NOVEL NEXT Chapter 48 – Quest reward
My seventh day of training was interrupted by a notification that caused all of the tension in my body to leave. Earlier that day I had noticed that the next raid had started and since the raid before the successful one didn’t count as the scouting party didn’t contain at least twenty five people I still needed one more party to fail to get past the fifth floor to pass the quest.
Sure, I still had one more chance before I absolutely had to defeat the raid but I was still incredibly nervous as I didn’t want to get so close to failing the quest. I was so nervous that I didn’t want to watch them like I usually do but I also couldn’t just go back to sleep. Instead ever since they started the fifth floor three hours ago I had been training with Ilvaite, Ilv for short, my kobold teacher.
Over the past week I had gained a bit more stamina through training so much so, while I was still tired, I could probably keep on going for a few more hours before I had to stop. However, since the reason that I was distracting myself had gone away I thanked Ilv for helping me before returning home and excitedly entering the living room.
I was excited to see what my new monster would be so as soon as I got into the room I jumped on the couch and told the system open random D tier monster pattern bag. Immediately a screen popped up in front of me with ten choices that were all D tier. It was similar to a screen I saw while designing the dungeon except this time I would only be able to choose one monster and they were all D tier instead of a mix of D and E tier.
As I looked over the monsters I was surprised that I only recognised half of them as I thought I would know more considering how much fantasy media I consumed in my past life. Luckily a monster encyclopaedia had been injected into my head, even if it was without my consent. I used this knowledge to learn about them one at a time, I even included the ones I recognised as they might be different from how they were depicted in my previous life.
I went through them in the order they appeared so the first up was the spore servant. The best way to understand what they are is by picturing a small Ent but instead of a tree it is a walking mushroom. The spore servants were about the same size as the average adult, had a big cap on their head that could spray spores, their face was a facsimile of a normal face but it couldn’t talk or even emote.
This all combined to make them extremely hard to look at without getting the feeling like something is off. They came from a smaller species that were essentially just big walking mushrooms with no face or arms, ranging in size from a medium sized dog to a young adult. Its later evolutions were varied however, some becoming more human-like while unlocking magic, others were huge behemoths that lost the ability to walk but were able to command tons of mushroom people, or myconid as they were commonly called.
And that was only two out of the hundreds of myconids they could turn into, there were probably as many different species of myconids as there were mushrooms back on earth. As I looked over them I decided that I wasn’t going to choose it as they wouldn’t work well with other monsters and I didn’t want whole floors dedicated to a single monster.
I moved on to the bronze wyrmling. These were essentially baby dragons or wyverns, still strong for their age but they didn’t hold a candle to fully grown wyverns or dragons. As I was researching them I found out that wyverns and dragons had one more difference than usual. This being that Wryms were created from mana and so monsters while dragons had evolved in the wild and so were creatures.
Learning this I was upset that I would never be able to have a true dragon in my dungeon but I quickly got over it as Wyverns were close enough. The bronze qualifier just indicated what element it was aligned with. In this case that was lightning, a tier 3 magic that combined the fire and air elements. While this had been informative for me I knew that my kobolds would eventually turn into them if I reached high enough in their evolutionary chain so I didn’t pick it as my monster.
Next was the Rutterkin, this was a type of undead that had been created by infusing a dead and decomposing corpse with demonic mana. Due to the nature of how they were created they were incredibly ugly and disgusting monsters but because of the demonic energy infusing them they were also incredibly strong. Any mage that fell so far to have to use them would usually keep them far away and only use them for menial tasks like moving things or cleaning their home while no one was around.
I instantly dismissed them as I didn’t want any disgusting monsters to roam my dungeon so I moved on to the Cave Fisher. These are lobster-like monsters that lived in dark caves and fed mostly on pests and small critters but they wouldn’t shy away from an easy snack if it came to them. They were probably among the weakest D tier monsters on this list so I quickly skipped them.
The nature elemental is exactly what it says it is, an elemental that has attuned with nature. The best way to imagine them is to think of a dryad that has been corrupted by evil forces. They were humanoid but had green skin and vine-like hair. They were able to control the plants around them and were incredibly dangerous when surrounded by nature. They intrigued me so I kept them at the back of my head before moving on.
The ogre and will-o-wisp weren’t different at all from how they were depicted from the stories I have read so I didn’t look into them much. Giant striders are essentially raptors except they have scales instead of feathers. They usually roamed in packs and were used as creatures of burden by the more humanoid monsters, they looked interesting but I already had both Thorn wolves and Cockatrices for cavalry so I moved on.
The Gnoll pack lord is just a Gnoll that has managed to have at least ten gnolls under its control at any one time. Gnolls are mutated hyenas that have become humanoid through some kind of demonic magic. They usually travel in packs to overwhelm their prey but since I already have plenty of pack monsters I wasn’t going to pick another one.
The last monster is the corrupted shark. It is the simplest monster as it is just a shark that has absorbed too much mana for its body to contain and turned into a monster but it is also the most appealing to me as it fills a role that I have no other monster in, it is an aquatic monster. The only other monster I have that could be placed underwater that I have access to is the aqua slime and they are too weak to manage a floor all by themselves.
After thinking about it for a few minutes I decided to go with the corrupted shark as I wanted to challenge my divers with not just the monsters but also the environment. So far the only floor to do that was the second floor and that had to change, not to mention having an aquatic monster would fill a huge niche in the dungeon.
As soon as I was sure what monster I wanted the system automatically closed the screen and gave me my new monster. With nothing else to do I immediately looked through its pattern.
Everything on its pattern made sense, it had high physical stats due to it being a predator but low mental stats since it was still an animal. They were my most expensive monster so far at a 350 DP base cost but it made up for that by being the only one that could be effective in the water and starting at such a high level. Going through its skills [Blood Frenzy] made it deal more damage when it sensed blood in the water.
[Sense Electric] let it sense the electromagnetic pulses its nearby prey gave off even when blind, something sharks in my old world could do. [Crushing Bite] consumed a bunch of mana to make the shark's next attack deal double the damage of its normal bite. Finally [Galuchat] is a passive that turns its skin into scales that are smooth when brushed in one direction to keep it aerodynamic when swimming through the water but sharp in the other direction to protect it from attacks.
After going through it I was happy with my choice so I decided to relax a bit, I still had too much adrenaline going through my body to go back to sleep. I also knew that Shonu would be visiting me soon so instead of trying I just read a book from the store on the third floor. It turned out that it took some stories from the system instead of just me so I had a plethora of new stories to read.