The Pinnacle Warrior

The quantity of nightmares slain is inconsequential and you may kill as many as you wish. They do not thrive on this mountain; they do not have the space to build up a charge between the trees, so they are easy prey to the Groves who dwell nearby. No matter the rate of creation of the nightmares, they can be easily dealt with. However, with the wyverns, we do not want to accelerate anything. As such, you have permission to hunt five on the first floor and increase that number by three for every floor that descends lower than that.

“So on the ninth floor,” Astrid confirmed, “we can hunt twenty-nine in a single day?”

Yes. Though that will increase the spawn rate slightly on the lower floors, any survivors of your presence will make their way to the higher levels of the branch. When those floors experience an influx of wyverns, we will guide you on how much to exterminate on each floor each day.

She nodded appreciatively. “I don’t know if we will be pushing quite that hard, but to have that knowledge is welcome.”

We maintain our gratitude to you for being willing to take the lead in the focused hunt of monsters which we find to be more difficult to deal with, regardless on how much you  manage to slay. Good luck on your hunt.

Astrid said her goodbyes as she turned to get back to town. Though she would prefer to push hard every day from now on, the words of her party stuck in her head. They wanted to take more of a break, and she wouldn’t take that opportunity away from them. Instead, she would have to negotiate.

***

“One night a week.”

“At least three a week!”

“One night a week.” Benedict’s voice didn’t waver. He stared into Astrid’s eyes, and she looked at Muti for support.

“I am not the person you need to convince,” the golden-haired Barbarian said.

“You’re not helping,” Astrid grumbled. “Felix?”

“I think two isn’t a bad compromise.”

“Only two nights a week in the Dungeon?” Astrid whined. “We’re delvers, not a bunch of babies!”

“I could take the stance of never sleeping in the Dungeon,” Benedict shrugged. “There’s a bath, warm water, and divine meals waiting for me here. That I would be willing to sacrifice that for even  a single night is a testament to how much I like you.”

“We have good cots and blankets and so on,” Astrid protested. “And fresh meat grilled on an open fire is nice.”

“Michel’s fresh baked bread is better.”

Astrid hung her head and looked at the Bard. “Two nights a week.”

“I am… amenable to that,” Benedict said, though the look on his face didn’t let Astrid feel at ease. “If we reduce the delve time on the days we don’t camp out from ten hours to nine.”

“No way,” Astrid laughed. “What are we going to do all day? Only nine hours will barely let us get to the fifth or sixth floor while hunting on the floors before that.”

“And then, two times a week,” Benedict shrugged, “we’ll have one day where we delve for like fourteen hours, set up camp, and wake up just to do it for another nine. I’d say that balances out.”

“So long as those nine hours are active delving time,” Astrid said, “with no long rest for lunch or anything. And we’ll be using draughts to accelerate recovery, then yes. I’ll agree to those terms.”

“You don’t want to give us a near hour of lunch?” Benedict complained.

“If we’re only in the Dungeon for nine hours when we’re delving, yeah,” Astrid confirmed.

“Fine,” Benedict shook his head, extending his hand. “I’ll agree to that. In a good compromise, nobody’s happy, right?”

“I’d say I’m pretty happy,” Astrid shrugged as she shook his hand. He narrowed his eyes at her, but the discussion had gone on through all of breakfast and then for another thirty minutes besides.

“Then that means, per the agreement that has been settled,” Skandr said as he stood up from his chair, “there will be one rest day for every six days of delving, to be decided upon by a majority of the party. On the six days of delving, it will be a nine-hour delving block, with only one short break to eat and recover around midday. That time will begin upon arrival and entry into the Dungeon branch and not before. Every day, after the nine hours of delving, we will return to have dinner at Michel’s inn and will sleep here. The exceptions to this will be two nights a week in which we leave at the usual time, delve for an additional five hours, break for camp, and spend the night within the Dungeon to be able to better fight on the lower floors on that day and the one that follows..”

He looked back and forth at every member of the Wanderers and confirmed, “Is that correct?”

Starting with Astrid and moving to the rest, they nodded and, that way, the decision was made. Astrid smiled and started to stand up as she said, “Then let’s get going, shall we?”

“I say today’s our break day, how about the rest of you?” Benedict grinned, looking at the other two men with a smile. Going off of their mischievous faces, even before they said anything, Astrid knew what the result was going to be and hung her head in frustration as she let out an involuntary groan.

“You win this time,” she admitted, shaking her head as she looked at him. “But I’ll make you pay.”

“I’m sure you will,” Benedict shrugged. “I can’t always win. However, for now, I’ll take great pleasure in this victory and my deserved day of complete relaxation.”

Though he won the day and this was one less day delving in a surging Dungeon branch than Astrid wanted, she couldn’t deny that having a day off wasn’t so bad.

She spent the day wandering around Neverwood, seeing which people were willing to talk to her, which wasn’t many. Most of the residents of the town were, according to Vera, happily reclusive, and they stayed that way. As such, Astrid ended up mostly wandering around and talking to Vera before lunch, and then sitting in the inn’s main room and looking around hopelessly.

“Let us train,” Muti said. With nothing else to do, Astrid did so, and found that, with Steady Load and her equipment, she was faster than Muti. The few spars that they conducted while using equipment quickly went in her favor, given that she could keep up with and even outpace Muti while also being a bit stronger and significantly tougher. Astrid’s Fortitude, after all, was more than twice Muti’s, so she could easily allow a series of heavy hits from Muti in order to catch an advantage herself.

It wasn’t long before Muti forced Astrid to take off her equipment as the Barbarian did as well. Without the massive boost to Astrid’s Alacrity that Steady Load offered, the fight shifted dramatically. Instead of being a quick exchange with Muti looking to pummel Astrid into submission without allowing the Warrior to close the distance, it became a waiting game for Astrid. She couldn’t hope to stand up to Muti’s speed, so instead, she remained patient and focused more than anything on finding an opportunity to grapple Muti.

In the first style of a fight, Astrid was undeniably the advantaged party, and the results showed it. Muti struggled to keep up and never seized a notable advantage over Astrid. In the second, though, Muti was able to leverage her extensive practice with hand-to-hand combat, fist fighting, grappling, and more, to keep Astrid on the back foot. Even after years of training together like this, Astrid hadn’t caught up with all the same habits and reflexes of her friend. However, whenever she managed to catch Muti for more than a split second, the fight went in Astrid’s direction as her hands quickly forced Muti into grapples that the Shadow couldn’t escape.

“It’s strange,” Astrid panted as she stretched the soreness from her sides and back from bone-deep bruises, “to fight without using any of my Skills.”

“It is a weak Warrior that cannot use the strength of their fists,” Muti replied, her grin as predatory as ever.

“I can punch a boulder apart and hardly feel it,” Astrid laughed. “My fists do more than enough, especially thanks to my weapon Skill. It’s harder than I expect to catch up with you when you’re so quick, though.”

“In a battle between strength and speed,” Muti agreed, “strength often finds it nearly impossible to leverage its advantages.”

They continued conversing, both exchanging pointers as they made their way inside and took their baths. Before long, Muti disappeared to do something with Felix, and Astrid didn’t care enough to find out if they were looking for intimacy or just had something else they wanted to do. Instead, she took her dinner with Skandr, who’d spent the day locked up with his grimoires.

“It really is quite interesting, how just a single day of rest will change the way I think about things,” he mused. “After all, I hadn’t considered the solidification of mana in unnatural ways until we saw the dragon and I had some time to think about it.”

“You’re going to have to give me more than that if you want me to understand what you’re talking about,” Astrid said, swallowing her bite of roll. “Isn’t whatever you make out of mana already a solid of sorts? You use water mana, it makes water? You use stone mana, it’s a rock?”

“Strictly speaking,” Skandr shook his head, “no. I know you don’t care about the specifics, so I won’t get into them. It’s a lot more complicated than that. Anyways. Tell me: what do you think the element was of the mana that the dragon used in its breath?”

“Ice? That’s what it did, right?”

“As a matter of fact, no. Actually, the mana was about one or two parts cold to five or six parts air. There was no water and no ice, only compressed, frozen air.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Astrid shook her head. “I mean, air doesn’t freeze.”

“So far as I know, you’re right,” Skandr agreed, “but if a dragon was to heavily compress mana in order to breathe an attack, then it results in something that wouldn’t happen naturally, so far as I know. And with that in mind, I’m trying to figure out how to improve my wind binding spell.”

“To compress it and make it solid,” Astrid ventured a guess.

“Exactly,” he nodded. “If I can figure out how to make the wind a solid when it appears holding something down, then it will be much more difficult to escape the bindings. That’d make our fights against flying things much easier.”

Astrid nodded, understanding, and she listened to the Wizard ramble about different possibilities, offering what little insight she could. Largely, she was listening to ideas and couldn’t say much. She didn’t understand much about magic, and did little else. Eventually, the meal was over, and they both decided to just talk and enjoy each other’s company instead of thinking or talking about delving, progressing Skills, or anything else. It was a strange experience to deliberately avoid any thoughts about fighting, what had become her life, and it was actually a bit uncomfortable to realize that Astrid had very little that she could talk about outside of fighting and killing monsters.

“If you had a kid,” Benedict asked, changing the subject and taking her by surprise, “how would you raise them differently from how your parents raised you?”

“I don’t think I want to have kids anytime soon,” Astrid answered.

“Yeah, I get that, but the question still stands. If you were in a position where you were having a kid now, in what way would you change the way that you raised them compared to your parents?”

“Honestly,” Astrid shrugged, “I’m not sure. I think they did a pretty good job with me. I never went hungry, I was given an opportunity to figure out what I might want to do in the future, and they provided training for that. I never thought they didn’t love me, and while I argued with them plenty, I never felt like they didn’t want me around or whatever. I wish they said something to me about the nobles, but also, what would ten-year-old Astrid have done with the idea that anybody in power might try to turn me into a slave?”

Skandr stared at her for a few seconds before shaking his head and saying, “Sometimes it’s easy to forget that you weren’t raised like the rest of us. Even Muti has more in common with our childhood than you do.”

“What do you mean?” Astrid asked as they walked up the stairs and settled in her room to continue talking.

“I had just my mom; she died, I was basically on the streets, had to learn the hard way about things. Got a Class that nobody could help me with, and struggled through most of life when I was young. Benedict never felt like he belonged on the farm, and though his parents were there to help him, he was always pretty miserable being there. Felix thought his parents were boring and didn’t want to be around them, so he ran away to join a gang. Then we all know Muti, being raised to compete and fight for her place among her litter.”

Astrid shrugged, falling onto her bed with a groan. Her belly was so full that she didn’t want to move at all. She didn’t speak any further with Skandr on that, and he decided to leave it. Instead, he sat on the edge of her bed, looking at her with a small, soft smile on his face.

“What?” she asked.

“You make me laugh is all,” he said with a shrug.

“What do you mean?” she insisted, sitting up and getting closer to him. When sitting, she still towered over him, but was now only about ten to fifteen centimeters taller instead of thirty to forty. With a start, she realized that, at some point, he’d grown. Not enough to even be as tall as her father, but no longer a spindly 175 centimeters. Maybe with the acquisition of Warlock’s Constitution he’d started growing more?

“The specific calculations of how much experience we would all gain,” Skandr eventually explained with a shrug. “Going and finding out exactly how long we’re allowed to spend in the Dungeon and so on. It’s funny to see you today trying to relax, but only really putting off the eventuality of getting back in the Dungeon.”

Astrid sighed, flopping back down on her back and throwing the crook of her arm over her eyes. “I’m really trying over here.”

“I know,” Skandr laughed, “and that’s what makes it cute. The big scary Warrior who beat a dragon to death with her hammer and fists is now wandering all sad around the town. She turns into a kicked puppy when she isn’t allowed to delve.”

“There just isn’t very much to do here,” Astrid grumbled, playfully pushing Skandr from her bed. He fell to the ground with a laugh, catching his feet and standing up.

“And there will be plenty of wyverns and nightmares for you to beat to death tomorrow,” Skandr said with an affected paternal tone.

Astrid just laughed and swatted at the air in his direction as she couldn’t muster the energy to get out of the comfortable laying position.

“Good night, Astrid,” Skandr said as he went to let himself out.

“Good night,” she replied. The sound of the door latch closing echoed in her room, and that was the last thing she could remember before sleep took her.

***

“The sun isn’t even up,” Benedict grumbled as Astrid pushed a plate of sausage links and some sort of root vegetable toward him.

“And this way,” Astrid countered, “will make sure that we’ll be back here in time for a reasonably timed dinner.”

He waved his hand dismissively at her, but Astrid did notice that Benedict stopped quite so much complaining as he took a deeper drink of the mulled cider and started to eat his breakfast. The rest of the Wanderers weren’t nearly so loath to get going, and breakfast was nearly finished for most of them.

Just a short while later, the party was ready to go, fully equipped, and out the door. The sun was barely peeking over the horizon, and the smell of dew was still thick in the air.

“Let’s go,” Astrid smiled. “According to the Grove Warden, the surge is just going to get stronger over the next four weeks, which means twenty-four days of delving and reaping all of this experience.”

Despite Skandr’s grumbling that morning, Astrid could see the excitement in everybody else’s bearing. After all, at her estimation now, adjusted to allow for much more hunting than she’d expected, at the end of today they would be at least halfway to level sixty-one. Now, all they had to do was actually delve.