I glanced down at the notification, one XP then, this was ten times the speed of most of the other parties. It would obviously get harder as we leveled up and hence produce more experience but still, at one XP an average group would need to kill ten rats to even gain a single experience point. I gave a silent prayer of thanks to whatever demonic ancestor had given me my passive. If we were getting full points that meant that most people would need to kill ten rats for a single XP point.

I was guessing that nobody actually used the first floor for long and just directly moved on to the second after farming for some cheap gear. Judging by how fast these things died though, with some training we could probably farm this place for experience. With how weak these were we could probably kill hundreds of them in the time it would take to battle harder monsters.

We kept that up for about two hours, proceeding farther and farther, finding and filling blank reds at a speed that would make other parties green with envy. I was pouring all of my XP into stones to let the others catch up. Magnus and Theo were level two, but most of the others hadn’t leveled at all yet. By the time we had filled around twenty reds we were all up to level three.

We finally all stopped at the final room. A sparkling fountain of water sat next to it. Shawn saw me looking and clarified “Water of meditation. Clears the mind and helps with focus. Reduces spell cost by ten percent too. If this is here we’re definitely at the boss room. Some of the later floors have healing or mana potions I hear, but by that point its not even cost effective to sell them. Unfortunately I have no clue what the boss is. Apparently it only spawns if you wipe the whole floor, and almost no one ever bothers because the rats give so little XP.”

I cursed “Ok guys, now that the waves of rodents are dealt with we have plenty of time to check the drops. What did everyone get?” I had personally picked up about five pieces of gear, I knew Erin had gotten one or two herself, our Luck stat was showing early and I wasn’t remotely upset about it. I reached in and pulled out three daggers, a staff and ring. I looked over at Shawn “You have an identification skill right? With all the research you do I figured one must have popped up for you.”

Shawn nodded as I put my items down on the ground next to my sisters two and three others including the leather armor from that first rat “Yes, my skill is B ranked and fairly powerful, it takes a bit longer but it can identify items up to about twenty levels higher than me should be up to strange curious at this point.” I suspected the drop rate down here was substantially lower for people who weren’t insane luckboxes. Shawn stepped forward and muttered over the gear for a minute or two before shouting and apparently mass identifying the whole pile.

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Dagger of Doubt(Common) Five percent chance to deal damage even in the event of a miss. Did you stab him? Maybe not, but he thinks you did.

Dagger of Dispersion(Common) Five percent chance to cleanse weak buffs on critical. I’ll cut you so bad even your buffs will feel it.

Staff of Semi-Serious papercuts(Common)Five percent boost to crit heal chance. Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

Rat Wrap(Common) A breastplate made of rat skin. Gross but effective. Two percent damage absorbtion.

The remaining few were all just trash tier gear with no special properties. We all picked our pieces. I kept my trash sword so the more martially inclined of us could get the good weapons. With a deep breath I nodded to the others and we turned towards the door. Time to take care of our first boss. We moved silently into the room, slowly and carefully setting down our feet so they wouldn’t echo on the stone floor.

My heart was pounding in my chest. Rats were one thing but we were about to fight a damn floor boss. This was when things got serious. I couldn’t help but think of the demon, think of the body of the girl it had killed. What if that happened to one of my party. I shook my head hard to clear it. No use thinking like that. I was here, I would use my Precognition to make sure no one got hurt. I could keep it up for an extra half a second or so with the buffs from the water in the fountain and I was going to make sure it was enough.

We all spread out to surround it, taking up positions we had subconsciously fallen into over hours of killing rats, and then finally we stared at the boss. I took a deep breath, and activated Revelation.

Rat Bastard(Common rank boss) A large bipedal rat humanoid with a giant heavy sword, the rat bastard is almost as strong as it is angry. Prone to berserk rages and wholesale slaughter, its biggest weakness lies in its relatively slow speed. The rat bastard is easily distracted by shiny things and hates loud noises. The rat bastard grows in power as it kills, this one has about five hundred HP and has eaten hundreds of other rats. Approach with caution.

I relayed everything I saw to my party as we approached slowly. The rat bastard seemed to be asleep leaning against a piller surrounded by the bones of both rats and humans. I wondered where it went when people hadn’t cleared the floor. Did it hide? Or did this room just not appear. What benefits did a floor boss give? Before I had more time to think, it became a moot, point. I felt my blood run cold as beady black eyes opened and locked on me. The time for thinking was up, now was the time to act.