Dante walked down the stairs carefully, as not to trip and fall down them as he was unsure of what was at the bottom. This is not to say he did not walk quickly, as he did not take long to reach the bottom.
However, what he saw at the bottom of the stairs puzzled him greatly. There was a hole which seemed to have no way of getting through, other than dropping into it. This hole looked down upon a large forest that was much brighter than the Dungeon he was in.
As this was a completely new area, and Dante wanted to explore more of his environment, he took the only option for getting down to the forest. He jumped through the hole, and began to fall quickly before landing in a clearing without any trees, as he had tried to propel himself into a safe looking area.
When he landed, he hit the ground with quite a lot of impact, as the drop was quite high. This impact was more important than he had thought, as the second he had landed, a creature hiding under the ground had tried to attack him.
A giant plant monster had shot its head up incredibly quickly to try and use its grass covered jaws to bite Dante and trap him. The fall's impact had smashed this monster back into the ground and killed it instantly without Dante having to do anything, or even noticing.
He stood up and looked around, checking his environment to see any potential threats. Seeing that there was nothing around, which was due to the danger of the hidden plant monster being known by other creatures, Dante decided to explore.
He wanted to see how his new skill worked, so he activated Sprint. His entire body began to crackle with pink energy which darted around his body, and the second he even moved forward slightly, he could feel the difference in speed. It would take some getting used to, but it would be the perfect time to learn how to move at such high speeds while in a forest with a lot of obstacles to get past, such as trees and roots.
Dante began to run, and he didn't know how fast he was going exactly, but he knew it was too fast for anyone to be able to tell he was moving, and if he got the hang of it he could potentially even make it look like teleportation once his Body stat was high enough to have increased his speed to that point.
It wasn't actually too difficult for Dante to adapt to the speed he was moving at, and after a while he was able to effortlessly move throughout the trees at incredibly high speeds. While training to control his speed, Dante had ignored any monsters he had seen, but he felt it was time to start levelling up again.
He began to run again, as he was not even a bit tired from all of his training despite it only having been around a minute since he had stopped. After a few seconds of running, he had travelled quite a distance and had spotted an enemy.
It had the form of a tree, except it had arms and eyes which glowed a deep orange colour. This would have been much more intimidating had it been night time, but being able to see the entire monster made it much easier to look at.
The monster spotted Dante, which wasn't as hard as before, as he had deactivated Sprint. Upon seeing him, a large root came out of the ground and tried to stab into Dante's stomach/Dante grabbed it, and snapped the root in half. The monster screeched in pain, and sent multiple more roots at him.
Dante dodged in between these attacks, getting closer and closer to the enemy, before releasing a Shockwave Impact directly in the centre of it which caused a loud boom, and a large hole in the monster, which Dante had decided to call a Root Wizard, despite it not being a wizard at all.
The noise from this attack seemed to have attracted more enemies, as the noise of laughing echoed through the trees, as something was seemingly approaching.
After a few seconds, a swarm of small fleshy creatures jumped out of the trees and attacked Dante. They were all wearing wooden masks which seemed to have patterns and faces carved into them, and they were painted with what looked like blood and crushed berries and other plants.
They were not large, and they were not strong, but there were a lot of them and they tried to gnaw away at Dante's body. He swatted these creatures away, and they fell to the ground before jumping back onto him.
Seeing as they were a source of experience, Dante did not want to let any escape, so he grabbed the Fleshy Bastards, which was actually a fitting name, one by one and ripped their heads off.
Eventually, this led to all of them being dead, and Dante being able to move onto finding more enemies. This was not hard with his Sprint skill, and he found a large number a few seconds later.
There were a group of Root Wizards in a circle, surrounding a pit of fire on the ground. In this pit of fire was a flame creature that seemed to be a slave of some kind, or at the very least a prisoner, as it was dancing while being whipped by the Root Wizards' root whips.
Dante obviously wanted to figure out what was happening, so he killed the Root Wizards with ease, not even needing to use any of his skills due to his high strength.
What he found in the pit was in fact not a fire monster, but a monster similar to a piece of coal. It did not seem to harbour any ill will towards Dante, as it looked weak and didn't seem like it would live long.
The monster was made up of a black rock that glowed red, like hot coal, except when it glowed a fire would emerge from it and the creature could control the flames.
Dante decided to see if he could speak to the creature, as it may have had some knowledge about where he actually was.
He scooped the creature out of the flames, and lay it down on the ground, waiting to see what would happen.