Boss Fight

Most of the morning was rather uneventful in Violet's dungeon. While Avorn and Camellia did stop by the dungeon, they only farmed some slimes and collected resources before leaving once more. Still, this did give Violet some yarrow and ramps, most of which were only worth 1 DP since they were repeats, but the first ramp did give Violet 35 DP, which was nice. The extra 49 dungeon points brought Violet's total up to 95 DP.

While Violet had no way of knowing, some of her slimes were beginning to become slower and react less quickly to incoming threats. This was only the first stage of their souls beginning to corrupt from dying too frequently, but it would certainly get worse at the rate things were going. It would still be a long while before any [Monsters] would stop respawning, but they would need to be replaced sooner or later.

 The basic slime in the wildflower meadow room was actually in better shape than some of the others. Since a single slime wasn't worth the effort, Avorn and Camellia had been traveling back and forth between the hay meadow and flower hunt challenge room instead. They were right next door to each other and both had a total of five slimes assigned to the rooms. While the chameleon slimes did offer a more difficult challenge, it was a welcome one since the duo could more easily learn how to deal with [Monsters] with stealth abilities without being in too much danger.

Luckily, the [Monsters] within the dungeon wouldn't affect the dungeon core, which was why there wasn't any way to tell when the monster's souls began to corrupt from dying too often. There was an alert built in for when [Monsters] stopped spawning altogether, though. However, that would be something for Violet to discover when the time came.

For now, Violet had other priorities to attend to, like evolving her rock slime into an emperor rock slime. This cost her 40 MP and 40 DP, but the effects were quite good. The emperor rock slime took up most of the centermost portion of the boss room and was located smack dab in the middle of the azalea hedge flower maze. The slime couldn't bounce around anymore now that it was so large and heavy, but it could still rotate slowly around so that it could continue to pelt adventurers with rocks.

It was difficult for Violet to convince the emperor slime to attack anything since she couldn't communicate with it. However, its mouth hole had gotten a lot bigger as it had grown from the size of a basic slime to the size it was now. Since the rock armor also seemed to be much stronger than it was before and the description said the slime should be stronger, it stood to reason that the emperor rock slime would be shooting large rocks as projectiles.

If Violet had to hazard a guess, it seemed like the basic slimes would have small pebbles about the size of your standard tin stored mint. There are a lot of types of mints out there, but this was referring more to the ones that were thicker than a penny but not as large around. Meanwhile, the emperor rock slime seemed like it would launch proper rock-sized stones that would be larger than a can of soda as someone. Assuming the force was decent in both cases, the damage was likely to be increased by a significant amount.

Deciding not to waste the last 10 MP she had, Violet put it towards enlarging her pond hole. She was now about a third of the way through the process of digging out the area for the pond. Yet the pond still just seemed like a strange round valley in the middle of a circular room rather than a proper pond. Hopefully, it would look more pond-like once it was finished being dug out and then filled with water.

As she wasn't sure when the next adventuring party would come through, Violet went to her dungeon core room to relax. She didn't need sleep or to rest, but she always felt exhausted mentally and it felt better to sleep than to lay awake thinking for hours on end. She'd end up noticing if anyone entered the dungeon and the uncomfortable feeling would only grow as people got closer to her dungeon core room. Besides, now she had a proper boss monster, even if the room wasn't set as a boss room yet, the dungeon should still be safer now.

The next group to visit Violet's dungeon ended up being Tobias's party. This time, they had brought a special tribute for Violet. Mirabella set the unscented beeswax candle tribute they had brought at the entrance, but Matthias carried the other portion of the tribute with him. Thodin looked up at the young man warily as he asked

"Are you sure you want to deliver that to the dungeon master in person? The dungeon has been growing quite quickly and it could be dangerous. She may have even installed a boss room by now."

Matthias hated taking risks, that much was true, but he shook his head as he firmly replied

"I want to go home and spend some time with my family. It'll be my younger sister's birthday soon and I promised I would go visit them soon. I was going to wait until we finished up here, but it seems like this is going to take a lot longer than planned.

If I'm going to stop showing up and helping you all out, I want to ensure the dungeon master is happy with us and it's less likely she'll kill you all off. Also, I'd rather she wasn't angry with me for leaving.``

Thodin just nodded in acknowledgment. Their party would be working together to move through the dungeon, anyway, so it wasn't like they couldn't watch each other's backs. Since their friend needed to deliver his tribute to Violet in person, they'd be putting off the slime parkour challenge for the next time. Instead, they'd be checking out the new 'flower hunt' challenge, as Mirabella's navigator class skill labeled it, and checking out the new potential boss room in more detail.

The group took the long way around, going through the floodplains meadow, the hay meadow, and then finally into the flower hunt challenge room. The group heaved sighs of relief when the doors didn't lock behind them. They had brought along extra rations just in case something like that did end up happening. Having both [Monsters] and a challenge in a room or having both [Traps] and challenges in a room were both common layouts for challenges and both tended to involve locking the adventurers in until they could be completed successfully.

"Alright, let's all gather one of each flower type and stand in front of an altar. We can switch the flowers out more quickly that way and see if we can get lucky enough to guess the answer. I'm thinking we can spend a good hour on this before we need to move on.

If we don't manage to complete this today, we'll probably have to wait until you return, Matthias. So, I hope you are willing to cooperate with us when you return."

Matthias gave a firm nod in understanding. His party members put up with a lot from him, so the least he could do was to place some flowers on a stone altar for a few hours until they could solve the puzzle. However, he also had the feeling that they might end up having to purchase some paper or wax boards to record things if the puzzle ended up being too difficult to figure out.

The group worked in tandem, placing a single flower on each of the altars, waiting a few seconds, and then switching when Tobias called out "next". They didn't end up solving the puzzle, but it was still less wet than the slime parkour challenge and less aggravating than the capture the slime challenge was. All of the challenges required a good bit of time to be invested in completing them, so an hour being wasted on an uncompleted challenge wasn't that big of a deal.

Tobias checked his pocket watch one last time before putting it away. The group made their way through the garden meadow, not bothering to leave a tribute since they were just passing through. Then they walked through the long hallways and into the hedge flower maze. While a maze might be difficult for most adventurers, they already had most of this room mapped out, so it was easy enough to figure out with Mirabella taking the lead.

Despite them having mapped this floor out, it was unlikely that most people would have as easy of a time as they were. This floor of the dungeon still wasn't worth enough to make it worthwhile for most adventurers to spend the coin needed to purchase a map. Only those who planned to frequent the dungeon often enough to make it worthwhile or nobility would bother with a map. Of course, anyone who frequented the dungeon often enough to consider a map was also likely to memorize the route through the maze, so their clientele would be limited to those with poor navigation skills and those rich enough to afford it.

Tobias was a bit surprised to see the new boss [Monster] and pushed his sister behind him who was then pushed even further back as Thodin also stepped in front of her. Matthias would protect the party from the back while casting long-distance magic. Getting into a proper formation, Matthias made sure to pass Thodin some poison, he had made previously, to coat his ax with.

Since dark elementalists only had spells for poisoning, making things dark, and creating illusions, most of Matthias's attacks were poison-based. Unfortunately, this slime seemed to have a protective stone layer, which most long-distance poison spells would not be able to get through. He could try something corrosive, but the area they were fighting in was rather small and there was too high of a chance of his party members getting harmed in the process.

Neither Tobias nor Thodin complained, though, as they confidently charged into battle. Matthias could protect Mirabella, the weakest of the group. With his poison magic and her basic non-class-based sword skills, they were unlikely to have any issues, even if a bunch of other beginner [Monsters] ended up swarming them. That allowed Tobias to concentrate on the battle ahead of him with ease.

He hardened the skin on his arms as much as possible, making it harder than steel before smashing his fist into the side of the slime. Meanwhile, Thodin bashed into the emperor rock slime with the side of his ax. Occasionally, when some of the interior layers of the slime were exposed, he would slash into it, allowing the poison on his ax to soak in. Of course, slimes didn't take much damage from poison, but this was a sort that would cause the blood to boil and evaporate in normal [Monsters] and heavily damaged slimes which were mostly made of a liquid-like substance.

Matthias had a hard time dodging the large stone projectiles and Mirabella had to use her short sword and buckler shield, which she normally stored on her back, to deflect much of the projectiles aimed towards them. They hid behind the hedges as much as they could, but the stone often would come flying through and damage both the hedges and them.

Luckily, Tobias was relatively safe from the stone projectiles and could almost ignore them since his skin acted like armor while Thodin was covered in a thick layer of armor that would allow him to face tank most damage coming his way. His berserker class tended to make him lose track of all of his reasoning anyway.

When the slime's body absorbed enough of the poison, it turned the tide in the battle. Its layer of rock-like armor began to burst away in large chunks, hitting Thodin and knocking him over. However, it gave Tobias the opening he needed and he thrust his arm into the slime and crushed the exposed core causing the slime to slowly disintegrate into nothing but a puddle of goo and rock debris.