Nateaser: Reborn As My Love Interest

Ember - Ch. 105

"It's kinda disappointing..."

The human girl was completely bored out of her mind, barely dragging herself behind us, and I felt the same, this dungeon business sucked. We encountered no strong opponents and found no epic loot, just a hole dug into the ground, filled with disgusting troglodytes that could be found in any dwarven tunnel, but none of us were interested in them.

I was even relegated to torch-making duties because they forgot to bring any. I created permanent flames fed by a small amount of mana that they carried around, doubling as weapons against the easy-to-defeat critters. Unlike hellhounds, these did not like fire at all.

"Hey Gitaut, do you even need that crystal? Can't we go home?" I joined in on the complaining. "We have been at this for hours, but I feel like we are going in circles and nothing interesting happens."

"Ember, please... Don't call me that." Was the orc's simple answer while he rolled his eyes. Another group of deep underground beasts showed up before he could continue and I quickly dispatched them.

With my fireballs, it wasn't even a challenge. It was mildly annoying to deal with them, and they kept coming for some reason. Well, I guess they were blind and dumb enough to walk right into their deaths.

"And we aren't going in circles, I'm following the mana trails towards the dungeon," Gitaut added after the critter's lives were extinguished.

"What do you mean, towards the dungeon? We are in the dungeon already, aren't we?" The human girl perked up, shaking her head. She held one of my torches instead of her sword, but her school uniform, as it was called, seemed so strange down here.

Although none of us wore actual armor, not even the hobs and the ogre in the first row, these little critters couldn't touch us, so we didn't need them anyway. Omerta was quick to correct Emi.

"This is technically not the dungeon yet, this is part of the entrance. What we call dungeon is in another dimension." She tried to explain, but seeing the human's reaction, it went right over her head. After a loud sigh, she attempted it again. "I mean it's a space between spaces, a different plane, not part of our actual world. But it drifted close enough thanks to the concentration of mana, and an entrance materialized here."

"The abyssal monsters that populate that plane simply dug their way to the surface, that is this cave system, not part of the actual thing." The other orc came to the rescue. His senses told us which way to go, otherwise I was sure that we'd just get lost immediately. The little bastards dug hundreds if not thousands of tunnels without clear logic, and we always took the left ones, which seemed to be the largest as well. "Once we enter the dungeon, it would look like we're overground, and time and space will behave differently."

"Oh, so it's just called dungeon because you have to go underground to access it?" Emi reached the wrong conclusion, so I decided to flaunt my knowledge about the matter. Not like I knew much about them, and it was the first time for all of us, but I still learned more than this human.

"Not every dungeon is underground. I heard about one that appeared in the middle of a city square, as a simple door." I grabbed her attention easily. I even created a tiny door out of flames, and a small ball to float around it as an illustration. "If you went around it, nothing happened, but if you passed through it, you got transported into a different world."

"Right, there was a legend about one that manifested over the clouds, and people had to climb up a tall magical plant to reach it," Omerta added her own story, stealing my glory. "Not to mention, some are underwater, though they must be rare and hard to access because of the Sea of Storms."

"Yes, yes, I was about to say," I claimed, glaring at the orc witch, but another small group of troglodytes distracted us all. This time she was faster and dispatched them with her chained lightning. "Still, these things aren't the abyssal monsters I expected. What are they even doing here? Where are the rest of the hellhounds? Give me something to shoot."