The limbs of Nate’s crossbow sang as they released, only to tighten again as he slapped another bolt into place while charging it. He cursed and jumped back, a dizzy Aura by his side.

  They had somehow managed to practically step right onto a sleeping snake.

  Nate’s boot had been what dug into the thing’s tail, but Aura was who it bit right in the leg. It had been venomous, and she was starting to feel the effects as they fled from all its slithering friends.

  She had already taken a pill for it from her inventory and was just waiting for it to take effect. In the meantime, she was having problems concentrating enough to use her energy skills.

  Nate’s energy skills were having a larger effect. His ‘Qi Blast’ was similar to a shotgun in the way it worked, making it perfect for crowd control. The crossbow bolts he was using with another energy skill called ‘Chanced Affinity Arrow’. That particular skill was based around activating two chance effects. The first was that the arrow had a chance of taking on the user’s affinity. While the second effect was that it had a chance of hitting a weak point.

  They had been running for the last several minutes, accidentally heading farther away from the RV as they fled from the mass of snakes.

  “Come on, Aura, just hop into my chest already!” He told her for the third time, watching as she stumbled to the side. The pill she had taken had helped, but it needed more time to get rid of the venom coursing through her body.

  He hoped the girls were alright. They had healing pills, but he wasn’t sure if they had ever thought of getting ones for poison and venom as well.

  She grunted weakly and lurched toward him, her muzzle tapping his arm as she sank into him.

  Aura would heal faster inside his chest, near his cores. They had never tested whether she would come back to life if she died outside of the dungeon or if she was limited in the same way Nate was. Frankly, it seemed better to assume that she was, and not play around.

  Dodging the abnormally large snakes, he began heading back toward the RV and hopefully reinforcements.

  This was not a good situation for them to be in. With beasts this small, they would never be able to retrieve all the bodies. That meant that eventually, the bodies they missed would begin attracting attention, drawing more beasts to the area.

  All that is to say, that they would need to find a new place to park and sleep for the night.

  Any cores these snakes might have had would be lost as well.

  “Anna? Angie, Lindsay?” He called out, as he hit the road and began sprinting back to where they had parked the vehicle. Behind him, a writhing mass of wriggling, hissing snakes burst from the underbrush and continued after him.

  Nate fired off another qi burst, the shotgun attack pushing them back momentarily. However, he had already used it so many times that his main core was running low on energy. He mentally switched cores and began drawing qi from his backup core instead for his attacks.

  That was the trick. He had to manually make the switch or wait until his main core was completely drained. That was generally not a good idea.

  It took him several minutes of running along the road before he finally spotted where they had pulled off. The bonus to this was that he had finally outpaced the snakes, even though more kept coming onto the road to chase after him.

  He called out to the girls several more times, his voice growing slightly hoarser each time. Finally, Anna responded, as she appeared by his side in a flash and cut all the snakes to pieces.

  “We need to leave now!” She ordered. “Lindsay was bitten, and we don’t have any pills to treat venom.” Her voice was bitter, clearly blaming herself.

  “Aura was bitten as well. I have some pills she can take, but I agree that we need to leave this area, regardless.” Nate was more than happy to see that Angie was sitting behind the wheel of the RV with the lights and engine already on.

  As soon as they both jumped into the RV, Angie floored it. There were streaks of squished snakes left in their wake. Anna went up to join Angie, while Nate went to give Lindsay a couple of pills for poison and venom.

  Bright headlights and light racks lit up the road in the failing light. They had made sure that the RV was well-equipped with lights. While their parents had paid for the initial vehicle. Nearly all of the modifications to the RV had been designed and paid for by the kids. Some, like the small core converter, had obviously been outside of their price range. However, they had done their best to pay for everything themselves.

  Lindsay stirred weakly as he shoved a few pills down her throat, along with some water.

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  “Thanks,” She muttered, with a cough. “Should have known that you would have some anti-venom pills already prepared.”

  He chuckled and patted her leg. “All you had to do was ask. I’ll give you both some of them later, so this doesn’t happen again.”

  She nodded and closed her eyes, going to sleep.

  “I gave Lindsay the anti-venom pills. She should be fine in a while. Right now, she is just sleeping everything off.” He told the other two, taking a seat right behind Anna.

  Angie let out a long, shuddering breath. “Good, thank heavens you had those. I would have had to drive like mad to get to Colorado City in time.”

  “I’ll give all three of you a few of them in the morning, so something like this doesn’t happen again.”

  Anna was frowning, unhappy with her own performance. “It’s only the first night and I already almost got one of you killed.”

  Nate rolled his eyes. “Anna, do you even know how many times I have been poisoned, stabbed, clawed, or otherwise injured going out on expeditions with my parents? We all know how dangerous it is to leave the cities. Sure, this was not how we wanted things to begin, but we also never thought that this trip would be safe either.”

  “I know that, but it’s different when I’m the one responsible for your safety still.” Anna’s hand was pale from how tight she was clenching it.

  Angie took them a couple of miles closer to the city before pulling over. “I don’t know about you two, but I’m ready for some sleep. Being chased by snakes and watching Lindsay getting bit wore me out.” She muttered, stretching her arms out with a yawn.

  “Make sure your door is locked,” Nate reminded her, doing the same for the side door. “I’ll see you all in the morning.” His bunk was nestled above the cab, while the girls were sharing the room at the back of the vehicle.

  For the next day or two, Anna would be using the table that sank down to become another bed as her own.

  Entering his avatar, Nate transferred to the kobold dungeon and readied his weapons. The kukris were strapped crosswise across his rear, while the kriegsmesser was on his left hip. He had finally gotten a holster for the gun a while back, and it was strapped to his right thigh.

  He was loaded for bear, as people used to say on OE, and it still wouldn’t be enough. Kobolds were annoying enemies; they were semi-intelligent and had strong natural armor. The theme of the dungeon he had put together against them, unfortunately, wasn’t exactly the most effective. It had been the impetus in which he had later begun to refine how he approached the themes and overall creation of each dungeon.

  The amount of information he had for each one was less and less each time.

  In the beginning, he had tried to create traps and the entire dungeon all at once. Now, all he worried about was hiding the core, and sometimes a basic layout. That was it.

  Once the dungeon had been formed, he would watch and study the monsters, creatures, denizens, or whichever term fit them best. Then, when he was ready, he and Aura would fight them if needed. The two would learn what they could about them and only then would he decide on the theme for the dungeon and the eventual traps.

  With the kobolds, he had been hasty and known them to be lizard-based. So, he had based the entire dungeon around ice. Coincidentally, he also learned how much he hated being cold.

  The issue was that while kobolds did indeed look like lizards; they had more in common with their draconic ancestors than their cold-blooded cousins. The cold and the various traps ended up doing more harm to him than them. There were still some that succumbed to them, but not as many as he had thought.

  At the moment, the Dungeon Core was researching glacial ice forms, due to how hard and cold they tended to be. If regular ice wouldn’t work, then he would just go even harder and colder.

  Nate shivered as the avatar settled into place in the dungeon.

  His armor was not exactly built to keep him warm. That wasn’t its main function, and he felt sorry for the cultivators who entered this dungeon, unaware of what he had done in his ignorance.

  He needed more parts for the path artisans in the community to work with. If it wasn’t for that, he wouldn’t have willingly entered this place, especially not without Aura as backup.

  It was going to be a long, miserable night, at least if he managed to survive.

  Nate managed to take out one group of kobolds on his own before he decided to switch dungeons. Kobolds worked together and had their own language. They were like a high-form beast in that regard. They were smarter than the average beast by quite a lot. It wasn’t quite fully formed, like it had been with blighted elves or humans, but it was still there.

  They fought in groups and used weapons, even energy skills, on occasion. Not to mention their more obvious advantages of hard scales, strength, and some of them even being able to combine their liquids to create a small amount of fire. It wasn’t much, but if you were close, it could still hurt.

  After working himself to the bone just to take out that one group, and only getting one scale and a rainbow orb for his efforts, he left. The ant and rat dungeons were out of the question, as they would simply swarm him. He had grown somewhat used to dying over the last year, but some deaths were worse than others. Those orchestrated by rats and insects were definitely rated among the worst that he had experienced to date.

  Going to either of those dungeons alone was simply suicide, even with the traps being somewhat effective. They could simply swarm those as well. Constantly repairing everything in those two dungeons was an absolute energy sink and he couldn’t wait to upgrade the Dungeon Core in both of them. The increased hardness of dungeon material would be a welcome reprieve on high energy expenditure.

  Unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be much he could do about that one.

  He had tried researching materials in the past without any luck. It could do weaker ones just fine, but stronger was always where the problem lay.

  There were plenty of other dungeons, but only one viable one that he hadn’t visited recently, the mixed skeleton, zombie, and lich dungeon.

  He swapped out the gun and equipped his crossbow and quiver. The crossbow was strapped to his back, while the quiver took the place of his gun and holster on his right leg. Nate tightened the strap on the crossbow and unsheathed the kriegsmesser.

  His view on practicing multiple weapons had evolved over the last eight months. Each of them had their uses, and he used them as such. This wasn’t some story where the sword ruled all, or the equally ignorant belief that the spear was king. They each had their uses.

  That said, he still had to pick and choose which ones he learned and focused on. He would have loved to say that he was some once-in-a-millennium genius with weapons. The truth was, he had been practicing nearly constantly with the crossbow, kukris, and now kriegsmesser since he had created the first dungeon.

  Countless hours were spent nearly every night with them in hand. Adding even more to the mix would just be insane.

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