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Jake saw the now so powerful dragonkin shiver as he stopped talking. He had known that Draskil had been a mole-type creature before the system and what Villy had described as half-human-like. Something with intellect between that of a human and a chimpanzee. Smarter than any normal animal for sure and smart enough to form societies and have full sapience.

“Happened often… but we needed to dig. Water fine, but being in it is not,” Draskil finally shook his head as he stared down. A few more moments passed before he looked at Jake. “Fear makes me weak?”

“Being afraid of something and being weak has nothing to do with one another,” Jake said with a shrug. “What matters is what you do when afraid. You swam alongside us, you fought, you killed. Even if you were afraid, you didn’t show weakness. So no, that doesn’t make you weak, but quite the opposite.”

Draskil was clearly skeptical as he sneered. “I was weaker because of fear.”

Does he want me to scold him or what? Jake asked himself but still didn’t fully agree.

“We were all weaker. You have already shown that even in the face of fear, you don’t back down, and even if you are afraid of it now, you can overcome that fear,” Jake said, trying to be convincing. He hoped for Draskil to accept the answer and feel relieved, but it didn’t go that way.

“What do you fear?” Draskil instead just asked.

Jake opened his mouth and was about to answer but stopped. What was he afraid of? If he was thinking back… he felt a bit scared of Oras when he saw him in the void? No, that wasn’t’ really him being scared but more an instinctual fear. But there was…

His silence seemed to annoy Draskil as the dragonkin asked. “Don’t know?”

Jake took a moment longer before shaking his head. “I don’t. Not really.”

That was… a lie. Jake just didn’t want to say it as he realized he did have one fear. It was a weird thought, but Jake was legitimately scared of one thing – losing control. Not in the sense of momentarily being unable to do something or being forced into doing things, but truly losing control of himself. He remembered one time that had truly scared him.

It was the time he thought Miranda had tried to take over his Pylon. The anger and bloodlust he had felt at that moment. Those emotions that now felt so foreign. He had not been in control then but acted on pure impulse and emotion. Jake feared those kinds of emotions. And there was one other recent time where that happened.

During his meeting with Ell’Hakan within the Seat of the Exalted Prima, Jake had lost his wits and trusted someone for no god damn reason. He had been furious afterward but knew deep down it was due to fear. He was afraid of that kind of power that could make Jake lose, even just momentarily, control of his own emotions… because he knew that even without any outside sources interfering, his own emotions were scary.

It was honestly a stupid fear. Fearing your own strong emotions. Or maybe it was a normal fear that many people had. Perhaps it wasn’t truly the emotions themselves he feared either, but what he would do while feeling those emotions.

“Or you do… and don’t want to share,” Draskil accurately read Jake. For some reason, this seemed to make the dragonkin feel better as he regained his old toothy smile. “All things to overcome.”

Jake wryly smiled as he nodded, not sure if his fear was something one could truly overcome. Especially not with his bloodline. Perhaps it was closer to something you just came to accept and live with. Something to manage.

The two of them didn’t speak much more but just relaxed and meditated a bit. Hours passed as they all got back into optimal condition, just needing a potion or two to top themselves up. The break was ultimately more to replenish mental energy than anything else and have them have a mental reset before the eighth floor.

Entering the eighth floor, it instantly became clear this was more of the same as those before the seventh, making Jake think that his theory of the water level being a failed attempt to diversify was correct. The only real difference on the eighth floor was how everything had just gotten massive in scale. Even the mushroom men had changed.

[Mushroom Man Giant Warrior - 183]

It towered more than fifteen meters into the air but otherwise looked the same. They all felt like they were miniatures of themselves. It was a pretty fun and novel experience.

Not that it had any effect on the outcome. Draskil still tore the big bastards apart with ease, and Jake blew them up with Arcane Powershots as he killed in droves together with the Malefic Dragonkin. Reika and Irin also joined in, but Bastilla could well and truly no longer participate meaningfully in combat. Reika barely could, but at least her ice magic helped slow down foes for Irin to sometimes finish them off. The problem was that Irin didn’t really have many offensive skills or abilities.

Her race offered her skills mainly related to subterfuge and illusion magic, as well as other things one would expect of a succubus. Skills that were obviously not useable inside the dungeon unless Irin wanted to get really freaky with a giant mushroom. And that was a mental image Jake really didn’t need.

Making their way through the cavern, they soon reached the next gate and saw the challenge to pass the eighth floor. Once they read it, Jake nearly wanted to laugh.

Create a hemotoxin, necrotic poison, or neurotoxin of at least uncommon rarity from the materials found on this floor and place it in the cauldron. In order to open the lid of the cauldron, at least eight hundred mushroom men must be slain.

Progress: mushroom men killed: 78/800. Poison placed in the cauldron: 0/1

“Quite a spike in difficulty,” Irin said after reading it. And she was technically correct. While the seventh floor had also required them to make an uncommon rarity poison, the materials provided had been far better as there were even a few rare rarity mushrooms they could use. On this floor, based on their initial observations, the best one could get was of uncommon rarity, and mushrooms with any of the required properties would take a good while to find.

However…

“Well, this will be easy,” Jake smirked as he pulled out two types of mushrooms he had already picked up earlier. “I will need more of these two mushrooms. Also, I need some of that red stalk you picked up earlier, Reika, and get the cores of those big stabby-arm mushroom men.”

They all looked at him a bit as Jake just shrugged. “What? Not my fault the dungeon decided to suddenly get easy. I wanted to gather all this stuff to eat anyway, as I am always looking to improve my hemotoxins and necrotic poison.”

Draskil nodded in approval showing himself a true man of culture. “Good poisons.”

With those words left to collect what Jake had asked for and Reika handed him the stalks before going to find more. Jake ate some of the materials he had gathered to absorb some knowledge through Palate as he got to work while the rest of his group killed things. Occasionally they would return with materials as Jake slowly refined the process. He made a common rarity hemotoxin in the very first concoction, and less than four and a half hours after entering the eighth floor, he got it.

Jake grinned as Draskil returned with some more materials, only to see Jake toss the poison bottle towards the cauldron. It landed on the lid still on top with a clank as Jake shook his head in an overly dramatic way.

“Man, you guys are sooo slow,” Jake failed to hold himself back from saying. He looked at the cauldron as he felt very good about himself.

Progress: mushroom men killed: 771/800. Poison placed in the cauldron: 0/1

“Only because we bring you stuff,” Draskil scoffed.

“What’s that? Us doing our assigned jobs with me excelling?” Jake kept laughing as he got up. Draskil looked slightly annoyed but didn’t complain more. In fact, he looked happy even with all his grumbling as the floor had gone far faster than expected.

Jake joined the dragonkin as they headed out and got killing. There were around a thousand giant mushroom men on the floor total, and they ended up slaying most while collecting materials. Even if they could have been out of the floor within less than five hours, they ended up staying for ten or so more simply to take full advantage of the place. Each floor held mushrooms Jake had never seen or heard of before, just as the dungeon had been described, and it would be foolish not to eat as many as they could for Palate.

Bastilla and Irin were the only ones really working for the last around seven hours as Irin was making their food and even mixed some salads using the mushrooms. Bastilla frankly had too many corpses to dismantle and ended up only bothering with those who had Lifecores within. If they had to wait for her to dismantle nearly a thousand corpses – well, realistically, nine hundred as Draskil had taken his frustrations from the water level out on a few – they would have been there for well over a day. Probably longer. This time also allowed Draskil to get back in top condition as he had expended quite a bit of energy. There had been a lot of them, after all.

“One floor left,” Irin smiled after they had ended their break and now stood before the passageway to the ninth floor.

“And that C-grade optional boss floor,” Jake added on.

“Technically, every floor after the fourth is optional,” Reika correctly said.

“I feel like I should be paying to be here,” Bastilla said self-deprecatingly.

Draskil just grunted as they opened the gate and went through the passageway. Jake dearly hoped the designer hadn’t decided to make the ninth floor a water level and was relieved when he saw it was just more mushrooms without the water. It was a bit of a mix between the giant stuff on the eighth floor and all the prior mushroom floors with regular-sized foes. Regular-sized being the three-meter tall mushroom men.

One thing that was different was the sheer number of foes. Just standing at the entrance to the floor, Jake saw thousands of them. Some were Mushroom Man Healers, Mushroom Man Warriors, Mushroom Man Defenders, and Mushroom Man Mages. All kinds of mushroom men. And in the middle of them, standing on a large mushroom, was the boss of the ninth floor.

[Mushroom Man General – lvl 199]

With the General were naturally its commanders, which were just copy-pasted versions of the boss on the fourth floor with a few more levels on top. Four of them.

[Mushroom Man Commander – lvl 195]

“The level of enemy diversity in this dungeon is just utter shit-tier,” Jake said, stating facts. Recycling older bosses as semi-regular enemies. Really?

“I must admit, it does seem rather uninspired,” Reika agreed.

“I am sure there is a reason it is like this,” Irin tried to defend the dungeon designer again even if she had to know, deep in her heart, that the dungeon designer had kind of sucked.

“Anyway, let’s get to the gate on the other side and figure out what the objective is this time around,” Jake said.

They all agreed and followed as they avoided the central part of the floor to not engage the boss. Not because they thought it was a threat, but because they wanted to avoid killing the boss only to figure out they needed to do something special to reach the next floor.

Only a few mushroom men were killed on the way to the cauldron placed in front of the gate. Another set of instructions was naturally also there, and this time there really was a spike in difficulty.

Create a poison using the Lifecore of the Mushroom Man General and from the materials found on this floor, and then place it in the cauldron. This poison must be at least of uncommon rarity and must primarily contain life affinity energy. In order to open the lid of the cauldron, at least two thousand mushroom men must be slain.

Progress: mushroom men killed: 41/2000. Poison placed in the cauldron: 0/1

“Only one real attempt… a complex affinity to have while still making it a poison…” Jake muttered as he read it.

“Uncommon rarity too,” Reika added with some worry. “We will need to make the life affinity energy highly volatile, that is for sure. If not, it won’t be recognized as a poison.”

“The problem is that the general’s core will likely lean far more towards a very stable and controlled life affinity considering its Records as a general,” Jake pointed out. “We will also need some cores from healers, but that energy is obviously of the healing kind.”

If Jake could add some of his own materials, it would be fine, but he couldn’t. The only thing he seemed allowed to add was his blood, as it was semi-qualified as dungeon material due to parts of it stemming from the dungeon courtesy of eating a lot of mushrooms.

“Before we decide anything, we need to get a proper understanding of what we have available,” Reika said, shaking her head.

“You can do it?” Draskil asked.

“Well, I think so, yeah, but I need to have the core of the general first,” Jake said. “Also, the core of the commanders are likely just lesser versions of the general, so we can use them for practice crafts.”

“So the first objective is to collect what this floor has available to get a scope of what we need?” Irin asked clarifyingly.

“And eat a mountain of mushrooms to figure out which ones are best,” Jake sighed.

“We go?” Draskil asked.

Jake summoned his wings and looked at Reika and Irin. “You two take the perimeter and hunt the stragglers?”

The two of them nodded as Bastilla added: “Then I will stand and cheerlead uselessly on the side, waiting for them to kill stuff I can dismantle.”

He gave her a pity thumbs-up as he and Draskil got to work. Jake and the dragonkin took to the air and flew towards the army of mushroom men. Every floor had grown in size as they progressed, and this one was no different. The large Mushroom Man General sat upon its mushroom uncaringly and unaware of the two monsters on their way to slaughter it.

Nay. Not monsters. Monsters did not act to set the world right by killing abominable existences that should have never existed. These were truly evil beings that deserved only death to make up for the sin of being alive. There was another name for those like Jake and Draskil who selflessly became arbiters of justice:

Heroes.