Chapter 41: Life Changes (Patreon)

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Ten Months Later…

Cayden stomped his foot with as much force as he could muster, smiling at the crunch that sounded underfoot.

The beetle-like monster didn’t make any noise, but its legs wiggled in a way Cayden imagined signified distress, and he wasted no time stomping again, and again, and again, until the monster was no more than a flattened mess of goop and partially-intact shell.

He was lucky that he had finally started to go through his growth spurt. Without the weight from his extra four inches of height, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to generate enough force to break through their tough carapaces.

Any observer would be hard-pressed to recognize Cayden as the same adventurer from almost a year prior. He’d finally passed up Elise in height, but he didn’t have the gangly look typical to most teenagers going through their growth spurt. His non-stop training, boosted and encouraged by his [Athlete] class, made sure of that.

No longer did Cayden look like a kid dressing up in his father’s cosplay. He filled out his armor now in a way he never had before, his hours upon hours of exercising showing their worth. He didn’t have a scale or other easy way to track his weight, but Cayden guessed he’d gained at least forty pounds over the last year. An amount that, if he had still been in his old world, would have been considered unhealthy for a kid going through puberty. Luckily, though, he was in a fantasy world. [Recovery] meant that over-exercising was all but impossible, [Physical Training] meant that there was always further for Cayden to push, and his increased vitality meant he could cope with what otherwise might have been an unhealthy amount of stress on his body.

But despite his growth, his increased size wasn’t the biggest change. That award would have to go to his newest racial skill.

Skin of Stone (passive): Success comes after many failures, but only if you survive. Greatly increases the resiliency of skin.

The grey of Cayden’s claws now covered his entire body. The level of resilience his new skill offered wasn’t quite to the level of protection that the skin around his claws had, but it was close. While Cayden had previously thought [Resistance] coupled with his increased vitality made it feel like he was wearing a second hidden layer of armor, now he truly was always armored.

Unfortunately, [Skin of Stone] somewhat hindered his flexibility, though he was still much more flexible than he had ever been in his previous life. The protection the skill offered was much better than any armor Cayden had worn, so he thought the slight flexibility loss was more than worth it. He wasn’t even sure why he wore any other armor anymore since anything that could get through [Skin of Stone] would tear through most non-enchanted armor with ease. But, out of habit and a desire to look his expected part of an adventurer, he continued to suit up in his leather armor before each delve.

[Skin of Stone] was his only new racial skill. At this point, he and Elise were almost certain that he could only gain new racial skills from primordial mud. Yet in what had to be approaching a hundred delves in dozens of different dungeons, they had only found a single other instance of the enchanting material. It was a painful streak of bad luck that Cayden always held out hope he would break on the next delve, yet so far he had always been left disappointed.

The one patch of primordial mud he’d found four months earlier had been much larger than the first, a small glimmer of good luck among the ocean of bad, though it still only offered him a single racial skill. Elise hypothesized that the skills offered might be affected by the quantity of the primordial mud absorbed, given how much larger of an effect [Skin of Stone] (and the implied effect of the other offered skill, [Winged Weapons]) had compared to [Clawed Grasp], but with only two data points that was just a guess. If Cayden ever found another primordial mud, they’d hopefully have a better understanding of how it all worked.

Cayden shook himself from his musings and refocused on his surroundings. The beetle-like monsters, called brantings by Elise, weren’t much of a threat to Cayden. Their physical attacks, even when swarming, had no hope of breaking through his defense, and even the super-heated acidic juices they squirted from their butts did little against [Skin of Stone] and [Resistance]. Yet Cayden wasn’t alone in the dungeon.

He glanced behind himself to where Elise huddled over a patch of verdant grass, oblivious to her surroundings in her focused concentration.

Only recently had Elise started accompanying Cayden inside dungeons without the support of a full team, and only after Cayden had already cleared the dungeon and found an enchanting material. But dungeons were unpredictable, and some were able to mix things up and spawn new waves of monsters in surprising ways, so Cayden had refused to bring Elise with him until he’d gotten one of his new skills.

Noting the two new brantings that crawled out of the grass ahead of him, he activated [Taunt] at the cost of twenty mana and watched as the monsters instantly focused on him.

It was one of his newer skills, and though it was unlikely, Cayden held out hope that it would combine well with some of his other skills. Despite falling under the ‘charisma’ stat, a stat that Cayden never thought he’d increase or find much use in, it was just too good of a skill for him to easily pass up. Since getting the skill, he’d found that he was almost as much in demand as Elise for their weekly delves with more experienced teams.

Normally, Cayden’s worth as a front-liner to the higher-leveled adventurer teams was questionable at best. Between [Resistance], [Skin of Stone], and his consistently increasing vitality, Cayden’s survivability was on par, if not better than, the best that adventurers in Avernon could offer. But that wasn’t all there was to being a good front-liner.

To be a valuable front-liner, someone entrusted with protecting the less-durable rangers, mages, and other back-line fighters, required an extreme amount of trust and coordination. Things that were almost impossible to build when Elise and Cayden hopped from team to team in their constant search for new dungeons and enchanting materials on a weekly basis. [Taunt], however, changed all that.

Coordination wasn’t nearly as important when a single [Taunt] disrupted any clever maneuverings or ambushes the monsters might attempt.

Against the brantings that crawled out of the grass towards him, it worked just as well as it ever had. The monsters instantly forgot about Elise or anything else that might have distracted them, zeroing in on Cayden instead.

With only a bit of effort, Cayden flipped each of the brantings onto their backs with deft flicks of his claws, dodged away from the acidic poop spray, and proceeded to stomp them into a paste.

His original delve of the dungeon hadn’t been nearly as easy. The brantings’ carapaces were extremely sturdy against piercing or slashing attacks. No matter how he’d attacked with his claws or his spear, he hadn’t been able to pierce their natural armor and had been forced to crush the beetles’ shells with brute force. While that wasn’t much of an issue when there were only one or two of them, this was a swarm-type dungeon. Stomping the brantings flat one at a time was a much more miserable prospect when he was covered in boiling acid, mysterious intestinal goop, and hundreds of angry brantings trying their best to find a part of Cayden that wasn’t as resistant to their attacks.

After completing his hours-long slog through the dungeon and finding the patch of verdant grass, Cayden had returned to the entrance to retrieve Elise. Luckily, this dungeon wasn’t respawning its monsters very quickly, and those that did respawn were all the lowest-leveled varieties, so Cayden’s time spent protecting his friend while she worked wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

“Whoo!” Elise let out a yell of celebration a few minutes and five dead brantings later, and after a quick glance to ensure no other brantings were storming their position, Cayden turned to his friend.

“All done? How’d it turn out?” Cayden asked, and Elise held out a woven grass necklace triumphantly.

“Why don’t you look and find out?”

Cayden sighed. “I got rid of [Inspect] last week, remember? To test out [Hold the Line].” The last ten months had been a flurry of delves and non-stop physical training, but that didn’t mean Cayden had given up on his next tier-three skill. He was constantly trading out skills one after another to see what worked best for him and with each other, always in the hopes of finding skills that would combine into a viable tier-three skill. As he learned and then discarded different tier-two skills that weren’t ideal fits, this left him with lots of temporarily vacant general skill slots, slots he typically filled with those skills he found useful and easy to acquire but were unlikely to combine into a good tier-three skill. Skills like [Inspect].

“Ah, yeah, of course,” Elise responded, looking sheepish, but Cayden couldn’t blame her for forgetting. As often as he was learning, testing, and then abandoning different skills, Elise was even more often researching potential options for him to test. Frankly, he thought it was amazing she was able to keep up with his skill set as well as she did. “Well, it’s a four percent increase,” Elise explained after a glance at her new enchanting item, presumably using her own [Inspect].

“Really? That’s great!”

Elise nodded happily, picking up a mostly-empty potion bottle from the ground next to where she had been kneeling. “Yeah. I really think my latest batch is the best yet. It can still be improved, though, of course.”

“Of course,” Cayden nodded along, and then glanced behind him as the grass started rustling. “Before you get to theorizing possible improvements, we should get out of here, first.”

Elise dismissed her soul notebook she had summoned no more than a second before and pulled her backpack on her shoulders.

Ignoring the branting that tried to chase after them, Cayden led the way in the opposite direction. After spending the loot from their many previous delves, even Elise had leveled enough and had a high enough agility to outrun the beetle monsters, and they walked towards the dungeon’s exit at a brisk pace.

Like the zepple dungeon, the branting dungeon was an open-air dungeon. But while the zepple dungeon had been an open field where adventurers could enter and exit from all sides, the branting dungeon had a defined entry point. The blue barrier that marked the entrance to the dungeon was in a deep gully almost ten miles directly into the Lost Forest. And after crossing into the dungeon, the walls of the gully only got deeper, transforming into a full-blown canyon before dead-ending at a large hive infested with brantings.

Cayden supposed it might have been possible to drop into the dungeon from the sides of the gully, but the walls were steep enough that even with superhuman strength it wouldn’t be an easy prospect. And the benefit of getting to the end of the dungeon quicker wouldn’t be worth the cost of losing a secure path of retreat.

Truthfully, the branting dungeon wasn’t the type of dungeon Cayden normally would have chosen to delve. He was practically invulnerable to the monsters, which meant there was little chance of improvement for his skills and stats, while the brantings were gross and time-consuming for him to kill. On average, the brantings were lower-leveled than most other dungeon monsters, which meant that despite their numbers, the haul of experience crystals was less than many other dungeons. It was further from Avernon than most other dungeons in a direction straight into the Lost Forest, which meant they might not even be able to get back to Avernon or even a road before dark. And finally, it wasn’t a cave dungeon.

It was by no means guaranteed, but both times he’d found primordial mud had been in cave dungeons. Since the second, Cayden had made a point to clear cave dungeons as much as he could on his solo delves.

If it weren’t so far into the Lost Forest, Cayden was sure some other adventuring team that perfectly countered brantings would claim the dungeon as their own, delving it on a weekly basis for the high reward-to-risk ratio like so many others. But, due to its distance, it hadn’t been delved for over six months, and the adventurer’s guild put up a quest for someone to clear it before it had the chance to explode in a dungeon break.

Cayden focused heavily on his own improvement and opportunities, but not so heavily that he’d ignore his purpose for delving in the first place. Power for power’s sake could be intoxicating, but he hoped he’d never forget what that power was for.

A few minutes later, he and Elise walked out of the dungeon with synchronized shivers. No matter how many times he’d walked into and out of dungeons, Cayden could never get used to or anticipate the feeling of passing through the barrier.

Without the walls of the canyon or the blue barrier over his head, Cayden looked at the sky between the branches of the trees and noted the time. This part of the Lost Forest wasn’t as flat as the area near Avernon, and it had taken them a while to locate the branting dungeon amid the hundreds of other identical-looking gullies and ravines. It looked like they wouldn’t be able to make it back to Avernon tonight.

“Let’s get started for Avernon,” he told Elise. “It’ll be nice to get a few miles under our belt before we have to make camp.” He took a single step forward, then paused, looking once more back at his companion. “What’s that noise?”

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