Dungeon of Chance: Even Odds: A Dungeon Core Novel (Serious Probabilities Book 1) by Jonathan Brooks (interesting books to read TXT) 📕

to take advantage of, called “Rush”, which allowed him to hustle across the floor of the dungeon at incredible speed – faster than Pascale, in fact – and slam into a monster, stunning it.  When her brother used it, he shot across the room and hit one of the Boars, knocking it off balance; from there, the entire fight turned into a chaotic scene with which Jeska and the others were barely able to navigate.

Every monster in the room targeted him, but Arcen didn’t care – he, in fact, welcomed it.  He no longer had a shield or powerful weapon, upon losing them mid-resurrection, but he still did have his basic Bronze Sword – which he used like a madman as he shouted some sort of incomprehensible growl, cutting left, right, and above him, hitting anything that came within range.  He didn’t care if he was getting gored, bitten, envenomed, or slowed because of the Ice Bats – he just kept going.  And it worked…sort of.

The abrupt change in plan was too much for Jeska and the others to quickly adapt, so they got there a little too late.  Jeska and Pascale tried to help by attacking the monsters from behind, while Rosara managed to “Captivate” one of the Serpents.  Neither of those actions was enough to save her brother, who was rapidly losing Health.  Kelty tried to use her one healing Skill called “Minor Mending“ on him, but there were so many monsters around that she couldn’t safely get to him; for Minor Mending to take effect, the new Healer would have needed to be within 3 feet of her target.

And that was when they came to the realization that it was never going to be safe.  If Kelty had waded into the fray, jumped over a Serpent or 2, then she might have been able to save him.  If Jeska and Pascale had thrown themselves at the monsters with abandon, without fear of getting bit or gored, then perhaps they also could’ve allowed Arcen an extra few seconds to defend himself and survive.  Even Rosara, having no weapon other than her singing and dancing, could’ve gone in and distracted a monster, giving him the extra chance to recover from the onslaught.

Arcen ended up dying, but he had killed 3 monsters – 1 of each kind, in fact – and damaged the others so much that it was easy enough for the rest of the group to finish them off. But it was the way he had gone in there, let all of the fear of pain and death go, that inspired the rest of them.  Basically, it came down to it not really mattering in the end; they would either die and be resurrected, or have their wounds healed – even the most grievous were no match for the Health Bands.  A Boar even ripped off half of Kelty’s hand once…and it regrew!  Quite disgusting to watch, but remarkable, nonetheless.

It took until their 4th shift in the dungeon before they managed to eradicate all of the monsters in the second room without anyone dying, though they were all at least half-dead.  Still, it was a remarkable accomplishment; it was especially remarkable because they still didn’t have 1 of every Class.  All they were missing was Jeska’s Mage Class, but even after over 400 times opening up Drop Chests, none had dropped.

Sadly, as far as Jeska was concerned, they had acquired multiple Class Orbs for each of the other Classes – Rosara even had 4 Support Class Orbs Tier 1 that she had picked up – but not a single Mage was to be found.  The same thing was happening with the other groups; they had acquired all but one of the Classes, but it wasn’t the Mage Class that they didn’t have – it was one of the others.

The problem was that they hadn’t discovered how to give an Orb that someone had picked up to someone else.  Despite trying multiple ways to open up each person’s Inventory and exchange them that way, or even thinking about giving them away, nothing worked; it seemed impossible.  Until they were preparing for their latest attempt at defeating the 3rd room, near the end of their 4th shift, circumstances amid which revealed the simple means of doing so.

The third room wasn’t what they had expected, because it wasn’t the same room with the glowing ceiling that Jeska, Arcen, and Rosara had seen when they visited the dungeon before they were even Heroes.  Instead of the hallway going straight ahead after the second room, it made a 90-degree turn so that it led off to the left quite a way, until it opened up in a large room that was quite dark in comparison to everywhere else.

They had soon found out that this was where the Debuff-causing Spider from the original second room had gone.  Fortunately, the Explosive Shambler – which had caused so much death all by itself – wasn’t there; unfortunately, the Cave Spider had brought some scary friends.

Cloth hung from the ceiling again, and spiderwebs cluttered up the edges of the room, but there were other things this time. There were only 2 torches in the entire room, one near the entrance and one near where she assumed the exit was, leaving the rest of the room in darkness. In that darkness, they had come to find out, were small depressions in the floor that were seemingly randomly placed – and virtually impossible to distinguish.  One misstep, and a Hero’s foot would fall inside, above the knee.  Many a broken ankle or wrenched knee resulted from these pits of despair, albeit that they weren’t deep enough to kill anyone.

There were also pools of slimy, unidentifiable goop lying on the ground, which was simultaneously disgusting, slippery, and distracting.  All of which contributed to the difficulty in determining what was safe and what was dangerous – because