With our arrival in the Menfis family group, I could see the formation of the expedition logically most are warriors and most of them don't have an elemental seed, but they have a high level of cultivation most have a green core and those that still has a gray core are at the peak of it.
The fighters with elemental seed are basically shield fighters with the earth element and one of them had the fire element too, I just saw two archers who have wind elemental seeds and a green core. And an interesting formation more focused on defense than attack.
But the expedition's attack power is not lacking, it is only concentrated in the mages to five mages besides Ingredi, most of them have offensive elements like fire and wind taking Ingredi only one mage with the earth element the other four have elements offensive.
Most of them are already ready and waiting for the expedition to start, from what Deneve said the expedition leader Katarina is not here yet, she went to solve a logistic problem and is arriving with the replacement of the defective material.
Looks like the group is going to take some weapon replacements and they were missing. From what Deneve has told me of the waves of monsters we'll face on each floor, he has a tendency to defy the resistance of warriors' weapons and shields. Several acid-spitting kruthiks and some shaman wererats and shaman goblins use acid spells and corroding curses.
These musts take away the stamina of the expedition's equipment, which is why we have to raise some extra weapons, but it also means that the weapons the warriors will use are common and expendable.
The decision to come as an archer was correct, I don't want to depend on weak and generic equipment or risk my weapons against the Kruthik's acid and acidic corrosive spells, the pause before the expedition came to an end when I saw it, I believe that one mage at the peak of the green core she has two elements being fire and water and it is unusual to see a person with two opposite elements like her.
She is carrying a magic staff and a cloak crafted with various runes that are gathering mana in the air, they should help her regain her mana and have more mana in the air around her for her to manipulate. When comparing her equipment with the other mages you can see a clear difference in equipment quality, only Ingredi can try to compete with her, although Ingredi's cloak is nothing special and a simple cloak more of quality, but when compared the staffs I feel that Katarina loses to Ingredi.
Even though her staff is loaded with a greater amount of mana, the elemental energy stores in Ingredi's staff and more than double the elemental energy in Katarina's staff, taking a moment to think about it makes sense.
Ingredi's elements may not have a very strong bond, but they don't repel each other like Katarina's elements, it makes sense that her staff is geared more towards holding mana than elemental energy, but that also makes her staff less advantages for her, causing her staff to be considered a lower quality staff than Ingredi's.
With the arrival of Katarina, I can see some boxes carrying weapons and several shields, the box was not wooden but metal with engraved runes, it seems they were made to resist monster attacks and prevent weapons from being stolen by monsters.
They were the same as the ones the warriors are currently wearing, with everything ready the march into the dungeon began. As Katarina was in a hurry to enter the dungeon, she didn't deign to waste her time with me so I simply positioned myself with the two archers, who by the way were surprised by my appearance, it seems they weren't expecting to have another archer on the expedition.
When the group positioned themselves in front of the portal, it released an amount of mana, which passed through the entire group. When the group started to enter the portal the darkness of the portal began to glow and become busier and irregular. It seems that the bigger the group the more difficulty the portal has to transfer them to the dungeon.
With the speed of entering the dungeon fast, it didn't take long for my turn to go through the portal, as I passed through it, I came across mine in a ridiculously large arena.
I followed along with the two archers away from the portal to make room for the others to enter the dungeon.
When the portal colored that's weird since the dungeon portals are uncolored black. The formation of the expedition was assembled. Like the bloody arena dungeon and a stationary dungeon, where monsters come at you and not the need to move around a lot and it's natural for groups of adventurers to set up a defensive position to face the monsters.
Apart from the barriers and trenches formed by the earth element magic that were being created, there were some metal walls that were being placed in the center of the group they basically set up a platform in the center of the formation for the mages and archers to climb, now we have an advantage of altitude to attack the monsters.
The expedition basically set up a fortification in my arena to face the hordes of monsters, the waiting period for monsters to enter the arena and the same as when I entered the dungeon alone, it's short. It didn't take long for the gates at the end of the wire to open.
Unlike when I entered alone and the gate released some monsters, a whole horde came out the sides of the arena, most were goblins and some wererats most of them were armed with rusty weapons.
The group of shield warriors formed a shield wall for bars at the time of monsters, the shield wall was not simple but had some openings between the shields for warriors equipped with lassos to position themselves to attack the monsters.
The mana on the platform became thicker as the mages and mages prepared to cast their spells, but to my surprise they just stood there while the horde of monsters prepared, maybe they don't intend to attack now when only weak monsters attacking us. They must be trying to preserve the mages' mana, so they will avoid using their mana on weak enemies.
As the time drew near at the shield wall the ground in front of the shields lowered a few inches and in this newly formed shallow trench several thorns appeared. When the monsters hit the shield wall several of them got hurt with the newly formed thorns and this prevented them from having support to try to grab or climb on the shields.
The warriors with shields attacked the monsters with a short sword and the warriors with spears started to kill the monsters that tried to enter the space between the shields.
With the momentum of the monsters stopped in the defensive line the combat was stopped, the monsters were dying at a great speed, but when the first wave of monsters had already lost more than half of their numbers, I could already see the second wave coming out of the alters of the arena.
As the second wave approached the two archers on my side started shooting arrows, it was really nice to see the two shooting arrows in a synchronized way. They must have rehearsed a lot to have the same speed while shooting arrows at targets in different positions.
Even though my arrows weren't as strong as the two, because of the difference in quality between our auras I can still keep the same firing speed as them. And since the monsters aren't strong, I can keep a kill rate almost completely equal to the two archers.
The first floor that we actually entered and the fifth floor of the bloody arena was quiet, it didn't even a strong enemy and the mages only had to release two waves of spells on the monsters, because their number was getting too large.
The warriors on the front line have killed almost every monster from this first floor. The number of magic gems colliding from the monsters must have exceeded a thousand on this floor alone.
I already expected that there would be more monsters on each floor, but I didn't expect such a large number of monsters on the first floor this showed me two things for me, the first is that an expedition like this should accumulate thousands of magic gems and second, I have too scared to know how many monsters there are when a mare of monsters happens on a floor of a dungeon.
The description I read was that the monster mare was when a floor has the number of monsters multiplied from three to five times. Just to imagine having to face five thousand monsters on one floor and a thought that scares the creeps.
With the completion of the first floor the defensive barriers were dismantled and the warriors organized the magic jewels inside the metal box, the bottom of the box is now filled with jewels, it should be almost completely full when the expedition ends. I wonder what the final number of jewels removed from the dungeon will be today.