Testing My Luck in the New World

We continued through the dungeon at the same easy, but quick pace that we first started at today. After our last surprising encounter with a pair of casual dungeon explorers, I had Yua keep an ear out for more on top of her monster spotting duties so we could avoid getting in each other's way. After every other fight or so, she would assure me to the best of her ability that we were indeed the only people still exploring the third floor. Probably because anyone that teleported down here from the outside realized we wiped out most if not all of the monsters and left as soon as they could to explore elsewhere. But it was due to the fact that we were alone that gave us a plethora of monsters to loot and level off of.

While I wished I could let Yua enjoy herself and fight to her heart's content, getting through here as fast as possible was still our top priority. She understood this and accepted it without hesitation. She even came back at me with an "I know I'm strong enough to beat them, anyways," and patted her biceps when I tried to apologize for sucking up all her fun for what I found to be near-mindless monster farming. In the end, even if it seemed we had most if not all of what we needed to pay off her contract, it was still safest to push forward as fast as possible.

Rounding off the floor, we exterminated a total of 30 goblins, but only 5 gremlins. Apparently, gremlins were so easy to kill once you found one, that most people that visited the third floor just killed a few and called it quits for the day. So, most of what was available, if any more than this was likely already exterminated by other Adventurers in the time it took us to complete the first two floors. Still, with the supposed point of this floor being to bolster the monsters' numbers, I had to wonder how many we missed out on. I wanted to spend a short while this morning doing some easy-leveling, but maybe we should have skipped repeating the first floor all together.

Adding up the value of the loot we were holding, including the Elderwood Staff, we had gathered about 53 gold, 79 silver and 15 coppers worth of goods. So, we barely made a dent. Seems like we really will have to farm the bosses to get what we needed. That or maybe we should check on the fourth floor and see what we can get there, since it was new to even the more experienced Yua.

Huh... In terms of floors, if not time spent down her, I'm actually about as experienced as she is now. Weird.

"Yua, do you know what the boss on this floor is?" I asked as we walked up to yet another waiting room right outside the large stone doors indicating the presence of a boss.

"No, sorry, but I never made it this far before. And I didn't ask anyone else, either."

"I see. That's unfortunate.

I really don't like the idea of going in completely blind, but if she didn't even ask, maybe she preferred it that way? Maybe she just wanted to make it more of a challenge, for the sake of the fight, rather than the goal of actually beating it, or something. Regardless, having her knowledge of what was ahead all this time must have spoiled me a bit, because I would really rather have known and was honestly disappointed that she couldn't give me any details. Our lives are on the line down here.

I considered just having her open the door just far enough to get a peek at the boss, learn what we could about it and then retreat before it noticed us. At least that way we could back off and wait until we came up with a plan to fight it. Hopefully, we could do this without it breaking free of the boss room and forcing us to square off against it in the narrow halls now at our backs. Every boss so far had been huge. Absurdly huge when compared to the other monsters. If we ended up forced into a situation where our only option to damage the boss was to run in a straight line towards it... Well, I couldn't exactly see that going well. Especially not if the boss had some sort of front-facing area of effect attack that we couldn't dodge.