40 Arriving at the dungeon

Rain was pouring down and lighting hitting here and there. It wasn't the nicest day, but the one where we finally arrived at the dungeon. As expected, no one else aside from us camped in front of the dungeon. Lisa told us that meeting other people around here is quite unlikely. Not many humans were able to handle a dungeon at this level and the ones who were, aimed for the ones with higher returns. This dungeon has mostly monsters and not too many treasures. Other dungeons around have huge treasures with rare materials and weapons in them. Some of those weapons are even on a level higher than any human has ever crafted one which makes them especially valuable.

As for hybrids, most of those were in the military at the time and preparing for something bigger, namely a potential war. So none of them came to such a dungeon either. This left only us, the students of the different hybrid schools. And with so many dungeons to choose form, running into another group seemed unlikely.

We parked the carriage right next to the exit and waited for the rain to either stop or decrease. Once that finally happened, we built up our camp right there on the spot. However, we wouldn't be staying here for long. The dungeon stretched out far too wide for us to come back to the entrance every day. We would have to camp in the dungeon itself if we wanted to make some serious progress. This also meant we had to leave the carriage behind with some food for the lizard.

Despite this, we decided to do exactly that for the first couple days. Even though we couldn't explore far into the dungeon, we would be able to get to know how it worked. It was the slower and safer approach, although it might even be a bit too cautious.

As it had gotten quite dark by now, we postponed our first entry to tomorrow. For today we had a fun time goofing around right before getting to serious matters. Iris smuggled a bottle of wine she got who knows where with her and that one bottle was easily enough to knock out all us light weights.

The next morning arrived and I found myself sleeping under the carriage without any sort of sleeping back or cover. Luckily the temperatures around here weren't too cold. I crawled out of there and saw the rest of the group also lying here and there in all sort of weird positions. Iris somehow managed to sleep in a sitting position on the lizard, while Emilia and Althaia snuggled together in a single sleeping back. The boys held up better with the wine and managed to get into their own sleeping backs. Although Lander got in there backwards with his head at the end of it.

I started to cook some of the meat we brought with us, enough for everyone of course. Soon, the others were woken up by the delicious smell of the meat. It wasn't seasoned at all but when you are hungry, you will take anything over nothing. While getting the meat from our carriage I noticed how much our reserves had dwindled already. If we didn't find any eatable monsters in the dungeon, we might have to purchase some food from nearby villages. Though those were quite a distance away and would require us to leave the dungeon again.

Mr. Black had taught us many monsters could be eaten without a problem if cooked enough. Some were even seen as a delicacy in certain regions of the human nation. As a rule of thumb, as long as the monsters didn't use poison, they were considered safe to eat.

The Demon Beast Labyrinth we were about to enter didn't have many of those poisonous monsters. Most of them focused on brute strength and had low intelligence. Also not many of them grouped up, so we would have the advantage in numbers. All of that made it quite the beginner friendly dungeon, even though the monsters packed a punch.

"Now that we are finished with breakfast, let's go over our plan again", Iris suddenly started to speak as she stood up. "Our formation will be Julian, Lander and me in the front, Emilia and Althaia in the back and Yoru will be in the middle. Yoru will help out whoever needs help but her main job is protecting our supports. Emilia and Althaia will both heals us when we get into too much trouble. Keep you buffing abilities off for now, we might need an ace up our sleeves sooner or later. Us three will scout and attack monsters, although we should isolate them at the beginning to make things easier for us. Once we get into the flow, we can change up our tactics or even split up for more efficiency. But I will leave that for later."

"Everything clear?"

"Yes, mam" we all shouted in unison.

And so we took our first steps forward towards our first real adventure.

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At this point of time, we didn't know what would await us on our journey. One person in the shadows spectated us closely but for some reason he couldn't shake off the bad feeling in his gut. Although by the strength of the dungeon monsters alone nothing should be a danger if he is also considered into the equation…..