“Gah! These fuckers… Are tough nuts to crack!” cursed Nadine as she matched blades with one of the humanoid monsters which wielded an artifact greatsword. To her surprise, the monster – despite it being an amalgamation of countless thread-like creatures as small as one’s hair – wielded the blade with obvious expertise and matched her blow for blow.

“Language, Milady,” tutted Maribel from beside her even while the woman narrowly avoided a blow from another monster’s axe before she returned the favor with a couple of slashes from her pair of sabers that only did superficial damage due to how tightly knit the monster’s “flesh” was. “Madam Ormont would be scandalized to hear that.”

“Let that old bitch fucking die of a heart attack and shit herself all over that antique chair she treated as if it was dad’s throne for all I care!” snapped Nadine back as she carefully deflected another slash from the monster to the side with the flat of her own blade. To her frustration, though, the monster managed to shift itself so that her counterblow only landed on one of the stone slabs that covered its flesh like another layer of armor beneath the armor it wore.

Her blow cracked the stone slab, but that was about all it did.

All along the front, the party were having similar trouble against the rest of the humanoid monsters. It was hard enough to fight the monsters when they merely used pieces of wood or stone attached to their body like a skin for armor and crude cudgels for weapons. Now that they used actual, proper weapons and armor, the difficulty jumped up noticeably.

If that wasn’t enough, one of the monsters even wielded some sort of artifact bow that conjured arrows of pure energy when drawn and provided support from the back. As a result, Osmond and Joshua mostly focused their efforts to keep that particular monster too occupied to shoot properly, which naturally reduced the amount of support the party’s frontliners could receive to the javelins thrown by Benedictus and Leda’s healing.

Those on the frontlines fought eight against nine – Ethan kept two of the monsters occupied with him – with most of them tackling one of the monsters. They had at first hoped for a quick resolution, but it quickly became apparent that there was no such thing awaiting them, as the monsters were not only tough opponents that made it difficult to even land a hit, but were also very durable to boot, with many of the party’s blows barely hurting the creatures.

The ones who had the most success out of the group was surprisingly Silvia and Alissa, who had struggled more when they fought larger creatures before this. Against these human-sized opponents with high durability, their skillsets proved to be far more compatible, their spears delivering deep, serious wounds with every thrust they landed.

As such, those two were the first ones to put their foes on the backfoot, compared to the rest who were at best holding their own if not struggling against the monsters they faced. Silvia’s opponent was already missing its left arm and had a sizzling hole in its abdomen area, where the holy powers that enveloped her spearhead when she invoked her skill kept devouring the creatures that came into contact with it.

On her side, Alissa had her opponent limping with one of its arms dangling uselessly. She had not expected it, but [The Cold, Hard Truth] and [Lies May Please, But it Doesn’t Heal] surprisingly seemed to work in tandem to somehow prevent the creatures from simply having other parts of its body unravel to take over the ones she had damaged, which in turn weakened the creature where she had struck it.

When Alissa noted how the fight was already going on for five minutes – they only had around fifteen minutes of time during which all of their team buffs would be in effect – and the rest were still facing difficulties, though, she decided to take things into her own hand for a change. Right away she intensified her assault at the limping creature she faced.

“[Pierce The Heavens!], [Grasp the Soul!]” yelled Alissa as she took advantage of an opening presented by her crippled opponent. Alissa had noticed how the creature always attempted to avoid stabs that were aimed towards the center of its torso, around where the solar plexus would be in a human, and had guessed that its “core” would be around that area.

Her guess was vindicated when her spear pierced deep into the center of the monster’s torso and the creature just fell apart into pieces right afterwards. It was a similar phenomenon as what she saw when other creatures in the second cavern had their cores destroyed, and the remnants would be far less dangerous compared to what it was like before.

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She could care less that she had likely permanently damaged the artifact chainmail the creature wore in the process. It was likely a lower level one anyway given how her spear pierced through it with such ease.

As such, Alissa ignored them and instead turned towards her right and fell upon one of the two monsters that Ethan was tackling instead. The creature was an agile one, wearing only light armor and armed with a slender sword and a dagger. As such, Alissa had something in mind for it to make the best use of her skills, since at their current levels the skills were good for several strikes.

“[Moment of Truth!]” she intoned as she charged at the creature, and the world slowed down drastically around her – or at least that was what it felt like – as the skill took hold. Using the slowed perception, she noticed how the creature reacted. Her eyes saw which way it was actually trying to evade to, rather than the direction it gave as a feint, and [A Critical Eye] also noticed a hint that she would have missed since normally she would have no time to pay attention closely in a pitched battle.

The hint made her reasonably certain that the creature’s core was around the base of its neck – something she could notice if the core was not under a section of the creature’s body that was covered by its armor – and in the remaining moments of the skill’s effects, she formulated a plan to take it down with the remaining three strikes where her skills would still be active, her body moving painstakingly slowly to her perception as she put the plan into action.

Alissa’s first strike sheared through the creature’s right wrist, dropping its hand along with the sword it held in it, and she made the second strike before the results of her first strike even registered for whatever served as the creature’s mind, this time piercing through the creature’s right thigh, the injury throwing an immediate hitch to its movements.

Even as the creature paused from the sudden injury, Alissa’s spear struck like a snake straight into the base of its neck, piercing deep into the creature with the point even coming out from its back. Alissa’s skill and its slowed perception came to an end just as the creature started to unravel like the previous one, as she had dealt a heavy blow to its core.

“Hey, thanks!” chimed Ethan as he immediately bashed away the weapon held by the other monster he was facing with his shield, before he swung his pollax one-handed and smashed its other shoulder with the hammerhead on its back. “I’ll take care of this one in a bit, you go and help the others with theirs?” he added even as he pressed the creature back.”

“Will do,” replied Alissa as she took a moment to catch her breath before she continued. While the fighting had been brief so far, it had also been more strenuous than usual, as these opponents pushed them to their limits, unlike the monsters where they could usually take a moment to breathe even while fighting hard against them.

Not long after Alissa left to Nadine and Maribel’s aid, Silvia and Ethan were also finished with their respective opponents. They quickly turned the tide by helping the others dispatch their opponents one by one, the humanoid monsters unraveling one after another as they were “killed” under their weapons, dropping their artifact armor and weapons to the ground.

As for the one creature that stayed in the distance, once those at the front took control of the situation, Benedictus split off to engage and occupy it, successfully holding it in place for a while, which in turn gave Joshua the chance to land a fatal blow that sheared the creature’s body in half on the spot. He had not struck the creature’s core, but left with only half its body, it was easy enough for Benedictus to finish it off before he started to slaughter the offshoots that the creature unraveled to.

By the time the party’s buff wore out, all the humanoid monsters were down and unraveled into many parts which were easy enough for them to hunt down and slaughter one after another. The cleanup took them another ten minutes, before they collectively groaned and held their heads from the sudden – but expected – influx of notifications and the headache that followed.

It was while the party was recovering from the headache that Sir Inolet and the rest approached as well and started to set up camp. They had clearly decided that it was better to camp there at the end of the second cavern rather than rush into the third cavern right away. Given how their heads throbbed in pain, none of the party felt like debating that call either.

Before fifteen minutes had passed, the party was already cleaning up and sorting the artifacts that the monsters had dropped, while Glenn and Leda – the two who turned out to be the best cooks amongst them – were preparing food for dinner on the campfire. There were ten sets of artifacts that the monsters dropped, and while half the armor were quite damaged or ruined, the weapons were relatively in good shape.

“Not bad, most of these weapons are about even to what you are using now, same with the armor,” noted Sir Inolet as they were sorting out the artifacts. “Don’t feel bad about the armor. We’d need someone to rework and refit them before someone could use them anyway, unless someone just happened to be the exact same size as those creatures just now.”

“Come to think of it, Sir, mind a question?” asked Alissa while she was checking a polearm dropped by one of the creatures.

“Go ahead, Miss O’Connor,” replied the old knight.

“Why do these things take such a human shape? To the point that they could make use of armor and weapons that were clearly intended for human use at that,” she asked. “It just felt odd to me, especially since the creatures we fought prior to this were all far more animalistic in shape and fighting style. Are they human in shape just so they could use the armor and weapons?”

“That’s actually one of the leading theories, as nobody knows for sure,” replied the old knight with a nod. “Most of those who believe it claim that since the Gods wish to gift us artifacts, we need to face a fitting challenge to acquire them. Of course, there are also cases where we have found artifacts hidden in the nest of decidedly not humanoid beasts, so clearly having the monsters actually don and use them wasn’t mandatory.”

“In the end, nobody knows for sure. I mean, the fact that artifacts would show up in dungeons like there where we had scoured the place clean not a month ago is already miraculous on its own,” added the old knight. “We just decided to not ask too many questions and just take it as it comes, I guess. Probably not the wisest course of action according to some, but it worked well enough for us.”