BDSysteM

With no response to her question about our knowledge of dungeons, Melody moved on to her next question. “Are all of you still level zero?”

Once more, everyone gave the same response of “yep.” Except me, I just sat there. Her question wasn’t really to me… Melody knew everything about me.

“Then you all have one core ability, hopefully more after today,” Melody said. “Do you guys want to go around in a circle? We can all give a basic rundown of our ability.”

“Sounds good,” Fara answered and volunteered. “I can go first.”

Melody gestured for her to go ahead and she began. “I have a ranged electricity attack. I charge however much mana I need, then boom, and the bolt goes until it runs out of energy. With all my mana I can get about five meters. When I do close range, I have basically infinite attacks though. Just a short cooldown.”

“How close is close range?” Melody asked.

“Like half a meter,” Fara replied. “And it does a lot of damage.”

“How much?” Silvia asked this time, surprisingly.

“Ten. Could probably kill anyone in a couple attacks,” Fara grinned.

I don’t think you could kill me in a couple attacks… maybe in twelve attacks, and then after waiting a billion years for my shield to disappear. And Melody… two hundred attacks? I thought A tiers were supposed to be powerful.

In all fairness, she is level zero right now.

“We need to get you to level one as quick as possible,” Melody decided. “Your mana will be 65 once you hit level one, then you can actually be ranged.”

“Sixty-five?” Fara questioned. “That much?! What about the other stats?”

I must say, I very much agree with Fara. Sixty-five mana at level one? I had fucking twenty! Although hers is probably linear… still! X tiers suck! Holy, I’m weak.

“Your other stats will be 44,” Melody answered. “It’s the same for the rest of you too.

“Elle, do you wanna go next?” Everyone shifted focus to her, and she soon began explaining.

“So, I’m a dodge tank. I use agility to run and stuff.” She blushed, continuing. “But I don’t really know how to… do anything, like at all.”

“I’ll teach you all later,” Melody replied, then moved the conversation along. “What’s your ability?”

“It’s just an aggro dash. I can dash to the side with mana and draw my enemies' attention with me,” Elle finished up. Seems like a useful ability. She can run in circles while we work on killing some stronger enemy or something, and I assume the dash has a cooldown, so I can give her a chronofield to hop around in, which will hopefully speed it up. Not sure how the effect works exactly. I guess she should enter whenever the cooldown starts, then leave once it finishes.

It would really depend on how long her cooldown is. If it’s longer than the field lasts… or even sooner than that, if monsters can catch up quick enough, I don’t know how helpful the chronofield would be.

“Okay, Amane next,” Melody continued, satisfied with Elle’s explanation.

“I… uh… I can… harden my skin…” Amane somehow managed to turn her head even further downwards, then finished her explanation with some… words. “I feel the pain… but… it becomes… mana.”

“So you’re immortal?” Melody asked, completely ignoring the fact that she has a system designed for masochists.

“N-no,” Amane stuttered. “I convert it… so… if I take too much at once, I-I’ll die.”

So she has some crazy regeneration ability. Skin becomes hard, any damage gets converted into mana, and I can double the rate with my ability. My ability is pretty cracked, isn't it? Lets me support literally anything, including masochists' fantasies. And my fantasies. Having pain turn into mana would be awesome. It’s a loop of activate ability, get hurt, activate again, get hurt again, and on and on. Although… she must be a super masochist. I mean, feeling all the pain? Maybe it nerfs it a little or something… I’m not sure I’d want to feel all the pain, just some of it would be nice.

“I see,” Melody replied, then moved along the circle to Silvia. “Silvia?”

“I can see mana formations, traps, and the like,” Silvia started, before adding. “Consumes mana, but it’s pretty slow.”

This is what I was worried about… my ability said it doubled all rates, would it double Silvia’s consumption rate? In her case, doubling the rate is only a downside… I guess we’ll need to find out sometime.

“Sounds useful.” Melody nodded. “Scarlet has a couple abilities and I have a bunch. Perks of S tier."

Then she spun to me, asking, “Should I introduce yours, Scarlet?”

Melody winked, clearly making my decision for me.

“Sure…” I mumbled.

“Okay. Scarlet has two abilities,” Melody began. “She can heal, and she can create a chronofield, speeding up rates of things.

“But, as you might have noticed, she’s wearing a collar.” I completely forgot already. How the fuck did no one say anything? It’s a pink leather collar, like a dog collar! Oh, my god. I… know I had Melody put it on earlier so they wouldn’t notice, but like, how didn’t they notice?

“It’s an artifact that enhances her temporal field.” No it fucking isn’t and… I looked over at Silvia who cocked an eyebrow, looking at my neck. She activated her ability, didn’t she? The ability that can see mana formations… which probably includes artifacts… fucking Melody… I’m gonna be so embarrassed every single time Silvia looks at me.

There’s no way in hell she can’t tell that it’s literally a dog collar and with a recon system, she probably has some pretty high intellect. She knows. She’s probably known. That’s probably what Melody spoke to her about.

“Scarlet’s abilities don’t consume much so no need to worry about overloading her. The chronofield can last around a minute right now and we hopefully won’t need healing today,” Melody finished, essentially telling everyone to use me as much as they want. Ability-wise that is.

“Lastly, I have a handful of abilities, but the important couple are my chains of debilitation that wrap around a creature’s legs, holding it in place and dealing damage when they struggle. Then I have whips of fury, which lets me rampage and triples my agility stat for a short period of time.” Well that’s… those chains… give me a bad feeling. I do wonder if they’d increase my chronofields though.

“You’ve been in dungeons?” Fara asked. “How many?”

“Just the one we’re going to today,” Melody answered, pulling out her phone. “I went in twice with a team from my family’s guild to power level.”

“What’s your lev?” Fara asked. I assume she’s asking for Melody’s level. Just shortened to ‘lev’ for some reason.

“I’m level fourteen,” Melody replied, scrolling through her phone. “I bet we can get all of you to at least level five.”

“What’d we need to kill for that?” Fara continued, her speech getting progressively more intense.

“Three or four hundred, I think?” Melody looked up from her phone. “Obviously we could go attack the boss and that would count for like a hundred normal kills.”

“How long do we have?” Fara asked, leaning back against the booth.

“I reserved three hours, but I can get more if we want,” Melody took another glance at her open phone on the table. “The two S tiers I brought along are at the dungeon whenever we want to go. The time slot starts at one, but we can always go early.”

It was about twelve-thirty, but I really don’t see how Melody can just get more time… I guess wealth, but like, how? Wouldn’t other people have bought slots for the time period?

“We should probably discuss a plan first,” Silvia interrupted. “So we don’t get killed instantly.”

“You right, you right,” Fara nodded, facing Silvia. “Elle and I together, Mel and Amane together, and Scarlet and you at the back.”

Melody shook her head. “I don’t need a tank. I’ll hang out at the back until you guys get a couple levels at least.”

“Then…” Fara got lost in thought.

Elle decided to continue for her, saying. “I’ll run around distracting enemies while Amane focuses on one at a time. Fara can attack the one targeting Amane, and Scarlet can support with those fields. Silvia can do… whatever she does.”

“Recon,” Silvia stated. “I’ll scout ahead and keep track of all the enemies.”

“Yeah, that.” Elle finished.

“Okay,” Melody clapped her hands. “Last thing, I’ll have one of the S tiers enter from a different entrance and draw monsters away, so we don’t get overloaded since there’s no one else in the dungeon. Or at least not on the top ten floors, not sure if there’s any deep raids running.”

Deep raids… those would be the ones that require multiple days in a dungeon. They don’t have very flexible schedules so I guess the dungeon management couldn’t promise there wouldn’t be anything. But that shouldn’t matter, since dungeon mob distribution is based solely on the participants on a single floor. I think… I don’t really know the details of anything. That’s why I’m at the academy and not, like, raiding dungeons already. Like Melody, who somehow knows everything.

“Finally,” Melody clapped again. “This dungeon is a slime cave for the first floor. So… easy, but slimy. That’s why we have special boots. They won’t get accidentally dissolved or anything.”

Everyone nodded.

“Should we head toward the dungeon?”

Once more, everyone nodded. Our plan was solid enough, I suppose. It's just the first floor and we have S tier backup. Can’t really go wrong.

“Did you all drive here?” Melody asked as we stood up. “If you didn't, we can give you a lift so you don’t need to ride the metro.”

“I… didn’t,” Amane whispered out. I smiled at her.

“Come with us,” Melody said, then scanned the room. “Let’s meet at the south entrance.”

Everyone nodded and we began walking toward the door, where Melody paused for a moment to pay for the food. Once she was done, she joined Amane and I outside, and we went toward my car. Amane climbed into the back with her pile of clothes that she had before changing into the dungeon suit and I drove away, following Melody’s verbal instructions to the dungeon complex, which was just down the street. A five-minute drive, probably a twenty-minute walk, or a ten-minute metro ride after wait times and paying and whatever. The metro here isn’t great.

We pulled into the ginormous parking lot that surrounded the stadium-like structure, made entirely of metal beams and concrete. Both because of its scale, and as a precaution against a dungeon break, although that would be pretty rare for a dungeon in a place like this, where it’s probably raided daily by high-level teams. 

Dungeon breaks tend to be in remote areas. Even then, they’re still rare. The last time I saw one on the news… was probably the dungeon break in Creyce a couple years ago—that one was big. I think a handful of S tier-level monsters escaped, killed a few hundred until the government managed to send a team, although I don’t remember the details.

After I pulled into a parking spot, the three of us left and headed toward the building, which was pretty close since the parking lot was largely empty. A side effect of reserving an entire dungeon for a few hours. We approached the southern entrance, one of four on the building, and the large glass doors slid open once it detected us. 

Despite the door being glass, it is strong enough to hold a dungeon break. These places have lockdown modes or something… I really don’t know much though.

We stepped through and I got my first real-life look at a dungeon complex, it's a huge ring surrounding the dungeon entrance filled with shops and obviously, entrances to the dungeon. It looked like only about half of the shops were open, because of it being a weekend, and Melody being crazy. Regardless, a handful of people meandered about, heading in and out of shops.

Fara, Elle, and Silvia were standing in front of the empty queue just ahead of the entrance, where there were also two more people, both women, wearing similar clothes to us, but with normal pants and no skirt. The type of thing you would think to wear for combat. Melody waved and all five of them waved back.

We walked over to join them. Once we arrived, Melody asked, “Everyone ready?”