on Earth. Ants communicate through pheromones. The stink bomb wasn’t a direct attack on him but rather the queen calling for the rest of the colony. Ajax had just unwittingly triggered sothing similar to the obelisk for the entire floor before he was ready.
Ajax stopped holding anything back as he pushed [Mana Syphon] to its fullest and started cleaving through the ants like a hot knife through butter. He was still much stronger than each ant individually but they were still mid to high level eighties so Ajax couldn’t simply shrug off the one or two hits he would take from them as they flooded the room.
His first instinct was to seal so of the entrances to stop the flood but after burning almost five hundred Mana on Earth Mana sealing the third tunnel entrance the first one he sealed had already been broken through making it all just a waste.
Ajax fought for hours on end, he had even been forced to fight his way through one of the tunnels away from the queen’s chamber as the corpses of the ants he had killed had started to fill up the large cavern. Ajax was down a quarter of his health and even with [Mana Syphon]’s most recent upgrade and [Berseker] his Mana and Stamina were both down to one quarter.
Just as Ajax was trying to find a way to deal with the sudden deadly situation he had found himself in he heard the one thing that could make this worse.
“AAAAAWWWWOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!” The floor had a boss, and it was a werewolf.
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