Alantina Online: The Greatest Sword Mage Reborn As A Weak NPC

"Nothing…. At least, I do not think. But we should be more careful from here on out, more so than before."  Vance replied as he picked up the few items on the ground. "Hmmm, a belt which gives intellect."

[Scaled Belt]

[Raitry: Uncommon]

[+10 Defense]

[+4 Intellect]

It was an ugly green color and really stood out, but Vance did not hesitate to put it on. Vance looked at his stats and scratched his nose as he thought to himself. 'I should probably up my intelligence, but I will wait just in case.'

He did not wish to use all his points just yet. He was playing things by ear. As a solo player, you never upped your stats all at once, it would be like committing suicide. You would up them based on the situation. If you had a monster that was flying that you needed to kill, but your magic power was too low, and you upped your agility or strength instead of your intellect beforehand, it would result in you gritting your teeth and cursing yourself for being stupid. Smart players always left a bit of leeway. Currently, he already has high stats for his level. So it was okay not to sink his status points into everything, which was allowing him to be much more stingy with his status points.

"Let's go further in." Vance decided to keep going despite the feeling he was getting about this dungeon. They slowly made their way down the tunnel killing a few more snakegoons along the way, which made Vance frown even more. Not a single batgoon had been seen yet.

When they got to the end of the tunnel, Vance halted his steps. The room before them was one of the branch rooms and was large but also had many different paths one could take. Normally Vance always took the left routes to do dungeons. Since ninety percent of the time, you would end up getting to where you want to go. But as he looked into the room in front of him, he noticed that the only light was coming from the glow stones on the walls and floor of the dungeon. There was no light coming from the ceiling.

"What's wrong?" Alice became alert when she saw Vance's grim expression.

"We are going to back up for the time being…." Vance said as he began slowly walking backward. The girls did the same. Only when they were a few feet from the entrance of the room did Vance stop and sit down. He began drawing on the floor with a rock. "Look at this."

Vance pointed at the drawings. "The first area, these tunnels, we should have run into a few batgoons and not snakegoons. They are quite easy to kill with long ranged weapons. This area here is where we entered the same room. The first section of this tunnel should have been clear of any monsters, yet as soon as we exited, we were attacked not by a batgoon but by a snakegoon instead."

"Are you saying that the snakegoons were pushed out to the outer reaches of the dungeon?" Sally asked.

"You catch on quick. That is exactly what I am saying. This does not mean the batgoons disappeared. No, in fact, if I am not wrong, the entire room ahead of us had thousands of them inside." Vance frowned. He did not know why this was, though.

"What!? Thousands!? How are we going to fight that many!?" Alice cried out. She did not wish to die yet! She still had not had babies with Vance!

"This is the tricky part. If it was normal batgoons, then we could easily just last them with magic, and they would die easily. But these are all elite monsters making them stronger and harder to kill. Which means we need to come up with a way to deal with them. My first thought is to use this tunnel, but we will need a method of slimming the numbers down even more." Vance thought for a moment and tapped the ground before an idea popped into his mind. He looked at Alice and grinned.

"What!? Why are you looking at me!? Just so you know, I am not rushing in there. You can forget about it!" Alice humped, causing Vance to laugh.

"No. I do not want you to do something so dangerous. What I want is for you to pull them from this tunnel. You can shoot an arrow into the darkness and hit one of them, which should pull a handful of them. But…. If we use earth wall to our advantage and funnel them into the tunnel and then block them off, we can then take care of a group of them at a time." Vance remembered an amazing genius from his past life who had come up with this idea for leveling low level players. They used earth wall in a dungeon and had a ranged player pull a bunch of monsters, then funnel them into an enclosed area and block them off while people rained damage down on top of them.

"Will this work?" Sally asked. She felt that if they did pull it off, it would be worth the risk but only if it would work.

"It will. I have a title that makes my magic do more damage at half the cost. So we can easily take on a group with ease. We will just need to break in between so I can regain my mana." Vance was actually quite excited about this. If the bats were able to respawn quickly enough, they could actually use it to power level themselves!

"It's worth a try, but only you know how to use earth wall…." Alice brought up a good point. Earth wall was not a magic that would resist a bunch of hits. While it might stay around for a long time or until canceled, it also had a kind of health bar to it, making it quite fragile as well.

Vance pondered for a moment before he began drawing on the ground once more. "I will draw the magic circle, and just like the healing spell, you will try to learn it."