A few nights passed by as I descended more into the Deep. I had seen numerous odd creatures, and fought in several intense battles. I had even had to flee from time to time. The difficulty of the monsters could be hard to gauge and there was no steady progression. I could stumble across an extremely easy enemy that died in one blow, only for a bit later to meet an enemy that I had to escape from. Size and appearance didn’t always delineate the danger either.
I had started making it a habit of using God and Devil Eye on new enemies so I could ascertain if I could defeat them. I was increasingly finding more and more monsters that weren’t worth the risk of fighting. I wasn’t in a dungeon, but it would be a real shame if I ended up in a battle to the death because I encountered an albino squirrel that was as fast as my eyes could see.
I was starting to notice a pattern though. It seemed like one particularly difficult boss-like mob ruled over each area, and the rest of the monsters were weaker creatures that served as its food. In that case, it was more luck on whether I ran into that particular area’s boss. So much for getting breaks every five levels, and spending my nights in a safe room. I found that when I wanted to rest, it was best to depend on Alysia or Pait to remain as a guard. In that respect, I was glad that I had brought him.
“We’re going to need to go about this differently,” I muttered to myself quietly.
“What was that, Master?”
On the second night in the Deep, I was eating something while sitting in a small out of the way area where I felt I was safe. At the very least, there was nothing red currently on my map.
“The Deep is massive, right? Two days and I don’t feel any closer to finding Terra or Garnet. Without Garnet’s original maps, I have no clue where the deep dwarves even found their home. I had been hoping I would have seen signs of mining or something that would lead us there, but I guess I underestimated the Deep, or overestimated the deep dwarves.”
“We just have to keep looking, Master.”
“I fear we could keep looking for months and be no closer to learning their whereabouts.” I sighed. “We traveled straight down from a volcano not too far from Gram’s Passage. I’d have expected we’d end up pretty close to where Terra had sent the imager up the vent. Yet, I don’t know if we need to go down, to the side, or even up.”
I was a mouse in a cage, and the trick of using the bond to track her still wasn’t working. I had allocated a month, but it could even be years I could search down here and find no trace of them. I had naturally tried again to reincarnate them, and received no response from their souls either. They had to still be alive. They just had to be!