With the end of the first floor, I can see the difference between the behavior of the dungeon when faced with one person and when with dozens of people. But one thing I don't really understand is where the mana comes from to feed the dungeons.
The number of magic gems taken by a single large and ridiculously huge group and multiple groups doing it every day. I know that the mana of a level one gem is low quality and has few uses, they can barely be useful as disposable batteries for low level magic tools.
My problem is that the level two and three gems will drop the same amount on the upper floors of the dungeon, so I can deduce that the level four to six gems are the same.
I wonder where all this mana comes from, as far as I know mana doesn't come from the environment around the dungeon, if the mana had been taken from the environment, there wouldn't be a city around the dungeon but a dead desert. The dungeons are made by neutral gods and they feed their faith through the dungeons, but that doesn't explain where all the mana and elemental energy that appears in the dungeons comes from.
I don't have much faith that I can figure out how a dungeon works or even how society worked before they existed, without the resources taken from the dungeons the continent's economy would shrink by more than fifty percent. Without the abundant resources that are taken from the dungeons the form of today's society would be impractical.
But going back to the expedition I didn't see many different monsters on floors sixth through ninth. The number of monsters has increased very little and the quality of monsters has changed.
Number of levels one monsters has decreased a lot; they were mostly replaced by level two monsters. The number of elite monsters appearing is also large every fifty normal monsters to one elite on each floor.
The equipment of goblins, kobolds and wererats has improved a lot. It's too bad their gun metal doesn't even make a profit, if we could sell those guns an expedition's income should increase by at least thirty percent.
This is because outside the dungeon the monsters' metal weapons lose their durability until the structurally integrated metal or leather becomes rubbish. And I believe that as they were created with a large amount of the mysterious energy that is only present in the dungeons, then by taking them out of the dungeon they can no longer sustain their integrity without absorbing more of that mysterious energy.
It's a shame that the only materials that can be taken from the dungeon are the biological parts of the monsters or the crystallizations of mana and elemental energy.
The biggest problem with the expedition floors were the level two kruthiks and elites, they spew a lot of acid against the shield wall, even though the shields were made to resist acid to a limit so not very cheap and disposable equipment can warm up.
During the floors I the shield warrior who discarded his shield less often was already using the third shield. The first guardian we're going to face on the tenth floor.
When I was alone, I faced an annoying guardian, but it wasn't difficult for me but now if the same guardian is unlucky to show up it will be very difficult for the group to take him down.
As we passed through the portal the group dispersed into an open formation, waiting for the guardian to appear. The two archers and I stayed close to the mages, only now the leader of the Katarina expedition noticed my presence.
She was looking around and suddenly turned her gaze to me, it took a few seconds for her to remember my identity and roll her eyes and go back to looking for the guardian.
On one side of the arena, the gate opened and a monster similar to a Kruthik emerged, but its proportion and shape was very different from normal. Not only was he huge, his crust was bigger than normal and red and full of thorns, he had a lot more legs than the four Kruthiks usually have.
To my surprise the huge kruthik didn't spit out a blast of acid, but released a bloody mist from his body and leapt at the group. The shield warriors formed a formation to block the kruthik's onslaught.
A thick layer of earth and aura solidifies in front of the shield wall only to be broken by the kruthik's onslaught, the shield wall has been pushed back, but they will manage to hold the entire formation.
I fired my arrows with my aura and wind element energy, but my arrow is not able to penetrate the thick defense of the giant kruthik and when I aimed at the less covered parts like his eyes and body joints my arrow just got stuck inside him.
The problem of big monsters and piercing arrows are almost useless against them, only if I could pierce enough to hurt the kruthik's internal organs can I do something useful while fighting this guardian.
My arrows may be useless, but the two archers on my side aren't, they not only used elemental arrows but also used an art of the wind element that I don't know about.
They fired their arrows with a small gap between them, one of the arrows trailing the other. When the first one hit one of the kruthik's joints it blew it up broken the target's surface, so the second arrow pierced the kruthik's flesh only to explode and create a large wound in the kruthik's body.
As the kruthik spun his body in response to his wound, the warriors threw spears and hooks that had chains attached to them. Even though the kruthik is really strong several chains held by more than ten warriors and strong enough to pull the kruthik to the ground, with the help of the earth element magic of Ingredi and the other mage.
The dos turned the ground of the arena below the kruthik into quicksand, the kruthik began to sink when several whips of water manifested behind the kruthik, and tied themselves to the kruthik's paws and pulled him in the opposite direction to the warriors.
Pulling it from both sides can be awkward, but when you do this by pulling it down too, the kruthik ends up being thrown onto the unsteady ground and ends up preventing the kruthik from getting back up.
The offending mages began to unleash their magic against the kruthik's head and although the attacks didn't break the kruthik's crust, they still damaged it. With the help of the shield warriors to stop the kruthik from moving, he was basically at the mercy of the mages and their archers.
To not embarrass myself anymore I had to resort to spending a lot of money, I took out one of the elemental arrows and used my two elements to saturate it. I used my aura to create a covering over the arrow to trap the elemental energy.
As I didn't expend a lot of elemental energy on the top floors, so I have enough to create an arrow really charged with elemental energy.
My arrow fired at the joint of one of his paws that had just been wounded by the magic of one of the wind element mages, he created a nice cut in the joint of kruthik's paw.
My arrow pierced the kruthik's flesh and exploded because of my fire element which consumed the wind element that was still left in the arrow and detonated in a very large explosion.
The fire element managed to break through the inside of the leg, but it still wasn't enough to separate Kruthik's leg, but I managed to do some good damage to him.
But right after my attack, one of the water whips tied it to the injured leg and pulled it, breaking the damaged link, snapping one of Kruthik's legs in half.
Kruthik's death was slow and painful, we spent more than half an hour breaking kruthik into pieces. His vitality was really great, he must have bled several liters of blood when he had lost half of his paws and became an immobile target.
From his body, we took several large chunks of the Kruthik's hard crust. Although it is not a very rare material, it is used in creating the shields that are used in this dungeon. The kruthik's crust has a slight resistance to their acid, so it's a good material for creating the simple shields used by shield warriors.
While the warriors remove the kruthik's crust, the mages are resting to regain their mana and elemental energy, I started talking to the archers beside me.
I found out their names were Irina and Mia; they are cousins and they specialize in fighting in pairs it seems they have a lot of combos like they used against kruthik. Talk to them and I have sinned the name of some elemental arts associated with a bow.
When the warriors were finishing recovering the Kruthik's bark, I felt a death glare on my back, when I looked back, I saw Hilda. She was making a hand signal that can only mean she's going to cut something very precious for me if I flirt with Mia or Irina.
Leaving behind the pile of distorted flesh that was left of the Kruthik, the expedition party headed for the eleventh floor.