chapter 7

After sending off the note by owl to my family, I went to bed. I woke up to get ready for the dungeon raid. We met up at the adventure guild where we met the raid team. We headed off to the dungeon in Emberglade Forest. After reaching in front of the dungeon, the raid team got separated into groups because of a powerful magic spell placed on the dungeon door. I ended up with a girl in the raid team. She told me her name was Alina Latin. She was from a small noble family in the city of Lumina in the west of Sunhaven. She came here because she wanted to study the sword by a man named Thorne Darksteel, one of the ten sword masters. But when she came, he had long left the village and headed off to Elysium Academy to enroll as a teacher. So now, she was just adventuring to make money to travel to the academy. She said she would like to enroll in the academy in a month's time, but she doesn't have the money. When I asked her about her family, she said they didn't support her wanting to be a swordswoman and going out to adventure, so they disowned her. I wondered how people could be like that.

After talking to her, we headed off to find the others and escape the dungeon. While looking for the others and fighting off monsters, we ended up at a door with the language of the insect tribe. But the insect tribe died off a long time ago, yet the door looked like it was made about three years ago. It didn't have any magic damage or corrosion on it at all. After looking at it for about two minutes, we entered. But what we saw inside that door still gives me nightmares to this day. It was an Eldritch Shrieker, one of the ten monsters of calamity that wiped out a whole region. Why was it here, and why was it sealed behind a door like this?

"Alina, run! It's about to attack!" The attack that it used was a 10-core fire blast. We barely dodged the attack. After Alina and I ran at the monster using 5-core spells to attack, but it did not do anything, and because the spells we used were over our core level, our mana pools ran down significantly. We tried attacking again and evading the spells it threw at us, but our mana ran out, and it was starting to damage our cores, so we weren't able to cast any spells. We kept evading the spells, but it caught up to us. While trying to evade a magic spell from the monster, Alina slid and was about to get hit. I jumped in the way to protect her with barrier magic, but I failed. I lost one of my arms to the impact and was unable to move due to the pain. Alina tried to heal it, but it was a lost cause. The monster was coming to step on us before that could happen, so Alina and I conjured up a teleportation spell. We managed to conjure up a teleportation spell just in time. As the Eldritch Shrieker's massive foot descended upon us, we vanished from its grasp and reappeared outside the dungeon's entrance. Gasping for breath and shaken to our core, we collapsed on the ground, grateful to be alive.

Alina quickly tended to my wounds as best as she could with her limited healing magic. Despite her efforts, the pain throbbed relentlessly, a constant reminder of the peril we had narrowly escaped.