Chapter 180 - Tom's Fatal Mistake

"This time, I will be going ahead," Tom announced, not caring about the opinion of his friends. 

They already wasted more time than they could afford. As the stronger group out of all the participating ones, they had to be the first to reach the sixtieth floor, and at their current rate, it would be no wonder if they were to be the last group to do so. 

"I guess we don't really have much choice," Marvin muttered, likely thinking about the same problems. "Tom, go," he said, nodding his head as he pointed his hand at the doors leading to the teleportation stairway. 

"I'm not going to wait for you this time," Tom informed, grabbing a better hold over his spear as he moved forward. "As soon as I will extract the stones, I will be moving ahead. I will only stop upon reaching the floor we decided to meet with others at," he added before pressing forward. 

A moment later, Tom was once again all alone. With the rest of his group left on the other side of the portal, it would actually take a moment for them to reach the beginning of the forty-fifth floor. 

Not because they would have any problem at crossing over the distance from their position to the gate. With no more monsters guarding it, even Kira could run through it in a matter of seconds. 

But Rufus could not 

Even though he was a man in his later teens, his body has yet to hit the climax of its height sput. As such, his legs were simply too short for the kid to keep up with everyone's speed if they were to start running. 

On the other hand, Tom instantly jogged forward, no longer willing to waste even a second of his time. 

Just like he said to his friend, they wasted more time than they should on various stuff, from encountering unexpectedly powerful monsters at the intercourse with Cleo ending. 

What Tom had to do right now was to breeze through the floors and reach the boss room of the sixtieth floor as soon as possible. 

'Huh?' Tom thought a few moments later as his spear cut through the monsters as if they were made out of butter. 'Was it always that easy?' he asked himself, surprised by the ease at which he could deal with the monsters. 

It wasn't that the monsters of this level could pose any challenge for him... But it didn't mean that he could one-shot them with a spear to their intestines either. 

In the end, he didn't put his back behind this attack at all. It was nothing more but a warding-off move aimed at forcing Tom's opponent to increase his distance rather than openly attacking the enemy. 

And yet, despite all of that, the monster could only writhe on the floor for a short moment before the dungeon itself started to clean up. By the time its flesh started to vanish under the influence of the strange quality of the dungeon's walls, Tom was already several turns of the corridor ahead. 

'It's not that those monsters suddenly turned weaker,' Tom thought, splitting the boss of the floor in half with ease. "I guess I just became stronger," he thought, watching how the monster's parts quickly fell to the floor. 

Instead of instantly leaving for the further levels, Tom wasted a short moment to extract the stones from the wall. 

The moment he split from the rest of the group, he was no longer certain that they would reunite just by following the same path for a while. 

Just like Tom's entire family was forcibly split upon entering the dungeon, the same could happen if they were to take some time before moving through the inter-floor gates. 

'Since I never tested it out, I don't really have any other option but to assume the words,' Tom thought,t watching how the stones fell right into a plain cloth, only to pull the bag up and close it with a tie. 

It was the simplest way to carry stuff around in the dungeon. Given how Tom was quickly climbing towards the floors where even he would have to be cautious about his movements, he didn't like the idea of keeping the stones in his backpack. 

After all, his backpack was the biggest flaw of his position, the one thing that the monsters could successfully target and even, potentially, force Tom to abandon. 

With the boss of the level defeated, Tom quickly extracted the stones and stashed them away by his belt. Then, without any further wait, he moved towards the doors at the far end of the boss-room before stepping into yet another floor. 

'Now that I think about it,' he mused as his surroundings changed, 'doesn't it feel as if I'm getting better way quicker while I'm fighting than I did back when aI simply walked around?' Tom asked himself, puzzled by this sudden finding. 

Was it the case of the physical effort facilitating the natural adapting processes of his body? Or maybe he was picking some kind of trace amounts of energy from the monsters he was killing that allowed his body to get used to its new state quicker?

Just like with many other things in the dungeon, Tom couldn't tell. But since he was pretty certain that his current actions were a way better way of getting rid of the aftereffects of consuming the golden stones, all he could do right now was to take it for a given truth, even if he didn't know the principle behind it. 

Conquering the next four floors took Tom only a few minutes. He would simply run through the main corridor of the dungeon, following the path that he had mapped out in the memory. 

While that meant leaving quite a lot of straggling monsters, Marvin and Cleo were strong enough to deal with those on their own. And in this way, between the moment he would appear at the beginning of the floor, and the moment he would kill the boss of it, no more than seven minutes would pass. 

'I wonder if I will meet him,' Tom thought about anything other than killing the monsters only when he reached the beginning of the fiftieth floor. This was one of the few places in the entire dungeon that he committed to his memory. 

Not because in one more level, the monsters would turn stronger by a huge notch. But because, if lucky, he would get to meet that strange sage monster in the boss-room of the floor. 

With an insane number of questions constantly ramping up in his mind, Tom was pretty eager to ask for some answers. For the first time in a few long yet boring moments, his rush was fueled by something other than the simple hurry. 

And soon enough, he arrived at the doorstep of the boss-room...

Only to find out that his hopes were all in naught. 

The boss on the other side of the barrier was just another overgrown orc. Judging from the staff it was holding, it was some kind of magic orc... But an orc nonetheless. 

Not the many-armed giant that he met during his first pass of the entire dungeon. 

"Just my luck," Tom muttered a moment later, stepping on the decaying corpse of the orc's shaman. 

The fight with the magical orc turned out to be quite novel with all the summons it could bring to the battle. Sadly, just like all Tom's battles before, it didn't pose any challenge for him, only furthering Tom's boredom. 

'Well, I can't complain about getting bored,' he thought, stepping down from the corpse and directing his steps towards the doors. 'It's better to be bored than being worried about Marvin and Cleo,' he thought, once again immersing himself in the bloody rush to the sixtieth floor. 

Starting from the fifty-first floor, the monsters turned stronger. It was the usual occurrence happening every ten floors. Yet, for Tom, the difference was so minimal that there was hardly any reason to even think about it. 

If not for the possibility that the monster he was omitting would now pose some challenge to his friends, he would pay absolutely no mind to the monsters. 

Yet, propelled by this worry, Tom actually paid a bit more attention to clearing the floors, hoping to decrease the chances of his friends finding themselves in a struggle against a bigger group of stronger monsters. 

Ultimately, Tom managed to reach his desired point in about an hour and a half. 

On its own, this was a pretty bad rate of clearing the levels, given how powerful he was when compared to the local monsters. Yet, even though he could speed that process up considerably by ignoring all the monsters that didn't stand in his path, Tom took special care to clean out all the bigger groupings of monsters. 

Even though he was in a hurry, this was his responsibility as not only the stronger warrior of the family but also its damned leader. 

'Now that I think about it,' Tom pondered once he finally reached the end of the sixtieth floor, 'those who never ventured in the dungeon before nor played around the Dungeons Online can find it pretty troublesome to reach the sixtieth floor so quickly.' 

As fatal of a mistake as it was, Tom no longer had any means of rectifying it. 

'The most I can do is hope that if there will be any group too weak to reach the level sixty in time, they will simply turn around and go back to Earth,' he thought, already hatching up a plan of coming to their rescue.

After all, it was better to get into an even bigger conflict with the online hub than to learn that most of his greater family died because of his unreasonably high expectations!