My Dungeon Life – Chapter 1454-1456

Chapter 1454

“I’ve been meaning to ask, what ultimately gets more cred. Should I struggle with the fights, only barely surviving each time, or should I defeat them overwhelmingly?” I asked Bernice after the first fight was over.

“Usually, I would recommend that you not try to put on a show. There is a risk you could lose a fight that way, and you never want to take that chance…” Bernice declared. “Furthermore, as people start to realize you’re holding back, some will come to resent that you acted so deceitful, especially those who lost money betting against you.”

“I see, so I should probably just end the fights swiftly…”

“On the other hand, if you act too overbearing, many will begin to eagerly want to see you put in your place. No one will be able to make money betting for you, so, you’ll unanimously be bet against. Every victory would only be a slap in the face to those who lost money. Furthermore, you’ll lead to contestants acting more desperately to defeat you, wanting to earn the cred for bringing you down. Universally, you might end up being hated…”

“What are you saying then?”

“I think if you want to get through this, you’re going to need to not act weak, but not defeat them quickly either.”

“…”

“Look, you’re the one who asked!”

“Alright, alright!” I held up my hands.

“Oh, we have someone coming back for seconds!” The voice announcer shouted. “Deacon the Dragon is returning for another fight. I guess we’ll get to see him seriously perform this time. He’ll go against Faradex Kong!”

“What is with these names?” I muttered to myself as I returned onto the stage.

The man across from me was rather slim and small compared to me. I had the feeling he was the type who focused on speed.

“Ah, what’s my going rate?” I asked the referee.

“One to one point two.”

“Two to one! Is that a bit excessive?”

I was one to two before, but it had seemingly flipped. That meant for every two coins bet, you’d only win one. Of course, they still took away 20%, so really it was for every five coins, someone would win two.

He shrugged. “The way you handled the last guy, plus this one is smaller and unarmed.”

I let out a sigh as I stepped over the ropes. I had truly lost out on my chance to make a profit. I still had her bid though. Hopefully, if I acted less overbearing in the future, I might have a few more opportunities to make a better profit.

When the man saw me, he gave a polite bow. “Good evening. I apologize, but I will destroy you now.”

“Eh?”

“Go!”

The man threw down something that erupted, creating a cloud of smoke. I saw a glimmer above me to realize he had jumped up and was coming down with a kick. I just barely managed to catch his leg, and since he was still falling through, I carried it, slamming him into the floor with a boom. I immediately let go.

“Oops, sorry!”

He didn’t get back up. In a single attack, the match was decided. The crowd was silent.

Chapter 1455

“You’re defeating the opponents so quickly that no one can even react!” Bernice chastised. “That’s the exact opposite of what I told you to do!”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to! He just caught me off guard and I reacted in kind.”

I was starting to remember that I wasn’t a gladiator, I wasn’t a competitor, and I wasn’t a fighter. I wasn’t even a warrior or a soldier. I was a dungeon diver. It was do or die. Even a soldier could be resurrected, but when you were in that dungeon, it was your life or there’s. There was no such thing as throwing a punch, and there was no such attack that aimed to do anything less but incapacitate or kill your opponent. Even when I was taming monsters, the attacks I was using on them were near lethal. Of course, once they submitted, I could always heal them, but that didn’t mean I slouched at all.

It looked like I was going to have to learn how to ease up. I had practiced these kinds of skills in the past, but all it took was being stuck in a life and death situation, and I started developing those bad habits once again.  I began to realize that this was a pretty good means of practice. Of course, my winnings continued to shrink as I blew through the bottom ring of the underworld, but by the time I beat the fifth and final guy, sometime early in the morning and just before the sunrise, I was able to last five moves before pummeling him into the ground.

As I collected my winnings, a combination of the bets I made and my victories, a man dressed in some fancy-looking suit came out and stopped me at the exit.

“You will be coming back tomorrow?” He asked.

“Is that alright?”

“Hehe… what stamina young ones have these days. I look forward to it. We use metals to order our people. We have Iron, Copper, Steel, Silver, Gold, and Diamond matches. You’ll be fighting in the Copper matches tomorrow. I have a mind to move you straight to Silver, but rules are rules.”

I gave a nod. “I look forward to it.”

He gave a cold smile and then turned away. It wasn’t until I got outside that Bernice grabbed my arm and pulled me close to her.

“This isn’t good!”

“Huh? What?”

“You’ve gotten the notice of the underworld’s kingpin.”

“So?”

“It’s usually not a good thing. If he’s noticing you, then there is probably something he wants, and it’s only going to create trouble.”

“You do realize that I’m an Earl, right? We control this city.”

“You don’t realize just how much trouble he can cause for you! Chalm doesn’t have an underworld, but this city exists on layers, and the foundation of those layers is the criminal underbelly. He probably has half the guards in this city on his payroll, and just about every successful merchant owes him a favor or two.”

“That sounds really troublesome.” I frowned. “However, it doesn’t sound like there is much I can do about it. For the time being, we’ll just have to continue as we are.”

It was just one more problem I’d have to hold in the back of my mind.

Chapter 1456

The next day went about smoothly. I did my best to prepare the army. There was actually very little I could do. Everyone already had their jobs and was going about it. It seemed like working on my combat ability was the best thing I could do. I didn’t want to put myself in a dungeon where some random event could happen and I end up stuck there for a month, so my best bet was to continue to use the underground fighting to help develop my combat ability.

Rather than working on pure strength, I started trying to unequip jobs and make use of the skills without having access to the lore. Although few books in Aberis understood the lore as deeply as I did, I had come to have a confident understanding of just how the job system worked. Jobs were essentially redundant lore that attached themselves to the souls of people who were moving down a certain path. As they grew more experienced, they grew closer to the lore, deriving more benefits as they level. These benefits came in the form of status increases, skills, and bonuses.

Once reaching enough understanding, these fragments of lore could in turn attract new fragments of lore, which is often what I understood as second-tier lore and on. Equipped lore was lore that you pushed closest to your soul, allowing you to read it directly, while unequipped lore was nearby and accessible, but too distant for you to read it. It was sort of like the difference between having the memory in ram and having the memory in the hard drive. You could store a lot of memory in hard drives, but any memory you wanted readily available required the use of the ram. In that respect, 2nd and third jobs were like getting an extra ram slot.

That exhausted all I knew about computers. I had a cousin who was somewhat skilled with them and tried to show me how to build them, however, that felt like an eternity ago. Anyway, that analogy failed, because by repeating skills endlessly, I could make them a part of my lore permanently, and then I could use the skills even when the job wasn’t equipped. This was ultimately my goal over the next week. Since I had to fight people back-to-back who were inferior to me, I chose to handicap myself in this manner, trying out and practicing different methods of fighting. I wouldn’t say my levels went up particularly quickly during this period, but I did feel my comprehension did.

I had read about a condition called experience exhaustion. It was a point a lot of dungeon divers and adventurers, the type who tended to level rapidly would experience where the higher they leveled, the smaller their experience would become. Of course, when your experience increased, the obvious option was to fight more difficult enemies, but you eventually reached a point where the enemies outstripped your ability to defeat them. Thus, fighting the top enemies you could handle, you earned piddling experience and your leveling stalled.

I had mostly avoided that by having experience multipliers that overwhelmed such an ability. Adding my body and soul upgrades, I had managed to level steadily without issue. However, at some point, my leveling might stall, and that came when my levels exceeded my comprehension. No matter how powerful someone was, if they didn’t understand how to use that strength, they could only fight weaker enemies that didn’t help them gain any experience. Of course, I even had a cheat here too. Advanced Learning allowed me to accelerate my comprehension, so even after a few days, I had a much better handle on my levels. I felt like I wouldn’t bottleneck in the near future.

Not only did I defeat the enemies one after another, but my ranks steadily rose as well. I was on my third day, having reached the Silver Rank when my next opponent surprised me.

“Deacon the Dragon versus Queen Lionness!”