[TTIABAD] Chapter 113: Getting into the swing of things

“Riary, this tastes amazing.” I said.

“I hope you burn your mouth on it. Besides, Tyler cooked it.”

I nodded to Tyler, who was busy stuffing his face with his own cut of meat. He’d gotten the leg while I’d gone for an arm and he seemed incredibly happy with it. He seemed even more happy then when he’d been cooking with Riary earlier.

“It tastes wonderful.” Konohora added in.

As for what we were eating. T-Rex. Dismantling it with the four of us had been relatively easy. Not because it was easy, no, there’d been a few surprising moments, a few areas touch and go, but there’d been no injuries. Well, I suspected we’d all have tinnitus without Konohora but that was about it. Without proper planning and working together, we’d have been fucked. The T-Rex hadn’t been stupid but it lacked experience against human opponents and the sharp mind of true people.

I mused on that while I ate the damn things arm. It’s roasted corpse was a few dozen feet away. Being in a fight was very weird. You kinda developed a form of tunnel vision most of the time, where it was block, respond, dodge, attack, move, etc. But there was a certain, sharpness of the mind, that came out. The way the Assassin that attacked us dodged away and moved through mid-air, the way I copied that not long ago when moving leaping from the T-Rex’s tail, the rough plan me and Riary once made against Vanessa, even just the way I lept off the ceiling one time to get at those wind mages. It wasn’t quite like, a master plan, but it was responding and thinking outside the box immediately. That level of sharpness, it’s what made people so much more dangerous than the typical monster.

That and planning ahead of time.

“Our plan worked well.” Konohora said to Tyler, who nodded, finally swallowing a large bite.

“But it was jagged.” I picked up, which had Tyler and Riary looking at me.

“How so?”

“Hmm. In a proper dynamic, we wouldn’t have needed me, Riary, or even Konohora to wait. We all could’ve rushed in at once and worked together seamlessly. I’ve seen you three do that before at least once, with the ogre. And all the time if we count weaker monsters. Strategy is good but we should be modular. I and Riary should be able to ‘lower’ our threats enough that Tyler can tank without issue, Konohora should be able to fight without sacrificing her healing readiness and so on and so forth. But I’m sure you three already know that. Like I said, I’ve literally seen you do it. Are you guys slowing things down because of me?”

Riary nodded. “Of course. We’ve barely fought together. Especially not as a team with roughly… equal strength.” Riary squinted at me, but said nothing more.

I refrained from commenting on that pause.

“While it would have been nice to have Kasandra train us, motivations and desires made us leave before we could receive it. The best solution in the meantime is to take things slow, as we get more experience fighting together.” Konohora said.

“...I thought my strategy was pretty good.” Tyler mumbled around his meat.

“It was fine. But it needs to be intuitive, seamless. That and a million other things. We’ve never gotten much time to be… well… an adventuring team. Not the four of us. Even with the power upgrades, you’d all be fine together, but I’m still lacking. A month alone with a trainer has helped my combat instincts but it’s just no replacement for dozens or hundreds of battles.”

“We should go deeper.” Riary said. We all turned to her. “The big problem is people want to kill you and so they want to kill us too right? But we’re C-Rank, so not a big enough ‘threat.’ Word has spread and will keep spreading but no one but us knows we’re close to breaking through to B-Rank. I’m assuming a lot of people think the city will take care of us. It might be a bit of political mess outside but as long as it’s inside the dungeon, we can just be wrote off as being eaten by a dinosaur. That’s what we need. We need to be written off as being eaten by a dinosaur and killed by the dungeon. If we do that, we can spend a few months, maybe half a year, down here.”

Tyler’s eyes widened. “But the gems…”

“No, Riary is right. B-Rank… it’s something held by people with more than a few decades of experience. The average person who actually reaches that seems to have lived for fifty to a hundred years Tyler. We’re not even including the decade or two every one of them has getting used to their new B-Rank strength and abilities, on average. Your ‘special situation’, Riary’s amazing mind, my Ability, and Konohora’s new constitution will make things easier… but not decades worth of experience easier. The Gems are an incredible danger but not a world ending one. An A-Rank could’ve sped through the jungle, murdered everyone, and probably taken the Gem with little issue. Even a B-Rank probably wouldn’t have struggled that much. Well, the ice one might’ve been tricky but you survived it so, others would have been able to as well. Ultimately, the Gems are like… keys, or doorways. To what seem to be entire planes of something. Life, Cold, ‘Space’, etc. I doubt they’re even the most dangerous thing on this world.”

I said that and I saw Konohora frown. Then frown heavily. Well… yeah. I did actually think these were most dangerous things in the world but my perspective had been ‘enlightened’. Power worked on a different curve here. Even I doubted someone with the Hell Gem could ‘instantly’ destroy the world. Especially not with Gods and Goddesses who no doubt wouldn’t be happy with that outcome. The world was bigger than a bunch of shiny rocks that led to terrible, horrible places. I just prayed and hoped they were most dangerous thing out there. I couldn’t imagine much worse than a door way to hell.

“We need to… start thinking in the terms of years Tyler.” Those words physically pained me. Not just because it meant leaving a massive threat that was Happy Go Lucky around for who knows how long, doing who knows what. It wasn’t just finding the gems and getting Tyler home we were putting off in the pursuit of strength. It might really take me years to find a body changing potion. At the very least, I didn’t expect it to happen within the next year. But that was alright. We were in this for the long haul. That meant power. I’d like to be able to survive an A-Rank Psychic who could apparently blow up brains across the equivalent of the entire distance of Earth.

My words seemed to sap all the joy from Tyler. He’d already been away from his family for, gods, who knows how long. Year and a half? Nearly two years? He’d spent at least a few extra months and honestly, there was no telling how time moved between one world and the next, not that I’d ever bring it up. He didn’t need that kind of burden.

“Years…”

“Well, let’s not worry about that.” I said. “For now, let’s just eat, rest, and keep fighting. There’s a lot more monsters and B-Ranks around us after all. But it’s getting late now, so we should probably start on that resting pretty soon.”

Riary’s face turned dark. “I wish we’d killed that damn Assassin.”

“We all do Riary. We all do. Going to sleep is fucking horrifying. Especially with how it goes pitch black at night.”

Everyone sighed at that.

*****

The days began to pass and my nerves began to get easier. There’d been no sign of the assassin at all. That didn’t mean we got any more lax, just the opposite. I started checking if there were any shadows at all while I slept, anywhere that could be used. I tried to extend the range of my senses, but that was a messy, messy problem. My Ability was always ‘on’. Modifying it was possible but would take a very long, arduous time. Without my True Hero nature, which only now started to sound ridiculous to my ears, who knows if it would have been possible at all. But range? That was like trying to see further. You can’t just ‘do’ that. I needed better ‘eyes’. That was almost an entirely passive thing.

What I could do was filter out the world so that the maximum range was clearer and the range around me was much clearer. But it still wasn’t anything like true sight. I could tell you a lot of information about the power of something, but color hardly mattered in that distinction, so telling that was hard. And a million other things like that were hard to impossible.

Tyler and Riary tried to do something fancy with their soul/power connection. Riary walked a slightly different road than Tyler. Mages and Aura’s were weird, put simply. I didn’t really get it. They had them and would develop them, usually in B-Rank like most everyone, but it was, well, related to their magic core or something. Riary said she’d already unlocked a deeper step with her soul becoming ‘awake’, she could feel it, but she hadn’t passed the first steps yet.

Tyler was already well on his way, having been taught Aura early to ‘slow down’ his unnatural speed. It was exactly like trying to learn how to build a rocket engine as a teenager. At least that was the feeling I’d gotten from Tyler. The only reason he seemed to be an S-Rank potential Genius and not a True Hero seemed to be that everyone thought he was being taught from birth, basically. If they learned he’d been in this world less than two years, well, that’d be a different story.

Tyler, surprisingly, actually said he ‘felt like he was onto something’. Which was fascinating, because I didn’t feel any power change from him. I didn’t doubt his words, it was just interesting to see a part of the ‘power’ process that was completely removed from me. Metaphorically, if it took you a year to ‘build the rocket’, my power wasn’t going to say anything on day two about it. The change in ‘power’ was just too minor.

Konohora didn’t even try. She has some light experience with assassins but that was more Casual, D-Rank and low C-Rank stuff. Nothing like this and her abilities weren’t suited for scouting or blocking.

And there’d been fighting. B-Ranks. But all… weak. Really weak. Mostly just B-Rank versions of those walking lizards but there had also been a funny looking flower that attacked with vines. That’d been pretty funny.

We were walking along, aiming for just a general ‘deeper’. We were surrounded by strong B-Ranks but there was still weaker ‘paths’. We were following one of them now, looking to where it led us. A hopeful gradual rise in difficulty.

And that was when I ‘saw’ it with my Power Gauge and stopped dead in my tracks.

“Derek?”

“I…. uh… c-can dungeons make sentience species?”

Tyler’s eyes widened but Riary and Konohora immediately shook their heads no, strongly.

“No. They can create species that mimic sentience, even ones with tactics and strategy and intelligence, but they are ultimately monsters. There have been tens of thousands of attempts with human, elven, and dwarven races found in dungeons. Not a single one did not result in immediate hostility. There is even a famous mind mage who declared that they were ‘missing what makes a person a person’. It’s not… as bad as the Lost, but all evidence shows they are monsters.”

Phew. That was a relief off my mind then.

“Well… I think I just found us a village of Cavemen.”