For a lower-class adventurer, exploring the 12th Floor alone was basically a death sentence.
To make matters worse, Maris had just been ambushed by a pack of Orcs and nearly crushed by an Infant Dragon.
Given her low stats, her only real option for survival was to run upward, heading straight for the upper floors.
For one, running up made it way easier to bump into other adventurers and scream for help.
Second, the higher up you went, the slower the monster spawn rate became.
Compared to staying on a deep, dangerous floor, moving toward the surface offered a much higher chance of survival.
The Adventurer's Handbook was packed with this exact kind of survival advice from veterans. And Eina was notoriously serious and stubborn about her job.
If the half-elf was Maris's advisor, she had definitely drilled that knowledge into the girl's head, just like she had with Noah.
Maris should be smart enough to make the right call.
"What a nuisance," Noah muttered.
Facing a horde of monsters rushing straight at him down the tunnel, Noah didn't slow down in the slightest.
Just before the wave of monsters crashed into him, a sinister gust of freezing wind swept through the cavern.
For a split second, the movements of the entire monster pack stalled.
As Noah walked through the pack, the entire horde suddenly blurred.
With a wet bang, blood sprayed across the walls.
Skipping the actual act of swinging a weapon, the monsters were simply shredded to pieces by an invisible tornado of wind surrounding Noah.
Even their magic stones were crushed into dust, dissipating into the damp air.
He had condensed the wind into dozens of invisible, razor-sharp blades, setting them spinning at high speed around his body.
He was basically a walking, rampaging meat grinder!
The monsters on the upper floors were being slaughtered without him even lifting a finger.
When it came to pure extermination efficiency, he could rival a hundred lower-class adventurers combined.
'So this is probably what Ais felt like back when she was Level 2,' Noah thought.
When facing trash mobs, Ais Wallenstein's Ariel magic allowed her to crush monsters with wind pressure alone, she didn't even need to draw her rapier.
In terms of raw destructive power, the wind Noah currently manipulated was still miles behind Ais's.
Her magic came from Aria, the Great Spirit of Wind, giving it a baseline power that totally eclipsed standard magic.
The scale and density Noah could control right now couldn't even match a normal Elf, let alone compete with Ariel.
But against weak, upper-floor monsters? They had absolutely zero chance of resisting the meat grinder.
The sickening sound of flesh being shredded followed Noah the entire way down.
If monsters didn't turn to ash and return to the Dungeon upon death, the tunnel behind him would have been a mountain of corpses and a river of blood.
Floor 7.
Floor 8.
Noah intentionally chose the loudest, flashiest method of travel possible.
He wanted Maris to hear him coming.
Upon hitting Floor 9, Noah noticed a massive spike in adventurer traffic.
The reason was obvious.
Starting on the 9th Floor, the monster variety increased, and powerful beasts that were impossible to solo began to spawn.
Because of that difficulty spike, adventurers naturally grouped up into parties.
A monster that could easily slaughter a solo fighter became a safe, manageable target for a coordinated team.
Not only did partying up drastically increase survival rates, but it also made farming way more efficient.
Hearing the roaring wind and the sounds of slaughter, the adventurers in the tunnels went on high alert.
Based on their experience, anything making that much noise was usually a massive enraged monster.
But when they braced themselves for a fight, the sight left them totally speechless.
"A kid?"
"H-he's so fast!"
"Wait, that's the Artisan Spirit, isn't it?!"
"Huh?"
"The genius blacksmith from the Hephaestus Familia?"
Ignoring the stares and the whispers, Noah pushed deeper toward the 12th Floor, his eyes scanning the shadows.
He didn't stop for a single second in his search for Maris.
Floor 11.
Before he even stepped off the stairs, Noah could hear the monsters.
There were a lot of them.
And from the chaotic sounds echoing up the shaft, they were in a frenzy. Their roars blended into one continuous, deafening clamor.
Stepping out onto the 11th Floor, Noah immediately spotted a massive pack of monsters blocking the main tunnel.
Because the tunnel sloped downward, the monsters were all clustered together in a pit.
And they were all roaring at the ceiling.
Hanging from a thick, protruding stalactite was a blue-haired human girl.
Looking down at the snapping jaws below, her face was full of despair.
Even after fighting with everything she had, making it this far up was her limit. The second her grip failed and she fell, her life was over.
Heavy footsteps echoed down the passage.
In the enclosed, rocky cavern, the steady, calm footsteps carried far, cutting through the noise.
Even the deafening roars of the monster pack couldn't drown them out.
'S-someone's here?' Maris thought, her arms screaming in pain.
'But judging from the steps, it's only one person? Could it be a high-level adventurer?'
A tiny spark of hope reignited in Maris's eyes as she stared fixedly at the dark mouth of the tunnel.
Slowly, the figure of a young boy stepped into the light.
Her eyes went wide.
"It's you...!"
Noah glanced up at the hanging girl. His eyes immediately locked onto her right leg.
It was still bleeding heavily..... because the leg was gone.
Her entire right leg from the knee down wasn't just cleanly cut off, it looked like it had been violently torn away.
She had tied a ripped piece of her cloak around her thigh as a makeshift tourniquet, but the crude first aid wasn't doing much to stop the blood loss.
Standing on the ridge, Noah looked down at the massive pack of monsters swarming below her.
He held his right hand out.
Countless streams of silver liquid metal flowed from his storage ring, taking geometric form and shifting shape in the air.
The heavy, pure-white sniper rifle materialized in his grip.
He loaded a specialized healing crystal directly into the chamber, aimed the barrel at Maris and pulled the trigger.
A soft beam of green light hit the blue-haired girl.
A gentle, warm glow covered her body, instantly soothing her exhaustion and closing her smaller wounds.
With her strength returning, the first thing she did was grip the stalactite tighter, securing her lifeline.
"What a perfect grouping," Noah muttered, looking at the clustered monsters.
He loaded an artillery spell formula into the chamber, dropped to his knees and aimed the heavy sniper down into the pit.
The heat dispersers activated.
The heavy vents on both sides of the sleek barrel popped open, glowing a bright, angry orange as the weapon charged.
A blazing, complex crimson magic circle unfolded in the air right in front of the muzzle.
"Bombardment."
He pulled the trigger.
A scorching, blinding ray of energy fired from the barrel. Shooting from the high ground, the heavy beam looked like a crimson meteor crashing down to earth.
BOOM!
The violent explosion instantly engulfed the center of the monster horde, directly vaporizing dozens of them in a flash of white heat.
The raw power of the artillery formula rivaled a Level 3 fire-attribute attack spell, but it also packed a heavy kinetic punch that standard magic lacked.
It was a brutal hybrid of physical penetration and elemental fire damage.
A small mushroom cloud of fire and dust rose from the pit.
Aside from the monsters instantly incinerated in the blast radius, the surrounding beasts were thrown back by the massive shockwave.
They struggled to stand, their movements sluggish and weak from the concussive force.
Noah racked the heavy bolt.
A smoking tungsten-gold shell casing, nearly as thick as a man's forearm, ejected from the chamber and hit the stone floor with a loud sound.
As he slammed the bolt forward, a second round chambered automatically.
There was no need to aim carefully.
He just pointed the barrel wherever the monsters were packed the tightest and pulled the trigger.
BOOM!
BOOM!!
For a full minute, the Dungeon shook with the deafening roar of heavy artillery.
Maris looked down in sheer horror.
The cavern below looked like a literal layer of hell. The heat was so intense it dried the spit in her throat.
The constant bombardment had churned the stone floor into a field of glowing molten rock.
The earth itself had turned into a pool of searing magma.
The monsters that died instantly in the blasts were the lucky ones.
Watching the survivors burn alive in the magma sent a deep chill down Maris's spine.
Orcs with their feet burned down to the bone collapsed into the lava, screaming in agony as the heat consumed them.
Seeing that more than half the horde was wiped out, Noah let go of the sniper rifle.
The weapon immediately shifted into its floating cannon form, hovering dutifully at his right shoulder.
He drove his gauntlet straight into the solid stone wall of the tunnel.
Fire and lightning surged through his grip. With a quick pivot of his hips, he yanked his arm back, drawing a massive oversized tachi straight out of the bedrock.
It looked incredibly similar to Kurogane Ouma's device, Ryuuzoume.
The pitch-black tachi was actually taller than Noah.
In his hands, the long, curved blade looked absurdly slender. It was so long he couldn't even carry it normally, he had to let the tip drag against the stone floor.
He abandoned the high ground and stepped off the ledge.
No—he crashed down.
Using Spell-Weaver to manipulate gravity, he accelerated his fall.
He landed feet-first on an Orc's shoulders and the crushing, multiplied gravity instantly popped the monster's head like a bloody balloon.
Seeing him suddenly ditch the massive overpowered gun, Maris started to panic again.
'Why would he jump into close combat when he could just safely blow them up from the ridge?'
But a second later, she understood.
She watched the boy swing the absurdly long, thin sword like it weighed nothing.
In a single, fluid sweep, he bisected six armored Orcs at the waist.
Maris couldn't even process the shock.
It wasn't like she had never seen a Level 2 adventurer fight before. Sure, compared to a Level 1 rookie, a Level 2 had incredible power, blinding speed, and the experience to move through the Dungeon with ease.
But their fighting styles were still normal.
They blocked with shields, parried attacks, and struck vital points. They dodged, waited for an opening, and countered.
But this? What the hell is this?
This was just a one-sided slaughter!
In reality, Maris's confusion make sense. What she didn't know was that using the heavy sniper's artillery rounds came with a high cost: the magical ammunition was a consumable resource.
Compared to burning expensive ammo, just swinging a sword a few times to clean up the trash mobs saved him a ton of money.
Sensing a sneak attack coming from his blind spot, an image flashed in Noah's mind. I
t was an Orc swinging a massive fist right at the back of his head.
Noah didn't even turn around.
The Orc behind him was instantly crushed flat against the stone floor, squashed into a bloody pancake as if an invisible steamroller had just run it over.
Seeing that bizarre, terrifying sight, the surviving Orcs finally realized something was horribly wrong.
Their limited intelligence kicked in, and they froze, terrified to step anywhere near the boy.
Under Noah's mental command, the floating cannon drifted in front of a frozen Orc like an autonomous drone.
The heavy muzzle leveled right at the monster's face.
A spiraling stream of compressed air blasted out of the barrel, completely blowing the Orc's head off its shoulders.
"GRAAAAHHHH—!"
The remaining Orcs finally lost their nerve.
They backed away slowly, then turned and fled deeper into the dark tunnels as fast as their legs could carry them, not even looking back.
'The monsters are actually... running away?' Maris stared blankly at the impossible sight.
Monsters weren't mindless, unfeeling puppets.
Unlike golems that only followed orders, monsters born from the Dungeon possessed real biology, including brains.
While their intelligence varied wildly depending on the species, when faced with death, even monsters possessed the primal instinct to flee.
Noah had zero interest in chasing them down since they were just trash mobs.
They wouldn't drop any rare materials, and their tiny magic stones weren't worth the effort to collect.
Using his gravity manipulation, Noah gently lowered Maris down from the stalactite, setting her on a clear patch of stone.
Thanks to the healing bullet, her life wasn't in danger anymore, and her minor cuts and bruises were fully healed.
The biggest issue was the missing right leg.
After checking her over, Noah looked her in the eye. "Eina issued a formal Guild commission. She sent me here to pull you out."
"Hm?" Maris blinked as tears welling in her eyes.