Azotreh was taking some time to recover from the incredible force of Mukurric's aura. They were on their back as the third eye reshaped their skull to emerge on their right temple. It was rather lucky they were there. Gaining a new eye was disorienting, even to someone like Azotreh reinforced with magic. They knew they could probably still walk with relative ease, but only if they relied on the cold awareness.
They wanted the eye to disappear and let them return to just their normal pair for the sake of stability. After all, Mukurric had said she'd be back soon to continue the training after they recovered.
They didn't understand the strange woman's idea of training. Just pummeling them into the floor with her aura had granted some gains, but didn't feel like training.
While distracted with that thought, Azotreh suddenly realized their vision had stabilized back to just their original pair. The third eye had vanished. They could feel that it was still somewhere in their body, but couldn't see through it.
They reached one hand up to where it had been in their skull, but only found smooth skin in its place. They pushed slightly and felt the normal resistance of their skull. It was as if the eye had simply vanished and left unaltered flesh in its wake.
Ruby, still nestled within Azotreh's body, felt the aura suppression they had undergone. She knew it was good for her bond–and for her–to do such training. She knew it instinctively, but still felt a visceral disgust at it.
Azotreh always projected a calm stability, mostly through the help of the cold awareness she had, only a vague awareness of. She knew it was there, brushing up against the edge of her soul when she was fused with Azotreh. But that wasn't right. It didn't touch her soul; it touched something else.
She, as a kitsune, had a far greater awareness of her own soul than most. She knew that instinctively. Azotreh had a similar, possibly even greater level of general awareness about their own soul, but she easily outmatched them in terms of control. Her awareness of her own soul allowed her to sense the absence of the cold consciousness's touch on her soul. She didn't know where it always seemed to brush against her, but she still had an awareness of its presence.
Right now, Azotreh was collapsed on the ground, panting heavily as their aura slowly regenerated its strength. Hufgind, the resource of the aura, was easy to drain and to regenerate. But pushing the pool to empty made it much harder to regenerate it back to full in any sort of reasonable time frame.
She knew she couldn't share her resources with them due to the archetype difference. If they were a member of the beast archetype, she could have shared her Hufgind with them, but at the moment, it was more likely to kill them. Even without the raw archetype difference inflicting damage, there was a low chance that it would turn them into a beast. That kind of transformation was always painful and left long-term damage in its wake. She was also worried about the possibility of them instead gaining the beast archetype and dying to what the system called a Tribulation of Power.
She wasn't entirely sure what the event that killed their bond was. But she knew why it happened.
Instead, she decided to use her own aura to guard Azotreh. They weren't physically hurt, but still stunned to the core. Getting hurt in a safe environment was common enough practice for most beasts, her mother included. But other than the fact that the walls seemed to respond to Azotreh's will and the nearby presence of Atu, this was not a safe environment.
The small fox tattoo lit up on Azotreh's face and began to slightly emit an aura. Not Azotreh's aura, but Ruby's. It barely reached a half centimeter past Azotreh's face, but slowly began to expand outward.
She pushed it as far as it would go, which was about a half meter away from Azotreh's body in all directions. Not even enough to blanket the room, but more than enough to protect Azotreh from possibly invasive auras.
By pushing her aura out, she also felt Azotreh begin to regenerate whatever their Hufgind resource was more quickly. They didn't need to expend any on pushing their aura back out, allowing them to not expend any of the resource as they regenerated it.
Her concentration didn't falter as system notifications rang in her head.
The system always spoke to her in her mother's voice, though of late it had begun to shift from her mother's mental words to those of her bond Azotreh.
[You are pushing your aura beyond its normal functions through the bond with Azotreh Nightshade. Your bond with Azotreh Nightshade has strengthened.]
[Due to your spiritual and physical nature, you can use your aura to activate certain abilities. Due to your connection to Azotreh Nightshade and their possession of the Skill System, you can use Azotreh Nightshade's ability: Basic Looting instead of your own.]
[Azotreh Nightshade has gained titles: Aura Conduit I, Familiar II, Companion II]
[You have gained titles: Familiar II, Companion II]
Hearing the words spoken by a voice somewhere between her mother's and Azotreh's was certainly an odd experience, but not an unwelcome one.
Mukurric suddenly turned her head towards the room the kid was in. Both orcs and Atu turned to look at her. The dragon lady suddenly turned to Atu.
"Does Azotreh have a familiar?" Her voice was filled with genuine curiosity.
"Yes? Ruby, she-" Atu began before being cut off by Mukurric.
"Yes, yes, I know. A young kitsune, maybe only as old as Azotreh."
Both orcs looked at Mukurric in surprise before looking back at the wall. Lady Dur Bloodskull, the combat specialist chosen by Lord Bloodskull, was the first to speak.
"What kind of job did we get assigned to?" Her voice was strained. Lord Kurdan Bloodskull, the arcane specialist chosen by Lord Bloodskull, simply shook his head.
Ruby was startled as Azotreh suddenly lit up like a light bulb. The crimson of the strength poten and the turquoise-green of E-Grade. As the light faded, no impurities emerged. The black gunk that always shone in a myriad of colors under any sort of light was emitted in small amounts with each poten advancement, in larger amounts at the grade advancements, and even more extremely at rank advancements.
But Azotreh pushed out none. Instead, they seemed to grow a little bit stronger. Their body trembled less, and their aura finally managed to push out slightly. Weak, fragile, but present once more. Her aura retracted slightly, but stopped pulling back when it reached Azotreh's weak aura. Rather than fight, the auras seemed to merge slightly as they passed over one another before she felt her Hufgind began to feel properly depleted, and she withdrew her aura.
Azotreh had more training to do, and Ruby was properly tired.
Mukurric had begun to worry after the two hours she gave Azotreh to regenerate were complete. The aura of their familiar was still in control at that point, but she easily pierced it to view Azotreh's aura. It was fragile in a way it shouldn't be. Auras had an innate strength due to the willpower resource that fed them. The same as the body's strength due to the prana and backbone that flowed through it. Their aura shouldn't feel this weak, especially in this environment.
She'd noticed it the moment she'd entered the dungeon. While the mana levels weren't ideal for her, they were far better than the forest above. The energy was denser here, yet still clearly tin-rank. It carried the power of zinc-rank mana.
While even an emerald-ranker could probably survive for an extended period on the surface, they would eventually weaken as the energy flowed from them instead of the other way around. A lead-ranker or higher would probably weaken to the bottom of their rank within a week without any kind of assistance. She was a powerful platinum-ranked dragon and only survived by the connections she shared with her cursed artifacts. They fed her enough cursed energy to keep her body stable, if barely.
Even this avatar, lowered to amethyst-rank, would at most survive an hour on the surface without the power it shared with her true body. Here, though, she would likely survive at least a day without her power.
The density of the mana in the air should have amplified their regeneration rather than weakening it. She didn't know why they regenerated so much slower than normal. It made her less confident in training them until they finally awakened with Ruby's assistance.
She felt the shaky underpinning of their aura. The damage her previous aura assault had left in its wake amplified through their weakened aura. But she also felt their resolve. Their need to prove themselves capable. It was a drive she envied. In her old age, she had long lost that vigor of the early ranks. When her lifespan had only been around half a decade, and she was barely aware enough to plot her kills. It had been so long.
Fuzem was getting more irritated with each attempt. She knew the task she'd set for herself was more difficult than it was worth. A spider twice the size of its normal form. She'd driven this avatar's intuition, or Xanthonence, as she vaguely remembered her instincts telling her, to the edge over and over. She'd even drawn from their general pool to keep this madness going. She knew something had to change soon.
Suddenly, the rage was drained from her mind. The fury set deep within her driven to nothing in a mere moment. She could still feel some lingering anger, but nothing else. Not joy or sadness, rage or glee.
She once again yanked on the resources of the prime avatar and dungeon nexus, though not intuition this time. She pulled on its empathy resource on instinct and felt the rage return. It coursed through her and burned at her insides. Just like she wanted it to.
She was fueling herself on mostly rage at this point. After the initial success, she'd been greeted with nothing but failures. Thousands, tens of thousands. She was bashing her head against a brick wall in hopes it would break before her skull did.
But the wall did not break. It didn't even budge as she kept pushing at it with everything she had. Why did she even want a big spider like that? What was the point?
But something had to break. She knew it did.
She had to find a way. This was getting her nowhere. She was spending energy that they were regenerating far too slowly for her satisfaction.
After an attempt she had long since stopped counting, she finally received a message other than an error.
[Due to your act of will to create a new monster, your perk: Inferior Mutation Specialization V has advanced to Inferior Mutation Specialization VI]
[You can now apply gigantism to a monster, to a maximum of 6% larger than its original blueprint.]
[Your act of willpower and mental fortitude has been recognized. You have gained title: Persistent I]
{You have received a Task!}
{Commit a great act of diligence (0/1)}
Another task like the ones they got from the Overlord of Gluttony, though this one didn't carry a name, not even a title. Of course, the other tasks never carried a name either, but when you get the blessing of Beelzebub and then get a task from someone called the Overlord of Gluttony, the pieces aren't hard to put together.
What did it mean by a great act of diligence? She knew that diligence was important to complete a task, but what defined it as a great act?
Nicholas was moving again. The giant orcish body, now with three eyes, began to move down a different tunnel. Nicholas had an idea and felt a deep need to prove it. He knew he complained a lot about having too many skills, but at this point, he accepted that it was inevitable.
At least they hadn't been overwhelmed and broken after the initial core damage. He wondered absently if it was the fact that Azotreh now had much denser slime than before. Biomass seemed to help their core in some way, though he was still unclear about what a core was. He could only make guesses based on knowledge from Earth.
But he didn't have time to think over stuff like that. He had a task he had set for himself.
{Task: Commit a great act of diligence (0/1)}
And a task he'd gotten from something powerful? He hoped the completion of his goal counted for a great act of diligence.
After a while of walking down a dim tunnel, only lit to his Eye of the Black Dragon, he found what he was looking for. Eye of the Cerulean Dragon found a strange concentration of mana in a wall, filled with a deep vermillion look that no other mana shared.
Mana, as he'd found out, was blue. The same blue as Azotreh's slime, and the same blue as the draconic eye power he'd grabbed by accident. It didn't change shades under different conditions; it was simply blue. Cerulean blue.
Finding the red, pulsing light within the blue sent an instinctive shiver down Nicholas' spine. Whatever this was, it was wrong. Wrong like a monster.
So, he focused on his hand as he carefully curled it into a fist. He'd watched enough fist fights on TV to know how to hold a fist. He focused on the movement of the orc's shoulder as he struck out with his fist.
The monster, some kind of three-mouthed silverfish that seemed to blend with the shadows around it, screamed. Not in pain, but in anger.
The monster's aura exploded out of it, tin-rank, but filled with an almighty rage against the very world it found itself in. But that anger was mostly focused on Nicholas. A rage that could never be sated. He recoiled at the sheer ferocity of the thing in front of him, incapable of moving out of the way as it moved with an unnerving speed and bit into his shoulder.
Once again, he found it a bit odd that he didn't feel any pain as his body was attacked. When he focused on the wound, it stung a bit, but didn't hurt when he didn't focus on it.
The monster kept biting into his shoulder as he once again concentrated on his fist, bringing it up to hurt the monster again. Its exoskeleton slightly cracked where his fist met it. But it was a strangely tough bug.
Maybe all monsters were just tough, he guessed. After all, an orc probably couldn't withstand having its shoulder ripped open by three jaws filled with serrated teeth.
He kept punching it, cracking its carapace bit by bit until it died. The monster almost immediately began to dissolve into primarily black and silver smoke, but Nicholas touched the corpse again and used Basic Looting.
[Congratulations! You have slain Darkstalker Silverfish!]
[Base EXP: 10]
[Grade Disparity Bonus: 2x]
[Rank Disparity Bonus: 1x]
[You have earned 20 EXP]
[You have earned 24 DX]
[You have Looted Darkstalker Silverfish]
[+10 Tin-Rank Alchemic Coins]
[+1 Tin-Rank Monster Core]
[+2 Darkstalker Antennae (Tin-Rank)]
[+4 Darkstalker Carapace Shards (Tin-Rank)]
Nicholas immediately left the orc for a moment to empty the inventory back into the storage room they had made beside the dungeon nexus before returning to it. He still had a task to complete, and he assumed he'd need to punch many more monsters to reach his goal.