I check Map after we go down the stairs, but there are few reactions of people. But I also feel like there are fewer reactions of monsters compared to the thirty-first floor.
Maybe some people passed by here recently on the way to the thirty-third floor. I’ve heard of second and third parties of a major clan making their way to the fortieth floor.
That’s because they need a good number of people from the forty-first floor onward. I’ve heard that Guardian Sword has currently advanced to the forty-second, and since it gets tougher from that point forward, they’ve been training people to increase their numbers.
Other clans have been doing the same, so now there’s a split between guilds trying to reach new floors, and guilds trying to make money mining on the fifteenth floor.
And apparently the twenty-fifth floor is the main hunting ground of adventurers not in guilds.
Monster spawns are in a way fixed there, so it saves them the time of having to look for them. And it’s easy to leave the dungeon even without return stones.
“Won’t that make it tough with the numbers we have now?”
I ask, thinking about what’s beyond the fortieth floor.
“Well, we can just go there and think about it if we can’t advance further. You said you’re aiming for the lowest floor, but with your skills, it might be possible to go without even fighting monsters, right? The problem is how we’re going to defeat the boss, but we’ll wait for information from the ones ahead of us.”
Siphon is right. We should plan after we know what monsters appear in the boss room.
The people who go there first have to be ready for whatever comes, so it takes time to prepare to get through a boss room. The fortieth floor is a good example. And there’s the fact that it can’t be redone.
But we’re not completely in the dark either. If it’s the fortieth floor, that means that it’s probably going to be monsters that appear from the thirty-first to the thirty-ninth floors.
Apparently last time it was a race called giants, so the boss was something called gigantes with giant elites with it.
“How about we go forward and talk about what’s ahead later?”
Says Jin, and Siphon and I nod, so we continue our exploration.
Thinking about kobolds reminds me of the kobold guards that gave us trouble in a boss room. But this time we have more people, so when we come across near thirty kobolds, we dispatch them without much trouble.
With Siphon and Jin here, we have more close range power, and since I have the golems, I can go forward too.
And Mia and Chris can protect themselves with magic shields. I’ve given one to Yuno too, but she’s still learning how to use it.
According to Mia and Chris, she’s good at controlling the flow of magic energy. Mia is kind of upset, because it was so tough for her.
“These things never sit still. I’m not really good with fast monsters.”
“I think it’s easier to fight them. And kobolds don’t have tough skin, so weapons go in easily.”
“Yes, we can move from one right to the other.”
Siphon is complaining while wiping sweat from his brow, but Rurika and Hikari have the opposite opinion. Especially Hikari, since her main weapon is a dagger, and she has trouble with thick-skinned monsters.
Still, compared to normal people who use daggers, she uses a mithril one and can control the flow of her magic energy, so she can still slash monsters. The bigger issue is the short blade.
“Wouldn’t it be better to make the blade a little longer? It might be a little harder to use, but…”
That would change its weight and the way she would get close to enemies too.
It would take time to get used to a weapon that was changed like that. Maybe I should talk about it with Hikari on the way back. She’s bigger than when I met her too.
“How about we eat? I think we got all the monsters around here.”
No one objects.
Today I’m making soup for lunch, and we’re eating things I bought from stalls. This is because Siphon and the others were talking about how they haven’t been to their hometown in a while while we had dinner yesterday, and how they miss the food there.
We haven’t actually been there, but we just happened to buy things at a stall in a different town that sold the kind of thing they were talking about.
“Ah, this taste feels nostalgic…”
Says Siphon with an earnest tone, and the other four nod as they silently eat.
Their town got hit hard by the war, but it was rebuilt, and still exists.
“Aren’t you going to visit it one day?”
“Well, we could, but…”
Siphon sounds evasive, and peeks at Yuno.
Maybe I shouldn’t ask more.
Then we keep hunting kobolds as we advance, but after serving food from stalls, we start doing that once every couple of days.
“So Hikari, is there anything you recommend?”
And because of that, I see Goblin’s Grief asking Hikari about it from time to time.
Well, they’re not wrong to ask Hikari about food.
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