Alone in the dungeon

In the suburbs of New York, a gate appeared. It was reported nearly instantly by a family living nearby.

Employees from the FBH arrived swiftly after to measure the gate´s magical power. It was no surprise when they found out it was an E-rank gate. It was about the size of a normal door after all.

There was a problem with E-rank gates in the world. Most hunters who could clear them didn´t want to. They could earn much more money in the gates of their own rank. Hunters earn money primarily by selling essence stones and in the lowest rank gates, the stones are practically worthless. Even if the gate is really good the money gained would be around 1000 dollars at maximum. If you divide that between five or more people and apply tax then it´s just not worth it.

The FBH has to pay random hunters to clear these gates. However, that is not a viable solution when you consider the number of gates appearing around the world.

A low-rank employee by the name of Phil was stationed on the E-rank gate site in New York. Watching over gates was a very good job until something comes out of them. Fortunately, that doesn´t happen very often with low-rank dungeons.

Phil sat down in the cabin and enjoyed his coffee. Someone booked this gate for 15:00 so if they come in time he should be home by 6 PM.

Then the door opened and a young man, looking like your average college student, came in. He wore a jacket over a hoodie and a rucksack on his back.

"It´s pretty cold, huh?" said Phil.

"Yeah. Can I leave my things here?" asked Mark.

"Of course."

Mark took off his jacket and emptied his backpack. He took his priced grimoire and got ready to raid.

"Wait a minute, show me your license." Phil told Mark.

"Here" he gave him the card.

Phil looked over the card. 'Mark Williams, A-rank' Finding no problem he swiftly gave it back.

"There are sometimes people who want to jump into gates to end their life. Just wanted to make sure."

"No problem." said Mark and started walking towards the gate.

'It´s much smaller than the D-rank one. If I remember correctly it correlates with the size of the boss monster.'

He sighed trying to calm himself down and stepped inside the vortex of swirling mana.

There was nearly complete silence and Mark couldn´t see anything in the darkness. He flipped through the grimoire hoping to find the right page.

'Page 5, Illuminate'

A small ball of light appeared floating over Mark. The spell was very energy efficient. It was consuming much less mana than his A-rank body generated.

Finally able to see, Mark analyzed his surroundings. It was a cave, just like most dungeons but this time the walls were made of sandstone. The orange walls and grains of sand on the ground were an obvious giveaway.

Seeing no monster in sight Mark decided to go deeper.

In contrast to his first dungeon enemies were lurking behind the first corner. Locusts the size of a dog were sitting on the dungeon walls.

When Mark saw the insects he flipped to the first page.

'Page 1, Stream of fire'

He minimized the temperature and maximized the distance to fill the whole cave with flames. Not only was the cave filled with flames it was also filled with the sound of tiny essence stones falling to the ground.

Deactivating the spell Mark collected his earnings.

'One of these should fetch about 10 bucks and I already have 8 of them.'

He continued through the dungeon blasting everything that moved with fire. He could afford a little bit of leniency because of the insects' weak attack attempts. They got incinerated quicker than they could get even near Mark.

However, ten minutes later a problem arose. It was getting hard to breathe. The lone hunter was beginning to get tired by just walking which was not a good sign.

'This is not good. I forgot that dungeons are an enclosed system. There is not a lot of air, especially in these narrow caves.'

It got better after a minute of rest, but Mark could not afford to use spells that used fire anymore.

'It´s fine for now, but I need to resolve this issue for the future.' he thought and continued deeper into the cave system.

'Page 3, Automatic rock spike'

His mana spread through the ground and walls creating a grid of some kind. As he came near another locust a spike grew from the wall and penetrated the insect.

After experimenting with the salamander´s scales Mark became able to differentiate the magic power of a monster and a human. With this knowledge, his page 3 spell was finally usable even when there were other people around.

The rucksack on Mark´s back was filling up with essence stones the size of his thumb. There were exactly 97 of them.

Half an hour has passed and all of the locusts disappeared. The passage was beginning to widen.

Mark smelled something was strange. More literally than he wanted to because there was a foul stench present.

'There is probably a boss monster behind that corner.'

He flipped to the fourth page and prepared his next spell.

'Considering the strength of the salamander this shouldn´t be a problem.' he thought and stepped into the hall.

There were several sandstone pillars and decorations on the walls. On the next side of the room stood an undead covered in bandages. The mummy looked at Mark with its one functional eye and began running towards him.

Surprisingly to Mark it ran very fast even though it was limping and had its back hunched over.

'Page 4, Targeted freezing'

Ethereal flare left his hand and embedded itself in the mummy. Unphased it continued running at Mark.

Unfortunately for the monster, it was quickly intercepted by several streams of supercooled water. Seeing that this spell barely worked on the salamander last time Mark tried to improve it and the result was a success.

The mummy became a statue encased in ice. However, it was not dead yet. It was still watching the hunter with its one eye.

'Creepy, but also hard to deal with. Undead are a thing I hoped to never come across.'

'Page 3, Automatic rock spike, size: 2m'

A huge thorn went through the frozen monster, crushing it.

'This needs a better solution. I need to improve so many things.'