The Alan who came out of the dungeon almost three weeks after he had gone into it, looked like the same person, but much had changed about him. To start with, one of his classes had reached the point where he could upgrade it to diamond. Not that such a thing was an option for him yet, since he needed to combine all of his classes. That meant he would need at least two classes at a hundred percent before he could even think of using a class stone.

In addition to all of his classes getting closer to maxing out, his skills had also made a ton of gains. The one skill that had improved the most was Aether Reading, no question. During the last two weeks in the dungeon, when he had been unable to do much else, Alan had spent a lot of time conversing with the dungeon core and studying its physical crystal. He had learned a lot, but he would have rather spent that time on the outside. A lot could have happened to Elstree, Lyonel and his party, Thadrick, or TS and Akilatjin.

As Alan's mind started to drift back to the reason he was stuck in the dungeon, he forced his thoughts onto a different track. He didn't want to consider what had happened, or what that meant for the future. He was alive and the dungeon had been cleared. It shouldn't be a threat for at least a month now. In order to distract himself, he pulled up his stats sheet again, reveling in all the abilities and talents that had upgraded.

Alan Taylor

Race: Therianthrope [W]

Class:

Custodian (91%) Opal

Dimachari (93%) Opal

Inquirer (70%) Opal

Learner (87%) Opal

Medicine Man (100%) Opal

Phantom (96%) Opal

Sorcerer (98%) Opal

Stalker (90%) Opal

Health: 660 (66/hour)

Stamina: 626 (125/minute)

Mana: 606 (61/minute)

Army Rank: Vice-Lieutenant

Stats:

Strength: 40

Dexterity: 39

Perception: 41

Focus: 35

Intelligence: 34

Wisdom: 35

Constitution: 34

Spirit: 29

Skills:

Aether Reading: 92, Alchemy: 45, Archery: 59, Aura Reading: 215, Blocking: 55, Blunt Weapons: 125, Cooking: 69, Daggers: 177, Dodging: 128, Energy Handling: 143, Farming: 40, First Aid: 54, Harvesting: 41, Herbology: 49, Identify: 96, Mana Drawing: 104, Mana Enhancement: 86, Mining: 3, Qi Reading: 47, Running: 82, Sneak: 89, Spears: 7, Swords: 42, Tracking: 59, Trap Detection: 50, Trap Making: 8, Two Weapon Fighting: 145, Unarmed Combat: 72

Titles: [Apprentice], [Gladiator], [The Mayor], [Top Recruit], [Sealgair]

Class Abilities:

Custodian: Absorb

Dimachari: Twin Slash I

Medicine Man: Healer's Mark

Phantom: Fade I

Sorcerer: Empower, Mana Lode II

Stalker: Stalker's Sigil I

Talents:

Custodian: Block I, Hammer Blow I, Shield, Taunt, Thick Skin I

Dimachari: Fury, Parry, Slash I

Inquirer: Inspiring Presence, Sensitivity, Soul Block, Soul Mending I, Soul Probing

Learner: Critical Hit I, Fast Learner I, Understanding

Medicine Man: Concocting I, Cure I, Eyes of the Healer I, Mend I

Phantom: Backstab, Dodge I, Quick Hands, Stealth I, Light Steps

Sorcerer: Air Bender, Dark Spreader, Earth Mover, Fire Starter I, Light Spinner, Mana Lacing, Water Weaver

Stalker: 6th Sense, Charm Animal, Predator's Focus, Track

Spells: Bramble Wall (Rare), Cone of Steam (Common), Conjure Water (Rare), Exploding Missile (Rare), Fire Bolt (Uncommon), Gust (common), Healing Waters (Rare), Light Bolt (common), Light (common), Meteor (Rare), Minor Healing (common), Minor Regeneration (Uncommon), Prismatic Orb (Rare), Purify (Common), Shadow Bolt (Uncommon), Stone Spear (common), Stone Wall (Uncommon)

It seemed like all of a sudden his talents were competing to level up. Part of it was related to his new title, which boosted his talent and ability growth speed, but a larger part was just how difficult the dungeon had become at the end. The first five floors hadn't been a walk in the park, but the sixth floor turned it up to eleven and the seventh and eighth just built on top of that. The final floor had seen Alan in a small forest being hunted by a full party of red grade adventurers.

He had learned later from the dungeon that it had taken to offering doomed delvers the opportunity to join the dungeon rather than perish. That was how Gralven had ended up in here. He was the last of his party, and rather than dying with his fallen comrades, he had chosen a life of servitude. Alan had to admit that he didn't see the allure. He would rather go out in his own personal blaze of glory rather than spend his life as a slave.

The party he ended up having to face had entered the dungeon while it was on a red grade planet. They had managed to almost fully clear the dungeon, but they had fallen to the final boss. Alan hadn't needed to fight the same monster that had defeated them, since it couldn't be utilized by the dungeon in the lower mana zone it found itself in now. The mechanics of how that worked were still not fully clear to Alan, but he had enough trouble with the party that had lost to the boss that he was just fine not having to face it himself.

If he had run into the party all at once, there was no way he would have won. He had grown tremendously in almost every facet by the time he faced them, but he was still mid white while they were solidly red, and there were five of them. Luckily, Alan had learned to embrace his phantom class on the last few floors, and he had been moving stealthily through the forest, looking for his challenge. He had found it by a campfire, where the five were sitting around laughing and eating as if they had not a single care in the world. Since they were basically immortal here in the dungeon, perhaps they didn't have any.

Activating fade to make sure he wasn't seen, Alan had surveyed his future opponents. There was a clear tank, a large human wearing platemail with his helmet on the log beside him. Alan didn't see his weapon anywhere, so he must have a storage device. Another was obviously their ranged expert, polishing a beautiful longbow while they sat. Two others looked to be some kind of magic users. They could be mages or healers, but it was difficult to tell the difference. Alan didn't dare use identify as that could give away his presence.

The last member was harder to pin down. He had leather bracers on, but that was pretty much the limit of their armor. It was possible that he had a padded shirt or specially treated pants on, but it wasn't anything significant. That would have suggested another mage to Alan, thick garments could make handling mana more difficult, but something about the man suggested he was an up close kinda guy. He wasn't sure what about him made Alan think that, but he got a feeling that those bracers had been covered in plenty of blood.

So here he was, a small, underpowered force, facing off against a strong, well equipped enemy. If there was ever a time to ask for a Green Beret, this was it. Alan knew that jumping into their clearing and taking them all on at once was suicide. Instead, he needed to split them up and deal with them one at a time. That didn't mean he couldn't take opportunities when they arose. Such as a group of carousing enemies who hadn't placed a watch.

Quietly removing his crossbow from storage, Alan had to decide who to target. The ranger type was a tempting choice, she would be very dangerous in a game of cat and mouse in the forest. However, he worried that she might have a talent like his sixth sense, or possibly something even stronger. If she did, his first shot might be wasted.

The scary man with the bracers was another possibility, but some instinct warned Alan away from targeting him. That left the two mages and the tank. The mages could cause a lot of problems on a battlefield, especially if they were red grade. Their spells and mana pools would make anything he had look like a lame magician's trick. On the other hand, they were nice and squishy targets, so taking them out in the close quarters of the dim forest should be relatively easy.

That left the large man who had helpfully left his helmet off. With it on, Alan wouldn't have felt confident of being able to penetrate the thick armor, or finding a chink where he would put a bolt for a lethal hit. Since the helm was doing absolutely nothing while sitting on the log, Alan had a nice big target in the man's head. As a tank, he might also have some abilities that would allow him to avoid the shot, but it was less likely than the ranger.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Alan didn't want to give anything away in case someone had a way of sensing danger. Instead he made sure everything was ready, and then drew several long deep breaths, calming his racing heart and focusing his mind. He would have loved to activate Stalker's Sigil, but that would warn an alert seeker class that they were under attack. Instead he rehearsed what was about to happen in his mind. Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.

In one swift, sure movement, Alan brought the crossbow up to his shoulder and sighted on his target for less than a second before pulling the trigger. As soon as the bolt was away, the crossbow went back in his ring and he was moving away. He wanted to watch to see how effective he had been, but he also didn't want to be standing in the place he had fired from when they went to find him.

Two steps into his repositioning, Alan heard a grunt followed by twin screams behind him. He fought the urge to look back and instead focused on getting to a new observation point. It only took him four seconds to feel comfortable with the distance he had put between his current spot and where he'd shot from, but it took a tremendous amount of willpower not to look back. Now that he could, he was shocked by what he saw.

The first thing he noticed was that this party was experienced. The two mage types were at the side of the large human, while the other two party members had taken up positions at the edge of the clearing and were searching for the attacker. It was a good thing Alan had moved because the intense looking man was positioned less than a meter from there. It wasn't until he had taken all of that in that he finally checked on his handiwork.

It looked like at least one of the mages was a healer and trying to do something, but it didn't seem likely to matter. This actually surprised Alan because he had missed his target and hadn't put his shaft through an eye. However, the bolt had gone right through the man's nose and into his skull. It would have taken an unfortunate trajectory for that shot not to be fatal. He stayed for only about another five seconds to make sure there hadn't been some miracle before he repositioned once again.

This time he moved much farther away. He wanted to be able to see the campsite still, but he wasn't looking to attack again, only gain information. The tank was definitely dead. The party left his body where it was, and then set out together into the forest. The female ranger, who seemed to be humanoid, but on the shorter side, was leading, following the tracks that Alan had left. In his rush he hadn't been as careful as normal about leaving traces behind. That wasn't to say it was easy, it was taking her some time to follow his trail.

When Alan had moved the second time, he had been much more discreet since he wasn't in a rush. He could tell the moment when she started to struggle as their pace slowed way down. The two mages started to get frustrated and mumbled something to her. His hearing was literally superhuman, but he couldn't pick up what they were saying from the current distance. It was obvious, though, that the ranger wasn't pleased with what she heard.

It took another five minutes, but she finally found something she could follow. Alan had brushed up against a smaller rock as he avoided stepping on a fallen branch and that had caused the stone to shift slightly on the ground, leaving a trace that she could see. It was an impressive find, one that Alan wasn't sure he would have noticed himself. All of his waiting and watching rewarded him with two pieces of knowledge.

The first was that the ranger was good. It really was too bad he hadn't taken her out first, but he still thought it was the right decision. The second piece of information was that this group wasn't going to separate easily. He had encountered other groups in the past who would split up to cover more ground while searching, but these people were being careful. Either because that was their default setting, or because of what had happened to their dead tank. Alan was leaning toward the latter reason, but either way it was going to make his life more difficult.

Setting off from his remote observation spot, Alan took special care to leave occasional signs of his passage. He wanted them to be able to follow, but to also need to go slowly. He also made sure to vary the direction of his travel. If he was moving in a straight line, or even simply tended in one direction, then the group might try to anticipate his destination and give up on the slow and steady route. Time was going to be important for the next portion of his plan.

Alan had previously picked up a skill for trap detection, but he hadn't spent much time making traps himself. That was in his new life, anyway, in his Army days he had taken several courses on how to make traps, both for animals and for humans. Some of the traps he had found in this dungeon he felt uncomfortable disarming. That was actually the majority of them, he simply went around or triggered them remotely. There had been some, however, that he had taken the time to disassemble and he had placed the pieces in his own storage. It was time to put some of them to use.

The easiest trap he could make was some kind of camouflaged pit for them to fall into, but with the ranger following his trail, he assumed that she would find it first and there was a zero percent chance she would be fooled. The same issue was true for a large number of his options. The pit was especially a problem since it would take a lot of effort on his part for most likely no payout. Digging holes is hard. Instead of targeting her, or using such time intensive traps, he was going to set up some easier ones on the periphery of his trail to try and catch the others. If they failed, it wouldn't have been as much of a time waster.

The first bunch of traps he used were small explosives that functioned similarly to an actual mine. These had been hidden under cobblestones in some of the tunnel floors, but here they were covered with some dirt and a few leaves. In an effort to be sneaky, he actually made the ground near it seem suspicious. By piling leaves up, or covering the adjacent ground with sticks it should make that area look like a trap, which might lure someone over to investigate, or at least discourage them from stepping there, so maybe they would step where he wanted.

Alan had several tripwires, but he had been unable to take the traps that went with them. These had usually been hooked up to larger features that were built into the dungeons layout. He had snagged the triggers, but he couldn't do anything with the payloads. He was trying to think of anything he could do with such a device when he thought of deadfall traps. Normally this would take too much time to set up. Getting a large log, or heavy rock, and then hauling it up a tree would be too much effort for a trap they might never trigger. However, thanks to Alan's old friend Simon, a competitor for his Mentor's apprentice position, he had a collection of large boulders in a wooden ring on his finger. They had used them for lifting weights.

Using the trip wires and some rope Alan carried with him at all times, he installed several deadfall traps with heavy stones positioned high in the trees. Figuring out the timing was tricky since he couldn't test them before setting them for real. In the end, he placed the tripwires and hoped for the best. If it went according to plan, the tripwire would release the boulders and they would crash down from above and land on the head of whoever had been foolish enough to trigger the thing in the first place. One serious issue was that he didn't know the value of g here in the tutorial. On Earth it was a healthy nine point eight meters per second per second. That was a function of the mass and radius of the planet beneath him. As far as he knew, the tutorial wasn't a planet, it was a disk and he had no idea what the acceleration from gravity was here. It didn't feel any different, but to date his experience with gravity included full Earth g, and zero-g. He wouldn't describe himself as a connoisseur of the attractive force between masses.

With several traps set up, it was time to loop around and watch his handiwork. He wasn't confident in his fledgeling attempts to actually kill anyone, but they might cause an opening where he could add something to make the encounter fatal. Even though he knew the path the party was following, it still took him a while to find them. It seemed they were moving slower than he thought. That probably wasn't a good thing for him if it meant they were being careful, but he couldn't help noticing the looks of impatience on the faces of the two mages. The ranger was focused on her task, while the intense man was constantly scanning his surroundings. His were the eyes of a predator, and not a lower tier one. He had the gaze of someone who was the top of his food chain. Alan found his own mental description to be an odd one. He didn't usually compare people to apex predators, but something about it just felt right.

It took another hour before they reached his first trap. As expected, but not as he had hoped, no one had even gotten close to his explosive device. The next one was also a dud, but the third one finally bore fruit. Ironically enough, Alan was eating a handful of raspberries when it triggered. He had gotten distracted as it seemed his efforts were being wasted. His first LT would have blistered his hide for losing focus like that.

It wasn't one of the mages who stepped on it, but the man with the bracers. He was busy scanning the more distant surroundings when his foot came down right on the explosive. The blast was impressive, leaving a crater that was over twenty centimeters deep. Unfortunately, the man had incredible reflexes and somehow used the blast to propel himself away from it. It almost looked like he was flying or gliding. When the dust settled, literally, he was left with a mangled leg, but it wasn't a devastating injury. It mostly seemed to be smaller flesh wounds and a lot of burns.

The healer rushed over and started sending vita into the wounded appendage, but the injured man never took his eyes off of the surroundings. He seemed to know that Alan was out there somewhere. This was not an opportunity to add another contribution. The trap had done some damage, but not enough to seriously threaten the target, and the party hadn't lost focus. That wasn't to say the experience was a complete bust for Alan.

New Skill unlocked: Trap Making

It seemed that having one of his devices tripped had been necessary to actually unlock the skill. Something similar had happened with farming. It wasn't until he harvested his planted crops that he gained anything. With the failure of his first trap, they were now more wary about where they stepped. It meant that the rest of his explosive traps were wasted, but there were only two more of them out there anyway. A bonus was that after finding the next two traps, the party became a little complacent.

They must have figured that these were the only traps Alan had placed, and so they became focused on finding more of them. It wasn't a bad thing for them, but it meant they weren't looking for the small tripwire set up between two twigs that the healer snapped with his foot. It would have made for a good story if the rock had come crashing down and squished his enemy like a bug. Alan wasn't that lucky, but he must have done something right in his life, because it did come down and crush the mage that was right behind the healer.

This was the opportunity Alan had been looking for. The mage hadn't been hit directly on his head, but it smashed down on his left shoulder and the force of the heavy trap obliterated his collarbone before smashing through his ribs, lacerating every organ in his chest, and then getting deflected away by the hip bones, which were also shattered. As a doctor, Alan could tell that he was dead, or about to be, and nothing was going to prevent that.

The healer wasn't a doctor, apparently, because he bent down and started sending his healing energy into the crushed body. Alan was too far away to see it clearly with his aura senses, but something must have been happening because the healer didn't stop. This was his chance to tip the scales. It was risky since the other two party members were now searching for Alan, but it was the opportunity he had been looking for. As soon as the mage had been hit, Alan had started gathering mana. He completed his spell and then took his crossbow out of storage. He quickly shot a bolt at the healer, who was too focused to do anything defensively, and watched to see which would hit first.

Even as the bolt flew through the trees, his meteor came falling from the sky. It was targeted to hit the mage and healer, just to be sure at least one of them died. If it had just been the healer who was still standing, both attacks would have landed, as he was totally focused on his patient. The caregiver in Alan had to respect that. Fortunately for the man, he wasn't alone. The ranger's eyes tracked the bolt as it flew through the woods, but there was nothing she could do about it. The other member of their group, though, showed some surprising abilities.

Alan had figured him for a rogue kind of adventurer, but the man with the bracers lifted both hands to the sky and created some kind of mana barrier above the healer. It was angled so that when the meteor hit it, and blasted through, it had redirected Alan's spell enough that the flaming stone hit well to the side of its intended target. The splash damage still washed over the mage and healer, but it was a pale imitation of what they would have taken if it had hit them directly. It turned out to be a mostly useless effort by the man, though, since there was also the bolt, which found its home in the healer's neck.

Alan had taken the opportunity of the trap's distraction to use stalker's sigil on the healer. That had allowed him to get a better sense of where to aim, and it seemed to have empowered the bolt as well. It went clean through the healer's neck, partially severing his spine and completely cutting through some serious blood vessels. If the healer had acted quickly, and had all of his vita energy, he could have possibly saved himself, but since he was busy trying to save his friend's life, he hemorrhaged severely and his blood pressure plummeted. When combined with the spinal damage that severed the vagus nerve, the healer was a dead man kneeling. When the small amount of splash damage washed over him it was simply too much and his body gave out.

That led to a double kill because the only thing keeping the mage alive had been the healer's vita. He probably would have died anyway, since there was a limit to how much energy the healer had, and it was mostly being used to keep the mage from dying while not actually doing any repairs. Two enemies down was a major achievement, but now Alan had a problem. The ranger had been able to track the bolt's path back to where Alan was located, and both she and the last man were sprinting for his position.

After the death of the healer, Alan had been able to transfer his sigil to the ranger, but he wasn't going to try and fight them now. Two red grade fighters with unknown abilities was more than he thought he could handle. What happened next was a true test of what Alan was made of. There had been a lot of running, sudden ambushes by both sides, and finally a showdown between him and the intense man who it turned out was named Gwaihir.

That wasn't a scene Alan was eager to replay, so instead he focused on what to do next. The first thing he had to deal with was a flood of messages. Apparently town notifications didn't go through while inside a dungeon. There was a lot to take in there, and at first he had panicked. After reading through a bunch of them he settled down and was quite pleased with what he saw. He still had a chunk of messages to go through when he noticed that he was no longer alone. He probably should have noticed them sooner, but Alan's mind wasn't in the best place right now.

Walking towards him was Thadrick and the rest of the dwarf's party. It looked like they had been staking out the dungeon entrance, possibly waiting for him, or maybe just guarding it in case there were any more leaks. That, at least, was one thing they wouldn't have to worry about for a while. With his first smile in many days, Alan went to greet his friend.

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