“Perhaps, it was too aggressive to think that we could reach the 10th floor in a single night.” I said, yawning.
Although there was no day-night cycle in this particular level of the dungeon, making it an eternal hot, muggy day, I was pretty sure it was late into the night. I had been hoping that the group could reach the 9th-floor safe room and tackle the first big boss tonight, but that might have been too ambitious. After all, heading down four floors of a dungeon was supposed to be a major accomplishment and a milestone for a Dungeon Diver.
Four floors a day could have been considered an insane pace for any group. If it wasn’t for my Map, the girl’s strength and scouting abilities, and our dungeon experience, we would have been far slower. Even for a skilled group on an easy dungeon, two or three levels a day could be considered quite good, especially if you didn’t already have a map of the route.
However, feeling impatient, I had pushed us down to the 9th floor. It wasn’t that we didn’t have enough time to reach the ninth floor, but that upon reaching the 9th floor, we hadn’t found the 10th. We’d already wasted hours and had just about filled out the entire Map. Till this point, I had yet to see the entrance appear on my Map.
I had even climbed a tree to try to fill out as much of the Map as possible. However, the Map wasn’t truly dependent on how far I could see, but on how far my mana sense could reach. In a dungeon, miasma acted as resistance, pushing against mana sense. The walls all but blocked mana sense, so at least in dungeons, I couldn’t see past any walls. Strangely enough, this didn’t affect Detect Treasure. My thought was that dungeons deliberately let you know where the treasure was, thus tempting you to seek it out and perish.
“We’ve walked the entire perimeter,” Celeste complained, even though she was in a small form and sitting on Lydia’s shoulder. “Where is the exit already?”
“Maybe the exit is where we entered?” Terra offered.
“The exit doesn’t necessarily have to be on the edge, it could be in the middle,” Terra explained. “But I’ve already sent out waves three times and we’ve yet to find one.”
It made sense that with the dungeon levels next to each other, the paths had to be along the perimeter, that was part of the reason we were able to move so fast since we didn’t focus on the middle portion of the dungeon. However, at least one dungeon was found with the path being in the middle. A cave went down, then followed a long path before coming out on the other side. Since level 10 was a boss room, it stood to reason that the boss room entrance could be anywhere.
The problem was that I had already walked 90% of the dungeon level. There was only one place I hadn’t looked at.
“Seriously? It can’t be there…”
“Where is it, Ma… ah… Ma’am,” Shao coughed, hiding a blush.
“The only place we haven’t looked is that lake. The entrance to the next dungeon level must be at the bottom of the lake!”