The next two floors were monotonous, but at least I got a bit more exercise with the hordes of first-rank monsters. Cutting them down was as easy as cutting wheat thanks to my greatsword, but we continued at a reasonably fast pace. Then we were once again fighting rank two monsters where we could actually move faster because we still had the damage to annihilate the smaller number of opponents, even when they were individually stronger.

The current area we found ourselves in was a cold, crypt-like ruin where our enemies were armored suits and the occasional skeleton. I was currently exploring on my own, and I once again had to thank my interactive map as it made moving around so much easier.

I had begun to explore on my own when I started to get anxious just sitting around and waiting while others slept. I still guarded them for four hours, after which Arabella took over. Apparently, elves needed about half as much sleep as humans, but of course, I needed a lot less sleep than that.

I have been getting to know my sword a lot better, and I’m still amazed at how good it actually is. Even now, cutting through second-ranked monsters that are made of metal armor was stupidly simple.

I still needed to strengthen the sword with my abilities, but I was nowhere close to the maximum output I could do. But that just meant that I could keep going a lot longer before I reached my minimum threshold of energy that I wanted to keep in case of emergencies.

This area was especially dark, even for me, as it seems that this dungeon was a lot better at managing how much dungeon energy it put into the air. In other dungeons I’ve been through, I could basically see like it was bright sunlight, but currently, it was more like dusk.

That, of course, changed when a monster was nearby as to my eyes they lit up like black and white fireworks with a few hues of blues splashed in. Sometimes I missed normal colors as the sights I was using usually didn’t include a lot of colors. However, this didn't change anything about my fights, which I was still ending with only one strike.

This was an incredibly good way to gain experience, especially thanks to the density of monsters. I have already leveled up twice, and I was closing in on my third level up for all my classes, but unfortunately, my time exploring was about to come to an end as I needed to go back to the others.

Soon we will be continuing onwards, and I at least know the general direction we needed to head towards. Hopefully, Horus will be able to guide us more directly so we can keep advancing fast enough that we would have a chance to reach the core.

On my way back, when I was relatively close to our campsite, I was stopped when Arabella walked out of the shadows. The only reason I was able to not react was that I noticed her just before she revealed herself. "Who are you?" she asked me in a cold tone, which made me wonder why she would be so hostile.

"I have no idea what you are asking, as I’m many things," I responded. My words did not please her, but I hadn't expected them to. But before she could continue, I spoke first. "Leaving our party members sleeping and defenseless is quite worrying. Do you have an explanation as to why I shouldn’t consider you a traitor?"

She took a step back as I said the last part quite menacingly. I, of course, didn’t mean it as they should have already been up for quite a while making food. Unfortunately, it seems that my ruse didn’t work as well as I had hoped.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

"Don’t try to deflect. You and I both know that I wouldn’t have left them if they were still asleep. Did you really think that I wouldn’t notice your maker’s marks that’s on your equipment? It's the same one that's on my bow. And I could sense that iron oak handle your sword has. So I will ask you once again, who are you?"

"Okay, I guess it’s time to stop beating around the bush. Before we continue, please enlighten me about what you know about iron oak," I said in a calm and in a relaxing tone which had the desired effect of confusing her. I do not know what went on inside her head, but eventually, she answered.

"An iron oak is a sacred tree for the elves. Its story began with our own and has been intertwined ever since. All of our greatest heroes have wielded weapons made out of iron oak, and we have a connection to that wood in our very blood. If you don’t have an iron oak growing on your land, you are not considered a noble it’s so influential. This wood is highly regulated, and I can’t even remember hearing about more than five occasions when it has been sold outside Elven nations."

Well, shit. I did not like how she is looking at me. The secrecy about our iron oak needs to be upgraded quite a lot. But there’s already a problem, and I was correctly looking at her. Whatever she saw in my face made her rapidly back off, which snapped me out of it.

I laughed a bit awkwardly and said, "Sorry about that, your news was just a bit unfortunate. Just out of curiosity, do you perhaps have anything else made of iron oak that I could examine for a moment? And honestly, don't worry, I’m not going to hurt you if you keep being civil."

It took quite a while before she took a few steps closer and then pulled out a necklace that had a crescent moon symbol carved out of iron oak. She was extremely hesitant, but she did give it to me. I wondered why she was so trusting all of a sudden, but as soon as I touched the symbol, I dived into it to try to figure out if the iron oak on my land was the same as from the Elven lands.

It was not but at its current state it was. The one on my land wasn't actually iron oak; it was capable of absorbing any kind of metal. This one that I was holding, however, was just an iron oak and would be no matter where it’s grown. However, I suspect it still needed an iron deposit underneath it; otherwise, it would just wither.

"Interesting," I said while handing the necklace back. She was quite curious as she put her necklace back, which revealed a bit of cleavage which was hard not to notice. I started to walk back to our camp. "Wait, where are you going?" she asked me, to which I replied.

"We should keep moving, otherwise we will be late. As for the reason you came here, we will discuss that later, but now we need to hurry." I walked alone for only a little bit before she joined me, but I was glad that she just walked beside me and didn’t try to ask more questions as I had no idea how to answer them.

Everything got a lot more complicated, and I felt like I couldn’t just bluff my way out of this. If she really lived in a Royal Court, I was quite certain that my acting skills and any other social skill weren't going to be good enough to fool her. The only thing I had going for me was brutality.

They had all seen me truly fight when I started to use my greatsword and they were all a bit scared of me after that, but eventually, the got used to it. But I was quite certain it was still at the back of their heads. But I wasn’t sorry about that as it gave me some advantages, but more importantly, it should get them used to the later floors. I’m quite certain that none of them have experienced what we will face down there.

I, of course, also don’t know exactly what’s going to be down there, but I can guess. From the speed at which our enemies are getting stronger and from the traps, I will not be surprised if we will soon start to lose limbs quite often. Thankfully, I was able to bring up limb replacement with Adam, and he assured me that he will be able to do it quite easily. I wasn’t so certain that it would be so easy on me as I wasn’t exactly made from normal human parts, but I also wouldn’t break as easily as the others.

I truly hope that my taunt ability is up to the challenge. If it's not, I am quite certain I would be the only one that would have a chance at walking out of this dungeon. With those thoughts in my mind, I threw myself against our enemies, trying to level myself up as fast as possible.

I should also probably use my free points to at least get to my next energy storage milestone to get the trait from it. But the real question is, should I use those free points on any of my other stats, should I keep them for later, should I be doing what I have always done and just put everything into energy storage?

Currently, I was nowhere close to running out of energy, but that was because of my party members who needed to rest a lot more than I needed to. But even if I was alone, I was quite certain that I still wouldn’t need a bigger energy tank; my current one was already big enough. Then again, I did have other people here who should know a lot more about the system than I do, so perhaps it’s time to start guiding our downtime discussions towards topics I need to learn about."