Chapter 39
I got lucky and pulled the 〈'Guest' Bracelet〉. This is a great start.
After that, we went back to the sixth floor and focused on gathering resources from the weak monsters.
Since I couldn't use 'Appeal LV5' without wasting MP, I had to make up for it with legwork.
I picked out hunting grounds where I remembered there being lots of monsters back when this was a game, then made the rounds.
Once we'd gathered the required amount of drops, we moved on to the seventh floor to collect resources.
We kept that up through the ninth floor. By the time we were done, two hours had passed, and my MP had recovered by about 60, so we resumed boss farming.
This time, we did five runs in thirty minutes. My MP had run out, and it was getting late, so we decided to call it a day.
"Whew, good work. The last one's a 'Silver Chest' too. Anything good?"
"Zephyrus-kun, you ask that every time now, ever since the 〈'Guest' Bracelet〉 dropped. You said yourself they wouldn't drop left and right."
Hannah pointed that out with a little giggle.
She had a point. Rare drops were rare precisely because they hardly ever appeared.
Besides, the drops from Lower Beginner 〈Shocker〉 dungeons were low-tier, so even when you got a rare drop, a lot of them were still pretty underwhelming.
But you couldn't give up on boss farming, not when genuine ultra-rares like the 〈'Guest' Bracelet〉 could drop.
In our sixteen boss runs so far, we'd gotten two kinds of rare drops. One of them had been an ultra-rare.
It was our fifth run since that ultra-rare. I figured it was about time for another rare drop. Seriously.
"Um, let's collect the materials first. Then the boss drops too... Huh? Is this the first time we've gotten this boss drop?"
"Hm? Oh, the 〈Bear Anteater's Great Pelt〉. It is the rarest of the boss drops, but... Wait, this is our first one in seventeen runs?"
The drop rate wasn't that low, but apparently Hannah had never seen one before.
Seriously? It was a valuable material for lightweight armor, and could even be used for body armor. As the rarest boss drop here, it also fetched the highest buyback price. Unfortunately, it looked like we'd only gotten one.
Seventeen runs, eighty-five boss drops, and only one of these? That's a shame.
"Now for the treasure chest. What do you think? Is this rare?"
"Whoa! It is! This is rare! It's a 〈Flame Rod〉 imbued with 'Fireball LV2'! This one's a winner!"
"What! It actually dropped? Amazing!"
〈Flame Rod: Attack Power 2, Magic Power 11, 'Fireball LV2'〉. I think those were its stats.
It was a staff-type weapon, and let you use elemental magic even if you hadn't learned fire magic yourself. It was pretty useful at first.
It was especially handy for safely leveling production Jobs like 【Alchemist】, and it worked on spirit monsters like 〈Ghosts〉 too.
Well, 'Fireball LV2' was only useful in Lower Beginner 〈Shocker〉 dungeons, and maybe just barely in Mid Beginner 〈Shotchu〉 dungeons, so it became obsolete pretty quickly. But it was nice to get one from our first Lower Beginner 〈Shocker〉 dungeon. It still had its uses.
"Hannah, equip this. You don't need to rely on that beginner weapon, your 〈Two-Handed Mace〉, anymore."
"Huh? But I'm really attached to it..."
"Don't get attached to a beginner weapon!?"
Had she gotten into the whole bludgeoning thing? Was she hooked on bashing things to death?
So that's why she hadn't upgraded her equipment.
Using my overflowing STR, I snatched Hannah's Two-Handed Mace.
"Ah! My Mei-chan!"
She'd even named it!?
No good. I had to hide it before she got attached.
Weapons are meant to be replaced regularly. Once you get attached, it'll be hard to upgrade, you know?
I lectured Hannah as I had her take the Flame Rod.
"Here, from now on you'll join the fight with magic. Apparently, aiming with magic is surprisingly difficult, so you should practice."
"Hmm. Okay, but... This doesn't look very sturdy. It seems like it'll break if I hit something with it."
"Don't hit things with it. Use magic."
It's a rod, not a mace.
Don't break it, okay? It can still sell for a pretty high price for the next month or so. (To a classmate.)
Well, knowing Hannah, if I tell her it'll sell for a high price, she probably won't break it.
That's an unsettling amount of faith.
I checked our spoils and started wrapping things up.
"We've got all the required items for the requests. We gathered quite a lot of other resources too."
"Yeah. I can't believe how many drops we got."
"If you're impressed by this much, you're in for a rough time later."
Just counting the items, there were nearly a thousand.
We couldn't possibly have carried all that without the 〈Item Bag (Capacity: Large)〉.
It was our first time clearing a boss, and I was still inexperienced, so we only managed this much. But once we got items or equipment that naturally restored MP, we could do more runs. We could also make more time for boss farming by reaching the bottom floor more efficiently, and shorten the boss fights themselves as our stats and my own abilities improved.
The real time attack was still ahead of us.
Thanks to the boss farming, I'd reached 【Hero LV15】, and Hannah had reached 【Alchemist LV18】. Not bad at all.
Leveling up had gotten a lot harder than it was before LV10, the Tutorial's limit.
We'd keep raking in tons of EXP through boss farming from here on.
You could level up to LV20 in a Lower Beginner 〈Shocker〉 dungeon, so that was our goal for now.
Since Hannah had reached LV18, surpassing the LV16 minimum I'd set for her, I asked, "You don't have to force yourself to keep going into dungeons. Want to focus on production instead?" But it seemed she'd already decided she was coming along to the dungeons, because she shook her head vigorously and refused.
"Well, let's head back."
"Yeah. Let's go in again tomorrow, together."
When I stood up, Hannah stood too.
I felt like she'd said something pretty embarrassing. Hannah's cheeks were a little red, too.
Thinking this felt like something out of a coming-of-age story, I just replied, "Yeah."
We picked up our things and stepped into the pink-glowing magic circle. That brought today's dungeon exploration to an end.