Testing My Luck in the New World

Seemingly more excited to see me test out my magic with the Elderwood Staff against something other than a door, Yua practically skipped her way down to the next floor. I followed close behind her, enjoying the view of her tail giddily swishing about, hoping all the while that my magic had become strong enough to impress her while I could.

More importantly, I hoped to accomplish something on this floor. Aside from making money, of course.

"What types of monsters are on this floor?"

At my question, Yua's ears perked up wearily and she stopped skipping so suddenly that you'd think she'd forgotten how to keep going. Even if she was excited to see what the staff could do, now that we both knew that she shared what happened to her here, the happiness wasn't allowed to last. It was thanks to this, if I could even be grateful for such a thing, that we were allowed to meet, but I hoped she didn't make much of that connection. I may have bought her, but I didn't want the first thing she thought of when she thought of me to be the imaginary collar around her neck.

However, where I thought that the tears she'd shed earlier meant that she was going to find facing the monsters that beat her bloody on the same floor where she then met the man that ruined her life, she instead clenched her fists without so much as looking back. If I weren't mistaken, she looked even more fired up than before.

"Master, the monsters on this floor are Goblins and Gremlins."

"More goblins?"

"Yes, but on this floor, they travel in groups of two. Their strength is about the same, but they are still more dangerous."

So, this level trades power for numbers? That's fairly understandable. If there was any truth to the story she told me about the monsters here being part of the so-called demon king's future army, then just a hundred floors worth of what we've been fighting so far wasn't going to be nearly enough. Especially not when I was capable of one-shotting the first floor enemies before my cheats even kicked in. The bosses would no doubt be a danger, but they'd still be lacking in numbers. And if one were to tack on the Adventurers fighting the dungeons on top of any king's army, then the number disparity would only increase in severity. It wouldn't be much of an army.

Even if the lowest level monsters were about as strong as or even a bit stronger than your average human, which they didn't seem to be since any citizen can fight in the dungeons, that strength would mean nothing if they didn't have the numbers to overwhelm much of anything before the high-level Adventurers and knights fought them back. Overrunning the city would be impossible with just a few handfuls of monsters. So, some floors were probably specifically meant to bolster their numbers with what would essentially be cannon fodder, rather than add new true soldiers to the mix.

I imagined a floor much like the one containing potion ingredients we assumed to exist, except instead of a vast field cultivated with various plant life, there would instead be a farmland growing goblins by the hundreds, their tiny misshapen heads poking out the soil and snarling only when their ready to be harvested.

However, none of this meant all that much unless they actually managed to break free of the dungeon and as things stood, I had a hard time believing they would. Again, barring sneak attacks, only the bosses have managed to put up any sort of a fight so far. The lower floors were still a mystery to me, but I had to hope that the first few weren't the sort of easy tutorial area I once assumed the forest to be and that the difficulty wouldn't ramp up past what our levels could handle from here on out.

I did ask the Goddess if I had some other purpose for being here, but she basically brushed me off so cleanly that I assumed I was free to do as I pleased, like she herself suggested. So, I was under no obligation to use my abilities to plow through the dungeon to clean up this mess. As long as the Adventurers currently delving into this place could handle it, then everything should be fine. Yua may have enjoyed the challenge, but that wasn't much of a reason to continue deeper inside.