After his daily routine of teasing Jeanne until she was beet red, Leon let her go and surveyed the wrecked battlefield. He waved her off. "You burned through a lot of stamina. Take a break and recover. Don't be stingy with the Potions either. The low-grade ones barely cost anything. I'll handle the loot."
PotionOrigin: Blue Pharmacy Type: Elixir Effects: Gradual stamina recovery, fatigue removal Description: A pale blue solution, typically packaged in a glass vial with an oak stopper. Priced at 500 valis. An absolute essential for Dungeon exploration.
Potions like these were universal. From fresh Level 1 sprouts on their first day to Level 5 and 6 veterans at the top of the food chain, every adventurer carried at least a few.
They lacked the dramatic, near-magical wound-healing of High Potions, but they restored stamina and cleared fatigue. In the Dungeon, a sealed labyrinth cut off from the surface, adventurers lived in constant danger. Unexpected crises were the norm, not the exception. Staying fresh and recovering fast enough to fight at a moment's notice was survival 101. And at 500 valis a pop, everyone could afford them. The adventurer's most basic necessity.
Jeanne nodded without argument. She pulled a Potion from her kit and downed it.
But instead of resting where she stood, she moved to the chamber's entrance and took up a watch position.
"That fight went on for a while, and the Killer Ants kept swarming in. The noise must have carried across the whole floor. Other adventurers have probably noticed. Better safe than sorry."
The reminder snapped Leon back to reality. The battle-high had been smothering his better judgment.
Urgency flooded in. He picked up the pace.
...
"Magic Stones, Magic Stones, more Magic Stones..."
Leon carved through monster remains on autopilot, prying out the cores. As the leather Magic Stone Pouch swelled fatter and fatter, his expression went progressively more numb.
Between the two of them, they'd ground through wave after wave of Killer Ants. Maybe not two hundred total, but easily over a hundred.
A glance at his System's exp pool told the story: 8,800 had jumped to 9,000.
That was the cumulative total from every kill on the way down, of course. But even with that enormous body count, not a single Drop Item had appeared.
Let alone a Drop Treasure Chest, with the System's absurdly low drop rate.
With rates like these, no wonder Drop Items and Dungeon materials kept climbing in market price.
Leon crouched among the carnage, face dark as charcoal. He kicked a charred ant carcass in frustration.
The Carving Knife sliced open another mangled corpse with practiced ease, and he froze.
"A drop?"
"Oh hell yes. Killer Ant Shell. Solid crafting material for armor, so it fetches a premium. Around sixty thousand valis." Relief washed over him. At least today's Dungeon run wasn't a total loss.
By his math, if he relied on Magic Stones alone, the whole trip would net around fifty thousand valis.
Compared to a standard five-person Level 1 party averaging twenty to fifty thousand per day, that was respectable. But this haul was inflated by an Irregular: the Dungeon's malicious little welcome party.
The Monster Party had flooded the floor with extra spawns, and surviving the onslaught naturally meant a bigger payout. That wasn't repeatable.
After subtracting Potions, food, and other supplies, plus equipment wear, maintenance, and upkeep, their net profit barely cleared thirty thousand.
And that didn't account for time or labor.
It was only because Leon and Jeanne were absurdly overpowered for the upper floors, free to steamroll everything in sight, plus the lucky Irregular, that they'd earned this much. On a normal day, a realistic daily take for the two of them would be twenty to thirty thousand valis. And that assumed staying on Floor 7, not pushing deeper.
...
Leon tucked the Drop Item away with a satisfied grin and sped up his processing. Before long he'd finished with the charred pile and headed for the passage entrance where Jeanne had been fighting.
Compared to his scorched heap, her section hit different.
Green blood splattered everywhere. Severed limbs, shattered skulls, and cracked shells stacked at the mouth of the corridor like a scene from hell itself.
Neither of them batted an eye. Their gazes were flat, unbothered. This kind of carnage didn't register anymore.
Leon crouched down and blinked.
"Another Killer Ant Shell? Lucky streak." He grinned and pocketed it.
The grin didn't last. As he kept carving, Drop Items kept appearing. One after another. The count climbed and climbed. Then a gleaming, golden Drop Treasure Chest, visible only to him and his Familia, materialized before his eyes.
The smile vanished.
Leon stood up and looked at Jeanne. Completely serious.
"What's wrong? That chest is a good thing, right?" She tilted her head.
"Jeanne." His voice was quiet. "Recruiting you was the best decision of my life. Don't ever leave me."
She froze. Her mouth opened, closed, opened again. The tips of her ears burned red.
"W-what are you suddenly..."
"I mean it."
"S-someone's coming!" Jeanne blurted, Revelation pinging hard. "Put everything away, now!"
He crouched over the chest and swept its contents out of sight. The chest was invisible to others, but the loot wasn't.
"We should go. If anyone sees us here, your whole low-profile plan falls apart." Revelation had been active the entire time. Its extraordinary detection range let Jeanne pinpoint the adventurers approaching their position with ease.
"Right. We'll take the unmarked route, bypass the main path, and loop down to the lower floors." Both of them pulled up their cloaks and hoods. With the parchment map as a guide, they slipped away in the opposite direction.
Leon glanced back at the corpse-strewn, devastated chamber one last time. He tugged his mask up, and his silhouette melted into the dark.
...
Along Floor 7's main route, groups of three to five adventurers dotted the corridors at regular intervals.
Leon and Jeanne had started their shift early. By now, more than an hour after they'd reached the seventh floor, the morning rush was only just beginning.
Not far from the scene of the massacre, a party of adventurers moved through a connecting passage.
They were technically traveling, but their body language told a different story. None of them carried the hair-trigger tension that low-level adventurers usually wore in the Dungeon. If anything, they looked relaxed. Leisurely. Like schoolgirls on a field trip.
Only two kinds of people moved like that down here. Clueless rookies too green to know better, or fighters confident enough in their own strength to fear nothing.
These girls were the latter.
"Did any of you hear something strange?"
"Strange? Nope."
"Relax, it's Floor 7. Probably just some Killer Ants or Needle Rabbits teaching a rookie a lesson. If it gets bad they can always run, right? Worst case they take a beating and learn something. Nobody's dying. Chill."
"Exactly! No matter how unlucky someone is, it's not going to be an Irregular. Who'd be that cursed? Hehe."
"..."
The girl who'd first noticed something twitched her pointed ears and went still, listening hard. Gradually, her companions dropped the chatter too. The smiles faded. Expressions turned serious.
They'd sensed it as well. Something was wrong.
A faint but dense skittering drifted through the corridor, laced with the clash of steel and the muffled thud of magical explosions.
"Is that..." The female adventurers exchanged glances. Every pair of eyes reflected the same gravity, the same alarm.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa. That's one intense fight. And that sound... all those legs. A Killer Ant swarm?" The girl with fiery red hair pulled back in a ponytail, a one-handed sword at her hip, shouted in disbelief.
"This is bad. An Irregular. A Monster Party. Someone's getting swarmed. Move, now!" The speaker threw back her green cloak, and her form blurred into a streak of gold and green wind, racing toward the source.
"You and your big mouth!" A striking, dark-haired girl in a wine-red kimono shot a glare at her captain's retreating back, grumbling even as she gave chase.
"Wait, seriously? No way. Someone's actually that unlucky?!" The red-haired swordswoman's expression froze in genuine shock. Curiosity won out. She bolted after her companions, pushing to full speed.
Please let them be okay.