We smashed all the crystal gargoyles back to sparkly bits, and then we paused our exploration to prepare for the monsters in this layer.
Reed pulled out some fancy-looking arrows from his backpack and loaded them into his quiver, while Arine reinforced her axe blade with scaled leather, turning it into a solid blunt weapon.
Friede boasted that her greatsword was more than enough, and no one dared to argue after seeing what she could do.
Finally, I secured Edelmut in its sheath, tightly binding it with a leather strap, and wrapped a cloak around it to keep it safe from breaking easily.
Swinging a sword upside down doesn’t seem like a bad idea, but the impact getting concentrated at the crossguard’s tip made it too precise.
Rather than poking the gargoyle’s weak points like using a pickaxe, it seemed smarter to use the sheath to strike with the whole blade like a blunt weapon.
After awkwardly turning my sword into a makeshift club, I smashed some nearby crystal stalagmites and crafted a spear from the shards.
With both the spearhead and shaft made of crystal, it looked less like a spear and more like a long, shabby ice spike, but hey, who cares about looks? It’s a disposable item anyway; as long as it flies right, aesthetics don’t matter.
“Uh… Krimhilde? Is that a spear?”
“Yes. I have a bit of experience with throwing spears,” she replied confidently.
Not just a bit; Eisenstein’s art of spear fighting, the Frostwind Spear, boasts a lethality comparable to a tank with my current skills.
Of course, Reed didn’t know that. He seemed a bit skeptical, taking my words as if I would throw the spear to stab a gargoyle.
“Throwing a spear at a gargoyle… wouldn’t it be better to use a catapult? Ah, of course, with your strength, you could probably break a gargoyle with a spear.”
“That’s true, but… it’s possible we might run into something else besides a gargoyle.”
“Oh, certainly…”
Reed nodded, convinced by my answer. Just because we encountered a gargoyle doesn’t mean that only gargoyles exist in this layer.
This spear is meant for crushing monsters made of flesh and blood, not those like gargoyles or golems which reduce damage from sharp weapons.
I could indeed smash a gargoyle with a spear, but for that, I’d need to prepare a spear made of at least steel, not crystal. A weapon of the same material as the monsters would likely break before piercing through them.
After setting everything up, we cautiously resumed our search. Perhaps feeling responsible that I spotted the ambush before the archer, Reed focused intensely on sensing any presence.
“Four gargoyles behind us! They’re appearing now!”
“Right! I’ll handle it!”
Thanks to that, we were able to anticipate and respond to four more surprise attacks from crystal gargoyles.
The moment they dropped their transformation magic and returned to their original form, we capitalized on the brief openings to smash them.
With their wings, tails, arms, and legs still not returned to their true forms, those gargoyles were nothing more than unmoving crystal sandbags—easily broken.
The shattered crystal fragments piled up along the path we took like rocks.
“…Another dead end here.”
“Yeah, what a hassle of a dungeon.”
Unlike the previous layers which were nearly straight, the seventh layer had several forks like a cave.
Every time we came across a fork, Reed took out parchment from his backpack and scrawled a rough map, and we relied on that map to thoroughly investigate the seventh layer.
After encountering a dead end, retracing our steps, and moving to another fork, smashing through the surprise attacks from crystal gargoyles along the way for two hours…
“What’s that…?”
“…Looks like our casualties are starting to increase. They must have been overwhelmed.”
We once again stumbled across the remains of the first exploration team.
A woman’s body had been sliced into six pieces, presumably due to a gargoyle’s claws.
Her torn robe, silver pendant necklace, and the spellbook she clutched suggested she was quite a capable mage in her lifetime. Now, she was merely a corpse.
“It’s Jena. She was a talented member of the first exploration team… how tragically she passed away like this.”
Reed shook his head with a sympathetic expression as he retrieved the spellbook from her lifeless hands.
Arine knelt and prayed to prevent Jena’s corpse from rising as undead, while I broke the cave floor to create a grave for her.
Forty minutes later, we found another corpse—this one belonging to a man in his mid-twenties wearing plate armor over chain mail.
He must have been yanked by a gargoyle and had his head yanked off. A long spinal bone stuck out from beneath his helmet like a tadpole’s tail.
It seemed he had overestimated the armor’s defense and fell victim to an attack that armor alone couldn’t block. What a pathetic death for a knight.
After burying the man’s body, I took his black steel spear as a reward.
Though it wasn’t a magically-imbued weapon, the fact that the handle was made of black steel made it heavy and durable—quite to my liking.
“Well, this will do the trick.”
“Right?”
With that weight and strength, it looked like it could serve well as a long club. At the very least, it felt much better than using the sheath for whacking.
The eighth layer was pretty much the same as the seventh.
The only difference was that there were altars or chests at the ends of dead ends.
Whenever an altar looked suspicious, I smashed it apart, and for the chests, I prodded them with my sword before opening.
If luck was on our side, we might find magical tools or treasures, but seven out of ten chests discovered in dungeons usually contained monsters instead.
– Krack!
“Keyeeeee!”
Saying that, as soon as I stabbed the chest with my sword, I immediately kicked it open, and the monster inside went wild.
It was a snail monster with the size of a medium dog and a mouth resembling a nuchal eel, with many heads.
A monster that paralyzes and eats adventurers who carelessly touch the boxes— a mimic.
Or rather, a former mimic?
Half of its body had been torn apart from the kick, and the other half was squirming skewered on Edelmut. It was bound to die anyway.
“Another mimic, huh.”
I swung my sword as if shaking dirt off, and the mimic flew into the crystal wall, exploding with a thunk.
That made it the seventh mimic I had killed. Given that we found eight chests, what a stroke of bad luck!
Only one chest wasn’t a mimic, containing glass bottles filled with a red liquid. I thought it might be a potion, but upon opening it, it turned out to be just blood.
I couldn’t tell if it was human or beast blood, but Reed said that either way, it wasn’t worth anything. Basically, it was trash.
◆◆
Ninth floor.
We noted a new monster in our exploration records, and seemingly devoid of cheer, a new corpse was also added.
The body of a priest, crushed from head to groin as if it had been obliterated.
Recognizing the clothing atop the meat scraps, Arine sank into a profound sorrow and prayed for quite a while.
Though we weren’t that close, it was someone who had been her senior. Reed comforted her by wrapping his arm around her shoulder.
– Guuuuuuuuu!
The monster that killed the priest was a golem—a crystal golem crafted from luminescent crystals like the gargoyles.
Much larger than trolls, with immense mass and a notoriously troublesome ability to regenerate until its core is destroyed.
– Kwaaaaaaang!
The black steel spear I had been saving really shined at this moment.
Though it was used like a club rather than a spear, every swing packed with the strength of Kwangwan shattered the golem’s body.
In total, I smashed four golems.
Since it costs a lot to make a golem unlike the gargoyles, the only four of them lurking in the ninth floor were all we faced.
I collected all their cores because it’s said they sell for a high price even if broken. It made distributing them among the party easier with one core per member. Reed and Arine insisted on refusing their shares, leading to some playful bickering as I insisted they take their shares.
After all, it was mainly thanks to Friede and me that we took down the golems, so shouldn’t we be entitled to all of it?
“We all worked hard! Honestly, without you Arine, defeating that slime wouldn’t have been possible! So just take it!”
Of course, I refused their refusals.
Distribution of loot ought to be as fair as possible. If you keep hoarding everything for yourself, chances are you’d end up with a knife in the back from your allies while tossed in a dungeon corner.
Noticing that the two were getting gloomier each time we met another corpse from the first exploration team, I wanted to cheer them up in some small way, and that’s how we arrived at the tenth floor.
By the time we had lunched well past noon, the sun began to set, and we finally encountered a survivor from the first exploration team.
“Reed…? Arine…? Oh my god, am I dreaming right now?”
“Max?! Oh my goddess, you survived! We thought you all perished!”
A warrior in his thirties, possibly from lack of sleep, with bloodshot eyes filled with fatigue and anxiety, and dark circles beneath them made him look like a wreck.
His grip on the mace trembled, and his damaged armor made him look like a failure.
Well, he technically was a failure; hiding alone in a corner of the dungeon without any of his party.
We decided to have dinner here, and while Reed cooked stew, we gathered around Max, the survivor we barely found.
“Max, are you hurt anywhere? If you’re injured, we should handle it right away….”
“I’m fine, really… Just a little tired…”
Of course, even as we cared for a survivor, our options were limited to just feeding him.
If he had been injured, Arine would have healed him, but there wasn’t a scratch on Max despite the condition of his armor from the fierce battles he must have faced.
He must have been injured previously but had already healed himself with potions for quite some time now.
It seemed he had ran away badly injured from a strong enemy, using potions to recover enough to hide with his eyes wide open.
He couldn’t possibly have taken down a single gargoyle or even a mere golem alone, so he was now a classic case of a backline failure in the dungeon.
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