The next ten waves were some kind of historical soldiers, trojans or Greeks or something, he was becoming too mentally taxed to pick out details to figure out who they were, he just pushed forward. His smooth and efficient moves that he had practiced for over two days straight were now like a trance, moves he made while fighting the hundreds of people shaped monsters no longer required thought. His body would just react and make the required movements. The boss on wave 135 got a small cut on his cheek and the boss on 140 got him with a two handed war hammer in the right thigh. It didn’t break a bone but the muscle was so damaged he could feel that he lost some strength in it.

  Wave 141 were some kind of old 1800’s Russian soldiers with fur coat type leather armor and had very strong sword swings combined with fancy footwork. The boss in that set was some kind of illusionist, making it very difficult to pick out where he was going to strike. Eli took three solid hits cutting his left arm twice and a deep one on his left side. Getting frustrated, he had to use an air detonation with a touch of gravity magic in it to find it, then a blink to finish it off before it could use another illusion. Both of those spells were expensive, the air detonation because of the gravity inclusion and he found out that blinking in this form took a large amount of magic.

  Now he was on his last set, waves 146 to 150, but he was hurt, his left arm had almost no strength and his right leg was weakened. He just hoped that the fighters that came out would be an easy match-up for him, a hope that was immediately crushed when he saw that it was army soldiers, his army, from before the world ended. Seeing hundreds of soldiers dressed in combat fatigues, the kind he used to wear, every enemy dressed like the people he used to consider his brothers and sisters. They all had knives and were rushing towards him, then his heart fell even further when he saw that they were all women.

  Every instinct in his mind wanted to protect them, and he had to slaughter them, all of them. He heard Stacy’s voice in the back of his head saying ‘resolve’ over and over and he came to his senses and got to work. He took small cuts from them as the slightest hesitation would creep into his mind when one of them would remind him of Tara, but he took the hits and kept going. By the time he finished the four waves containing over 2000, he had black tears running down his face, black tears that burned a line into his skin like acid. He barely finished wave 149, only getting a little over a minute to breath before the boss of wave 150 came out and the tears got worse.

  The boss of wave 150 was a copy of Bethany, an exact copy, the fight started before he could even come to his senses after the stun of seeing his opponent. He took a cut from its spear to his left leg, almost deep enough to hit bone, the pain snapped him out of it and he got to work dodging and parrying strikes. He got a few hits in with his mace but they weren’t too damaging, he was still trying to shake off the hesitation at hitting it with the intent to harm or kill. He was so tired, his soul was on the verge of breaking after all he had done in this place. Five minutes went by, then ten, his injuries increasing and the fake Bethany’s injuries weren’t slowing it down.

  After 20 minutes of fighting, Eli took a spear hit to the stomach so hard it was poking out his back. He fell to a knee and grabbed the spear, the monster tried to pull it out but couldn’t win against his grip. The twisting and wrenching it was doing was causing him excruciating pain but he kept holding and wouldn’t let go of it, if he couldn’t bring himself to hit it for real, he would die if this kept going. Then, to his shock and surprise, a spear went through the back of its head and out its mouth, it fell over dead and started to dissolve into the ground. Behind it, the real Bethany was standing with her spear in her hand.

  Eli didn’t get up, he couldn’t, his injuries and exhaustion wouldn’t let him think clearly so he stayed there, down on a knee, a spear through his gut, staring blankly at Bethany's tear covered face. He wasn’t sure how she had gotten out of the stone ring, when a wave started whoever was inside the stone ring couldn’t come out during boss waves. She must have been standing outside the ring of stones in case of an emergency, then pulled on their connection to borrow his blink skill and save him at the last moment. He fell to his side as he could feel himself losing consciousness, as more acid tears fell, in his blurry vision he could reach out for her and she grabbed his hand right as he passed out.

  He woke up sometime later inside the stone ring, still groggy and confused. He sat up quickly looking for danger, but all he found was an intense pain in his stomach which forced him to lay back down. He was worried since he didn’t see or hear the two that had been with him. He lay on his side in a panic, then he heard them talking in the distance and walking towards him. Groaning in pain he rolled over so he could see them and he smiled and let out a long and weary breath. The two saw him moving and ran up to him.

  “Don’t move too much, your injuries have healed but you're probably going to be sore for a while, I can feel there's some lingering foreign magic in you left over from the final stab through the gut.” Bethany said worriedly.

  Eli’s mouth was dry so his words were hoarse, “The dungeon?”

  “All done, we ended it after you transformed back to normal, well mostly normal and we dragged you here.” Bethany explained.

  “How long?” he said barely audibly.

  “You have been out for about twelve hours, the dungeon said we would have 20 to recover before we would have to leave.” Stacy said.

  “Wait, mostly normal?” Eli said louder, but still somewhat strained.

  If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  Stacy got some water out and gave it to him to drink. He took it and drank until it was empty.

  “Well there are some… scars.” Bethany said. Eli began slowly moving around on the ground looking at his body, searching for the scars. He only found one, a star pattern scar to the left of his belly button, the center part was about the size of his thumbnail and it had two inch lines of scar coming out of it in all directions.

  “You said scars, as in plural, is there more I'm not seeing?” he asked, with a bit of panic hoping it wasn’t bad looking. He was just getting used to being truly sexy for the first time in his life.

  Bethany got a bit sheepish and blushed a bit before saying, “you eyes.” Before he could panic too much she took out one of the weapons they had picked-up, a sword with a wide blade and a mirror finish. He held it so he could see his face and he was stunned. His acid tears from the last five waves had marked him, his eyelashes were gone and in their place was a thin line of black skin. Then from the center of his eyes going straight down his cheeks to his jaw were two thin black lines, one under each eye. It wasn’t something that would heal, it was a permanent mark. He searched inside himself to feel the magic and tears came to his eyes again, the eye markings weren’t physical scars but emotional ones. His soul was so shaken by the experience that it marked his physical body.

  “It looks like I have eye make-up on. I’m not the god of emo’s now am I?” Eli looked at the two, “How does it look?”

  “Well, we both think it's hot, but it might not be for everyone.” Bethany said. Stacy gave her a side-eyed look implying that she didn’t want him to know that, but she didn’t seem upset enough by it to say anything to contradict her.

  Eli took a breath and just enjoyed the feeling that the dungeon was over and he had made it to his goal. “Did you guys get any good loot? Good experience?”

  “Well, I’m 99 and it says additional experience pending. Stacy is all the way from 82 to 98 so the experience was good for us, but we would guess that you got a lot more than we did, maybe twice as much.” Bethany explained.

  “I’ll check it in a minute, what about loot?”

  “Well, there wasn’t any.” Stacy said.

  “What? No loot?” Eli said then he opened his inventory to check for anything and there was a lot. Apparently all the weapons he collected from the bosses and gave to Bethany, she had put them all in his inventory, except one item. It was a necklace with a black chain and a large black and gold pendant made out of some kind of mineral like obsidian but much heavier.

  “Black Onyx Champion necklace”

  “A reward from the Endless Waves Dungeon for highest clearance record.”

  “Increases all non-harvesting regeneration by 10% while worn.”

  He put the necklace on and it kind of stuck to his skin which was good cause it would flop around during a heated fight. After it stuck to his chest, the gold on it changed to a runic language, which the system translated for them to 150.

  “You guys were there, why didn’t you get one?” he asked.

  “Well our contribution was low, so the system asked…” Stacy got cut off by Bethany

  “It’s not important, and I know you just got up but we don’t have a lot of time so you need to read your system messages so you can get over 100 and we can leave.”

  “Can’t I do that outside?” he asked.

  “I have a suspicion that we will have company when we get outside, Gwen and her relative who's a lord are vindictive and won’t let what happened go unanswered.” Stacy said.

  Eli sighed with bone deep tiredness, “Ok, I’ll go through them but we are going home after this. I need my bed.”

  “Agreed,” Both of them said at the same time.

  “Congratulations on completing the dungeon”

  “Contribution to completion: 83%”

  “Wave reached: 150”

  “Experience distributed”

  “Level 99 reached, experience gain paused.”

  “Loot awarded”

  “You have 15 hours to recover before being forced to leave.”

  “You meet the requirements for a realm creature bond”

  “This bond must be completed to advance in level”

  “Warning: realm creature bonds have a 50% survival rate”

  “Would you like to attempt a realm creature bond? Yes/No”

  Eli scratched his head in confusion, for the life of him he could not figure out why every dungeon didn’t have a standardized completion block of messages. He thought on it awhile while other parts of his mind were processing the system windows as well as what he had been through. He remembered that every dungeon had a creator, meaning the system didn’t design the dungeons, people did. Maybe you could earn the right to design one, or pay to design one. However it worked, it meant that there was a chance that if those people were still around, they would know how he did in their dungeons. That was all thought for another time though.

  “So I need this bond to advance in level, I knew that was coming but you are saying that I should do that now. Even though it has a 50/50 chance of survival. Why?”

  “Well,” Stacy started then sighed and kept going with an encouraging hand on her shoulder from Bethany. “I’ve met one other lord, Gwen’s relative, and he was… powerful. Gwen told me that clearing level 100 gave a big boost in stats and the bond was a game changer in magical potency.” Eli raised an eyebrow at her. “Yes you are probably still stronger than him, even how you are now, but if the goal isn’t to kill everyone waiting for us, you might want to do it.”

  Eli tapped his chin with his finger in thought, “I can see that, just give me another hour to collect myself.”

  “Sure,” Bethany said and walked away with Stacy so they could talk where he couldn’t hear them.

  “So, it's been longer than the day I said I was going to give you. What are you going to do?” Bethany asked Stacy.