Chapter Seventy-Six - Tombstones I walked through the portal, moving from the entrance all the way down to the final boss room, where an exit portal was hovering a foot off the ground. This dungeon wasn’t that large, and frankly it wasn’t that complex. Mostly it was a straight line, with a dozen ‘rooms’ each one relatively small as far as that kind of thing went. Still, that didn’t mean that it wasn’t a valuable dungeon. There were a lot of things in here that were probably worth grabbing and reselling. The first few areas had several rows of tombstones, with text on them in a language I didn’t recognize. Then there were mausoleums further in. The amount of stonework around was actually impressive, and it was the main draw for Luna Corp with this one. When I returned from my patrol, I found Sergeant Guy already overseeing the squad bringing in lifts and pulleys and laying out these thick rubberized mats from the portal out that were pretty decent for allowing you to roll a dolly on. A few E-rankers were already ripping the first tombstones out and stacking them onto a trolley. Each one of these was probably worth a couple thousand... maybe? I was actually not sure how much a stone tombstone cost. But there were a dozen in this first room, and more further in. The mausoleums were too big to move, but they had little gargoyles at the corners that had to be worth something. And I remember once, as a member of Squad E3, coming in and tearing them all down with sledgehammers to make gravel out of the stone. A few of the E-rankers looked up as I passed, but I just nodded to them, and continued to walk. There were monster corpses all over. This dungeon only had skeletons with it, and they weren’t particularly impressive ones. Mostly humanoid-ish, all very dead. They’d be grabbed as well. There were uses for bones out there, especially portal-sourced. I think it went to making fertilizer with some amount of trace magical energy. Whatever. My job now was to see how two of the E-rankers here ended up dead. Maybe it wouldn’t happen at all now that I was around. Sergeant Guy was certainly eyeing me a lot, so maybe he’d be a little more cautious? In the meantime, spellcasting practice! I didn’t have a way except for gut feeling to know how much magical energy I had at my disposal. I knew there was cyberware that could help with that, but it was probably outside of my budget. Besides, getting used to that gut feeling was important, I figured. Right now, I’d started the day depleted. But being in a portal world, even an E-rank one, was letting me take in a fair amount of ambient energy. After a solid twenty minutes, I felt comfortable enough to cast Exhaust Senses on myself, focusing on touch. That let me get a feel for the spell, how it worked, how quick it was to cast. I was pretty sure that the carved spellform I’d picked up had some deficiencies in it. And I didn’t just mean because I wasn’t that good at carving yet. I think that with some trial and error, there might be a few small corners that could be cut to make the spell a tiny fraction more efficient. One ‘bend’ in particular felt a little weird to get over, and I was wondering if turning it into more of a curve would help. From what I could tell from talking to Terry and Dharti and the others, making a spell even one or two percent more efficient was something that a lot of casters put a lot of effort into. I could kind of get it, too. When dealing with stronger spells with higher costs, shaving off a few percentage points would be decent, and maybe learning to cast the spell a second or two faster could make the difference between life or death. If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. I was maybe two hours into my constant patrols when I heard a scream. The sound startled me out of what I was doing, and I winced as the spell I was slowly casting fell apart and I received the mental equivalent of being smacked by a rubber band. Still, I didn’t have time for that. I ran over towards the third room in the dungeon, only to find someone on their back, very dead, and another E-ranker fighting. They were facing a pair of skeletons. One was missing its lower half at the hips, but it was still thrusting out with a rusty halberd, the other was standing over the E-ranker, swinging at them with a sword. The E-ranker, a young man, was batting the sword away with the length of a rifle, but his stance was all wrong, and I gave him even odds of ending up injured. I whipped my handgun out and opened fire, first taking out the skeleton on the ground, then planting a few rounds into the one standing up. A few slipped past the narrow bones, but enough hits connected that the skeleton was ripped apart. “Dammit,” I said as I reloaded my gun and then jogged over. I checked on the E-ranker on the ground first. He was... vaguely familiar. Like, this was definitely someone I’d crossed in the corridor a dozen times before. And now he was dead. A long, deep cut right under his plate carrier, a second chop along the side of his face. Neither looked immediately lethal, but feeling at his neck revealed no pulse. “Fuck,” I swore. The inquisition started right after. Sergeant Guy was pissed, some of the E-rankers were nervous. Soon gunshots were ringing out as the order to double-tap everything went out, just in case. A gurney was brought in to carry the corpse out, and the other E-ranker who’d been caught in the fight was checked over, though the worst he had was a small cut to the arm. Of course, Sergeant Guy immediately turned the blame onto me. I think it even made sense, in a typical corpo fashion. I was an outsider, there to pick up the blame, and my job was to keep his team safe. I sighed, then Reloaded. Well, whatever, it was more practice time. This time, after making it back, I only joined Squad E2 as they were about to leave, and I had picked up a bodycam from a supply closet as well. When we returned to the portal, I found the two injured skeletons. They were... well, they looked dead by default, didn’t they? Now I had to make a choice. Kill them now and get the threat over with, or wait until they attacked the E-rankers later. The first option was the safest. At most I might have to file a report on why I shot my gun in the portal, but like... I had a camera, and I could just pretend that I’d notice one twitch. The second option would earn me a lot more respect. I’d be saving someone’s life while making it obvious. That would be cool. But like... where did I draw the line? I really didn’t mind showboating a bit as Deadline, since that was to build a rep that I planned on using later, but... it was kind of a dick move. I walked over to the skeletons and shot the first. When the second started to stand, sword raised, I put a second round into its face. Sergeant Guy came over to grill me about it, but I had a body cam and little patience for his shit. He backed off, the corpses were carted off, and I spent the next three hours training my magic. The next loop, and the one after, and the one after, were all more of the same. By the end of this long ass workday, I’d have Exhaust Senses and Restore Stamina down to the degree where I could more or less reliably use them in combat. I’d still want to train Restore Stamina with Dharti, though. She had a decade of experience to draw on, and I’d be stupid to skip on that. But hopefully next week I’d be ready for a cooler spell. Once the day ended for real, without the intention of Reloading again, I headed back to the HQ with Squad E2, but my mind was on what I had to do for the rest of the day. My days being so ridiculously long was really messing with my sense of time. Today was Tuesday. I had to call the black marketeer tonight, and go see if that motorcycle I wanted was available. It was about damn time that I get a ride of my own.