We entered the first of the two Dungeons at long last, this was the Rank 1 Dungeon and the place where the people of the sect got most of their food. It was a dungeon named "Little Spring Sanctuary", which was composed of 10 floors, each floor had few lots of grasslands, a few trees, and rivers and lakes.
They were mostly bright at day, but for some reason as the mana of the dungeon was drained, the artificial sun that it creates to illuminate the dungeon had gone off and it was not working properly, completely ending up in making the place as dark as it can get. There wasn't even any moonlight or something, and the usually invisible walls were now visible, making the entire place an eerily wide room filled with creepy darkness and pure silence.
Anyways, originally in this place people used the vast grasslands to plant all sorts of crops, while hunting the land-dwelling Rank 1 monsters here, which were mostly Ice Bisons, Ice Horned Hares and Rabbits, and Ice Wolves, which were all easy to beat for even the most unexperienced of sect disciples. As long as they knew a spell and had some armor and a weapon, they should be fine.
Of course, this newbie utopia also had monsters in the rivers and lakes, especially in there is where people enjoyed the most their food, as there were octopuses, squids, shrimp, and fish monsters usually all around here, even scallops and more, the Lakes were the richest, of course, while the rivers usually only had a lot of fish monsters.
"In this Dungeon is where we usually would fish our seafood! …However, now its all dark and the water seem still… without mana to fuel the entire ecosystem, it has become a barren land in such little time… How unfortunate. I remember having found this dungeon long ago, I was so happy because of the seafood in here… However, it was being occupied by a massive clan of Orcs with leaders up to Rank 4, so we had to put a lot of effort into slaying those guys to have a chance ourselves… Fufu, the fight was arduous, but after we seized this wondrous dungeon, our sect finally began to flourish!" said Yukihime.
"So that's the history behind it… Huh, even more spiderweb…" I said, as I grabbed some sticky spiderweb from the damp walls. The silky and sticky spiderweb seemed to actually be quite good, like silk.
"I've never seen spider monsters here… perhaps this is the species introduced here!" said Yukihime.
"It certainly looks that way- Huh?" wondered Yuki, as she suddenly noticed several little legs crawling around the ceiling.
I moved the lamp and then illuminated everything with it at long last.
FLASH!
The entire room, which was almost 100 meter wide, finally illuminated completely, showing us off a massive quantity of black-colored spiders with sharp crimson-red eyes looking at us, crawling all around the ceilings and walls, some moving captured prey entangled in their spiderwebs, some of them even still moving inside… this was creepy. I don't really like spiders… and to boot, there were a lot of dried corpses of ice giants in here! I remembered that Mikohime said that they had sent some people here… are these those people?!
"Uwah! SO many spiders!" said Yuki.
"Hundreds… no. thousands! And they are the size of a person each…!" said Yukihime.
"My lord, shall we beat them?!" asked Rose.
"Woof!" said Frost.
"Alright!"
The spiders were already rushing towards us from all directions, so it was fair to actually just fight and kill them at this point. I had seen many of their eggs stuck around as well, but that wasn't really the important thing now. The important thing now was getting through this and killing them!
I sensed within this swarm of Spiders that all of them were Rank 2 with some Rank 3 mixed in between. The Rank 2 Spiders looked more normal and chonky, while the Rank 3 doubled in size, reaching up to four or five meter big, and were covered in sharp spikes, they also had a large horn in the middle of their eight eyes.
I can already see how they even won against these Rank 2 guys and even there are some Elders there that died to them… I guess Mikohime couldn't do much about them because she herself hasn't even gone inside and was planning to handle this issue later, completely unaware that there was such a dangerous swarm of monster inside of this place, which was clearly way above the usual rank.
"GRYYAR!" The gigantic spiders groaned as if they were not really just our fellow arachnids.
"ATTACK!" I roared, as everyone quickly unleashed a barrage of magic projectiles, mostly ice, which began to fall in the form of icicle spears of all shapes and sizes over the spiders, freezing the first dozens composing the first wave. However the other spiders simply climbed their deceased friends and rushed towards us at an even faster pace than before. Relentless bastards!
"Time for some action!" said Yuki, rushing through frontlines by herself, as we heard the roar of a furious tiger, her Beast Spirit had been awoken.
"ROAR!"
A massive white tiger made of spiritual light emerged out of Yuki's body, roaring wildly at the spiders and jumping into battle, materializing through the usage of mana, the deadly beast slashed through the spiders, freezing them and cutting them with its claws, while Yuki used her own metallic claws to pierce the spider's heads and jump around with her amazing swiftness.
SLASH! SLASH SLASH! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
"ROAR!"
The white tiger showed to be an excellent companion. I remember that Pekora said that having a spirit that wasn't of your original beast-kin race was one in a million, being extremely rare occurrence. Yuki was blessed with a powerful White Tiger Beast Spirit, which was even catalogued as a Legendary-grade one as it was based in a mythological creature!
