Dante sat beside Alicia and gasped for air. "That's bad... really bad." He looked at her, "Six or seven of them, all torn apart by something big."
She threw a fearful gaze at the darkness. "Dead... all of them? Are there any abominations around?" She was worried that the corpses would attract more abominations here, but Dante smiled.
"It was another Tentacle Ooze that did it, but that thing is dead there among the corpses, sliced cleanly in half." It seems that Dante wasn't the only one who could one-shot a Scarred Abomination among the Blessed sent here.
Dante stood and looked back at the darkness. "There should be another entrance to this cavern on the other side. I'll go seal it with earth magic and keep it marked, then we will seal this side and turn this cavern into a temporary base."
Alicia nodded, and he carried her. "Let's go. Get ready, it's a grizzly sight." He warned her, but she shook her head. "I'm used to seeing torn bodies and corpses. I worked as a healer in the church after all."
She then looked at Dante with a smile. "Want me to let you in on a secret?" As she whispered that into his ear, Dante felt the faint hair on his back stand. "I don't want to hear it."
"After Saint Maria failed to heal you and you were declared dead. She sent you to me. I was the one to wash your corpse, document your wounds, and register the cause of death before sending you to the morgue." She gently tapped him on the back. "It was then when I found that your heart was still beating."
"What?!" Dante stared right back at her in shock and almost threw her to the ground. "I told you not to tell me!" By that time, they had reached the corpses, so she summoned her wheelchair and Dante let her sit on it.
She looked at the corpses with a somber face, and then looked at Dante. "We should bury them outside the cavern. Diseases are a thing even here." He stared at her in silence. "We can't take their corpses back?"
She shook her head. "What the dungeon takes, stays in it." She looked at him and smiled. "But we'll take their tags back with us to give to their families." She pulled the tag she wore around her neck. "You got one as well, right?"
Indeed, Dante got one like everyone else. It was like a soldier's tag, with his name, blood type, and the name of the person to give it to if he dies. In Dante's case, who had no family, he had them engrave Saint Maria so they would take his corpse back to her. That way she might be able to heal him.
"Then I'll go close the second entrance. You wait here." He immediately rushed away, leaving her alone with the corpses.
Alicia gave the torn corpses one look and could tell immediately. They were torn away by the Tentacle Ooze's tentacles. Seven aspiring Blessed all killed by a single Scarred Monster... as horrifying as it looked, this was normal. Those abominations are a death sentence.
She looked to where Dante went. He was the weird and scary one. To have killed a Scarred Monster and a Scarred Beast on his own, to have managed to mount that last attack with broken ribs, a collapsed lung, and a pierced liver, was just abnormal.
After that, she shifted her attention to the dead Abomination. This thing got cleaved in half with a single swing, and its wound has marks similar to the burns associated with a Smite user.
"The one who killed it survived and moved further into the cave." She rolled her wheelchair close to the abomination and tried to look around for any footsteps, but found nothing, as the entire ground was made of solid stone.
Minutes later, Dante returned sweating like a hog. "I closed it." He had used all of his mana and only had a single drop left. "I need to rest first before I close the other one." He then threw a gaze toward Alicia. "Can't you use earth magic?"
"Sadly, I've never tried learning it." She lifted her hand. "I focused mainly on the Temple of Healing and Temple of Warding." She smiled. "You're impressive, to have learned the School of Destruction as well as the Style of Aggression in such a short time."
Dante sat down, took a few deep breaths, and then shook his head. "Those are the two easiest to learn. It's not that big of an achievement." After only a few minutes of rest, he stood and started dragging the corpses away.
After moving all of the corpses outside the cavern, he had already regained all of his mana, so he started working on closing the cavern's entrance. He then went back to Alicia, who had cut all of the decent meat out of the Tentacle Ooze and got it ready to cook.
He sat, helped her cut more meat as they waited for his mana to recover, and then finally cast a flame spell. [Heat Spell]
Heat spell was one of the most efficient, yet useless spells of the School of Destruction. It simply allowed the caster to directly use their mana to heat an object to extreme levels.
Dante had picked a melon-sized stone from the cavern and heated it as much as he could, allowing him and Alicia to cut the Tentacle Ooze's flesh into thin strips and grill it on the stone.
The meat was hard, tasted a bit weird, but it wasn't so bad. Dante found it quite nice to eat, but it seems that Alicia really hated it, forcing herself to swallow it. She then summoned something strange, a large bottle that she filled with water from the cavern. "This can filter water. We can drink it directly since we're blessed, but I'm not going to drink muddy water with blood in it."
"Can't we just create water with magic?" Dante lifted his hand, pointed his finger at his mouth, and started condensing water from the moisture in the air directly into his mouth.
"But it tastes flat, like nothing..." She looked at him, and he looked at the water on the ground that she was filtering. "Then you like water with the flavor of blood, piss, and gore?"
She opened her mouth and closed it several times as if trying to speak, then her face flushed red as she looked away. "I... can't use Destruction magic to condense water... so my only option is to use this filter. That's why I wasted a lot of money turning it into an item..."
Dante smiled. "So? Want me to fill that bottle with water for you?" He tilted his head, and she looked at the filter bottle. Silently poured its contents out and extended it toward her. "If you would, please."
Dante took the bottle from her hand, cleaned it, and then filled it with fresh, bland-tasting distilled water.
She silently took the bottle from his hand, looked at it for a long while, and took a sip. "How do you like my fluids?"
He asked, and she immediately spat it on his face. "You bastard! Are you trying to choke me out?" He couldn't help but burst out laughing. "Sorry, sorry... I couldn't help it."
She put the bottle down carefully, clenched both of her fists, and started hitting him, doing zero damage. "I'll have Rain hug you when we get out of here. I'm sure you'll love it."
Dante smiled. "A hug from a beauty like her is to die for... I'll dig my grave beforehand." Indeed, if Rain were to hug him, it wouldn't be that different from bear-hugging an electric transformer and getting turned into fried chicken.
For the first time since they entered the dungeon, they could relax a bit and rest.