Dungeons Online

Chapter 188: Gap between level and skill

Tom's small group blasted through the levels as if there was no tomorrow. Even though neither of them received any level-ups ever since reaching the sixtieth floor, they still managed to somehow keep up with the rising difficulty of the dungeon.

The main reason was pretty obvious and had a shape of a human working with a spear. 

With Tom thinning the herd of every floor and allowing only a few monsters to reach the rest of his group, they could still keep up with the pace while dutifully practicing their skills and cooperation. 

Yes, cooperation. 

This was the biggest element of Tom's plan of defeating the last boss. Because even if every single last one of them reached a hundredth level or even higher, Tom still doubted that they could tackle the last boss on their own. 

'Well, it goes without saying. I never defeated that dragon girl once,' he thought, the taste of those previous defeats still souring his mood. 

The only reason why Tom managed to go past the top floor of the dungeon to its other side... It was because after fighting for a little while, the dragon girl would just... stop. 

'What's even worse is that with every second of the fight, she is getting stronger than before,' Tom recalled that small detail from the very first fight with that girl. 

At first, he had an easy time coping with her attack. Yet, just a second before she would return to a neutral position and freeze in place, the attack that she was about to smack Tom with was well more than enough to eradicate all the signs of his presence from the world!

'Judging from the changes to the dungeon, she is going to keep fighting for a lot longer,' Tom thought grimly before turning his head to his team behind. 

Marvin and Cleo did exactly what they would do on the floors where Tom traveled only with them, Kira and Rufus. While Marvin would focus on supporting the girl and holding the monsters relatively at bay, Cleo would either slam herself into the enemy or unleash a flurry of kicks, stomps, and fists against it. 

Now that she had developed some more abilities, her ability to stop an entire monster in its track also proved to be useful, although Cleo was clearly quite conservative with using it. 

From all four members of his current team, Tom was most interested in the two that he didn't observe fighting before. 

Dagstan was a perfect all-rounder despite his semi-support class. He would use his reinforcement ability that stole a tenth of one's total mana to create a shield around them first, before jumping in to bash the monsters with his armed gloves, just like Claudia did while Tom toured the dungeon with her. 

But his greatest ability didn't come in the form of reinforcement, but the alignment field, being an area of effect that negatively affected all that the man considered his opponent. 

'It's just a guess... but it looks like a good ten to twenty percent of the monster's strength is shaved away by it,' Tom thought, keeping a close eye on the developing events while leisurely killing all the monsters that dared to attempt to approach him. 

On the other hand, there was Peter. The reliable fighter that Tom already had a chance to fight alongside. Yet, previously, due to the formation, he failed to figure out what the skills of that young cousin of his were. 

As it turned out, he was a magic swordsman, quite similar to how he was a magic spear wielder.

His skills were pretty similar. From being able to call forth a sword, through the ability to rapidly dash towards his opponents or imbue his weapon with various elements, it appeared as if Peter was a carbon-copy of Tom... just fighting in even closer quarters than Tom did. 

Yet, the main, distinctive difference between the two of them laid in their weapon's presence. 

Tom's magical spears were pretty plain but effective. Yet, his main weapon, one that was fully physical instead of consisting of hardened magic, was pretty extravagant to the eye. 

On the other hand, Peter's sword... was fully invisible. 

At first, Tom took it for a drawback. Given how Peter never really learned how to fight with his sword, it was clear from his moves that he couldn't really grasp the shape and length of his sword. 

But as their group continued to rapidly advance through the floors, Peter quickly managed to overcome this flaw of his fighting style, turning his sword's invisibility into a deadly attribute. 

"Boss, are we going to level up yet?" Peter approached Tom when they managed to defeat the boss of the floor seventy-seventh completely on their own. Yet, what was clear to Tom's eyes and everyone else's souls, they were quickly reaching the limit of how strong they could become. 

In the end, in the dungeon, one's personal skills and prowess could take them only so far. Beyond a certain point, the gap steeming from levels would become simply too great for one to overcome it with ability alone. 

"Just three more levels," Tom replied, shaking his head. "Once we reach the eightieth floor, we will have both time and the stones to spare," he explained his decision. 

Tom wasn't lying. 

Bringing three people from a level around sixty to level one hundred cost him nearly all the stones that everyone managed to save up. Even with the help of the slime and his own spear-related ability, there was only so much that he could do with grade four and five stones. 

The reason why Tom chose the eighty floor for the place to level everyone up was pretty simple. 

This was the floor where the grade six stones would make their first appearance. And with how each grade of the stone drastically increased the amount of energy it contained, the haul of just a single floor would bring them more leveling potential than using all the stones they had left. Including both the leftovers from the last round of level-pushing and all the grade five stones they obtained in the last six floors. 

Peter didn't bother to argue any further. While he was the most energetic in the group, he was still a member of the second line of Tom's family. So instead of wasting his energy pointlessly uprooting Tom's authority as the leader of the group and the person behind all the decisions, he focused on fighting the monsters instead. 

And what a sight it was. In contrast to Dagstan's more calm and tactical approach to each fight, Peter would simply throw himself into the fray. While this kind of behavior appeared to be quite reckless, it also yielded surprisingly nice results. 

'I wonder if he has some kind of passive ability that makes him fight like that,' Tom thought, watching how his cousin dealt with a group of three monsters, each of which is easily capable of defeating them on their own. 

It was a contradiction, one that made sense only within the narrow corridors of the dungeon. If Peter were to be ambushed by those three scorpion-like and horse-sized monsters on the open plain, he would promptly lose his life to their attacks. 

Yet, in the narrow confines of the dungeon's corridor, he made perfect use of their size, forcing them to block each other from using their claws or stings. 

With Dagstan quickly rushing to support him, Marvin buffing the two of them, and Cleo watching over to step at the moment the fight would turn risky, Peter managed to deal with the group that even Tom could find troublesome to fight at once. 

'I guess I'm not the one most blessed with abilities, but simply lucky enough with my encounters so far,' Tom noticed grimly before his mood suddenly improved. 

'What am I even annoyed by?' he asked himself, feeling the inner pressure to slap his own face. 'The stronger my family becomes, the better for everyone,' he reminded himself before turning around and facing the deeper part of the corridor. 

In the end, their group managed to reach floor eighty without any unexpected hiccups. Yet, by the time they did it, every single last one outside of Tom in the group was on the verge of collapsing from exhaustion. 

Both Marvin and Dagstan exhausted all their energy on healing others, leaving them all with some light wounds after the fight with the boss of the seventy-ninth floor. 

"Huh?" Peter was the first one to react when they moved over to the eightieth floor. Seeing how rather than in a corridor, they appeared in the boss-room right away, he raised his guard, ready to tackle the boss monster and buy others enough time to escape. 

Yet, when noticing just how relaxed Tom was, he managed to lower his guard as well.

"Now you should understand why I picked this floor to be when you will level up," Tom said with a small smirk, approaching the wall with the grade six stones. 

This time, there were entire eleven of them, giving a great hope of bringing everyone to the hundredth level right off the bat. 

"I guess I do now," Peter muttered before falling down on the ground and releasing a deep sigh. "Damn, I'm tired," he exclaimed, finally taking the opportunity to rest a little. 

"It's not over yet," Tom smiled, already moving back to the rest of the group with the stones he extracted from the wall. "If I were in your shoes," he muttered, passing the first stone to the slime on his shoulder, "I would hope that the rapid advancement will go smoothly!"