Nate’s bolt hit the orc, went in about an inch, and then stopped. The orc blinked stupidly at the aluminum bolt that had barely pierced into his thick hide. The monstrous pigman snorted irritably and brushed it away, his eyes narrowing in anger.

  Angie gulped and looked at her thin, single-handed sword. She had speed, and that provided a certain amount of strength to her attacks. The same could be said more of Nate’s bolt though.

  They had witnessed how much the others had struggled to take down the orcs before. However, outside of Landon and Anna, they didn’t have a good gauge of how strong any of them actually were. Angie and Lindsay knew how strong Nate and his crossbow were.

  Seeing it brushed aside like that was a true wake-up call for the entire group. Even before they could truly begin, the knowledge that they were outmatched had been reinforced. If they could even take this beast down, it would be an absolute slog of a battle, involving a death by a thousand cuts.

  Not to mention that Aura would be limited in the ways that she could help. Thankfully, she was stronger than them, so her bites and claws would do a fair bit of damage.

  Shaking her head to clear away the bout of fear and doubt, Angela leaped forward with Landon and Aura by her sides. A few steps behind her came Lindsay with her massive halberd and Anna with a whip she was borrowing from Jen. The woman truly had received training in a great number of weapons.

  Behind them stood Nate, with his crossbow, pumping out bolt after bolt.

  At the moment, his bolts were more effective as distractions, sad as that was for his pride. They were little more than stinging nettles to the orc. Each time it looked as though it was going to attack, a bolt would appear in its armpit or neck. Wherever was open and vulnerable and guaranteed to throw off its rhythm.

  The rest of the time, the others were swinging their blades relentlessly. Angie’s sword was shaving pieces of skin off the orc with each swing. She had given up on cutting through its hide properly and instead gone for the old Chinese torture method of death by a thousand cuts, times two. Each chunk she shaved off caused blood to slowly well up in that area.

  Landon was obviously having better luck directly cutting into the thing.

  Lindsay’s halberd had enough weight behind it that she could act like she was chopping at a fleshy tree. Either way, the results were pretty good, and the orc definitely saw her as one of the greater threats. The other was Aura, whose teeth and claws kept tearing into it.

  Then there was Anna, with the spiked whip. It took her a minute to get used to how it handled, and then she began swinging it wildly while cackling like a weird BDSM lady. Actually, now that Nate thought about it, the image fit her better than he would have thought. The spike dug into its cheek, gouging out a deep bleeding furrow that exposed the yellow teeth beyond. The cheeks flapped in the air as it roared in pain.

  A second later, the other cheek was cut open, taking the muscle with it. The orc’s mouth flopped open uselessly as a muted roar came forth. Anna was concentrating on its head, attempting to take out its eye, but just barely missing each time.

  Soon the orc was using one shredded arm to cover its head while it weakly fought off the others. Even with it not actively fighting back against them, the three teens and Aura still took the better part of ten minutes to take the orc down. It was really only once Aura went for its throat and it truly began to bleed out that the matter was settled. They simply weren’t doing enough damage otherwise.

  Lindsay was, but even she would have taken another couple of minutes to finish it off.

  Still, when they finished it off, Landon’s team wasn’t looking at them. Instead, they were giving Anna weird looks. Jen carefully took back her whip from the woman, and only then did everyone turn to the kids.

  “You all did well, but what did you learn?” Jen asked them.

  “That we need to be stronger,” Angie gasped out, her hands on her knees as she panted.

  “That we need to pick our future fights carefully,” Lindsay added, from her place collapsed on the ground.

  “How about, how valuable information from the locals is?” Nate replied for his answer.

  “All good answers, and all correct. None of those are the responses I was looking for though. Your teamwork was actually pretty solid, but you need to develop some tactics. None of you used any of your energy skills the entire time. I have a feeling that you are used to using them in one-on-one battles, but when fighting together. It is something that you need to work on.”

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  She took in their condition and then the orc they had taken down and smiled. “Now, let’s pack this one out and head back to the rig and trailer. You three get to take turns pulling the carts back.”

  ***

  Nate was currently sitting in the first dungeon with Aura and watching the creatures in the newest dungeon float about. They were… odd. Worse yet, he could swear they looked familiar in the weirdest way as well.

  They looked like jellyfish, just without all the extra stringers floating everywhere. They had a row of teeth underneath that they used to attack, as well as to do pretty much everything else. Any time they bumped into a wall, they would latch onto it with their mouth for a few seconds, before calmly swimming away through the air.

  It seemed as though they were blind, or at least using some other organ instead of sight to sense where they were going.

  It was a little disconcerting, but at the same time, strangely calming. Just watching them swim through the air, occasionally blink out of existence, and then reappear several feet away.

  So far, that was the only skill he had seen them use. They never used it again right away, but he hadn’t yet determined if that was simply because they didn’t want to or couldn’t.

  Now that he had been observing them for a while, he had a better idea of what sort of dungeon to create. First off, all the walls would need to be at least seven feet thick. The max distance he had seen any of them teleport in one go was six feet, but it was better to be safe than sorry.

  Second, while the floating jellyfish things, could indeed well… float and swim through the air, they had a height limit. He hadn’t seen any of them touch the ceiling. For that matter, he hadn’t even seen any of them teleport above their height limit and then drop down. Interesting, but that was a matter for later. Either way, seven and a half feet up, was their seeming limit.

  Now, onto the matter of traps, and the dungeon’s theme.

  He wanted to say heat and fire, but that was a little too simplistic. These weren’t actually jellyfish, no matter how much they looked like them. Yes, space was cold, but he had no proof that these things came from space. Only that they had the affinity for it, the same as him, and he most definitely did not come from outer space.

  The unfortunate thing was that once a theme was decided and implemented, it couldn’t be changed. That said, there was nothing preventing him from choosing a broader theme. It would make everything slightly less effective, and cost more to create, maintain, and use.

  The broader theme would allow him to experiment with different things. The cost of doing so would be higher, but that was where researching things came in.

  Regardless, it was obvious that some changes needed to be made. The first of which needed to involve the strengthening of the defenses around the Dungeon Core. He had originally done nothing else with the dungeon than hide the Core.

  He massively thickened the walls around the Dungeon Core, the changes happening the next instant. The floating jellyfish, in a radius of around thirty feet, reacted to the change and began to go toward the hidden room. As far as he could tell, they were blind, but they certainly had some other form of senses to make up for that deficiency.

  Nate watched them crowd around the wall for the next few moments. Several of them attempted to try and teleport through the wall, only to reappear back in their original location after flickering out of existence without going anywhere.

  One of them had found the small grate-covered tunnel that he needed to have for the Dungeon Core. The size of the tunnel he had continued to learn was dependent on his own abilities. He still wasn’t sure why there needed to be one, and Aura wouldn’t give him a straight answer either. But the tunnel itself could become needle-thin if he could make it that small. He wasn’t at that point just yet. However, at the width of one of his fingers, most things weren’t getting through it.

  With that worry now out of the way, he could begin to construct some rooms. While he was doing that, he would think about what traps to use as well and whether to leave the corridors as a safe space. The original idea behind that move had been one of psychological warfare. It would heighten the tension for the being before they entered the next room. Unfortunately, while that worked in horror games and for normal people, he was dealing with cultivators and monsters.

  He didn’t think the idea of a safe space had panned out nearly the way that he had envisioned it would.

  That was when he discovered that there was another reason behind the existence of the safe spaces being there. It was something that the dungeon itself wanted. In the past, he had occasionally noticed little nudges and feelings about things that he couldn’t do. However, this was one which had gone completely unnoticed. He still thought it was his idea, but now some doubt had crept in.

  Regardless, he forced himself to ignore wondering where the idea had come from, as there was nothing he could do about it either way. Nate added room after room, far fewer than normal, due to how thick the walls were.

  The question about what traps he was going to use had still persisted inside his mind. In large part, because the reason behind this dungeon’s existence, at least for now, was different from normal. He needed to learn the secret of these weird creatures’ spatial abilities. Which meant the traps needed to push them to use those, and not simply kill them endlessly. Not yet, at least.

  What sort of trap would do that?

  Strange as it was, he guessed the theme of the dungeon had been decided. Experimentation. He wondered what sort of restrictions it would place on him in the future.

  For now, he contented himself with constructing the rest of the rooms. They wound around the area, allowing for multiple paths to be taken to the exit. Not that the jellyfish seemed all that interested in leaving the dungeon. Each time a new wall would appear, a group of them would flock to it and begin their inspection process anew.

  What he didn’t see the entire time he was watching, despite several of them being near it, was a single one of them leaving through the exit. Maybe he would forego traps a little longer, or at least not place them anywhere but at the exit/entrance. He still needed to worry about cultivators, after all.

  The choice of which trap to put there was another decision entirely. The theme of the dungeon was experimentation, but did that mean high-tech, low-tech, or a mix of the two? For that matter, could he even mix the two? He had never been able to in the past, but he had also never had a dungeon with this theme before.

  It was a truly annoying question.

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