Ben jumped into the dark.

  He landed in an earthen tunnel, small crystals in the walls provided faint light.

  To unlock the node in this area, you must clear five pack burrows. Good luck.

  The message had popped up without waiting to be opened. He assumed they were in one of these pack burrows and that they would need to make their way in the only direction the tunnel provided.

  He took a few steps forward to make space for the others. Jamal, then Anne, Akira, and Michael quickly stood beside him.

  The tunnel was large enough to allow three of them to walk side by side. It had to if it was the home of the large wolves.

  Michael scouted ahead, but quickly returned. The good news was that they would not have to walk through dark tunnels for a very long time. The bad news was that the central cave held fifteen Tundra Prowlers waiting. That was more than they had fought at the dungeon portal two days ago.

  The saving grace was that the tunnel probably provided a better funnel and that they were less exhausted than before. Ben looked at the others to get their confirmation that they were happy to take that fight.

  After they had agreed they moved forward and quickly made it to the cave entrance.

  The Prowlers were waiting for them.

  It was a large cave, easily forty meters across. In the center was a plinth with a blue sphere resting on top.

  The Tundra Prowlers were in constant movement, but held their distance from the tunnel entrance.

  “They would like us to enter the cave…” Ben murmured. He turned to Akira. “How about you unleash some range attacks on them?”

  The man just nodded, thought for a moment, then began to cast his spell.

  Ben twitched as the massive bolt detached from Akira’s staff and blasted two wolves apart.

  He was pretty sure that people with a normal human resistance would have suffered permanent hearing damage from the thunderous noise.

  The attack had been the signal for the wolves to attack.

  Jamal stood at the center of their formation and roared his challenge, creating the breathing room that Anne and Ben needed to deliver damage to the creatures.

  Anne started out with [Power Projection], golden fists smashing into the wolves as they closed in. She quickly followed up with two kicks, taking the beast down.

  The moment they closed in and attacked, Ben retaliated with [Unyielding Retribution].

  Ten enemies remained.

  Akira had followed up his initial strike with multiple smaller lightning strikes and Michael had pulled out a new addition to his arsenal, a small crossbow that still delivered powerful bolts. They couldn’t take out any of the creatures in one go, but in combination with Akira’s lightning and an occasional hit from Jamal or Anne it added up.

  Ben delivered blow after blow while fighting in the controlled style that ensured no openings formed in their line.

  It was a relatively long engagement as they did not take any unreasonable risks and they did take quite a bit of damage to their armor, but Jamal’s shield—now Tier 2 from the System Store—held.

  Towards the end, Ben noticed that with every Tundra Prowler dying the blue sphere in the center of the room dimmed in glow, until, finally, it was completely dark with the last wolf dying.

  1/5 pack burrows cleared.

  “Let’s rest here where the wind does not cut right through to the bone,” Jamal suggested and everyone agreed.

  It was already early afternoon by then, given that they had to hike all the way up to the dungeon and then explore this far.

  “I guess we can do one, maybe two more of the burrows today, then we need to make camp for the night,” Ben said with a scratch of his neck.

  He didn’t particularly look forward to camping in a dungeon but given the enormous size of the place he didn’t see a way around it.

  Just to be sure, Ben checked the wolves for cores and was pleased to find that they had them. It seemed that the ones in the small burrows did not, but those in the large burrows did.

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

  They had a few bites to eat and Ben went into [Meditation] for a few minutes, but soon after, they got back on the road.

  There was no guarantee, but Michael thought he had found a way to predict where the smaller burrows might be, so they navigated around them where possible and made it to the next large rock on the tundra with the counter for gathered points sitting at 89.

  With one last glance at the others, Ben jumped into the next entrance below the rock to enter the next burrow.

  Almost three hours later, they had cleaned up one area of the third burrow they had entered and cleared. By now they had accumulated 44 Tier 2 cores and 169 points.

  They made progress, but it was also clear to Ben that at this point, no other team in the settlement would stand a chance in the dungeon.

  It would mean that they would have to focus on it, which was acceptable given how profitable it was, but it ensured that even if they brought the dungeon back, which he wasn’t sure they could do, the pressure on his team was back to what it had been in the very beginning when they had been the only ones capable of clearing any of their dungeons.

  But that was a problem for another day. Now he would rest, and hopefully they would be able to clear the node in this region on the next day.

  ***

  5/5 pack burrows cleared.

  The final blue sphere went dark. They had done it over the course of half a day, they had traveled to two more pack burrows, cleared the path, and cleared the caves.

  By now they had 250 points acquired and 75 cores. A truly tremendous haul.

  For a moment Ben was afraid they would get buried in the earth when a wall in the cave crumbled to dust, but it revealed another tunnel. Apparently they had uncovered the path towards the node.

  He saw no reason to rush. “Let’s rest for a while, time for a late lunch anyway.”

  “I haven’t been to many dungeons. Is this what you expected?” Akira asked.

  Ben shook his head. “No. The scale of it all—and the openness as well. In the Tier 1 dungeons you have to basically follow a linear path, more or less. This feels more like an open world. Also, the rewards… Even if we don’t get anything anymore, this is the equivalent of more than 200 Tier 1 cores. That will make an enormous difference in what we can afford. We can really push the settlement forward with this.”

  “But let’s not forget the time involved. Normally our runs take a couple of hours, some are even faster. This is a multi-day affair,” Anne added.

  “True, and we are still quite far from a thousand points,” Ben conceded.

  “I can’t imagine what it must have been like to run those dungeons dozens of times before.”

  “Once you have figured them out, it actually can get a bit boring, at least for the easier ones. Was it that different in your village?”

  Akira looked pensively. “We were not in a high Energy zone, at least not as high as in the settlement. There were a lot more creatures than what I heard from the large cities, but still. So I had to stay vigilant, go on hunts to thin out the monsters, but it was not a daily fight to the death.”

  “How did you get so strong, then?” Jamal asked.

  “I was a researcher and engineer in an electronics company. That got me my first perk [Lightning Spark] as I worked on power supplies. Besides being the only one to fight in the village, I had time to think a lot about lightning in this new world. I also experimented with lightning as a source of power when electronics failed after a few days. I think all of that contributed to me getting quite focused perks; and while I do agree that they are quite strong, there isn’t a huge variety in them. In the end, that was why I asked my grandparents, with a heavy heart, to help me convince the rest of the village to move… I was sure that eventually there would be monsters that I couldn’t handle with my specific way of fighting.”

  Jamal nodded thoughtfully. “That makes sense. We are happy to have you.”

  “Truer words were never spoken,” Ben added. “Not just you personally, your whole village. For one, we likely still wouldn’t be Level 3, and, two, I have heard great things about how your villagers have integrated themselves. A lot are helping care for the orphans we have taken in.”

  “The village was very old—like many others in Japan—seeing so many young people and children is a boon for my people’s soul. And of course, it helps that they are also physically fitter than they were before Arrival Day.”

  They continued chatting for a bit longer but eventually got ready and headed towards the new tunnel.

  Ben was pretty sure that the dimensions and geography of these tunnels did not adhere to conventional physics because it just took them a few minutes to reach a gigantic cavern. It was hard to tell how big it was, but several hundred meters at least, and the ceiling was dozens of meters from the ground.

  In the center stood a pillar that connected to the roof; stairs seemed to wind their way around it to the top.

  They arrived on a walkway that formed a balcony over the cave below them and ended in stairs to the ground.

  Around the central pillar blue sparkling energy barriers split the cavern in four slices.

  Each slice held Tundra Prowlers.

  A lot of them.

  Given their constant movement patterns it looked like it was close to twenty.

  That meant there were 80 wolves down there in total.

  An insurmountable number.

  To clear the node, you need to eliminate all Tundra Prowlers. Once you step onto the ground floor, the first group of creatures will be unlocked, and your time starts to count down. After five minutes, the next slice will be unlocked. Once the node has been attacked you cannot stop until it is cleared.

  Ben swallowed. That would be an enormous challenge. So far, they had fought up to 15 at the same time, but the burrows they had just cleared had provided a beneficial battleground. Here, they would be fighting mostly in the open, or at least in an environment that didn’t offer bottlenecks on a silver platter.

  Was it reasonable for him to ask his team to do this? Was it reasonable for him to do this?

  Why?

  What really drove him to do this?

  He came back to the question how much the Energy, the systems, or the new world they were living in had changed him.

  Risking his life. For what?

  It was one thing to do that to defend the settlement and the people he loved. But here, there was no comparable urgency.

  Given that they had achieved a quarter of their target points already, they could probably spend another couple of days trying to hunt on the periphery, maybe explore the forests.

  At the same time, he was pretty sure that their rewards would be better if they did this, they would be quicker to get to what they needed, and it was certainly easier to understand what he needed to grow if they really pushed themselves.

  He looked toward the others. “What do you think?”