It turned out that, fortunately, the dungeon was temperate. Also, every single floor was a joke. John couldn’t stretch that enough. A real. Giant. Joke. Floor five, breezed through; floor six, decimated; seven, annihilated; eight, obliterated; nine, massacred. John had almost felt bad for the Cupids they were taking out, small little angels with cute wings and bows that shot pink arrows. Their appearance deserved to cover the front of a valentine’s card, not to be impaled by a bolt from Mono’s Lesser Lance of Longinus or by the tal projectiles Lydia used.
That wasn’t to say that they weren’t a threat. Like the Demon dungeon, the Angel one was a multitude of towers connected via bridges, although everything was golden and shiny, instead of grey and dank.
The enemy’s patterns were also inverted. Where the Satantyr had been holding each and every tower like a small fort, with the Cupids it was a fight from bridge to bridge. The flying enemies would start showering them with arrows, in groups from five to twenty. With Sylph in the group none of the arrows ever hit their mark, though. The tempest elental even went as far as to redirect the arrows to hit another Cupid just because it was all too easy.
Now, they were on floor 10, and a few things had changed. The monsters looked different and the environnt had been replaced with the inside of one giant tower, rather than a multitude of small ones. Beyond that, the situation remained the sa. They remained easily capable of cutting through everything that ca before them.
The enemy of this Floor was the Guardian Spirit. One of these animated suits of armour was currently facing them, in all of its silver, gleaming glory. It was getting kicked around by Rave, sliced by Aclysia, and cracked open by Gno. A halo above its head flickered and finally vanished, monts before the entire monster turned into dust.
“Johnnie, where is my challenge?!” Rave, now level 62, complained. A question that he had no imdiate answer to.
The way this floor was laid out was rather interesting. There was one of these Guardian Spirits (sotis two, but that was a rare occasion) per room. They never left these rooms, unless baited out by a mber of the group. That ant that, basically, they were free to take a break between every single encounter, which gave this more of a round-based feeling. The rooms in turn were situated around a giant circular hall. John led the party back into that hall at the mont.
Like the previous floor, the colour sche of the hall was gold and shiny. Ornants curved through white marble; a bas-relief, depicting the biblical tree of life, decorated the ground. So finely worked was that picture that the light from the shining crystal up above reflected in every single one of the uniquely worked apples of gold hanging from the carved tree. John didn’t doubt that the boss would spawn here, once they had cleared all of the rooms.
“Johnnie!” Rave repeated and snapped her fingers in front of John’s face a few tis.
“What?” he asked, then rembered her earlier question. “Oh, sorry, dunno, honestly, I expected it to be easy but not THIS easy,” he answered and tried to find her sothing to keep her entertained. Most of the doors already stood open.
“I, too, am slightly surprised by the ease of this,” Lydia chid in, checking her status at the sa ti. “What do you say the level of these enemies is?”
“66 to 70,” John told her, “I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised… how is your EXP gain by the way?”
Rave was the first to answer that question, “I get around 0,5 percent per mob, I guess?” she said.
“0,1 percent,” the princess added.
“And the last boss gave you…?” John probed, thinking he had figured things out.
“1 percent,” Rave said. “And you don’t have flat numbers on display? Only percentages?” He probed further.
“That is correct,” Lydia stated, Rave also nodded.
“Okay, so it seems that you earn more EXP for higher level enemies, but what you gain is capped at 1% max for bosses. Now, I would theorize that Gaia made that cap even lower for different kinds of enemies just to disable from abusing this and getting people power-levelled,” John spelled out his idea.
“Certainly sounds like her,” Rave agreed.
“How would you know?” Lydia asked.
“Just kinda the way tiger describes the texts he's getting… plus the way he told she acted when he t her.”
“You t Gaia?” Lydia asked, one of her eyebrows shooting up. “Are you earnest in this claim?”
“I t her twice,” John reported. “Both etings were very brief. Also, as Jane said, she is writing my Achievents, and, believe , the sass is real.”
“Gaia is a green haired woman, of a petite fra with a notably pronounced bottom. She is slightly taller than Sylph -in her big form-, with curly hair and a black dress that reveals almost all of her ass, due to its design, which slits the dress into four strands from the waist downwards. A google search has resulted in Tatsumaki from an ani called One Punch Man as reference,” Aclysia inford all of them.
“For real’zies?” Rave laughed.
“Uhm, no idea about that One Punch Man part but the rest is correct, yep, yep,” Sylph chirped. “t her right before fighting mister pickle, we did. A true hero of the world, the bestest, most aweso Space Marine and a pickle. PICKLE DIO!”
“You didn’t tell about either of those things!” Rave complained to John, barely holding back her laughter.
“Because I am still not convinced it really happened,” John said, walking towards the next door. “It was too stupid. Anyhow, if this is too easy for you, we can always just kill the rest and go to a higher floor,” he stated while entering the next room.
‘Shouldn’t you send in Aclysia or Gno first?’ asked Mono in his head.
‘I normally would but, wooooaaah,’ he barely dodged a mace coming for his head, ‘I still have to beat the current Challenge.’
John wasn’t particularly afraid of the mace. Even though it looked impressive, a silver shaft with starlight as its head, swung by the animated armour, it was barely a threat. His HP was high enough that he could have tanked several hits. Even if an enemy managed to puml and overwhelm him, Aclysia was right behind him, ready to intervene at any mont. So he could beat his current Challenge, to kill 50 enemies with Mana Blade, in relative safety. This was the last enemy he needed anyhow.
Ducking underneath the next attack, John extended his arm so that his flat hand pointed at the being’s helt. Then he cast Mana Blade. Rapidly, the blade extended right through the enemy’s head. Pulling his arm downwards he split the living armour in two.
‘Should use it like that more often,’ John thought as the blade vanished, leaving his hand bare again. Having the blade appear only when his hand was already in position not only made the attack less predictable, at least the first ti around, when the enemy didn’t know what the motion was about, but it also saved him a bit of ti. With every Mana Blade only lasting 3 seconds, every mont counted.
With the enemy defeated he only needed 5% more to achieve the next class level. One more Challenge would surely do it.
“First, you kill younglings, then you kill , and now you chase into my deserved rest?!” The ancient voice whispered; it was like the sound of leaves in the wind. John saw the three faces take familiar expressions, those of a man, a woman and a child.
“Oh great, that guy again,” Rave complained. “Wasn’t that like the second boss we ever killed?”
“Yup,” John answered. “Guess we are doing it all over again.”
“Are we… can we… was that truly…” Lydia began then shook her head. “All of this is ludicrous!” With that declaration, she prepared for combat.
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