Testing My Luck in the New World

We continued rampaging our way through the dungeon almost entirely uncontested. As promised, Yua handled all of the wolves, while I delt with the slimes like we should have done from the get go. By the time we stopped to take a break and catch out breaths, we had killed five more wolves and four slimes. Thankfully, the dungeons hadn't been as cleaned out as Yua and I were expecting.

The experience gained was enough to level both of us up. I myself leveled up twice and caught up with Yua quicker than I thought I would. I even managed to outpace her a bit thanks to the EXP boost, putting me closer to the next level than she was. I even managed to level up the Mage class to level 2 thanks to killing the slimes with magic.

It felt incredibly unfair for me to have already outpaced her after how many years of diligent practice it likely took her to become as skilled a fighter as she was, but if it was for the sake of burning through the dungeon and making money faster, then I chose to accept the cheating as a fact of life.

Thanks to our efforts, we now had 7 wolf pelts and 1 Wolf Fang, appraised at around 3 silvers. I was already suggested that it was possible, but I was still surprised to find out that monsters could really drop two items at a time if you were lucky enough. Thanks to this, we also found 1 Slime Oil, appraised also at 1 silver, on top of the 5 slime goos that seemed to be a guaranteed drop just like the wolf pelts.

In total, if I took the appraised prices at face value, after about an hour's worth of risking our lives, we had earned a paltry 79 silver pieces. Just a little more than shy of 1 gold piece and fucking nowhere near what we needed. The kicker was, that since I was the one with the Appraisal ability, I was the only one that noticed this issue.

We were both starting to sweat and were both moderately out of breath, so we chose to stay put for a few minutes. While we did so, I did some quick mental math. If we worked a minimum of 10 hours a day for the next two days before the deadline, assuming our profits were consistent with what we just got, we would still only bring in about 47 gold and 4 silver pieces. Again, nowhere near enough.

Then there was the fact that we were both tired and my mana bar had been mostly depleted due to the rapid succession of slimes we faced. It was slowly recovering on its own thanks to one of my cheat traits, but that wasn't going to be enough to keep fighting this way. Eventually, we'd come up on a slime while I had no mana and we'd be forced to either waste a significant amount of time fighting with sword and fist, or we'd have to run away and come back once more of my mana had been restored. So, in other words...

"This isn't working," I said after taking a deep breath and sighing it back out. "Yua, can you find any more of them?"

Standing back up by pushing her hands down on her knees to straighten them out, this time without any snarky remarks, she tilted her head back and twitched her ears. It was the same gesture she always made when trying to locate more enemies for us, but I couldn't come up with a valid reason for why the slight change in angle made so much of a difference to her.

Regardless, from where I sat against the wall across from her, the non-existent light sources allowing us to see all seemed to have put a spotlight on her and I was forced to notice that her hair, slick with sweat, was sticking to her flushed face in a way that made her look even more enticing. I watched as droplets of sweat slipped down her delicate neck and down into the forbidden valley between her breasts as they rose and fell with every lightly labored breath she took. Her already tight clothes were clinging to her shapely body even more thanks to this, which only made it harder not to look so much.

I already thought she was beautiful, obviously, but now she was downright sexy. She'd been fighting all this time, but the appearance she wore now gave off the impression she'd just undergone an intense night of passionate love-making. And to think, I almost shared such a night with her and likely would have if Alphonse didn't screw us over.