When Alicia calmed down, Dante had to get her away from the cold water first. Hypothermia is a real threat, and not even the Blessed can endure it. If she weren't a Blessed, she would've already died hours ago.
Dante approached Alicia, looked at her for a second, and she lifted her arms. "What are you waiting for? You said you're going to move me." She looked like a little kid waiting to be carried, but instead of that, Dante grabbed her by the hands and dragged her to a dry patch of ground like she was a corpse.
She looked at him with a deadpan face and mumbled. "How rude, couldn't you have just carried me like a princess?"
Dante stared at her with an empty face. "Well, you're wet and wearing armor. Even as a Blessed, I can't lift you up." He crossed his arms. "Let's say you weigh 60 kilograms and your armor is another twenty. That's a whole 80 kilograms that I have to pull off the ground. When we go back, ask the firefighters and medics about how hard it is to move a body."
She frowned. "Don't assume I weigh 60 kilograms!" She growled with a pout, and Dante looked at her with a serious face. "70 Kilograms?"
"What?" She cried, and he added. "Then it's 80... don't tell me! 90 kilograms!"
"Stop it! Why are you just making the numbers bigger!? I only weigh 49 kilograms! My lower half is basically just bones and skin." Dante laughed, and for a second she just glared at him with an angry face before laughing herself.
As both of them relaxed a bit and the tension of being trapped inside a deadly dungeon filled with hungry monsters vanished, Dante looked at Alicia once more.
"Your armor is wet. Unsummon it and summon it back again, and it'll be dry. For heat, you'll have to rely on your body." She had been sitting in the cold water for a while, so getting dry first was important.
She smiled. "I know. I'm just waiting for you to look away so I can do it." Hearing that, Dante turned around and summoned his sword. She dried her armor, and he was already glaring into the darkness.
"We got company coming. Prepare yourself." He growled, and she froze.
"My telepathy range is just around twenty meters. If you can help it, don't get too far away or we might get separated." As she looked at his back, Dante smiled. "Don't worry, I won't leave my med-kit behind."
She stared at his back. "Then what does that make you? My guard dog?" To her surprise, he chuckled. "Sure, why not?"
Both he and Alicia had been a bit too noisy for a while, especially when she was crying after he used all of his mana. That had drawn the attention of a lot of abominations.
Three Mundane Beasts, one Scarred Beast, and one Scarred Monster. That will be a tough battle, practically a suicide, if he weren't immortal. As long as he can kill all of the abominations and keep Alicia alive, he should be fine.
"How many are there?" Alicia asked as she looked at Dante's back, and he looked back at her with a somber frown. "Multiple ones."
Her lips pursed together as she frowned, clenched her hands, and then took a deep breath. As she waved her hand, from thin air, a wheelchair appeared. "Can you help me on it? I'll fight as well."
"You could've used that all this time? And how are you going to fight?" Even though he looked annoyed, he did lift and set her in the wheelchair. "The ground is uneven; just rolling this thing around is nearly impossible." With the countless holes and stalagmites, Alicia's wheelchair was bound to get stuck.
With a faint smile on her face, Alicia summoned another magical item. An advanced, large compound crossbow. Then, with a simple brush of her thin and delicate fingers, she touched the cave's wall and pulled stone from it, shaping it with earth magic into a bolt.
Seeing that, Dante smiled, and his eyes burned with white magic, causing Alicia to flinch. His eyes reminded her of Saint Maria when she fights. "Good, I'll leave the backup to you."
It was at that moment that the first of the abominations showed its ugly visage. A writhing mass of flesh, teeth, and tentacles, blood-red and moaning in pure agony as it slithered out of the thin cracks hidden within the cave's darkness.
The entire cave seemed to get darker; the air smelled of blood and salt, and just existing near this thing was enough to twist the mind. This was Alicia's first time ever facing an abomination face to face, and what she saw in the eyes of that horror and the madness of its abominable mind was too much to handle.
She screamed and almost stumbled out of her wheelchair, unable to stop her entire body from trembling. This was the Scarred Monster, the strongest of the abominations that Dante sensed, and the others were just behind it.
Alicia didn't know that, but she could deduce from its unnatural form that it wasn't a mere beast, and also from the density of its magic that it was of a higher rank than herself.
"D... Dante..." She stuttered, "This thing isn't normal! Beasts don't look like this. And with this magic, it's higher than us in rank. We need to run away." This was a losing fight, a suicide.
"Damn, you're ugly." Dante took a step forward, standing between the abomination and Alicia with a casual stance. "Sadly, this bastard isn't our only guest. Take aim." Only after hearing that did Alicia notice the moving shadows behind the disgusting abomination.
Three achesouls with twitching maws drenched in blood, and one large caiman-like abomination with two tails and a back riddled with bites and scars. Abominations can fight among each other, but whenever a human is around, they always attack the human first.
Dante watched the Scarred Monster, kept track of its countless tentacles, many eyes, and where it was gazing. The other abominations were a threat, but nowhere near as deadly as this ugly mass.
He was right, as a moment later he noticed the Monster's eyes looking at his head, and one of the tentacles twitched subtly before it jolted forward like a deadly whip toward his face. Dante lifted his sword and barely managed to block the attack with the sharp edge of his blade, causing the tentacle to cut itself.
The entire cave quacked, and the severed tentacle hit the wall like a bomb, causing enough shrapnel and debris to throw Alicia off her wheelchair. That was the moment when both Dante and the abominations all exploded into violence.
Dante used one droplet of mana to accelerate forward as fast as he could and dashed past the charging abominations directly toward the Scarred Monster. He had to get rid of that thing first.
Of course, the Scarred Monster's alien mind wasn't sleeping, and it immediately attacked Dante again, sending three of its tentacles hurling toward him like super-sonic whips.
But that was also a part of Dante's plan. This abomination certainly doesn't understand physics or how whips work. The dangerous part of a whip is the very tip, the end that you want to hit with, but the further down you get, the slower the whip moves and the weaker its hit will be.
The three whips all hit Dante at once, and they hurt like hell, making him feel as if his bones had been shattered, but as they didn't tear his limbs off, he could keep going, and with how small the cave was, he was already standing right in front of the Scarred Monster, ready to swing his sword.
^I won't take any chances.^ Knowing how dangerous this thing is, Dante used two droplets of mana and infused one into each of his arms, swinging his sword right at the Monster's torso, where its souls were, with both hands.
But the moment his sword hit the Monster's body, his face paled, and his arms froze. The blade didn't dig deeper than a finger. Right beneath the monster's red skin was a thick layer of teeth. ^Hard!^
At that instant, one of the Scarred Monster's tentacles wrapped itself around Dante's body and swung him violently all over the place, smacking him on the walls and ceiling as if he were a ball attached to a rope.
Alicia saw that and immediately took aim. The moment her fingers closed on the trigger, her hands stopped shaking, and all of her anxiety disappeared. She couldn't run around and swing a weapon as everyone did, so she had trained with crossbows until her hands bled.
One shot, one broadhead bolt, and she had hit her mark, cutting the tentacle and freeing Dante.