Testing My Luck in the New World

If I were to combine the heights of all the boss rooms, we had been at least six stories beneath the surface of Amoranth, if not more. The relatively short walk between the dungeon floors didn't suggest we'd gone so deep, but it was hard to argue with what I saw and what I felt. When the teleportation portal created by my Dimensional Step spell formed, a strong breeze that could never be present so far underground blew past us, ruffling Yua's long chestnut hair and cooling my sweat-stained body. Feeling its sweet embrace relax my muscles, which apparently had been tight with tension for a while now, it alone was enough to win the argument of whether or not we needed to stop fighting for the day.

The second we set foot in our room back in the Lazy Cat inn, I felt a powerful urge to just call it quits for the day, plop down on the bed and shut my eyes. Unfortunately, we still had work to do.

"Could you turn around? Sorry, but I need to put some stuff in your bag. With all we need to carry, I doubt we'll be able to pretend you're actually carrying it all at once, like we did earlier. It'd look too suspicious."

"No problem, Master. Carrying the loot won't be a problem for me!"

Still in a good mood herself, she did as I asked and, braving the need to step closer to her swishing tail, I unlatched the belt holding the bag shut and dropped all of our pelts into it before fastening the Proud Great Wolf pelt on the top like last time.

"Master, we won't be able to fit it all in there, will we?"

"No. I'm not even going to try and cram it all in there. After we make our first trip, I'll just refill when I have the chance."

"Understood!"

No point in making her carry all that heavy crap, anyways. She may not look it, but she had to be tired on some level too. She did all of her fighting with her body, after all. Her stamina bar may have completely refilled itself by now, but given how our health bars were a little finicky in that they didn't seem to directly tie themselves to their owner's overall health, just their current physical condition, I had to assume that it was the same for our stamina bars. Yua may well be putting on a brave front.

She may have spent most of the third floor just walking around with me, but after that last boss fight, I decided to keep an eye on her condition as well as her numbers.

As if wanting to share in some friendly solidarity with us, the Sun was starting to show its own fatigue by basking the city in the early night's comforting mixture of orange and red hues. The blue magic torches acting as Amoranth's street lamps weren't quite lit yet, but I knew they would be soon thanks to the hour displayed on my HUD. People still filled the streets despite the late hour, so at least we weren't going to be alone out there as we hurried through the city to finish our errands.

We sold off all the pelts easily enough, if anything, the shop keeper was happy to have another Proud great Wolf pelt so soon. According to him, most Adventurers don't repeat that particular boss fight. And most choose to keep its pelt as a sign of their own strength and their success at beating the first floor. I would have liked to do the same, but we could always go back once everything was settled.

After this we stopped by the Apothecary shop, dealt with her snide jokes, all of which were naturally aimed at me, and sold off all of the ingredients we earned today. There was no point in keeping them if I didn't have what I needed to make use them right now. They didn't exactly take up much space in my bottomless item box, but I'd rather turn them in for the coin for the time being. In all our time in the dungeons, we never managed to find any more of that Green Moss, but since Madame Turquesse managed to keep a good stock of potions, I had to assume that there really was some sort of farming level in the dungeons. Unless there was some other ingredient you could substitute for that specific brew, there was simply no way to keep up her stock if the main component was so rare.