Chapter 49
After finishing our preparations, we were moving forward again.
“It feels like we're getting close to the boss.”
Claude said, breaking the tension.
We would have to be careful of the monsters appearing from this point onward.
“At last, the boss.”
“Heh heh, I wonder if we'll even get to see that bastard's face?”
“No, Livnil. Our mission is to make it to the boss room's entrance.”
One of the main duties of a dungeon advance party was searching for the boss room.
Occasionally, a dungeon had no boss room on the first floor, so confirming whether one existed was the most important thing.
“The mana is definitely growing denser already.”
“Heh-heh, so there really is a boss on the first floor…!”
If there was no boss on the first floor, one could infer that the dungeon was correspondingly smaller.
There were even cases where the dungeon ended with a single boss.
But if there was a boss from the first floor onward, there was a high chance that the next floors would have bosses too.
That was why the advance party's exploration played such an important role in determining the dungeon's size.
“Our mission is to confirm whether the boss exists. Let's be careful.”
An advance party just charging headfirst into a boss was out of the question.
We were supposed to find a route that would take us to the boss room.
By now, several parties had probably reached the vicinity of the boss room, just as we had.
The information they gathered would be compiled into a map of the first floor.
If some parties had been defeated and failed to return, we would have to be wary of that entrance.
“Mr. Claude, if another party tries to break through, will you join them?”
“I would like to fight alongside them if I could, but there's a problem with our equipment.”
“Ah…that's true.”
Nepenthes had rendered all the armor we were wearing unusable.
Our party was currently wearing robes so loose they looked as though they had been custom-made for us.
I couldn't help wondering how many robes Claude actually had.
“It's a staircase.”
We carefully made our way down the stairs leading below.
We were using all our senses, since we had no idea what might leap out, when, or from where.
“Master. I smell an unidentified creature on the floor below.”
“Yeah, it seems there's something down there.”
We descended as quietly as possible.
The moment we reached the end of the stairs, I entered first.
I raised my sword toward the smell and was about to swing it….
“Whoa!”
“Eek!”
But what I encountered was a person, not a monster.
I hurriedly withdrew my sword, but I couldn't slow my momentum.
Crash-!
I collided head-on with the swordsman and tumbled down with him.
Shing-! Shing-!
As the swordsman and I went down in a tangled heap, I heard his nearby companions drawing their swords.
I quickly got to my feet and drew my own sword.
But the man I had collided with waved his hand and said,
“Hey~ It's all right! This lady's with the advance party.”
Pinned against the wall, I held my sword in a low stance.
Beside me, a man sat cross-legged as if nothing had happened and tried to touch me.
“Grrrrr…!”
I sidestepped and leveled my sword at him.
But he looked at me askance and said,
“Oh…feisty, are we? I like this lady even more.”
There were two swordsmen and one archer.
There was a mage too.
“Grrrrr….”
“Growling won't scare me, you know? Cute.”
Could that seated man be their leader?
The others slowly approached to protect him, so relaxed was he.
“Boss, do you know her?”
“Hm? No. I saw her in the advance party's sparring match.”
“Is she a beastkin?”
“Why is someone holding a sword wearing a robe?”
“Oh, the others are coming!”
Livnil ran toward us, but they blocked her path before she could reach me.
Soon, Claude took out his staff and approached, saying,
“Everyone, lower your weapons.”
“What? Is your whole party made up of mages?”
“Yes. So release Aris.”
Claude asked them politely, but they seemed to have no intention of doing that.
“Your name's Aris? Cute.”
“Shut up…!”
“Hahaha! Don't make that face. Why don't you come over here? What do you think of me? I'm not bad, am I?”
“Move aside before I kill you….”
“The feisty, sharp-tongued type. I like you even more.”
The leader stood before me, nodding as he looked down at me.
Claude said,
“Are you saying you intend to fight us? This is a dungeon.”
“Fight? Don't make me laugh. This one ambushed me. Didn't you see her try to kill me just now?”
Naturally, I had only tried to attack him because I thought he was a monster.
No adventurer who worked in a dungeon could be unaware of that.
I'd withdrawn my sword to avoid hurting him, and he knew it—he'd deliberately run into me.
“The fight has effectively already begun. You picked this fight with us. Admit it.”
“Since you tried to kill our boss, we had no choice.”
“Ah~ This is why punks shouldn't be allowed in dungeons~!”
They raised their swords with sneers and threatened our party.
Judging by the way they spoke, they weren't about to let the matter go.
They were very skillfully engineering the situation.
Claude shook his head and said,
“What is it you want?”
“Peace! And women! Oh~ The women over there are cute too. Hand them over.”
“That's not something we can agree to. I'll apologize for Aris bumping into you. Release her.”
At Claude's words, the leader drew a small dagger and crouched beside me.
He pointed it at me and said,
“You don't seem to understand the situation. I wonder what sort of scream this bitch will make?”
The archer was aiming an arrow at me, and the mage was preparing an incantation.
The two swordsmen were watching Livnil and Claude.
But where was Griff?
Judging by his scent, he still hadn't come down the stairs.
Claude said,
“If you release her even now, I won't hold this against you. This is your final warning.”
“Hey, mutt. That idiot says he doesn't care what happens to you?”
Then he thrust his face toward mine.
I drove my fist into his face.
Crack-!
For a moment…I was angry.
“Guh…!”
“You bastard! How dare you insult Master?!”
He slammed his head straight into the floor.
With a boom, the startled archer fired an arrow at me.
I caught the arrow in my mouth as it flew toward me.
“Graaah!”
At the same time, the two swordsmen turned around and tried to cut me down, but…!
They couldn't get through my sword with such small blades.
Clang-!
I knocked aside the sword descending from above with the hilt, then punched him in the solar plexus.
Though an iron plate protected his chest, I crushed it along with his chest, leaving a huge dent.
“Grrrrr…!”
The other man couldn't even swing his sword properly.
He tripped over the man I'd struck and fell down with him.
I didn't miss the opening; I smashed their heads against the floor one by one.
“Fire!”
Finally, the mage's completed spell flew toward me.
Unfortunately, I couldn't deal with magic as well.
Boom-!
But I trusted him.
Claude rushed over in an instant and knocked away the incoming fireball with the back of his hand.
He wrapped me in his arms, and a dazzling flash exploded behind him.
I looked up at him from within the deep shadow.
Sparkle. Claude was glowing.
“Eek….”
A small admiring gasp escaped me before I knew it.
My pounding heart made me keep staring at him.
“Aris. Are you all right?”
“Yes, Master…!”
Livnil quickly subdued the mage….
Griff, who had been waiting, came down the stairs looking dumbfounded.
“What? It's over already?”
“Hahahah! Miss Aris! That was over in an instant!”
“Of course. And…I'm sorry for rushing in so hastily.”
Somehow, I'd ended up making everyone worry.
Chris came over and checked me for injuries.
Wouldn't Claude's hand hurt more than mine…?
“Master. Why did you block the magic with your hand?”
“Ah, I was in a hurry, too…and wasn't it cool?”
He must have been watching the mage over there prepare to use magic.
‘How should I block that magic?’
After thinking hard about it, he must have simply done that!
Considering how men think, the fact that he was thinking, ‘That was sooo cool!’ was rather childish of him.
I felt a little deflated, but when I thought about it another way, it was cute.
The fact that he'd thrown himself in front of the attack for me hadn't changed!
“Hehe…it was cool, Master!”
“Yeah, right? I was cool, wasn't I?”
Was he really trying that hard to impress me, his slave?
Claude gazed at me with a deeply satisfied expression.
“So, what should we do with these guys? They're all unconscious.”
“No, this one is fine. Hey, what are you going to do?”
Livnil interrogated the mage she had subdued.
He was so terrified that he stammered,
“I-I…please spare me!”
“You pointed a sword at our companion, didn't you? Tch…should I throw you to the goblins as food?”
“Aaaaaah! No! Please spare me! Pleeease!”
What could we get out of someone who wasn't even the party leader?
That mage was probably no different from the others, either.
For now, we tied them up tightly and waited for them to wake up.
“Ugh….”
One by one, they regained consciousness and tried to thrash around, but they couldn't move.
“W-what is this?!”
“I can't move my body…!”
Claude made them kneel, set a chair in front of them, and sat down.
That chair certainly got a lot of use.
Claude said he had bound them with a very simple gravity spell.
“Do you have anything useful?”
What we needed was clothing and armor.
We decided to take only what we needed from them.
“What do you mean, what we have? You bastard…do you know who we are?”
“B-Boss…please don't pick a fight with that mage!”
The mage who had been with them said that.
“What? You idiot! Undo this magic, now! I can't move!”
“Boss! That mage is from the Mage Tower! We might all die!”
“W-what…?”
Claude hadn't said a word about the Mage Tower.
He, too, seemed surprised by the mage's words, his eyes darting slightly.
“The Mage Tower? Why would a monster like that be here?”
“I don't know either, but I've only seen gravity control this precise at the Grand Magic Tournament….”
It was a form of gravity control that left people barely able to breathe or move, yet unable to escape.
The mage began praising Claude, saying that he had witnessed incredible magic.
I wondered whether it was really worth getting so excited over, but I was happy since he was praising Claude.
“That…that's impossible…!”
At the mage's words, the party leader glanced up at Claude.
“I-I…what is it you want…?”
Now that things had come to this, Claude shrugged and said,
“Hand over everything you're wearing.”
That didn't mean he actually stripped them bare, though….
We simply took some spare equipment that we could wear.
“It doesn't fit! It's too big!”
“W-we can't help that….”
Livnil deliberately needled them, but what could she do?
That party was made up entirely of men, after all.
In the end, Claude was the only one among us who got anything that fit.
Who would've thought Griff was so tall they wouldn't have any clothes that fit him?
“You really don't have anything?”
“That's a little unfair….”
Instead, we were able to get additional information from them.
The routes and patterns of the nearby dungeon rooms.
The state of the monsters and the route they had taken so far.
“You didn't give us any false information, did you?”
“Of course not! I-I'll tell you everything, just spare me….”
“Then we'll go on ahead from here, so you turn back.”
When different parties ran into each other in a dungeon, conflicts sometimes arose for various reasons.
It was a matter of routes.
Nothing was more inefficient than two parties exploring the same path together.
One of them had to find another route.
“O-okay!”
We'd taken roughly what we needed, so we released them.
They were important people who could help uncover this dungeon, after all.
If they happened to die somewhere, well, that would be unfortunate.
“Then let's set out too.”
The route Claude wanted: the direction with the densest mana.
“Since we've come this far, we should be the first to reach the boss room.”
“Hehe, a bonus! Performance pay!”
“I'll put my trust in Master.”
Then he stroked my head and said,
“I trust Aris's nose, though.”
“Aww…no problem.”
Following him, and sometimes my nose,
we pressed onward once again.