28 The First Floor
“Want to help us kill a Gorgko? We paid twenty-five silver coins for each one.” She proposed but noticed the indifference with which she was looked at. “Wait… you guys are E-Class too, aren’t you?”
“We are F-Class and this is just our first day. Let’s adapt first.” Nathalia replied to the girl.
The half-wolf didn’t want to make his distrust clear, but he was surprised at that proposal, after all, the reward on the mission poster for the Gorgko was fifty coins for the head of this monster. So I couldn’t understand why they were paying the brunt of the reward for Gorgko, so they wouldn’t get anything.
The clothes in black leather and metal details left that unknown girl with an arrogant look, but Luke’s experienced look realized, that she is a good person.
The girl in the leather clothes shrugged and said: “Okay… Oliver, come down!” She gave the order to the skinny guard who was commanding the elevator handle.
Thrumm! The roar of gears starting to turn echoed up to the top of the dome.
The darkness in the well lasted a few seconds, and a dim light came into the eyes of those in the elevator. From above, everyone in the elevator saw a large chamber of ancient bricks and columns, the only illumination of which was the dim flames of the chandeliers on the walls.
Luke could feel his nasal walls burning, yet he needed to continue. Even though the stench diminished the range of his sense of smell a little, he still thought he could hear the monsters before they met.
Thoom! The elevator hit the ground. The room was very silent and only the crackling of the fire could be heard.
The girl with the metal arms approached again. “Anyway, good luck to you there. Be careful not to die.”
She shook hands with Luke and Nathalia, then started walking to one of the two exits with her group. She was the only girl in the quintet and appeared to be the leader.
“By the way, avoid the North area! It’s a farming area for the Soul Hunters clan.” The girl screamed.
Nathalia put her hands to her mouth and yelled back, “Thank you!”
Then all the five disappeared into the darkness.
*
Tim! Tim! The clash of Nathalia’s spear with the blade of a Kobold echoed through those corridors that most resembled crypts.
After a few minutes on the first floor, it wasn’t difficult to find monsters, but they showed up in a much smaller number than expected, at most one or two. For the Elf of the Noble Family Strogueher, it wasn’t difficult to handle everything alone, so Luke was left with the responsibility of lighting the room with a makeshift torch.
Tchunc! The blade at the tip of the spear pierced the Kobold’s skull. The bipedal red lizard, which carried an old sword, immediately began to turn black flakes and crumbled in midair.
‘So inside they fall apart and outside they don’t.’ Luke thought, remembering that when he killed the Higher Goblins, their corpses continued lying down in the grass.
“Hmph! He liked?” Nathalia asked breathlessly. She didn’t look tired, she was just full of adrenaline from her first battle.
The half-wolf just gave her a thumbs up and smiled at her. Nathalia laughed proud of herself too, after all, she worked hard to reach that moment and nothing could spoil her day.
“Do you know what the girl meant by that clan thing?” Luke decided to question as they searched for Jade Vine flowers in the hallways.
“Clans are much larger than the usual parties of just three to seven people.”
“And farming? She said something like that about the North, didn’t she?”
“They keep killing monsters to get their skill levels up, but since they’re doing it on the first floor, they must be a small clan.”
To the boy, these weird terms were confusing and didn’t make much sense. Although he knew very little about abilities given by genes, Luke didn’t understand how an ability increased just by killing monsters, because his abilities had developed with a lot of training.
Often the pair would stop for a while to rest and to decide what they would do. Since they didn’t have a map, they were relying a hundred percent on Return Stone to get back to the elevator.
Since they entered the Dungeon at lunchtime, the first floor was practically empty and as I sank deeper into it, they began to encounter more and more monsters and people returning home.
It was always easy for Nathalia to deal with Kobolds and Lesser Goblins, beings the size of apes but green and naked.
During one of these battles, the girl shouted excitedly: “I managed to raise my ‘Malevolent Hook’ skill to level two!”
And then she pulled a Goblin into her hand and grabbed it by the neck. The monster didn’t even have a chance to bleed before it began to come apart in midair from the spear that pierced its head.
“Are you hungry?” The half-wolf asked the girl and offered her a cloth to wipe the sweat from her forehead.
“No, I can still go on.”
This time, the boy decided to participate in the battles as well, because just looking was too tedious.
Bye! Chunk! Luke’s simple cuts alone were enough to kill the monsters who, in the boy’s eyes, were so weak that a stray dog seemed braver. When she let an adult Kobold slash her with her sword, she wasn’t even able to cut the leather off her bracer.
“Haha! You’re too strong to be fighting Class-F monsters, don’t you think?” Nathalia questioned, leaning her arm on the wall after a quick battle against seven goblins.
“I didn’t expect them to be so weak.”
“Let’s look for the second-floor entrance, we’ll find some E-Class monsters.”
The beginning of the expeditions was like that, calming and without much difficulty for that pair of marvels.
*
A week passed and the pair almost every day completed some mission, which was filling the half-wolf’s empty pockets. With the payment of Shiro’s bet, Luke’s financial situation got even better.
He even considered taking a boat to visit his friends, even so, there is no vacation when you work for the Stroguehers, so every day they entered the Dungeon in the early afternoon and left at dusk.
The bodies of the group Zion commented on were never found, which made the doubt in the half-wolf’s head grow even more, until the second week, everything began to be answered.
Ahead is a large stone gate on the second floor, Nathalia and Luke were standing, facing the hundreds of skulls that made it up. This wasn’t a Boss’s room, after all, he’d already been defeated a long time ago, so what could it be?
______
Discord for illustrations of the characters:
https://discord.gg/qz2vDAn7Kb