We joined up on the forty-fifth floor.

We’d had to wait a day for both Rishard Kire and Haley Faeland, but once they both arrived, we’d gone into the Dungeon and started pushing.

Rishard was a milky-skinned man with red eyes and white hair. There was something cold about him and I’d heard him say about ten words in three days.He wore a robe that was tailored like the personal guard armor. Black with red trim. His robe had a hood as well. Considering all of the floors were deserts, I’d asked him a few times how he was handling the heat, but he’d never answered.

Haley on the other hand, wouldn’t stop talking. She was a muscular woman with short black hair, yellow eyes, and green skin. She also preferred to wear very little despite being a tank. That had thrown me off at first until I’d seen her fight. She’d gone berserk, flying into a rage and using a very large silver ax to hit the thing that she was taunting. The more she got hurt, the stronger she got, which I immediately identified that she was a masochist because she would go out of her way to let things stab or bite her if she hadn’t been injured in a while.

Despite their quirks and Sipher’s antics, we’d gotten to the forty-fifth floor without any hiccups. The bosses had all been feline of some sort and fairly straightforward. They were bigger than the ones on the lower floors, but I couldn’t walk under them like I could the raid boss.

You didn’t want to have more than six people in your group, because if you did the Dungeon would start spawning elites. An elite was basically just a bigger, stronger version of a regular floor monster. You did get more experience for fighting an elite, but not enough to compensate for the extra party members.

The fifth floor of each Tier had an Elite floor boss. It was harder than all the other floor bosses on that Tier, but since it was always an elite, you could bring two teams into the bossroom and it wouldn’t make the monster any stronger.

We were all sitting outside the door to the boss room making preparations while Haley was buzzing around. She was an exiled princess from the Stupa Ward where the Faelands ruled the majority of the Ward, not the Gods. Her father had many kids and as a way to not show favoritism for the throne, the royal heirs would get exiled once they received their mantle. They had to prove themselves by assembling a party and growing strong enough to protect the kingdom. She still had lots of time to grow her following and raise her level. Their current king was one of the few level sixties in the world and still had plenty of life left in him.

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I inwardly sighed as the green woman bounced over to me. “Are you excited?!?”

I shrugged. “It’s an elite. It’s bigger, hits harder, and takes more to beat. Other than that, it’s probably going to be like every other boss we’ve done in the last two days.”

“Really?” Her face fell. “I was hoping for something besides a cat.”

I shrugged. “It’s the Dungeon we’re in. Most have a certain monster or theme that they follow. In this one, we’ve got felines.”

“Is everyone ready?” Sipher stood up and checked to make sure everyone had at least acknowledged him. “Let’s go!”

I’d been expecting the bandit to be somewhat unreliable, but he was actually really good with a sword. And despite his flighty and flirty nature, he remained focused whenever there was a monster around.

Once we were inside the boss room, the tank lit up the room to start the fight. The boss looked exactly like the floor forty boss, except this one didn’t have phases. Haley roared and lept through the air with her ax overhead only to get hit by stinger after stinger until she had four new holes in her. The tails were able to knock her out of the air, but she was back up on her feet and charging at the monster again like she hadn’t been touched. Rishard was mumbling under his breath as she ran, drawing most of his focus to keep her alive while she tried to get hurt.

The Sands were busy working on cutting off the tails, while Nyssa was going after its knees. Gall was using magic to hit its side while Sipher was attacking the feet as well and trying to stay out of Nyssa’s way.

I used Shadowstep to drop me on top of it, then plunged my sword between its shoulders. The Monster roared and tried to buck me off and when that didn’t work, it tried to sting me, but there was only one tail left at that point.

I dodged to the right while holding onto the hilt of my sword and watched the tail go wide the other way. The boss couldn’t see me, so it was having trouble aiming. As the tail came at me again, it vanished into smoke.

I heard a crack and looked behind me to see a green woman covered in her own green blood without a weapon because her ax was planted between the monster's eyes. I felt it buckle and pulled out my sword and jumped as the monster fell over. As it tried to get up, it had too many vulnerable spots exposed and one of us found its heart and the boss vanished into dust.

The blood soaked woman staggered over to me and shook her head. “It's no fun when they go down that fast.”

I shook my head. She was the only one I knew of who would come out of a fight looking like she did and complain that it was too easy. I was okay with easy though. Easy meant that we’d see what the deal was with Sipher’s item.