Massively tall muscular green humanoid monsters had appeared on the 18th floor, wearing just some loincloth and carrying weapons made of stone and wood. It was easy to distinguish what they were.

They were orcs, and there were a lot of them, 11 in total.

Alex and Wendy were having a really tough time fending them off at the front as Lucia, Chelsie, and Maria tried their best to help them in the back.

The orcs were surprisingly tenacious with the number of slashes they were receiving.

Chelsie was shooting her arrow to try to cover for Alex’s and Wendy’s back, and Maria was throwing potion bottles at them to inflict status ailments.

Lucia, on the other hand, was using her fire magic to keep most of the orcs at bay as Alex and Wendy were fighting some of them, but she couldn’t use her more powerful spells due to the chance of friendly fire.

Standing next to Alice, I wondered if I should go and help because orcs are a staple of the fantasy genre, and I really wanted to fight one. Oh yeah, they are having trouble too.

“Should we help?”

I asked Alice if we should help, and she nodded yes.

“You should step in.”

I rushed in to relieve the pressure from Alex and Wendy, while Alice shouted at everyone that I was going in to help fight the orcs.

Hearing Alice, everyone acknowledged what Alice had said, but Alex and Wendy, who had a desperate look, had a look of shock and dread like something bad was going to happen for some reason. They didn’t have that look for long because the orcs they were fighting swung their weapons at them, and they barely got out of the way.

Taking out all my spikes from reading the Dradevow dungeon book and watching Alex and Wendy fight them, they would need to be hit in their vitals for them to go down quickly.

I threw all of them at once, hitting the eyes of the orks because that would do the most damage and temporarily stun them for a bit.

They screamed in pain while I jumped at the orc that was in front of Alex and thrust my short sword right through its throat, coming out the other end.

It fell to the ground as I jumped down from its big body while pulling out my short sword from its neck.

I turned my attention to the next orc closest to me. I sidestepped away from a swing of its stone axe and slashed at its wrists, causing it to let go of its weapon.

Realizing its right arm was unusable, it used its left arm to take a swing at me. Before I was going to decide to dodge, an arrow flew past me and hit its other eye, completely blinding it.

I glanced back and saw Alice pointing at the orc I was fighting and telling Chelsie to fire the arrow at it. It wasn’t just that; she then was telling Lucia where to fire her spells and what potions Maria should throw and to who.

I don’t know what she was doing, but it looks like she is taking command of the party. She is doing a pretty good job at it, like a natural-born tactician. It seems natural to her, and she is in her element because she seamlessly instructs everyone on what to do, like she had worked with Alex’s party from the start.

I was about to grin seeing unexpectedly how well she could instruct others in addition to how much fun it was to fight these orcs.

Their tenaciousness was second only to the Latrodec spider and dire wolf, where you have to aim for vital spots, but they don’t make it easy since they are quite intelligent, enough to fight back with some semblance of skill. One main challenge was that there were a lot of them for anyone to deal with, which I wonder if we were really unlucky for getting this amount of orcs since the normal amount was 2 to 3.

Before I grin, Alice shouts out an instruction.

“Nyx, help Alex on your right!”

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Doing as she told me to do, I ran to Alex and helped him out with his orc.

As I moved toward Alex, I heard Alice instruct Lucia to cast a fire javelin spell, which was a javelin made out of fire. Then she instructed Lucia to fire it at the orc I was fighting; it went right through the orc and into another, killing both instantly and leaving a massive charred hole through their chests.

Running toward Alex while dodging the other orcs' attacks, I caught it off-guard and slit its throat, then thrust my sword into its heart.

Alex, for all intended purposes, looks absolutely freaked out, and his legs are shaking for some reason. He flinches, nearly dropping his sword when I glance back at him but ignore it and focus on the other orcs.

As I focused on the rest of the orcs, Wendy had finished fighting her orc.

There were now 4 left; one was taken out by me, two by Lucia, one by Alex, and another two by Wendy.

Seeing a total of 4 orcs staring at us; 3 had one of their eyes taken out and one didn’t, I decided it was a great opportunity to try out the knives Mila had engraved on them.

Holding 2 knives in each hand, I threw them all simultaneously and hit all 4 of the orcs.

They hit the orcs, and immediately the orcs began suddenly spasming and screaming in pain, with the electrical current flowing through their bodies. However, when I was about to go in for an attack, something unexpected happened. The little sparks of electricity coming from the knives suddenly grew bigger into what looked to be arks of lightning coming out of the knives, making a small field of electricity.

I was not expecting something like that would happen, and not only that, the bodies of the orcs fell over, with smoke coming off their bodies with massive electrical burn marks.

Seeing that they were dead, I looked at Wendy, who was staring at me in complete surprise and baffled by what happened. Not only that, but everyone too, by what they saw.

Lucia seems to be the most surprised and breaking her silent treatment of me, she shouted out.

“What was that?!”

I told her it was an artifact I found.

I said that it was an artifact because I didn’t want them to be involved in the things I was doing, which would bring them trouble if I did tell them.

Everyone was even more surprised when I said it.

“That is really amazing; how did you get such a cool artifact like that?”

Maria said it in a fascinated tone as she approached me.

I told them a prefabricated story I made beforehand.

“A chest suddenly appeared when I fought the Latrodec spider, and they were inside. I just got very lucky, that is all.”

From the Dradevow dungeon book, artifacts can show up in one of two ways. One is in a chest that shows up by luck if you find them, or by killing a boss, and the stronger the boss, the higher the chance of artifacts dropping.

“That's really lucky of you if you don’t mind me asking, but what does it do?”

“Well, it sends out a spark of electricity whenever I throw it, but I've never seen this happening before.”

“I see, that is quite interesting.”

After the conversation with Maria, I was picking up my throwing knives, and I noticed Lucia was enviously looking at me for some reason but she turned her head away when we made eye contact.

Looking at the magical circles, they were all completely burnt out, which I feared would happen because of the amount of electricity coming out of the knives.

I wonder what caused it. How did it gather that amount of mana to generate that amount of electricity?

There weren’t any magical shards that dropped from the orcs when I was picking up my knives and spikes, which was weird.

In the book about the dungeon, orcs always drop a magical shard, a medium one usually, or a couple of small ones if you’re unlucky.

Could it be because the magic circles that gather the mana in the air also gather mana in the monster, which includes the magical shards?

Either way, I better ask Mila for her suggestion; she might know something.

Finishing collecting my knives, I turned my head to Alex and Wendy, looking at me like there was still danger. I ask with my normal expressionless face.

“What?”

Alex and Wendy sighed in relief, and for some reason, I was getting the feeling that they weren’t for any orcs that might come towards us.

Regrouping, we discuss whether we should head back up or continue.

I suggested.

“Why don’t we check out the village on the 19th floor?”

From the Dradevow dungeon book I read, there was a small village made inside the dungeon on the 19th floor that acts like an outpost for adventurers to resupply and rest.

Additionally, there were other places down the dungeon similar to the village on the 19th floor but were generally smaller since they were on the deeper floors, like the one at the 3rd stratum that has a camp set up on an oasis.

“Wait, there is a village inside a dungeon.”

Alex looked at me skeptically and was a bit surprised that a village was in a dungeon, which Chelsie responded to him with.

“Yes, I believe I’ve heard about it.”

“We can rest there for a bit instead of just going up since you all are tired from fighting.”

After discussing with each other, everyone agrees to go to the village on the 19th floor, including Lucia, who begrudgingly agrees, so we make our way to the 19th floor.