I glared up into the canopy of a tree in annoyance, but not a single acid crawler deigned to drop onto my head.

  "Seriously?" I complained, but there came no answer. Nor was there any response when I fired a [Lightning Shock] straight into the air.

  Apparently, I'd run this dungeon completely out of monsters, and I'd done so within spitting distance of a level-up. So close that a single acid moth would have pushed me over the edge. I was sitting on nine skill points. One short.

  One.

  One skill point. One monster.

  Alas, it seemed that there was only one monster remaining in the dungeon. As I'd cleared out the dungeon's denizens, I'd been forced closer and closer to the centre in search of fresh prey, until, at the dungeon's heart, I'd seen it.

  At first, I'd thought a tree had grown wings. It had taken a second look before I'd realised what I was seeing. There was a tree under there, but the acid moth matriarch was wrapped around it. The wings looked much the same as a regular acid moth, albeit on a far larger scale, but that was where the similarity ended. There were no visible legs. The body was long and thick, coiled around the tree, with skin the colour and texture of bark, hence how I'd missed it at first. There were pulsating growths scattered all over. Some were leaking a constant stream of the green fluid, falling from the tree in small waterfalls and flowing into a pool of acid beneath. Thankfully, dungeon shenanigans ensured the pool didn't overflow, but even so, I didn't fancy trying to get close to the monster.

  Given the monster's name and the way the writhing skin at some of the bulges suggested things were moving around inside, I guessed that launching an attack would trigger the release of more monsters. The thought of crawlers bursting their way out of the matriarch was rather nausea-inducing. Had the monster never heard that it was supposed to lay eggs, not let them hatch on the inside?

  Not that monsters tended to respect basic biology, which also meant the thing was likely to release moths, and not just crawlers. A matriarch releasing smaller monsters hadn't been in the bestiary, but this was a dungeon boss, not a wild monster. The dungeon shenanigans were firmly on its side.

  I didn't really want to fight it, but thus far, the dungeon had proven exactly as safe as I'd hoped. Heck, I'd even been able to get an undisturbed night's sleep. The thing looked pretty immobile, which meshed with the bestiary write-up, and it wasn't in any sort of sealed chamber. If I could trigger the release of a monster or two, fry them, then flee, I could grab [Archmage]. Heck, given the way [Lightning Shock] tended to burn through things, maybe I didn't even need to wait for it to release them.

  Plan made, I crept closer, my heart pounding within my chest. My last encounter with a B-rank monster hadn't exactly gone well, and that sort of near-death experience left an impression. But I was stronger now than then, despite it being only a couple of days ago.

  Although, I could be stronger still. If I was about to take [Archmage], it was time to dump points into my physical Stats.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  They wouldn't help blast the thing with lightning, but they would certainly help me run away afterwards.

  Forty points per Stat was a lot. It hadn't been long since I'd spent all my free points, and yet they'd built back up so much already. Crossing a growth milestone added ten per level, and losing [Perfectly Balanced] added another five, but even so, I'd been gaining levels too quickly the past few days. I felt lighter on my feet, yes, but I felt almost too light. As if I'd float away should I let my concentration slip.

  In the spirit of playing safe, I felt obliged to spend half an hour getting used to my increased abilities before approaching the dungeon boss. Besides, it gave my Mana and Stamina a chance to regenerate.

  The boss was in the exact same position as when I'd first spied it. It didn't react to my presence at all, although whether that was due to [Expert Stealth] and my cover behind a tree, or dungeon rules about starting boss battles, I couldn't say. Heck, I couldn't see any eyes on the thing, even though I knew it had some. Maybe they were facing inward, toward the tree, or were closed and camouflaged among the bark-like skin. It may legitimately not have been able to detect me, even without [Expert Stealth].

  It was sure as hell going to detect this, though. "Lightning Shock!"

  Light flared, accompanied by crashing thunder. White light ran down the central tree and its coiled monster, acid splashing from the green pool beneath it. For a moment, the constant writhing ceased, and then the monster screeched.

  Moths shouldn't make noise. Maybe the quiet tap-tap as the stupid things repeatedly flew into a wall, but they certainly shouldn't scream. Then again, they shouldn't be large or flexible enough to coil around a tree, either, nor was leaking constant streams of neon green acid a usual feature of the monster's more mundane namesake.

  Despite the screech, the monster didn't move. I didn't even see any eyes open. What did happen was that every pustule expanded at once, each one inflating like a balloon. And then they burst, a shower of acid blasting from each one, great deluges of the stuff raining into the pool, which somehow still managed not to overflow.

  And with the acid came the matriarch's spawn.

  Acid crawlers were flung through the air in huge clumps, with no regard to their lack of aerial manoeuvrability. Despite my assumptions, there were no acid moths. "Lightning Shock!" I shouted, aiming a blast at one of the clumps.

  The corpses arced and fell, splashing into the acid. So did the survivors. Again, no aerial manoeuvrability. They had very little choice.

  While dungeon design often had only a passing acquaintance with common sense, I couldn't imagine the boss ejecting a load of monsters which then immediately perished. Doubly so since the boss itself still didn't seem to be doing anything. The crawlers presumably wouldn't melt in the acid.

  Indeed, it turned out they could swim. While I was busy watching the boss for movement, the front end of a caterpillar stuck its head above the surface and spat a glob of the acid. I dodged easily enough, leaving the deadly ball to splatter against the tree behind me, which hissed and spat as the substance ate into its bark.

  The problem was that there was rather more than one acid crawler swimming in the lake.

  Head after head poked above the surface, launching their balls of deadly green and forcing me to circle around the lake. "Lightning Shock!" I shouted, aiming at the pool, but the heads dropped back under too quickly, and no kill notifications came as a result. Still, there hadn't been that many of the monsters. Maybe a few dozen? At two shots each, all I needed to do was...

  Ah...

  No, waiting wouldn't help in this situation. Probably. I had no evidence for it, but I rather suspected that these monsters wouldn't be limited to two shots. They were literally swimming in a lake of acid. They had all the fuel they could want.

  I could possibly take them out one by one if I concentrated on shooting the moment their heads raised above the liquid. Or I could concentrate on dodging and unload my bolts into their mother. Or I could do the sensible thing and run away, now that I had what I'd come here for. Yes, there was a Mark and potentially treasure on offer, but I could always return once I'd taken my Path and tested the upgraded Skills.

  That would be sensible, but with my upgraded Dexterity, dodging the rain of acid wasn't proving a problem, even if I did have to jump, kick off trees and sprint along branches from time to time. They quickly proved me correct about not being limited to two shots. In turn, that placed me on a time limit, because even if the dungeon ground seemed immune to the acid, the trees weren't, and the splashes weren't magically vanishing. I still had time before things got dangerous, but I couldn't simply hang around dodging indefinitely.

  "Lightning Shock!"

  Another bolt stabbed at the acid moth matriarch, flashing along its length and grounding itself into the lake. The boss didn't appear to react.

  "Lightning Shock!"

  I struck it with blast after blast, occasionally taking out its spawns when an opportunity presented itself, but it wasn't until my Mana was half spent that there came any reaction. The bulk of its body moved, slowly unwinding from the tree. The wings made a single flap, and with glacial slowness, the monster detached from its perch.

  "Lightning Shock!" I shouted, because I wasn't going to let it get away with moving so slowly. If it wasn't going to defend itself or go on the attack, I'd have to be an idiot not to take advantage.

  The boss screeched for a second time, and the barrage of acid from its spawn ceased. It seemed it was time for phase two.

  I struck the monster with another pair of lightning bolts before it made its next move, a second flap of its wings sending a cloud of dust straight at me. I immediately bolted perpendicular to get out of the way, not wanting to breathe in even a single particle of whatever that dust was made from, but then [Danger Sense] flared. [Mana Manipulation] revealed clumps of mana moving ahead of the cloud. I hurriedly leapt from the ground, landing on a tree branch.

  The ground erupted right where I would have been standing, had I not leapt out of the way. A patch of soil was ripped up and torn apart, raining back down in tiny grains. Without [Mana Manipulation] I'd have had no idea what had happened. It was, effectively, [Wind Blade].

  Not one, but a dozen of them. I jumped again, the branch splintering a moment later, and then the moth's dust cloud hit, and the entire tree melted.

  "Fuck," I exclaimed, feeling that given the situation, some amount of swearing was justified.

  I wasn't using 'melted' hyperbolically. As the cloud of dust impacted the tree—several trees, actually, since the cloud had been rather large—the leaves had vanished faster than I could see. Twigs blackened and dripped half a second later. Branches lasted a little longer, layer after layer liquefying and raining from the trees, but the assault still only took a handful of seconds to reach their cores and eat them to nothing. All that remained were blackened trunks, their surfaces oozing downward as gravity tugged at them, but even they were shrinking as I watched, leaving a line of tall, black, pointy cones.

  Phase two seemed a rather large step up from phase one, and that attack wasn't something I was prepared to deal with. Now it was time to go.

  I ran, devoting over three-hundred-and-fifty points of Dexterity into putting as much distance between me and the boss as possible.

  It wasn't enough.

  One more flap of its massive wings and the acid moth matriarch was moving faster than me. Perhaps I could have outrun it on flat, obstacle-free ground, but I was having to dodge acid pools and trees. The dungeon boss wasn't, flying above the pools and through the trees. Trees thick enough that I couldn't come close to wrapping my arms around their trunks snapped like twigs on impact. If the boss could do that, no wonder it was shrugging off my magic.

  Thankfully, while the monster had no respect for laws of physics or biology, that didn't mean it operated completely without rules. To avoid face-planting into trees, I needed to curve, but the boss continued straight, requiring a flap of its wings to change direction. A large, slow flap. I couldn't outrun it, but I could evade it. Throw in a sudden curve whenever it drew too close, or used its melty-dust-and-wind-blades attack, and it couldn't catch me. All I needed to do was make it to the exit.

  A boss couldn't follow outside of the dungeon exit, right? I'd never heard of anything like that happening before, beyond dungeon breaks, but I hadn't seen it explicitly written down that they couldn't.

  No matter. I could keep evading it on the outside of the dungeon, too, in the unlikely event that it followed. Besides, there was a decent chance that its ability to fly through trees was more dungeon fakery, and outside they would at least slow it down. I had plenty of Stamina remaining. Despite perhaps pushing things a little further than I should have done, I was still safe.

  Relatively.

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