November 3, 2022

  Day 14 / Dungeon Day 0

  Bloody hell. What did Matt put in that pebble? That hurt.

  A lot.

  Maya thought, as she observed her surroundings and pieced together what had happened. Now free from the effect of the mental attack, she watched the two birds flying toward her, with Matt and Daniel at their tail, swords out.

  She did the math.

  Three against two isn't such bad odds, and I think I can skew them a bit further in our favor.

  Picking the more harried of the two birds, Maya started firing mana bullets at its already battered wing. It was flagging but reached her before the damage crossed a critical threshold that would ground them.

  But she had another trick up her sleeve. Recalling what happened when she had first cast this spell, Maya spoke the words and targeted the spell right in front of the bird's eyes, closing her own eyes at the last moment.

  Illuminate

  Muttering an apology to her friends who had also been blinded by the light, she fired three more fire bullets in the general direction where she expected her target to be. Then she dissipated the Illumination, and opened her eyes, firing two more bullets before everyone else regained their vision.

  After losing one of its wings, this bird too started flying in circles, and to its misfortune, instead of crashing atop the branch, it flew around, missing the branch completely, and continued falling toward the forest floor.

  Gaining speed every second.

  It won't be long before it hits the ground. And it won't be pretty when it does.

  Maya thought, some remorse creeping into her conscience.

  Now alone against three enemies, the last remaining bird had second thoughts as it flew in to attack. Matt gave it no opportunity to second guess its decision, as he stood like a wall in the guardian's trajectory, taking the strike head-on. The impact resulted in his tumbling behind several steps and falling on his ass, but he had achieved his goal. The bird has lost most of its speed, allowing Daniel to come in from behind and get a good stab, embedding his sword firmly into the bird's wing. As it struggled to free the wing, Daniel held a firm grip, and the guardian only exacerbated the damage.

  Soon, Matt was back up and the two made quick work of the downed bird.

  Maya too got some credit for the kill.

  Probably because of all those the holes my bullets had left behind.

  A few seconds later, she got another notification.

  It took this long to hit the ground. Poor bird must have been terrified the whole time. What a horrible way to go.

  Maya thought, having second thoughts about all the violence now that she had a few seconds to think.

  But a few seconds was all she had, as the trio started running toward Rahul and Ivan, who were now sporting many cuts across their body.

  After paying attention to their movement for some time, she quickly realized that they had both entered their trances.

  Matt spoke.

  "You two, stay hidden. I'm going to go into a trance and join them. If some of the birds decide to leave the group and attack you, we won't have the awareness to do anything about it."

  Maya wanted to protest, but Daniel spoke first.

  "We'll go back to the alcove in the tree and hide there. If things look safe, Maya can step out and attack while concealing herself behind the trunk."

  I guess that works.

  Maya thought, and Matt seemed satisfied as well, as he ran to join Rahul and Ivan.

  "What are you going to do while we wait."

  She asked Daniel.

  He took several mana potions out of the bag of holding he had borrowed from his wife and spoke.

  "Figure out just how many fireballs I can push into the matrix without losing control."

  Blinding light and scorching heat brought Rahul back to his senses.

  Slowly the light faded and the heat mellowed, and a few seconds later, he could see his surroundings.

  Maya spoke.

  "Sorry about that. All the birds were dead and you guys had started striking at the empty air. Daniel and I put together a heat and light show before the three of you had the chance to start hacking at each other."

  Rahul rubbed his eyes as he replied.

  "I don't think we'd have done that, but it doesn't matter, your illuminate spell did the trick, along with Daniel's..."

  He paused as he noticed the large cube with neatly arrayed fireballs. He counted six from top to bottom, six across, and assumed there were six from front to back as well.

  216 fireballs.

  Putting two and two together, he dropped his previous line of thought and smiled.

  "So that's how you guys managed that barrage back then. I had been wondering what took you so long."

  As Maya gave him and his fellow melee fighters a healing potion each, he looked around and noticed the carnage the three of them had caused.

  There were no clean beheadings. The birds they had killed in the trance state had all been slowly ground to zero health before they died.

  Looking at his notifications, he saw a series of XP notifications. He skimmed over those quickly.

  Something else had captured all his attention.

  A new skill, a bunch of upgrades, and two specializations.

  Changed to

  The upgrade and the skill were both a long time coming, and I guess fighting against formidable enemies in a life-or-death battle was just the last push they needed. Given how often I dual-wield blades in fights, that reduced penalty is surely going to come in handy. Footwork is sure to help, and the dexterity bonus is just the cherry on top.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  Rahul thought and smiled as he slashed with his two knives. The difference between his dominant and non-dominant hand was much less noticeable now. He checked the next notification.

  Changed to.

  Intent Cold Trance has to be the skill I used in the fight earlier. I guess that means I won't need momentum to control the flow of intent for me the next time I want to get into the trance.

  Rahul had a theory about Intent Trance as well.

  When I had used Kinetic cleave in the last dungeon, the system had simply given me the base attack Willblade Strike too. That's probably what the system did again, filled in the gaps again and granted me Intent Trance, which the Intent Cold trance builds upon.

  The upgrade to stamina control may be because of the number of specializations I have earned, or it might simply be because of how often I have used the ability.

  Whatever the case may be, the two specializations got me 200,000 XP, and then I got 30,000 for the skills. That's more than enough to reach level 24.

  With that thought, Rahul opened the next notification.

  Recalling that he had 685XP leftover from when he had leveled up last, Rahul calculated that killing the birds had netted him over 30,000XP. He quickly invested the five free stat points into dexterity, while doing some calculations.

  If I take their average level to be 22, that means I effectively killed about 14 of the birds. My friends must have killed the rest, getting about 15,000XP between them.

  That thought prompted him to ask them about their levels.

  "Did anyone level up?"

  Everyone shook their heads.

  "Let's fix that."

  Looking around at the result of their battle, he declared.

  "No more kiting enemies back to base camp. It's time for us to take the fight to those damn birds."

  Rahul felt like he did a good job hyping up his team, and was striding away with confidence, expecting his friends to follow him, when Maya interrupted.

  "Well, before we go, two of the birds dropped some loot. You want to take a look?"

  I guess...

  He thought as he smiled and turned around.

  "Of course!"

  Daniel pulled out two items from his bag of holding and Rahul immediately inspected them.

  His eyes narrowed and everyone immediately erupted in laughter.

  Daniel spoke again.

  "I guess you see the same information that everyone else does. Despite how useless the prompt is, we reckoned that the talons might be useful, so we cut off the talons of all the birds here. Maya tells me that if Charlie were here, he would have de-feathered the birds, but none of us were inclined to do that."

  Rahul nodded, then remembered something.

  "Maya, you and Charlie had harvested some resources out of the previous dungeon bosses too right? What happened to those?"

  Maya nodded.

  "It's all sitting in one of the rooms on the top floor. Now that there are people with non-combat classes on the island, I'm sure someone will figure out what to do with those."

  Daniel smiled at Rahul as he pointed at the two loot items.

  "And these."

  Then he added.

  "That was all. Please lead the way. It's grinding time."

  That's exactly what Rahul did, but there was much less spring in his steps this time.

  November 3, 2022

  Day 14 / Dungeon Day 1

  It was more than 24 hours ago that Rahul had first felt the compulsion to jump off the tree toward the ground below.

  Since then, there had been many more such intent attacks, and Matt had become increasingly adept at throwing pebbles. His big breakthrough came when Ivan's Immutability manifested and noticed what was going on. It took some time with his short sentences, but he eventually got the point across that the physical impact of the pebble was not what broke the trance, but the intention that was poured into it when Matt threw it. The desire to protect his friends and fight the trance found a physical medium in the pebble and did the actual work.

  It was apparently also the reason why it hurt so much more than a regular wood chip, which is what those pebbles actually were, had any right to.

  Matt had been using the pebble as a crutch, but with some practice and guidance from Immutability, he figured out how to channel his intent without relying on a medium, culminating in a targeted intent defense skill.

  So now, as Rahul finally made the jump to the floor of the forest, it was not under the compulsion of any intent attack, but simply because the group had finally completed the trek down the tree and the ground was a mere 10 feet below him.

  Even as Rahul's feet touched the ground, he held his twin blades at the ready, expecting an attack.

  But as none came, four more pair of feet landed around him.

  Rahul spoke.

  "Looks like we are safe for now. It's getting dark, and we are all exhausted. Let's camp here for tonight."

  Daniel nodded and spoke.

  "We'll create a wooden palisade as discussed, and then keep watch in shifts. I assume you'd want to take the first guarding shift?"

  Rahul smiled.

  "Of course."

  I just need to wait a little bit longer, then I can finally check my specializations!

  Rahul thought as he joined his friends who had climbed back up the tree and were chopping off the branches for wood.

  Fifteen minutes later, Daniel pulled out a large camping tent from his bag of holding and set it up at the center of their palisade wall, adjacent to the tree.

  That drew looks, and he explained.

  "My wife said that the company wasn't sure what accommodations would be present here on the island, if any, so they sent them prepared."

  Lucky for us.

  Rahul thought, and with their lodgings for the night taken care of, he went through his last two notifications.

  Despite all his efforts to keep away from the fights, he had been forced to intervene in many of the battles his team had against the many flocks of the guardian birds, and this morning, he had reached level 25. Over the rest of the day, he ended up getting enough XP to progress to the next level, and in the past two hours, even wasted some as he couldn't level up without choosing a specialization.

  Okay, I've waited long enough.

  I'm ready.

  The system responded.

  It was decision time.