The Dungeon Conquerors: Journey to the Peak

After spending some lovey dovey naughty time together, Rein and Lauren again returned to the Dreadful Touvic Woods to complete their mission.

Technically leaving the forest in the middle of the test to have fun with your newest lover was definitely cheating and a crime worthy of the capital punishment, but the other mithril rankers who were in charge of keeping an eye on the participants had already lost Rein's and Lauren's trail when they hid their presence at the very beginning.

So, those invigilators were mostly trying to see if anyone was leaving the forest or not which would not be able to prevent or detect teleportation in any way. So Rein's crime was not caught. And if not caught, it was fine.

And spending time with his girlfriend had higher priority than any lousy exam anyways for Rein.

While Rein and Lauren were having their bed talk and were whispering sweet nothing into each other's ear, Rein had explained most of his powers to her.

It made Lauren very surprised, but she was also able to accept it easily as she already had a guess that Rein was way more impressive than what she had initially thought.

So, she proposed that she wanted Rein to leave everything to her, even for his safety. These rank 4 and 3 monsters were no trouble for Rein, with him her safety was assured. So she wanted to use this chance to train herself without any serious risk to her own life.

So, for the duration of the mission, Rein was not going to take any action. Lauren would be responsible for keeping both of them safe. If she was able to keep herself and Rein safe for the duration of the second test then Rein would go on a solo date with her.

And if she was unable to do so and Rein needed to take action, then she had to wear a dress of Rein's choice. It could be anything that Rein wanted and she would not be able to refuse her.

So with such high stakes at play, the adventuring date restarted again.

...

This time Rein did not do anything. She did not even use the stealth ability of his robe. Instead he left everything in Lauren's hands. Lauren was in charge of hiding both of their presence.

She was also setting up magical mechanisms to trap and hunt rank 4 monsters. Some of the Rank 3 ones were also getting affected by them. Lauren was capable of using most of the magical techniques but if she was asked what her specialisation was, then she would say it was magic circles and formations.

Lauren also looked like it was not her first time inside a danger zone and she was navigating quite well here. Rein really did not have to do anything and he was somewhat enjoying this situation. He would never hesitate about leaning on his lovers' shoulder.

Soon they were able to find a few stocks of Sonatia Grass and Rein was already done with his mission. Now they only needed to find an Evening Lalina to get the job done in this forest. But Evening Lalina was a bit rarer than Sonatia Grass so they were not able to find it till now.

As they continued searching for it, Lauren started searching areas that would be ideal habitat for Evening Lalina, but her luck was not good and she was still unable to find one.

After a little bit of research, she was able to find an area that had more than 90 percent chance of having an Evening Lalina. But the problem was that, this place was also habitat of a very strong rank 3 monster called Scoriadia.

It was a frog-like monster with a scorpion-like stinger behind it. It also had a long sticky tongue like a frog too. Those two organs gave it very powerful long distance weapons and most annoyingly for Lauren, this monster's magic defence was quite strong too. So for mages it was a very bad matchup.

It was not like this was the only place with the chance of Evening Lalina being there. There were other places too that had ideal conditions for Evening Lalina to grow.

But the chance of those places having the Evening Lalina was not as high as the location with the Scoriadia and as Lauren wanted to find that flower as soon as possible, going there was the fastest possible way.

Obviously, she was not foolish enough to directly challenge that monster. So, at first she created quite a lot of traps surrounding that part of the forest. Then she went to challenge the Scoriadia. While she was trying to defeat this boss, Rein was watching all this happening from the sky.

Scoriadia was not a very fast monster. So Lauren was able to run away from it quite easily with her wind and fire magic boosting her speed. She guided the monster to a location where she had hidden one of the magical traps.

It was the same trap that Lauren had used in her first ascension test, Inferno. Very soon Scoriadia's ugly looking body got surrounded by twirling flames. But unlike the first test, it was definitely not enough to kill the monster, or even to give it a fatal wound.

But Lauren was still calm. This trap was at least able to do some damage. That means her magic was not completely ineffective against it. In that case, with enough magical traps she should be able to kill this monster.

Very soon Lauren took this monster to the next trap destination and then the following one. To not make the monster suspicious, she did fight it, one on one a few times, where she acted like she was quite a bit weaker than it.

She also did not forget to taunt the monster now and then to make sure it was still chasing her.

This Scoriadia faced a flaming explosion trap, a wind blade trap, a trap where it got trapped in a lava pool, a trap that made it to endure an area with high wind pressure. Just like that, after taking on dozens of traps head on, this monster was quite a bit weakened.

This was finally time for Lauren to go on the offensive. This time she did not hold back anymore and used her strongest spells one after another.

But those were still just a ploy to buy some extra time as Lauren was preparing her personal unique magic, which was quite powerful but needed quite a long time to complete the casting.

After about 3 minutes, she was finally able to prepare the spell. Those three minutes were quite hard for Lauren. As she was giving most of her attention to her personal spell that she was preparing, the power of her other spells decreased and the Scoriadia was able to attack her using this chance.

Lauren was quite badly beaten up. Her right hand had turned purple as it was hit by the Scoriadia's stinger once. There were also a few whip marks on her body. The reason behind them was the long tongue of the monster which it used as a whip.

Many time Rein felt like jumping down between their fight to torture this monster to death, but as his lover was not in a life threatening danger and it was a good battle experience for her, he did his best to hold back.

Even though she was badly beaten up, Lauren still had a slight smile at the corner of her face as she released her personal spell. A ball of pure white fire came out of her hand and hit the Scoriadia right on its head.

It went inside the monster's skull without feeling any resistance and burned down the monster's brain. It died immediately.

This spell of Lauren used the principle that wind could make fire to get stronger to the fullest. Lauren continuously supplied her fire with wind magic to make it hotter and hotter, then when it became too hot for even her to control, she threw the fire toward the monster that easily killed it.

After that, just when Lauren finally got her hands on the "Evening Lalina" a weird high pitch sound came from the deepest part of the Dreadful Touvic Woods. This sound was filled with the feeling of anger.

A chill ran down Lauren's spine as she felt like the killing intent coming from whoever made this sound was targeting her.