Chapter 68: The Last Room
The traps were the easiest part of the dungeon. They were all reliant on runes. Hannah took joy in dismantling them as they traveled through the tunnels and entered new rooms laden with monsters.
The walk between monster rooms had become a routine that helped Hannah get into the flow.
For the most part, the beginning always remained the same. The monsters wouldn’t engage first. They would let the crawlers kick things off. It was through increasing difficulty and the appearance of new, tougher monsters that made this deadly game more variable.
Bookworms maxed out at Level 40 with several skills to watch out for. Commonly, they used Mind Scribbles. But sometimes they would use other skills called Bookmark Dart and Paper Cut.
Those skills didn’t sound intimidating until Hannah suffered a close call from a rushing bookworm. The monster used Paper Cut while she was under assault by another bookworm shooting a volley of Bookmark Darts.
Her highly resistant gear protected her, but she still felt the danger of their attacks and had a brief fear of being slashed apart or punctured by magical bookmarks. She retaliated in kind, of course, with sharp pulses of kinetic force, turning the bookworms into hundreds to thousands of shredded books and pages.
Other than that, Hannah’s parade of oddities steamrolled over the bookworms and treated them as the grunts they were. Since there were so many, it was easy to gain experience and levels off of them.
The book skeletons were the next tier of challenges and proved more noteworthy. They didn’t always hide under piles of books, especially when Hannah’s group entered monster rooms that held more varieties in designs.
At some point, the monster rooms transitioned into cozy-looking settings with rugs covering the floor beneath the piles of discarded, unintelligible books.