Time passed and down in the dungeon, an out-of-town team is making their way through the thirteenth floor. The six had met up in Wolf’s Rest at the start to farm beef. However, after the increase in difficulty that had happened, they found that they enjoyed growing stronger.

  At first, they and everyone else had been stuck on the twelfth floor. The need to find the way forward behind the wheat? If the stories were to be trusted, they had heard the town’s inner circle got stuck on it as well. Of course, once one group figured it out, it was like trying to keep fire in a paper bag.

  In a slightly ironic twist, the secret was found not by anyone actively trying to delve deeper, but another farming team. Though that team had been figuring out if they could profitably farm the wheat since flour has gotten quite rare. The answer, however, was not yet and that they would require either specialized tools or magic.

  Whatever the case may be, the six on 13 were happy enough that they could progress once again. The birds being a good opponent to train their skills against. The novelty from fighting a flying enemy provides a hefty boost to skill growth compared to just fighting more kobolds and goats.

  Though there are way too many birds. Sam, short for Samuel, takes another glance up the mountain. He would have been running low on arrows at this point if not for Clera’s magic. While the arrows sucked, the fact she could literally pull arrows out of trees was no small miracle for the team. Even if it did limit them to wooded areas.

  Sam frowned as that reminded him of one of the strange things with this dungeon. The trees weren’t alive. Sure, they looked green and you would swear the sap was running through them. But Clera swore up and down that they weren’t and Sam was one to agree with her. If only because of said arrows.

  Out in the wilds? The arrows she could pull out were green wood, through and through. However, when she pulled arrows from the dungeon trees, even if they did have sap in them, they were not green wood. It almost seemed as if someone had seasoned some wood, then soaked them in sap.

  Sam sighed as he released another arrow, spearing one bird through the armpit, wingpit? Whatever you call that spot. Either way, it’s kind of hard to fly with an arrow there and so it drops out of the sky. Not just that, but it had been flying over the forest below them and so had a long way to fall. Maybe it survived, but even if it did, the four winged pest wasn’t going to bother them.

  The team’s plan this time was to make it through the entire floor and take a peek at the fourteenth floor. From what Clera had heard while taking healing lessons, there wasn’t any rush to reach the fifteenth because it wasn’t a boss floor. Better to take things slow and steady. Not like they’ll catch up with those snobs in the inner circle.

  Just because they have control over the town and the dungeon, doesn’t make them any better than anyone else. Sam had seen enough nonsense before magic arrived and now there were even wolf people running around. No way, no how was he going to let people just set up some nobility based social nonsense.

  Not that many others seem to have his fervor. It seemed literal magic knocking everyone on their keister was enough to make people think strength trumped social order. Sam sighed, he would just have to see about others that felt the same way.

  Next to him Clera frowned. Her current team, she didn’t want to imagine it being her long-term team, that’s for sure, was making decent progress. If only the archer, what’s his name, would actually invest in Strength so he could carry a decent number of arrows. She was the healer and shouldn’t be wasting Mana on making cheap arrows. If anything, at least he should work at retrieving his arrows.

  Sure, that wasn’t exactly an option on this floor, but the only time she had seen him gather arrows was when they dropped to the floor after a monster corpse vanished. The man apparently had a thing against getting his hands dirty. Beyond that, he was a fool!

  Clera admitted she would prefer if things ended up at least partially democratic. However, it seemed that the option to become a literal god was on the table now. Kind of hard to get someone like that to follow the rules unless you had that power as well and the archer wasn’t going to get there.

  She had nothing against him, but it seemed like he couldn’t even imagine outpacing the town’s inner circle. How could someone become strong enough if they can’t even imagine being stronger than some guy in charge of a single town?

  Then she was distracted as she had to heal the team’s tank. A golem had managed to get in close enough and broke their leg.

  Good thing for the team, they had actually made it most of the way up the mountain at that point and they were able to rush to the exit portal. Did they end up having over twelve golems chasing them with the rest of the hexkus dive-bombing them? Yes, but since the monsters didn’t chase them through the floor portal, it didn’t matter.

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  Then the entire group paused, even the guy with a broken leg that had been forced to hobble his way with another guy’s help. Before them spread out an enormous cavern with pillars of stone and fungal growths connecting the top and the bottom. Though as they took in more details, that was called into question. Both the floor and the ceiling seemed to have monsters walking around and we aren’t talking about spiders.

  In front of them, they saw some of those myconids a bit deeper in while up above there was a group of normal kobolds that seemed to have noticed the party. Sam tried to shoot at them, but the giant mushroom trees provided too much cover for that to work. With that, the group wasn’t quite sure what to do about those monsters above them and so decided to just ignore them unless the situation changed.

  As the party continued deeper into the floor, though, it became impossible to ignore. The myconids were easy enough to kill. Well, not easy, but compared to the onslaught of birds on the last floor, they preferred groups of enemies with time in-between to rest and heal.

  No, the problem was above their heads. The further they got, the more kobolds gathered. While nothing said they had to fight them, everyone assumed that was just a matter of time.

  However, they didn’t turn back, at least not yet. They had made it through the previous floor and that involved many more monsters than this. So, instead, they came up with a plan.

  While Sam couldn’t hit them, that was just because of how far away the kobolds were. The obvious solution to that was get him closer and there happened to be a bunch of bits connecting the two sides. The question being whether to use stone columns or the fungal nets.

  And it was that last word that made up Sam’s mind. He wasn’t exactly one for free climbing and so decided to use the much easier to climb nets of fungus. About the only downside was that Clera wasn’t able to pull arrows out of the net. Which was kind of odd as she could pull them from the mushroom trees.

  Sam complained a bit about this, going on about how she just needed to try harder or something. In the end, much to his displeasure, everyone else decided the solution was to simply have him climb back down whenever he ran out of arrows.

  This was lucky for Clera. While the plan worked a couple of times, on the third ascent, Sam ran into danger. From within the tangle, a fungal vine whips out and grabs him.

  He has a decent grip on the fungal growth and so isn’t pulled away instantly, but that doesn’t change his situation. The rest of his party on the ground cannot climb up to where he was fast enough. Besides that, they notice movement. There is a second strange assassin vine moving into position. Both of them have an odd half fungal look to them.

  Clera doesn’t like the idea of leaving his body. Just letting the dungeon eat it feels wrong. However, with two assassin vines, the chance of recovering the body without losing someone else is low. Besides that, while risking themselves to save someone is one thing, but retrieving the body? Better that those still alive keep living.

  And so the remaining five people beat a hasty retreat. Though Sam’s death would be an important piece of information, likely saving many others as even the inner circle didn’t know about the hidden dangers of the connecting points on floor fourteen. Sam had truly been unlucky as there was only a handful of the assassin vines and troop guards on the floor.

  While this was happening, Doyle was quite happy about the situation. He hadn’t planned for the handful of midway monsters to be an actual threat. They were supposed to be more of a speed bump to climbing with a chance that someone would get knocked off.

  Instead, they ended up preventing an archer from cheesing the floor and discourage others from attempting the same. Sure, if someone was capable of attacking from one side to the other, nothing would stop them. Though as far as Doyle was concerned, anyone capable of that was either strong enough or specialized enough that they deserved to.

  That, however, is set to the side as Doyle was more interested in the assassin vines themselves. At some point, they had adapted to their environment. While still for all intents and purposes, still regular assassin vines, they had somehow developed camouflage.

  While the vines now looked like the fungal nets they lived in, the actual vine itself was still the same as any other assassin vines. It was more like a coat of paint. However, said “coat of paint” was quite unique. As despite the one pair having gained this camo, the other group on the floor hadn’t.

  This required testing. First being Doyle simply despawning one of the regular assassin vines on the floor and spawning in a new one to replace it. He even had the intent for the new one to match the camo assassin vines. Quite the shame that this did not work. It would have been very convenient if he could spawn in camouflaged assassin vines as needed.

  However, when he placed that new assassin vine with the two with the camo, it quickly took on the same adaptation. Well, “quickly” from a dungeon’s perspective. It still took a couple weeks of regular time and who knows how much actual time passed for the vines with the natural time acceleration?

  Still, this at least made it so Doyle would always have a selection of fungal assassin vines. And it was specifically fungal. Their ability to camouflage was not general. Doyle tried putting more of them in a variety of environments and no further changes happened.

  That left one more destructive test. Until this point Doyle had been keeping all the camo vines alive, even going so far as to remove them from that floor to the last floor’s farm. Now, he was going to despawn one and see what happens.

  Not that he regretted going through the other tests. His assassin vine pattern went from level 28 to 41. Which also showed his work on his mental triangle was working as well. Before, that little amount of work would not have resulted in so much growth.

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