An arc of hellfire slashed apart every golem in the room at once, the walking piles of rock hitting the ground with a sound like an avalanche.

  A brief flicker of activation, barely thirty mana used, and the room was cleared.

  Derek grinned. How did the saying go again?

  Oh, right, “necessity is the mother of innovation.”

  Hellfire was expensive as hell, and over time, he’d gotten absurdly efficient with it. At this point, the question wasn’t if he’d be able to beat the whole place based on his standard mana pool alone, no need to wait for it to regenerate.

  Hell, he could even switch it up.

  The next room, he instead handled with a swarm of flaming needles, conjured and directed in less than a second to tear apart everything in the room in an instant.

  With most other kinds of magic, that would have been wasteful … but hellfire gobbled up the mana anyway, so he might as well spend it all, as long as enough ended up on the enemy to put them down.

  Oh, and he now had enough XP to Level once, so he did that, earning himself 10 Stat and 3 [Skill] points, leaving him with ten of the former to play around, and meaning he was only at negative 3 on the latter.

  He threw the Stat points into Magic Power once again, which he planned on doing until he’d spent at least fifty, which should leave him with plenty of mana to play around with, regardless of what he wound up doing with it.

  And then he marched into the next room, carving up the creatures within using one more spell, tearing its inhabitabnts to pieces.

  That done, Derek marched back out of the Noob Caverns with a broad grin on his face.

  It had been the first dungeon he’d run, the place he’d tested his advancements, and now the site of his first gained levels.

  Well, actually, it hadn’t been the same Noob Caverns he’d visited all those years ago, that had grown too powerful to fulfill its purpose as the starter dungeon, but a place of the same name and purpose, in the exact same location.

  But for all practical intents and purposes, it was the same place, so he’d gone there.

  He liked that sort of thing, but part of him also wanted to once again compare and contrast the abilities he had now against what he’d had back then. Though it had also not been the least bit challenging, with him having taken longer to walk through it than actually fight the monsters.

  Still, that had been eminently predictable, which was why he’d booked himself several more dungeons, specifically designed in an ascending order of difficulty, so he’d hopefully be able to bring himself up to potentially even Level 10, and buy all the [Skills] he could.

  He had, in fact, looked over the list of options, but it had turned out that, just like he’d predicted, the true power of a study-oriented [Class] lay in, drumroll please, studying, which he neither needed nor could use in a combat scenario, not directly at least.

  A broad grin still affixed on his face, Derek marched his ass over tothe next Dungeon, while sending off a few more celebratory text messages.

  ***

  The second dungeon he headed into was of a far nastier persuasion, containing a collection of basic undead which, despite looking like reanimated human corpses, were still only creations of the dungeon itself, the same way the summoning portion of the [System] called them into being normally.

  It was also a “regular” dungeon, meaning it hadn’t been designed by and built for the academy, but rather had been created by someone who wanted to level in a specific kind of place and then handed over the Hunter’s Guild to manage.

  Which also meant that it wasn’t run all that often, to the point where there used to be the need for some poor schmuck to constantly stand outside the door, connected to the delvers to supervise and make sure the dungeon in question hadn’t mutated into a nasty cheating maneater who pulled stunts like sealing entrances.

  This connection would typically be maintained via a party, something anyone with the right [Skill] could set up, allowing for telepathic communication, as well as the creation of waypoints that could be used to coordinate in a fight, though in this situation, it had only really been used to send out alerts had it become necessary.

  Nowadays, though, there were spells for that, grand enchantments anchored to Seoul itself, which detected deviant dungeons well before they became an actual problem.

  Precisely none of which could actually help him in the dungeon itself.

  Derek walked up to the door of the place “chateau des morts,” and held up his phone against the scanner, using the app he’d used to sign up for this time slot to prove that not only was he the one who was supposed to be here at right that moment, but he was also an adult.

  Granted, a Level 2 adult, but an adult nevertheless. There were always stories about idiot kids trying to earn themselves something good by pulling stupid stunts, but there was a world of difference between doing something stupid with supervision and coming within a hair’s breadth of inadvertantly comitting suicide for uncertain gains.

  Still, the electronic lock beeped, and Derek slipped inside, closing the door behind him and then giving in an experimental push, just to make sure it had, in fact, locked. Even if ninety-nine percent of humanity would be in absolutely no danger from anything in here, he would still feel really bad if any member of the remaining one percent, children, for the most part, somehow wound up wandering in.

  He crossed the entry room in a matter of seconds, drawing his rapier and doing his best to mentally prepare himself for combat.

  A zombie lunged out of the dim twilight of the next room, yellowed teeth amidst moist and putrescent skin, a nauseating sight as it growled and tried to make a grab for his throat, only for him to stab it through the head.

  Or at least he tried.

  Because even though the rapier struck it squarely in the eye, it hit bone and stopped dead, even as the creature continued to advance, trying to push its way past the weapon, yet where a living creature would have known to get itself off the blade, hell, just plain run, the undead seemed determined to win using its current “plan.”

  Derek shifted his stance, bracing himself against the hilt of his chosen implement of war, its tip pushing against the inside of the creature’s eyesocket while he tried to think of a good follow-up… and then the universe took the choice away from him.

  With an ugly crunch, bone gave away underneath the monster’s strength, his weapon punching through and sinking into the rotten morass his opponent had for a brain.

  Instantly, it fell like a puppet with its strings cut, and Derek leapt backwards to avoid its corpse while jerking his rapier back.

  One down, an entire goddamn horde to go. An entire horde of walking, well, shambling bags of XP.

  Heh.

  Derek took another step into the next room, already facing towards where he’d heard another creature creep forward, a second zombie, though this one fell in an instant as his rapier cleanly speared it through the eye.

  Now, why had that worked? He’d hit harder, but had he hit harder enough to break through, or had the change in angle been what had done the trick?

  A clatter from his left made him whirl around, seeing a skeleton lunge at him, bony fingers menacingly pointy … Derek spun, seized it around the wrist and kept turning, yanking it off its feet and sending it flying off into the nearest wall.

  After all, despite the fact that the damn thing shared a living human’s strength and durability and could only be stopped by the destruction of its skull, it also weighed a mere eight or so kilogrammes, something even an entirely normal and unenhanced human would have been able to sling around with relative ease.

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  At a little over twice that strength … the creature came apart as it hit the wall, and he stomped down on its skull, earning himself ten XP and a near-fall as it crumbled oddly, though he managed to catch himself before we went sprawling.

  That was when three creatures got within range at once: two skeletons and a zombie.

  Derek began to retreat, trying to circle around the group without risking pulling any more enemies … then decided it wasn’t going to work and instead threw himself forward at them.

  He couldn’t kill anyone before the others jumped him, so he didn’t even try, bodychecking the leftmost skeleton, then spun into a roundhouse kick even as the first one clattered across the ground to send the second down, then leaped back to avoid the grasping hands of the mouldering corpse.

  Was it weird that his biggest worry at the moment was that disgusting filth touching him? Actually, that was pretty normal but also something he’d definitely have to work on if he was going to keep on doing this … and he didn’t have the time to go for the same killing blow he’d used on the previous zombies.

  But he knew that zombies had a weakness. Whereas skeletons were animated entirely by magic, only the actual destruction of a limb rendering it useless, zombies still used their muscles; as such, they could be far more readily crippled.

  As he backpedaled, Derek whipped out his kabar and drew it across the zombie’s forearm, slicing muscles and ligaments, causing the limb to start drooping, buying him a little breathing room.

  So he swiped with the blade again, then kicked down a closing skeleton again, though before he could pounce on it, the other one was on him, forcing him to throw himself to the side to avoid the creature.

  Though that hardly put it in a position to capitalize on his position, he swept its legs out from under it as he rose, then football-kicked its skull of its spine, and the bones clattered across the ground.

  Shit, there went his stable footing. And there was the damn zombie, back for more.

  Yet it couldn’t get its arms up properly, and now that it was this bloody close, it was too close … for its own survival.

  There were only so many places on the human head one could reach the brain through with the weapons he had. The back of the eyesocket was one such place, and at the base of the skull was another potential target, albeit one that was functionally impossible to target under the current circumstances.

  And then there was the temple, an incredibly thin portion of the skull, with massive blood vessels right underneath it that made it even more vulnerable on a living human.

  On a dead one? Still a viable place to ram his kabar through.

  He released the hilt of his weapon as the zombie fell, before it could rip the blade free of his grasp, allowing him to easily jump into the task of killing the final skeleton.

  A grab to the wrist let him pull it off balance, a kick to the legs threw it completely off balance, and he let go to see it fall upon the ground once again, letting him crush its skull with a single, brutal, stomp.

  Then, Derek retrieved his kabar, and a brief burst of black fire immolated the undescribably disgusting liquid coating it before he returned it to its sheath.

  A brief check of his XP bar revealed that he could level once more, so he did that and increased his Magic Power.

  More mana to play around with once he was out of here, more mana to burn his enemies to the ground if he felt the need to use it.

  That done, he marched deeper into the dungeon and carved a bloodless path through the undead, though blood was just about the only bodily fluid he didn’t wind up spilling.

  The deeper he went, the denser the enemies were clustered, but even as that happened, Derek found himself figuring out more and more exploitable weaknesses.

  Kicking the knees out on the skeletons kept them on the ground longer, and it was also possible to get the zombies blunder into the path of skeletons, especially if he retreated towards the corridor that led into a given room, and took them one at a time.

  In the end, he wound up hitting Level six before he ran into the first door since the entrance.

  If the guide he’d read was up to date, the room behind it would contain the boss, a Ghoul, which, while comparatively more dangerous than the zombies and skeletons he’d been fighting thus far, was still just a regular monster from the standard summoning table. Stronger, faster, tougher, and with vicious claws to boot … but not a threat to someone appropriately leveled.

  Which did put him into a small pickle: he’d been spending all his Stat points to bump up Magic Power to the Level needed for training the skills he’d need to head off-planet, but that also meant he hadn’t increased his physical Stats any, the very same Stats he should have been increasing if he wanted to fight the Ghoul hand-to-hand. In fact, the only points that hadn’t gone into Magic Power were ten points he’d chucked into Magic Regeneration.

  But he’d proven pretty conclusively to himself that simply chucking hellfire at the problem trivialized it as his current Level, and that went double for the mayhem he could unleash with his expanded reserves.

  So, purely for the hell of it, Derek decided to take the route of excessively flamboyant overkill as he kicked open the door and stepped into the boss’s room.

  Hellfire flared above his hand and shot off as two packets, one hitting the floor below and the other the ceiling above the boss monster, splashing across the stone and forming into half a dozen runes, each of which seared themselves into the rock before burning out, and then lit up in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that they were currently traced in lava.

  Lightning arced between the arrays, energy leaping up and down in an incandescent curtain that reduced the dungeon boss to ash in a matter of seconds.

  And that was that. Derek chuckled.

  Wasteful? Yeah. But definitely worth it.

  Behind the Ghoul, a treasure chest popped open and sent fifty-thousand Won notes spiraling into the air by the hundreds, making Derek curse.

  The money was “harmless” in the sense that it didn’t pose any real threat to him, but the concept of dungeons handing out monetary rewards as loot was a very real danger to the economy as a whole, which meant that he was (legally) required to report that, and from there, things wouldn’t move quickly.

  Well, if his sisters were to be believed, modern bureaucracy moved at the speed of light compared to the way it used to be … but he still wasn’t looking forward to being forced to hang out outside the doors for fifteen minutes for no good reason.

  ***

  After the bureaucratic crap was over and done with, Derek went looking for and found a conveniently-located 7/11 for a quick snack while he looked over his gains.

  For he found himself able to level yet again, bringing him up to seven, though this time, he chose to split the Stat points between Perception, bringing it up to 20, and Agility, which then wound up at 25.

  Three more Levels until he hit the cap for the starter [Class].

  That would be … some quick, back-of-the-napkin math … let’s see, Level you were trying to get at times a hundred …

  … that’d be 2,700 XP. Shit.

  Derek cursed internally. That was more than he’d spent so far, a bit too much to grab in a single go into any dungeon of reasonable difficulty.

  But he could take a bite out of it.

  Especially as the next dungeon he’d lined up was fire-themed, which he’d grabbed purely for easy XP at the end of the day.

  Let’s be realistic here, nothing I could realistically do in a fight like this would get me a legendary 1st Evolution, he thought.

  Also, he was a bit too fried to take another crack at something as dangerous as the undead dungeon.

  Besides, a quick check of [Skills] revealed there weren’t any that would directly help him in combat, so simply buying some with his current stash of [Skill] Points would do little to change the calculation.

  Derek quickly headed towards the next dungeon, the Infernal Caverns, which were neither demonic nor a “cavern,” instead being a tight series of tunnels that were almost impossible without constantly catching fireballs to the face.

  Fireballs that were sufficiently weaker than hellfire that he’d be able to mostly ignore them, where most others would be forced to march through, cowering behind a heavily enchanted towershield or its magical equivalent.

  In other words, for most people, it had to be utterly miserable, though Derek suspected that was entirely the point. Someone with abilities very similar to his own had likely built it as their own “private” farming ground, then handed it over to the association to manage, fully aware of the fact that almost no one would be willing to fight through it, and the few who did try would only block off a handful of timeslots, leaving plenty available for whoever had made it.

  So he scanned his phone once again, hauled open the door, and marched inside.

  The first few creatures were Forge Hazards, elemenals aligned with both metal and flame, floating clouds of burning embers surrounding one larger ember, which acted as the core.

  Now, the clouds weren’t so large as to render striking their heart with a sword of average length impossible to do safely, but considering that they’d be actively trying to light you on fire in the process, they were among the nastiest “weak” enemies on the summoning table.

  On the other hand, even if Derek had been without any other advantages, this was the exact sort of thing his rapier excelled at.

  So he tore his way through the first cluster of enemies; it took a matter of seconds for him to take them all down … and then spent around three times that shaking the embers out of his sleeves. They didn’t hurt, but by God, did those things itch.

  After that, there were the Slag Slugs, which were exactly what they sounded like, creatures made from partially solidified waste produced in forges and foundries, radiating a lot of heat but not actually capable of inflicting too much damage as long as one didn’t step on them.

  Of course, that was exactly what Derek wound up doing, figuring that stomping their cores into gravel was less likely to damage his weapons than trying to stab them.

  And things kept going on like that, with various kinds of flaming beasties falling to his weapons. Without fire being an issue, all the tight corridors did was force them to come straight at him and impale themselves upon his weapons, until he eventually reached the end.

  The dungeon’s boss, a Flowing Flame, at Tier 4 should have been entirely beyond his reach, but unlike its minions, it was almost entirely comprised of actual fire, leaving it rather lacking in the “physical impact” department.

  Yet another piece of evidence supporting his “private dungeon but not really” idea.

  Derek began to push open the door to its room, but before he’d gotten it more than a few centimeters open, something surged out of it, a bright orange tongue of flame slamming into his chest and sending him sprawling, though he managed to roll back onto his feet and look over to where the creature was bunching up again, a tall, shapeless figure nearly a meter taller than he was coalescing up against the far wall, and while it was entirely devoid of features, he got the distinct feeling it was glaring at him.

  And then it lunged at him once again, flowing around him, wrapping him in its fiery embrace, too quick for him to react, too ephemeral to actually restrain him.

  Shit, that thing was fast.

  But also, to him at least, harmless.

  Now, where the actual fuck was its core …

  Ten minutes later, Derek stumbled out of the dungeon, looking like he’d just picked a fight with a living whirlwind.

  Though he had won.

  And learned three things.

  Firstly, taking advantage of good matchups was incredibly profitable if one wasn’t looking to prove one’s competency in the eyes of the [System].

  Secondly, being immune to damage was only a relatively small part of a matchup.

  And thirdly, monsters got powerful at the higher summoning Tiers.

  At the end of the day, that information was almost more valuable than the XP. No, actually, definitely more valuable, because at lower Levels, XP came cheap.

  Then, he leveled up.

  To Level 9.

  Almost had it.