I released the Sonic Blast at the Crystal Spider. The air rippled as the waves of sound shot out. It struck the Spider, shattering part of the crystal hide.

  Not bad. My punches would do more damage but then I hit at over a Level 110 strength, if not more, and right now the Sonic Blast was only at Level 53.

  I really needed a better name than Sonic Blast.

  Fifty-three Essence was all we’d been able to find the last couple of days. Between the supply on Earth, what I’d gotten for loot and what we could get cheaply on the Nexus. It was enough for me to get started on training.

  The Crystal Spider was way out of the league of a normal Adventurer with a Level 53 Essence. The Spiders clocked in at around Level 75 to 80. Maybe. I wasn’t very good at figuring that stuff out, but that was why XXX had a job. He was the one that gave the beasties levels and assigned ranks to the Dungeons in all of the Solace territory. He helped the Adventuring teams figure out where the best places to Level were, where they could be challenged but not be insta-killed when they stepped inside.

  There were still some that didn’t listen. But all it took was one near TPK and they’d start listening.

  I was in a weird spot. I needed the monsters to be weak enough that I could damage them with my new lower Leveled Essence but at the same time be strong enough that my other Essence Abilities wouldn’t insta-kill them. The whole point of the training wasn’t just to raise the Sonic Essence but to figure out the best ways to use it and the best ways to incorporate it into my other Abilities.

  The Crystal Spider skittered toward me, one of its legs hanging useless from where I’d blasted it. I fought the urge to jump and land on the thing, punching it into pieces. I could have, very easily. Probably only two or three solid hits. But I was here to train.

  Another Sonic Blast struck the Spider, knocking another leg off. It wobbled a bit, trying to catch its balance. I added some Force into the next blast. The combination didn’t seem to really do anything special. Force was basically solidified air, and hit like concrete. The Sonic Blast struck as a solid wave of…well… force. So it was just a stronger hit. Would probably do some good against something with different Resistances.

  An enemy that was resistant to sonic attacks? The force might break through the resistance, allowing the sonic to land. Or the other way around.

  So the combo could be decent, maybe when they were equal strength it’d be better.

  This was the thirteenth Crystal Spider that I’d been bullying. And I did feel bad. Normally I didn’t like dragging out the fights. Kill the beasties as fast as I could. No need to play with them. I knew some Adventurers that liked toying with the arcanebeasts before killing them. Those were not people I wanted to be around.

  But I had to take my time as I was training. It was hard. The urge was to speedrun the Dungeon.

  I blasted off two more legs, making the spider fall to the ground. I’d tried shaping the Sonic Blast. It came out in a wave, which wasn’t ideal. Those last two blasts, I’d tried to concentrate it into more of a beam shape. But it was sound, and sound traveled in waves, so that was pretty hard. I just didn’t like the wave as it wasn’t that targetable and could result in friendly fire.

  I was able to get the wave down so it was only a couple of feet. By experimenting, I’d found that the wider the wave, the weaker it was. The sound spread out. By limiting it, I could concentrate the sound more, making it stronger. Still was a pain to aim.

  I put this spider out of its misery. A Force Spike to the head burst it right open. Small shards of crystal scattered everywhere, some even reaching me twenty feet away. My kinetic field absorbed their momentum, the pieces dropping to the ground. I didn’t bother collecting them. The crystal scales these things dropped were good, and Solace used them in our crystal tech, but the shards on the ground were too small. I walked over to the body, touching it to claim my loot.

  YOU HAVE SLAIN GIANT CRYSTAL SPIDER

  YOU HAVE GAINED +3 CRYSTAL SCALES, +2 CRYSTAL SPIDER EYES, +1 POISON SAC, +1 ENDURANCE ESSENCE

  I stored it all in my inventory. I was making out pretty good with the loot even outleveling the Dungeon. I’d run this Dungeon, the Crystal Caves, so many times in the Level Range. My Level range, because even back then I was challenging higher Leveled Dungeons by myself. I’d killed so many spiders.

  I hated spiders but they were everywhere.

  No Tower Points or Multiversal Credits, which I had been getting used to grabbing. It was odd to not get some kind of monetary unit from kills. When the System Integration had hit, all the typical currency around the world ceased to have any meaning. Sure some still tried to trade dollars for items, but soon enough people stopped accepting dollars. Or yen, rubles, francs, and so on. What was the point? There was no way to exchange them for anything and no value supporting them. So we used a barter system for a long time, until we could get a base currency system going.

  Now the world used coins, gold, silver and copper, which was easy to handle with the Challenge System’s inventory feature. A lot was still done by barter. Our spies told us that Subudai was starting to mint his own coins.

  Of course he was. That guy just didn’t want to work with anyone else. He wanted to control and rule it all.

  I wouldn’t let him, but that was a future issue.

  I’d killed that spider with a Force Spike, which was a variation on the Force Lance. I’d been trying to thin out the Lance, and been getting successful at it. The spike wasn’t that different from the lance, but it would be useful in some situations where the target area was smaller.

  It did give me an idea though. What if I used Force, or maybe even Kinetic energy, to shape the Sonic blast? Could I then make it targetable?

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  The next three spiders ended up being my test dummies.

  It took a bit of work, but I did manage to condense the sound wave down by wrapping it in Force. The range wasn’t great, the sound pushing against the force as it traveled, but the impact was crazy. The third spider, when I’d gotten the technique down pretty good, half its body exploded on impact. The sound just shattered the thing.

  Sound worked differently from force. Force was an impact against the top layer of whatever it struck. It was a bludgeon. Sound was more insidious. It worked its way into the structure, vibrating the structure apart. In this case the structure was the spider’s crystal carapace.

  Did spider’s have carapaces? What were their exteriors called?

  Didn’t matter. Carapace or not. It shattered pretty good.

  And it was loud.

  Before the wave hadn’t been quiet. It could be heard as it shot across the caverns. The sound echoed off the walls, but it wasn’t anything absurd. Just on the level that a lot of Abilities made when activated in an enclosed space. Outside, the sound might not even be heard. It was a whistling, like the wind blowing through the trees.

  But when it was enclosed by Force? The sound was like a cannon firing. It was a loud boom.

  And I loved it.

  Sound has a real penetrative power. The vibrations could break about a lot of stuff. Force and Kinetics were great, but they were both really blunt damage. The Force Lance was piercing but that was still somewhat limited. But sound? That I could do a lot of damage with.

  There wasn’t much left of the Crystal Spider after the first Sound Cannon. Sonic Gun? I really needed help coming up with good Ability names. I was usually pretty good at naming things. Solace was a great name, for example. Couldn’t go wrong with Solacetown.

  Jack would come up with a great name.

  I moved further into the Dungeon, nearing the boss.

  Four more regular Crystal Spiders and a dozen smaller Crystal Skitterers, basically smaller spiders, I reached the boss chamber. Stopping outside, I took a look around, re familiarizing myself with the layout. It’d been a long time since I’d grinded this Dungeon. I had made it a quick grind as it was not my favorite of the Dungeons in Solace. I hated giant spiders.

  I really hoped Sunie wasn’t planning on making the spider egg into a pet to bring on runs with us. He probably would, just to annoy me.

  The boss’s chamber was a kind of round cavern, a huge football field sized cavern. It had a basic round shape with some tumors growing off the side that were smaller chambers or just deformations in the layout. The middle was about twenty feet high, but the slope varied. One side, to my right, it was about ten feet high, but fifteen on the left. In parts, some parts got as low as seven or eight feet. A couple of growths hanging down, a couple sticking up. They formed a kind of ring around the middle, not circular. It looked like teeth to kind of trap us inside with the boss, or keep it from coming out at us, making some areas we could rest and heal.

  That was the way some Dungeons on Earth were, and I assumed the other planet’s in the multiverse, though I hadn’t checked with anyone on that yet. Maybe Stylo would know. The idea was to provide some safe zones because boss fights were supposed to be hard. Very difficult. And they typically were. They were definitely challenges but the Celestial System didn’t want to make it too challenging, so gave the leveling party some safe places.

  Of course, if they took too long to rest, the boss would just go crazy and no more rest.

  The System wanted us to challenge ourselves, not just be cannon fodder.

  Though it sounded like factions treated their people that way.

  The boss itself wasn’t just a giant spider, it was a kaiju giant spider. Twenty feet long, a dozen feet high, made completely out of crystal. The legs clinked as it moved, snapping with each bend. The light, a glowing moss along the walls and ceiling, sparkled off the carapace.

  The beast was strong. The legs could crush a body or snap it in two if struck. The mandibles would cut someone in half. There was no way to sneak up on it, the way the sound reverberated around its carapace gave it a kind of radar, maybe sonar was the better word, sense. I wasn’t sure that was technically possible but for this monster it worked.

  It could also spin webs. Crystal laced webs that were pretty damn strong.

  Its favorite tactic was to bash an opponent with a leg, then wrap it up in the webs and save it for later. It took a pretty long time to break out of the webs, and needed help.

  For an appropriate leveled group, this was a pretty hard fight.

  For me? It’d take about fifteen minutes.

  ***

  I finished it in eight. Sonics really was awesome.

  I was overpowered for the boss, and my Essences were pretty much the perfect combination to use in this kind of fight. The poor kaiju spider never stood a chance. I got some great loot and a couple Essences, but nothing I could use. I’d give it to Kat and let her distribute the stuff from the entire dungeon around to whoever needed it the most.

  There really was a difference in the strength of arcanebeast on Earth and the Infinite Tower. The difficulty really ramped up. If the kaiju spider was a tough fight for a party, they would really need to be on their A-game when they entered the tower. I knew how overpowered I was compared to most folks.

  But seeing how strong Sunie was, that told me that I wasn’t the only monster in the multiverse. And there was probably someone like me at the higher floors in the Infinite Tower. Maybe even an Anura or the Puka that Newton had belonged to.

  Which was kind of a warning for me. I couldn’t piss everyone off too much or they’d send one of those monsters after me.

  I wouldn’t stop being me, but maybe be a little more cautious. Especially once more of my people started arriving in Crossroads.

  The Dungeon was on the side of a mountain in the southwest edge of Solace. There were a lot of mountains in Solace. This one was in the middle of a range that we called New Appalachin. I hadn’t come up with that one. A decent sized town, Gibson, had grown at the base of the mountains near the outside of the range, just inside the first valley, road connecting it to the rest of Solace. From Gibson, could head into the mountains where there were at least a dozen Dungeons, lots and lots of roaming beasts, tons of Resources and a couple tribes of System spawned humanoids. Gibson had everything aspiring mountain and valley Adventurers would need. It was a bustling place.

  And it had a portal.

  Only a day from where I was.

  Taking a last look around, the entrance to the Dungeon gave a pretty nice view of a picturesque little valley filled with trees, ponds and rivers. I started the job toward Gibson and from there back to Solacetown and the Tower.