"You have cleared floor 2"
"Experience gained"
"Your magic level has gone from 16 to 18"
"Stat points available"
Well this was new, he thought as he looked at the system windows and popped his shoulder back into place. He received two levels at once, this really was meant for a team so he guessed he was getting extra experience. He did wonder if this place was easy or if he was strong for his level, because that would determine what kind of challenge he was willing to face. Maybe he was strong enough to take on higher level monsters than himself, or maybe this dungeon was like a beginner's type place and he wasn't really that strong. He had no one to compare himself to yet, so he would make choices under the assumption that he was weak so that he was covered when everyone else joined him in this new world.
He added in his new stat points to intellect, wisdom and resistance, putting all 3 stats over 10, and each one generated a system window.
"Your Intellect stat has reached 10"
"Minor threshold reached, each point in Intellect is now worth slightly more."
"Your Wisdom stat has reached 10"
"Minor threshold reached, each point in Intellect is now worth slightly more."
"Your Resistance stat has reached 10"
"Minor threshold reached, each point in Resistance is now worth slightly more."
The effect was not immediate but over the next minute, he felt the magic in his body gain density and like he could hold more of it. His body slowly started feeling sturdier and heavier, his bones creaked as they became more solid and his skin and muscles grew tight, feeling tougher and harder at first then going back to feeling like normal skin. But the biggest change for him was his magic sense, before it always felt like he was reaching, but now things just felt magically present. Everything was just present in his senses without a struggle or focus, he still had to focus hard to get details but his sense was sort of always on now instead of being something he had to choose to turn on and focus on.
He wanted to be sure his body and magic were done changing before he even stood up so instead he laid down from his sitting position and just thought about what he used to think about before all this, the psychology, philosophy and physics of power. He put his hand in front of his face and opened and closed it, everything was different now, individual power meant a lot more than it used to. In the old world, a single person could only have so much power, they would need resources and politics or religion to lead people and have more power than they could hold on their own. This new world would see powerful people rise up the levels and be able to control large areas and populations with just what they can do personally. Not needed to motivate or keep followers happy, this could lead things down a crazy road of cruelty and authoritarianism. He needed to get stronger so that he could stop those who would use their personal power to abuse those without power.
Eli's body was now settled and he stood and moved back to the safe room on this floor to do it over again, he wanted to be a higher level before the final floor. Also, he wanted to know how much stronger those boosts to his stats would end up being. He was stronger, his magic was heavier and did more damage with the same amount. He also had more to play with and it refilled faster, but the biggest combat difference was his resistance, he was harder to hit and even the croak attack from these monsters was diminished enough that he could brush it off and sprint through it on the smaller ones. They all fell just as easily as before as he got used to his heavier body and its new toughness.
Fighting the boss at the end was easier than before due to his increased weight and endurance, when he grabbed the tongue before it retracted it had a harder time pulling him and it didn't hurt his shoulder. It took another 7 clears of this floor to get to where he was high enough level to get all stats to 10, and he hoped that this would be enough strength to clear floor 3.
"Magic level 21"
"Stats: Strength 10, Reaction 10, Vitality 10, Intellect 10, Wisdom 10, Resistance 10, Will 56"
After putting those points in to get everything to ten, he again had to sit still while it slowly took effect. His muscles tightened and released feeling stronger and quicker, his eyes blurred and then cleared giving him clearer sight than he has ever had. Eli's ears rang so loud it was like an ice pick being stabbed in his ear slowly in and then it settled and he could hear the sound of his breathing echoing off the walls. Lastly, his blood boiled in his veins, it felt like acid and ice getting pumped through his body for about a minute then it slowly dissipated. With all of these increases he felt like a new man, a man remade stronger, faster, and more magical than ever.
He entered the floor 3 safe room, eager to test his new strength. The room seemed to be just a pitch dark cave about 30 feet across and with no doors or tunnels, until he looked up and realized that the tunnel to move on was near the ceiling. The room was a cylinder, about 30 feet high with rough walls and ceiling and a flat, smooth ground at the bottom with another small pillar or podium in the middle. There wasn't anything else to the room except he could feel the safe rooms allowance of regeneration, magic in the air felt different than when not in a safe room. He walked a lap around the outside inspecting the walls and floor and not noticing anything except the stone used on the walls was different from the stone on the floor, however, he doubted that meant anything.
The only thing left to do was to move forward, but he was going to take this slow. He still had about a week to go in this dungeon and he was worried that it wouldn't let him start the dungeon over to try for speed runs unless he left. So on this last floor he will be nice and careful so that he doesn't die or end up at the end of the dungeon with nothing to do. The system had told him he needed to stay in the dungeon for 2 weeks, but it didn't say that he couldn't stay in longer. He had to jump to get up to the tunnel leading out of the room, it was about 20 feet off the ground and he smiled at being able to jump that far in one go. It was dark, so even with his body lighting up he couldn't see very deep into the tunnel. The stone tunnel was irregular and misshapen, looking far more like a real cave, even narrowing in a place up ahead that he wasn't even sure he could fit through.
He looked down and noticed that his body wasn't much different from before the system, his stat upgrades didn't seem to help his looks much. Luckily for him he was slim enough to fit through this narrow crack, even if it was with no room to spare. Just on the other side, Eli suddenly stopped moving mid step, he was having one of those gut feelings that something bad was close. Right after stopping he looked at the ground, his feeling was because he saw the stone floor after the narrow part of the tunnel and knew it was trapped immediately. The floor was mostly flat but with grooves like decorative lines cut into the stone, Eli has seen way too many movies to fall for this one.
Stepping to the side he moved down to his hands and knees and crawled along the floor being careful to feel for any spots that would wiggle or sink into the ground. He then put his knees where his hands had been and slowly made his way across while finding, what he thought were, several suspicious stones. He knew he shouldn't but he just had to see if he was right and he picked up a pebble and tossed it at one of the stones that he thought was trapped. Nothing happened, but then the part of the floor he hit sank into the ground an inch and water poured from the ceiling in a column and as soon as it hit the ground the whole column froze all the way up and the water stopped. Well he was right about at least one of them, although he was sure about all the ones he picked out, his perception increase allowed him to see these crude things.
The cave tunnel meandered around and eventually ended up at another open area like the safe room, but this room was different, it had a tree in it taking up a lot of space the room. Before stepping inside he looked around and found that on the other side of the room up high and like the safe room, he could barely see the exit tunnel through the tree branches. He looked at the tree more closely and about midway up he could see a furry black… something. He couldn't see what it was but he figured it was likely a cat since this tree looked right out of stories where you find a cat in a tree.
Eli stepped into the room and the furry monster rustled but did not move enough for him to see what it was. Since he thought that cats are usually speed based monsters, at least they were in his head, he focused his will on perception and cranked his senses up as high as they would go. After three steps toward the tree, the monster jumped high up into the air and latched onto the ceiling with its hind legs and opened a huge 10 foot wide pair of bat wings, then screeched a noise somewhere between a bat screech and a cat hiss. The sound hit him like a boulder and he fell to his knees, he didn't know how but this sound was pushing on him like a physical force. The pressure was not impossible to deal with though and he got to his feet and focused on his strength and jumped but only made it 10 feet up and was smashed back down.
The sound was continuous and did not show any signs of slowing down. Eli went to the tree and started climbing, and that's when he noticed the sound wave pressure did not affect the tree and that made him pause. Was this sound actually causing pressure, he thought as he examined himself closer. He hasn't taken any damage and so he stopped moving and focused on his inner magic for a second, and there it was, the sound was disrupting his internal magic and drastically lowering how effective his magic stats were. He did his best to bring his will to bear and press down on his magic to dampen its vibrations so he could use more of his power. It sort of felt like it worked to him so he pushed harder and kept climbing. Now on a high branch he locked eyes with the cat and smiled, and with one push hard on his magic to settle it and push off the branch he managed to jump up to the cat on the ceiling, but it was gone. Just as his hand and mace hit the ceiling the sound intensified and he started falling, his magic was a mass of chaotic and disorganized movement.
Being 30 feet in the air and not able to use much of his stats he felt like the fall would hurt but not much else, so he let himself fall and almost managed to land on his feet, mostly. The sound stopped and he went to his knees to think and catch his breath, he was wrong it was hurting him, just so little he didn't notice. Then, something happened that he did not expect, the tree moved. It started to fall over on him and as it got closer, the bark split and a monstrous mouth opened like it was going to eat him whole. It was much faster than a tree had any right to be but it wasn't fast to him and he rolled to the side and gave the head a big smash and it was crushed. This didn't sit right with Eli so he sat down to think, to really think about what this room was.