A Dungeon…
Reaching the outskirts of the city, where massive forest lay sprawled on the ground, both of them disembarked from the car.
"Where should we go from here?~"
Rhea asked in doubt seeing the dense greenery fully blocking the road ahead.
"It should be somewhere around here. Gimme a moment, I'll find it soon."
Saying that, Galen closed his eyes and alread his awareness inside the forest.
He could feel the wild mana swirling like air currents at every corner of the forest.
At the same time, he also noticed that mana getting absorbed into the flora and fauna of the forest, starting to cause positive mutations, or evolutions in a sense, in this flourishing place.
Trees were visibly growing in their length and size, their newly grown leaves completely blocking the sun and casting long dense shadows on the ground.
Undergrowths filled the place everywhere he could see with his mana sense, removing any traces of previous pathways made by humans.
The animals and the birds also seemed to have become bigger in size, with some of them having already evolved into new species entirely with the advent of mana.
But it won't be the end. As mana continues to inflitrate the atmosphere, the changes are going to get even more pronounced in the future.
Gates aren't the only threats humanity is going to face up against in this world.
Galen thought, remembering his home world in the past, a peaceful and cozy world without too much war, not unlike the current Earth and how that had all changed when mana was introduced for the first time ever.
'Well, past is past. Now for the thing I've come here, where is it?'
Galen continued scouring through the forest spanning dozens of kilometres, which he easily covered with his powerful mana sense and eventually found what he had been looking for at the east side of the forest adjacent to the center.
Confirming the location, he finally opened his eyes, their golden sheen brightening with each passing moment.
Turning to the side to share the news with Rhea, he caught her sitting on the hood of the car and supporting her head with her hands, while looking at him with a silly smile on her face.
She was busy admiring his face as he had already removed his mask after getting into her car.
"What?"
"No matter how mant times I see it, I still can't get used to your handsome face which is literally out of this world.~"
"Haha..."
"You can look all you want when we get back, but before that let's do what we came here to do first."
"Which is?~"
"You'll see in a bit."
"For now, just follow me."
With that, Galen jumped and lightly landed on one of the branches of a nearby tree situated at somewhere in the middle of its wide trunk.
Then pushing off that branch, he launched himself forward – towards the depths of the forest, traversing between dense trees using their branches.
Of course, he used only used a little bit of his strength in order to not leave his lovely girlfriend behind.
Seeing Galen freely moving among the foliage, Rhea also followed him in his footsteps.
With her increased stats, and her past as an assassin who had experience working in all kinds of terrains, it was a piece of cake for her.
Not mention her innate ability, Dexterous Physique, that only made this task even easier for her.
Like this, with Galen leading the way and Rhea following closely behind, both of them went to the location that Galen had marked in his mind.
*
Ten minutes later...
Even with their leisurely movement, the both of them easily crossed more than ten kilometres and eventually reached a wide clearing with an area of about a square kilometer.
Situated in the middle of a lush forest, such a wide clearing with not a single tree in it was definitely a bizarre sight for anyone to happen upon this place.
But what was even more bizarre was the cave-like structure standing at the centre of it.
It had a shape similar to that of a door with a perfectly rectangular entrance, and an eerie opening covered in complete darkness, disallowing any onlooker to get a clear view of the inside.
Standing at a towering height of ten meters and a wide width of five meters, the only reason Rhea thought of that... structure as a cave was, it was situated in a small hill that had just about the same height as the cave.
It seemed like the hill's only purpose here was to support the abnormal cave present on the clearing.
Even the gate that she had previously cleard with Galen didn't have such a grand entrance.
'Gulp.'
Involuntarily gulping, Rhea felt a bit of nervousness creeping towards her at seeing such an absurdity all of a sudden.
"Umm.... Galen..?~"
"Yes, dear."
"By any chance, It is not a Gate entrance, is it?~"
She asked with an awkward chuckle, but Galen easily picked up the slight tremors she tried to hide in her voice.
Amused at her reactions at the thought of this possibly being a Gate, Galen wanted to laugh out loud but controlled himself in the end.
"No dear. It is not a Gate like what we've dealt with before."
"It is a Dungeon."
"..."
"...A what?~"
She hadn't seen such a thing in the memories that he had shown her before.
Since Galen could only share a bit more than a year's worth of memories from his millions of years of life, there were still a lot of things she had to learn about in this evolving universe.
And apparently, the dungeon that was standing before her was one of such things.
"You see Rhea, like us humans, not all of the worlds that are getting integrated with the universal system have strong inhabitants. Even though we have developed very far in the technical aspect, physically we are still pathetically weak even when compared to the beasts living in our own world."
"At the start of the mana explosion, this resulted in stronger worlds with inherently stronger inhabitants, preying on weaker worlds in the wide cosmos, sometimes even destroying the weaker worlds in the process."
"So to make the scales somewhat equal between newly evolved worlds and the older ones, the Universal System granted each world with these unique training grounds called dungeons."