We watched them for a couple minutes, trying to get a feel for their capabilities. They were long, each was easily ten feet and six feet wide. Short and stubby was a good way to describe them. They moved like inchworms, lifting the middle parts of their bodies and just kind of pushing themselves along. Their mouths, which were basically the entire front of the things, were filled with rows and rows of teeth. Lots of sharp looking teeth.

  They just opened their mouths and chewed on the stone. We couldn’t tell if they were digging tunnels or trying to get at some minerals in the walls. Either way, it was pretty crazy. The mouths would just suction onto the rock and then the teeth went to town. We could hear a strange grating noise, like the teeth were rotating and digging into the rock.

  “That’s just weird,” I said.

  “Yep.” Sunie agreed. “How do we want to kill them?”

  They didn’t look like they had an exoskeleton, carapace or anything like that. The skin looked pretty tough though. It was scratched and pitted, probably from digging through the tunnels. I glanced back at the tunnel, studying the smooth sides.

  “Why do I get the feeling that those,” I said, pointing at the Crawlers. “Didn’t make that,” I finished, pointing at the tunnel.

  “Too smooth,” Sunie said. “They’d need acid or something along their bodies to smooth it out. Unless there’s some hidden trick, those things don’t have it.”

  “So just big worms with super rock boring teeth?”

  “Yep.”

  “I say we go with my favorite strategy,” I said, stepping out of the tunnel into the next cavern.

  “Punch things until they stop moving?”

  “Yep.”

  The first Crawler turned toward me. I figured it worked off vibrations or sound. The thing had no eyes. It was basically just a creepy flesh tube with a mouth. It was slow in turning, which made sense. The body wasn’t built for it.

  I slid across the cavern floor, which was surprisingly smooth, and punched the Crawler right in the side. The body was a weird mix of hard but malleable, which kind of made sense with the way it moved. The hard part shattered under my punch, pieces falling down to the ground, exposing pink flesh underneath. The body spasmed, kind of squirming and shaking. I punched it again, exposing more pink flesh.

  The body warped, the side slamming into me. But I didn’t move, locking myself into place. The kinetic field absorbed the impact and I redirected it back at the Crawler. More pieces fell to the ground but the thing didn’t appear to be that hurt.

  Its head turned to me. I looked into a nightmare. Rows of teeth and what looked like a bottomless pit. Just a flesh lined tube into nothing. Where did all the rock this thing ate go? The problem with a head that was all mouth, was that there was nowhere for me to punch.

  I reached out with my Motion Essence, stealing all the inertia and kinetic energy from the Crawler. It came to a complete stop, allowing me to move around to the other side and keep punching.

  A couple more and the thing fell still. It hadn’t appeared to be hurting but it could only take so many Force-applied punches with its own kinetic energy added.

  YOU HAVE SLAIN COPPER CRAWLER. YOU HAVE GAINED +30 MULTIVERSAL CREDITS AND +30 TUTORIAL POINTS.

  The body disappeared, leaving the lovely loot behind. I noticed the floor of the cavern was covered in hundreds of weird little holes. They seemed to form a path from the entrance tunnel to the exit, almost the same width.

  YOU HAVE GAINED +10 CRAWLER TEETH, +2 COPPER ORE AND +1 DESTRUCTION ESSENCE

  “Whoa, this thing dropped a Destruction Essence.”

  “Seriously? That’s rare,” Sunie said, walking over. “Mine dropped nothing good. Lots of teeth, I supposed a crafter will find some use out of those. Might make a decent sword with a cutting enchantment.”

  “That could be cool,” I said, holding up the Essence. “Know anyone that needs one?”

  “Nope,” Sunie said. “I’m sure there’s someone in the Formation. You?”

  “I don’t think so. The Fellowship did just gain a couple thousand new members from another Clan joining us. Maybe they need it?” I shrugged, making the thing disappear in my inventory. We’d figure it out later. “Have you ever seen anyone with a Destruction Essence?”

  “No.”

  “I did. Once. He touched a door and just made it shatter. The whole thing fell apart, just by touching. It was wild.”

  “Has to be hard to Advance. The Essence drop is rare.”

  “Yeah, the guy is only mid-70s from what I’ve heard.”

  “From a friendly Clan?” Sunie asked, as we made our way toward the next tunnel.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  It was the same as the first, round and smooth.

  “Yeah. If we don’t know anyone that needs it, I’ll sell it to Fred’s Clan.”

  Sunie nodded, not really caring.

  We entered the next cavern and saw three Crawlers this time. Sunie used his freeze to hold one still and we went to work on the other two. Didn’t take long to kill them. More teeth but no Essence. The difference was that in this cavern we also found some crystals.

  They were in the walls where the Crawlers had been chewing, glowing a fiery orange color. They had a copper ore color when we got close, a bright light like fire coming from within. There were multiple nodes, each having three large multi-faceted protrusions and a couple of smaller ones. One node even looked like it had been chewed. I pointed that out to Sunie.

  “So we need to kill the Crawlers before they eat the crystals we need for the quest,” he said with a sigh. “I hate these kinds of Dungeons.”

  “We better hurry up then.”

  I pulled a pickaxe out of my inventory, holding it out to him. With a sigh, Sunie took the tool. He moved over to one of the nodes. I started picking at the node in front of me. It didn’t take long and a couple pieces of crystal fell to the ground. I picked them up, getting the Notification.

  YOU HAVE GAINED +3 EMBER COPPER CRYSTALS

  They felt more like ore than crystals, even though they looked like crystals. I put them in the inventory and moved on to the next node.

  The problem with grouping up is that you needed that much more of a Resource. I had gotten three, but it didn’t count as three for both of us. Just three. So we had to either combine what we got or each harvest our own. It wasn’t a great system, just making Resource gathering more of a challenge.

  The whole thing was called the Celestial Challenge System for a reason.

  We gathered all the crystals in that cavern, five in total, and walked down the next round tunnel to the next cavern. Rinse and repeat.

  The two of us made our way through five caverns just like the first, all in a line. It was a pretty boring Dungeon and not much of a challenge. For us anyways, but I could see it being harder for a full group or a lower powered one.

  The caverns weren’t that big and the Crawlers took up a lot of space. That made it hard to set the battlefield. Normally most groups went in a V formation, with the tank at the tip and the ranged at the end. The melee DPS would be in the middle and step out once the tank had aggro, flanking the beast. Having the ranged controller not directly in line with the tank allowed them to see the whole battlefield and control any other monsters.

  That wouldn’t work in these tight caverns with the big Crawlers taking up almost the whole space. A good group would have tactics to deal with that, but it would still be difficult for them. I could picture how Tracy and her team would handle it. I probably should have been writing all this down for when they got here.

  I made a note to start doing that.

  There were guides to buy, but why bother when I could make a run and then tell them what to watch for? Of course, they’d be on their own in the larger Dungeons that required a five member party. Or they would until we find a third, maybe a fourth, person to join us and started hitting the five member Dungeons.

  We were doing pretty good on the quests relative to the timer.

  7:03:23

  OBJECTIVES:

  DESTROY THE IRONBACK CRAWLER 0/1

  DESTROY COPPER CRAWLERS 19/30

  FIND EMBER COPPER CRYSTALS 27/50

  Rounded tunnel into a cavern full of Crawlers. Some had four and six nodes, others had three and five nodes. In some caverns, we didn’t kill the Crawlers in time and they ate the nodes. From the quest numbers, we were a little over halfway to the end and seven hours to spare.

  I was getting bored. This was a very repetitive Dungeon. The first part, with the pillars, had been interesting. Easy, but still interesting. This Crawler cavern after Crawler cavern was boring.

  The next Crawler caverns went quick. We had a system down after the first bunch, so were able to zoom through the last before the boss.

  Lots of teeth, lots of crystals and even got another Destruction Essence. One for me, one for Sunie. I wondered how much Fred would pay me for the Essence. Had he run through this Dungeon yet? Hopefully not. If his group ran it, they probably got a couple Essences and wouldn’t need mine as much.

  Maybe I could use the Destruction Essence?

  How would that pair with what I already had? That would take some thought. Being able to just shatter things, break them apart, could be cool. The Essence was very Arcanum heavy though. All Essence Abilities require Arcanum to power them and that Arcanum came from our Cores. It was really in the world all around us; Earth, the Crossroads, the Infinite Tower. Everywhere. When the System came, it Awakened our Cores and allowed us to channel the Arcanum generated naturally by the world into those Cores and then into our Abilities. The stronger we got, the more the Cores grew and the more Arcanum we could collect and hold.

  Most Essence Abilities used a lot of Arcanum. Mine were pretty efficient and low cost, but did take some Arcanum to maintain. I could probably afford to take on a burst Ability, what Adventurers called any Ability that used a high amount of Arcanum at once. Because of what it usually did, the Destruction Essence was burst with a high Arcanum drain.

  That might not be a problem for me with how efficient everything else I did was.

  It took another couple hours to get all the Crawlers and enough crystals for both of us. Ended up with far more dead Crawlers but it worked out. We entered the final rounded tunnel, heading for what we hoped was the last cavern in this annoying Dungeon.