Sporemageddon

[Congratulations! Your Sporemageddon Skill has reached level 40!]

I saw the text flash by my vision even as I was thrown back from the dungeon’s core and sent flying across the room to roll ass over teakettle along the floor.

Sir Nibbles grumbled, then bunded over to my side.

I... wasn’t hurt? I rolled over, noticed that my pack and much of its contents had been flung around, then I shook my head and refocused on myself. I patted my front down, then wiggled my toes and fingers. All there. The explosion had been less of an explosion and more of a wave of magical energy ripping out of the core and moving across the space. I think it might have travelled through the entire dungeon, but I didn’t have a concrete way of knowing that.

“We should start moving,” I said to Sir Nibbles.

If this was anything like our escape from the Ditz Dungeon, then the perils and dangers of the dungeon itself would still very much be active. The Sporemageddon on that dungeon had only turned it against people exploiting it. This one... might be different. I didn’t have a good way of knowing from here if it was different.

In any case, I didn’t want to stay here any longer than I had to.

So, I started to pick up my stuff and toss it into my pack, not being very careful about it. The air felt kind of tingly, and I suspected that I was getting a slight overdose of magical energy. It was something I had read about at the Academy. Areas with very high concentrations of magic could actually be dangerous, though like radiation, it was mostly an issue of dosage. And unlike radiation, I could just spend a lot of magic and reduce the load on myself once I was out of here. Still, it was a good reason not to linger.

“Come on,” I said to Sir Nibbles. “We’re done here... though... go over and touch the core? I heard that you might unlock better classes from that.”

Sir Nibbles eyed me, then huffed and ran over to the core to press his face against it, then he scampered back and leapt up onto my back while I was bent over picking the last of my things up.

“Fat bastard,” I grunted. He really was getting to be too big for this kind of thing.

With the moron on my back, I slid out of the room, then stated up the stairs. That was the part of dungeon exploring that sucked the most. The stairs. The way down was so much easier than the way up. I was certain that my calves would be worn out long before I made it out of here. It was, at a minimum, six flights of stairs up, and a lot of walking between.

Fortunately, I was all of eleven years old, and at the age where my energy felt rather boundless. I was gonna miss this once I was thirty and my knees started to crack.

I pulled my mask off a little and ate another mushroom to help with night vision, then I rummaged around in my bag and found a healing mushroom, split it in half, and shared it with Sir Nibbles.

I wasn’t hurt but it couldn’t harm us to have a little passive healing boost working in the background. I didn’t have the room or time or resources to experiment, but I suspected that consumables that used magic to heal might actually assist with stuff like increasing bone density and growing musculature.

“Ah, right, the upgrade,” I muttered.

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I opened my menus with a thought and found [Ritual of Sporemageddon] My only {Legendary} skill. It was sitting pretty at level 40, a 20 level jump from where it had been that morning.

Honestly, that alone almost made the trip worth it. Hitting the coveted level 1500 was going to take some time, but a 20 level jump in a single day, on a skill that was otherwise seemingly impossible to level up? That was worth... something. The rest of the skill levels I’d be getting from this adventure were going to add up as well.

[You have unlocked a Sub-Skill!]

[Congratulations! Your [Sporemageddon {Legendary}] Skill has unlocked the [Ending’s Passage] Subskill!]

[Ending’s Passage]? That didn’t ring any bells. It didn’t sound as strong as [Apocalypse Walker] the other subskill that [Sporemageddon] had given me. Well... strong, but useless. [Apocalypse Walker] rendered me immune to two branches of magic. Unfortunately, they were very likely two of the least common branches in existence.

Apocalypse and Forbidden magics didn’t just show up casually, and they weren’t tossed around willy-nilly. If anyone in the city had access to either, they were keeping them close.

I opened the subskill menu, then read out what [Ending’s Passage] did. By the end, I was grinning again.

[Ending’s Passage]

Barriers, wards, locks, seals, and thresholds cannot keep you out. They may notice you. They may resent you. They may scream. But they cannot deny your inevitable passage.

Oh, this was good-good. Very much the kind of insane ability that I’d expect to come attached to a {Legendary} skill.

Working through them in order... barriers weren’t common. I don’t think I’d ever seen one, though I had read of them in some texts, and I knew that some casters used them for protection. I wasn’t sure if the subskill would allow my own skills to bypass a barrier, but that was fine. Being able to pass them myself was a big deal already.

Wards? Those were a little more common, though not in the poorer parts of the city. There were some institutions that used them. The Academy had wards around some areas. Banks used them to protect their goods, and I imagined that noble homes probably had some wards protecting parts of them. There were also personal wards, but those were usually subtle except for in active wartime.

Locks.

Locks.

I started to giggle, and I didn’t stop when Sir Nibbles turned to stare at me.

Oh, this has so much potential. Was it any lock? Did doors count? Smaller ones?

If this worked like how I imagined, I was going to lock so many things away... maybe I could hire a locksmith to make extremely complex locks that never had a working key to begin with, locks that could only be opened by force or via a power like this one.

I think there were a few more... rogue-like skills that allowed thieves and the like to bypass conventional locks, but for every skill like that, the more security-minded found a new type of lock to stop them. It was the endless war between lockpicks and locksmiths. Most of the time, the way to stop the thieves was using complex, hidden wards, and wasn’t that convenient!

Seals... I didn’t know much about. The name said something, but I had no experience to draw on there. And as far as thresholds went, that felt both too generic and too vague, it could mean anything, so I’d assume it meant little until I could test it.

But locks! That was fantastic, an incredible boost to my everything!

I was in a very good mood as I started making my way through the floor. Of course, I couldn’t let that good mood dampen my caution too much, I had to keep an eye open for trouble and avoid walking right into an ambush if I could.

I couldn’t stop plotting, though, at least in the back of my mind. Being lock-proof... well, maybe I could switch careers to sneak-thief instead of part-time assassin? Though with the state of the economy, I wasn’t sure that would be worthwhile.

Oh well! I was excited regardless. Once I was out of here, things would become very interesting.

Still, that was for later. I wasn’t out of the dungeon yet, and thinking about all the things I could lock away once I was safe wasn’t going to help if I walked face-first into a Pale Stalker.

I forced myself to slow down a little. Not physically, unfortunately, because I still wanted to get out of here as quickly as possible, but mentally. I paid attention to the stone walls, the corners of around rocky outcrops hidden by shadows, the tall ceiling above. Sir Nibbles shifted on my back, claws catching in my shirt as he looked around as well.

Home. Soon, we’d be home. I was really looking forward to it.

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