The underground facility extended 15 floors below, and Leon and Camellya had ended their day on the 9th Floor.
From this point on, their clearing speed was bound to slow as the floors ahead were filled with monsters of much higher levels, the weakest being Level 80, with the average level increasing by 10 on each subsequent Floor.
"80, 90, 100! 80, 90, 100!"
Leon kept singing those levels as he walked cheerfully toward the stairs leading down to the next floor.
However, the moment he stepped onto the stairs from the 9th to the 10th floor, he froze, his song cutting off as he blinked and said, "Damn, that's cold."
The air rising from the lower levels carried a chilling cold that made Leon shiver slightly. He was dressed rather casually, wearing a simple long-sleeved t-shirt and cargo pants with laced boots beneath them. His outfit didn't look like something one would wear into a dungeon where they'd be fighting monsters and risk taking hits from them.
But the look of Leon's clothes was misleading. They appeared ordinary, but they had been crafted from materials, threads, and leather taken from monsters, retaining residual magic power from them, reinforcing the clothes and making them as durable as standard armour a dungeon diver would expect to wear.
Brands that produced gear for dungeon divers had recently begun placing far more emphasis on fashion than before. Because of this, more clothing like Leon's, which looked ordinary on the surface but functioned as protective armour, was being made.
Leon clenched his fists, running magic power through his gloved fingers as the brass knuckles embedded in them caught the dim light.
'My body's physical capabilities are superhuman compared to the world I lived in as Alex. Cold temperatures in that world wouldn't really affect me unless they dropped a dozen degrees. But here, the environmental conditions are harsher, so temperatures considered extreme cold there are closer to normal cold weather here.'
His thoughts ended as he sensed something approaching, so he raised the hand already brimming with magical power, forming a finger gun and expelling that magic outward, creating a magic circle with a single ring of light around it.
Camellya, who had also noticed the approaching monster, glanced at Leon, one eyebrow lifting slightly in surprise as she muttered, "That's not lightning magic."
Leon nodded and replied, "Yeah. It's the Light Magic you asked about yesterday."
Right after that, he murmured under his breath, "Light Magic: Light Bullet," and fired a bolt of light from his finger. It passed through the magic circle, gaining power and speed as it shot down the corridor, curving through the air and vanishing into the distance.
What followed was the pained groan of a monster as the light bullet pierced its vitals.
Leon kept his fingers in position and fired two more shots before lowering his hand and saying, "The recoil from using the Light Bullet spell reminds me of the recoil from firearms I used to shoot."
He relaxed his fingers and hopped down the stairs, and hearing that, Camellya silently wondered, 'Firearms he used to shoot? Did he use those on Citera or in the previous world?'
It caught her attention, especially after Leon had shown the day before that his memories from his past life didn't interfere with his ability to kill. It made her curious about what else Leon was beyond a college student and a video game streamer.
While she remained silent in thought, Leon reached the bottom of the stairs, stopped, and turned back to her.
"What's up? The cold getting to you?" His gaze lowered slightly as he added, "You are wearing a skirt, after all."
Just as Leon said, Camellya was wearing a knee-length pleated skirt under a black turtleneck shirt, paired with similarly coloured flat shoes. She looked more like she was stepping out for errands than entering a dungeon.
At his comment about the cold, Camellya walked down the stairs and replied, "I came prepared for the cold. I'm wearing skin-coloured leggings as well."
When she said this, Leon looked toward her legs and noticed that the area below her skirt was slightly darker than the skin visible on her hands and neck.
But all thoughts about her legs left Leon's mind a second later as something else caught his attention that he hadn't really cared about before.
He stepped back slightly, stopping beside Camellya as she reached the final step, then leaned his shoulder close to hers and said, "Oh, I'm taller."
Camellya paused and glanced at their shoulders, noticing Leon's was slightly higher. She then looked up at him and said, "You're wearing boots with two-inch heels. Take those off first before we compare heights."
With that, she stepped forward and continued deeper into the dungeon.
Leon looked down at his boots as she walked ahead, then pulled a ruler from his storage artifact, measured them, and hurried after her as he said, "My heels are 1.5 inches, not 2!"
"Huh?" Camellya turned around, about to speak, when she noticed the ruler in his hand, her expression turning to disbelief. "Why do you even have a ruler with you?"
Leon raised it slightly and shrugged, replying, "Probably something I left there after my last math class."
He returned it to his storage artifact, jogged forward, and kicked aside the corpse of the monster he had killed earlier with his Light Bullets.
"Most people think of healing and support when they hear light magic, completely ignoring its lethality," Leon said, twirling a ring of light around his fingers.
"My mum told me that the last invaders from two decades ago used to underestimate her because of her light magic, thinking she wasn't a combat mage."
Leon dashed forward, running up the wall and leaping over the head of a monster that rushed from a corner, swinging its sword toward where his head would have been. He landed behind it, formed his hand into a finger gun again, and fired a Light Bullet straight into the back of its skull.
"She said she used to enjoy it when enemies got close, thinking she'd be helpless at close range, and then she'd fill them with holes using the Light Bullet spell."
Camellya snapped her fingers, sending pressurised water spears toward monsters charging at Leon from behind, and as he turned and finished them with lightning punches, she said, "Your mother has rather…strange preferences."
The pause before the word 'strange' made it clear she had taken time to choose it.
Leon laughed and replied, "Can't argue with that."
"Sir Manuel said her gentle disposition vanished whenever she stepped onto a battlefield, and he sometimes felt pity for the enemies she lured into traps and decimated because of their preconceived notion that support magicians were weak in close combat and could be easily picked off without front liners protecting them."
Hearing this, Camellya shook her head slightly, a faint frown forming on her face.
"That assumption sometimes irritates me. Unfortunately, it has been spread across the planet for centuries before I was even born, and while some reject it, many are still raised with that mindset.
The idea that mages should always stay at the rear and rely on front liners for protection. Because of that, some mages ignore learning any close combat skills or techniques that could help them defend themselves when they don't have anyone protecting them."
She stepped over the monster corpses in front of her as she continued, "I mean, they have perfectly good weapons in the form of their staves, so why not learn some basic polearm combat techniques so they can use those to knock down enemies and buy themselves time to cast spells in emergencies?"
Right after Camellya said this, a roar echoed out, and a monster rushed at them from the side. She glanced at it, about to use earth magic to trap its feet, when Leon suddenly asked, "What about you? What type of mage are you?"
The moment she heard his question, Camellya retracted the magic power she had been about to release, and as the monster lunged and swiped its claws at her, she reached out with her right hand, grabbed its wrist, flung it over her head, and slammed it into the wall beside her.
She then turned back to Leon, sliding her hands into her skirt's pockets and asked, "Which one do you think?"
Her response made Leon laugh as he conjured a two-ringed lightning magic circle and fired lightning into the monster, roasting it until it died.
The rest of their dungeon diving for that day and the next continued in much the same way. Casual conversation flowed even as they slaughtered monsters, the two of them refining their coordination and Leon's control over his more powerful lightning while they descended through the dungeon toward their goal of Floor 15.
By the third day of their dungeon dive, they had reached the end of Floor 14 and decided to rest, planning to approach Floor 15 with fully rested bodies and minds.
The floors grew much colder as they went deeper, and by the end of Floor 13, stretching across all of Floor 14, the walls around them were covered in frost.
This made it difficult to find a suitable place to rest on Floor 14, so they returned to Floor 9, where there was no chill, rested there for the night, and then went back to Floor 14 on the morning of day 4.
When they moved down to Floor 15, the temperature felt like it dropped another 10 degrees, and looking around, Leon couldn't find a single patch of wall or floor that wasn't covered in a layer of ice.
As they walked, their footsteps echoed faintly against the frozen ground, and Leon ran his fingers along the wall before turning to Camellya and saying, "Water attribute mages would have a field day in this place. The ambient magic power is already water-attributed, so their spells will be stronger."
Camellya was about to nod in agreement, but then she stopped, a faint frown appearing on her face as she said, "I can't sense anything."
Leon blinked and turned to her. "Can't sense anything as in...?"
"I can't sense any monsters. My detection field has been active since we stepped onto this floor, but I haven't picked up a single one within its range."
"That's strange," Leon said, immediately shifting his focus as he released a pulse of magic power from his body, letting it spread outward and return feedback as it contacted the surroundings.
However, none of the feedback he received came from anything alive, or at least anything alive with magic power.
"It's been months since Cameron and I last came here, and we didn't reach this far," Camellya said. "The monsters should have reproduced by now. There should be more, not less, not nothing at all."
At Camellya's words, Leon rubbed his chin and immediately started considering the possibilities.
"Okay, so... when in-game Leon came here, there were monsters on the final floor. But before that, the dungeon had been empty for years, and he needed Beriel and Elidyr's help to clear it.
Now, in reality, you and Cameron have been coming here for years, so that might be a variable that changed something."
"What difference would that make?" Camellya asked.
"I don't know," Leon said, shrugging lightly. "Maybe someone noticed you coming here and decided to handle the monsters themselves?"
"If that were true, why would they ignore all the monsters on the first 14 floors and only clear the final floor?"
Leon pursed his lips at Camellya's question.
"Yeah, that's the part I don't ge—"
He stopped mid-sentence, eyes widening slightly as he snapped his fingers and said, "Wait, there are two exits from this dungeon. One is the entrance we used, and the other leads out of the gorge into the river downstream, connecting directly to this floor.
What if they came in through there, encountered only the monsters on this floor, and cleared just this floor?"
Camellya stayed silent for a moment as she considered it, and Leon continued speaking.
"Also, don't forget that our priority here is getting my Combat Class, not killing the monsters. Let's keep heading for the vault, with our guards several levels higher than before."
Camellya silently nodded in agreement, and the two continued toward the vault. Floor 15 was the smallest of all the floors, so it didn't take long for them to get close, but before reaching it, they discovered the fate of the monsters that had once filled the floor.
Along the long corridor leading to the vault, dozens of monsters were frozen in place in different positions. Some appeared to have been running away from the vault, while others seemed to have been charging toward it.
From the wave of ice that filled the corridor, it was clear that whatever had frozen all the monsters had come from the direction of the vault and left everything in its path encased in ice.
"So something gathered all the monsters here and froze them in one go," Leon said, stating his observation.
Suppressing as much of their magic power as possible, the two edged closer to the corridor and peeked around the corner.
Everything leading up to the vault doors was buried under multiple layers of ice, and beyond the cracked metal doors barely hanging from their hinges, Leon and Camellya saw a five-metre-long double-edged spear stabbed into the ground, the source of the intense cold that filled the lower floors of the dungeon.
That spear had been the weapon of mass destruction that the fallen Hero had used to end the life of the merman he had fought here.
It was a powerful artifact, and even though neither Leon nor Camellya met the minimum Level required to even hold it without being frozen solid, they still planned to take it for future use.
For now, though, neither of them could focus on the artifact, because coiled around the long spear was a massive creature with white scales, its thick, cylindrical body nearly a metre in width.
Its long body emitted a faint mist as it coiled tightly around the spear, each loop layered over the next, the pale scales reflecting the dim light around it.
Its two eyes were shut in slumber, but the passive magic it radiated confirmed that it was a First-Class Existence, confirming that the White Snake before them was well above Level 100.