We continued rampaging our way through the dungeon almost entirely uncontested. As promised, Yua handled all of the wolves, while I delt with the slimes like we should have done from the get go. By the time we stopped to take a break and catch out breaths, we had killed five more wolves and four slimes. Thankfully, the dungeons hadn’t been as cleaned out as Yua and I were expecting.
The experience gained was enough to level both of us up. I myself leveled up twice and caught up with Yua quicker than I thought I would. I even managed to outpace her a bit thanks to the EXP boost, putting me closer to the next level than she was. I even managed to level up the Mage class to level 2 thanks to killing the slimes with magic.
It felt incredibly unfair for me to have already outpaced her after how many years of diligent practice it likely took her to become as skilled a fighter as she was, but if it was for the sake of burning through the dungeon and making money faster, then I chose to accept the cheating as a fact of life.
Thanks to our efforts, we now had 7 wolf pelts and 1 Wolf Fang, appraised at around 3 silvers. I was already suggested that it was possible, but I was still surprised to find out that monsters could really drop two items at a time if you were lucky enough. Thanks to this, we also found 1 Slime Oil, appraised also at 1 silver, on top of the 5 slime goos that seemed to be a guaranteed drop just like the wolf pelts.
In total, if I took the appraised prices at face value, after about an hour’s worth of risking our lives, we had earned a paltry 79 silver pieces. Just a little more than shy of 1 gold piece and fucking nowhere near what we needed. The kicker was, that since I was the one with the Appraisal ability, I was the only one that noticed this issue.
We were both starting to sweat and were both moderately out of breath, so we chose to stay put for a few minutes. While we did so, I did some quick mental math. If we worked a minimum of 10 hours a day for the next two days before the deadline, assuming our profits were consistent with what we just got, we would still only bring in about 47 gold and 4 silver pieces. Again, nowhere near enough.
Then there was the fact that we were both tired and my mana bar had been mostly depleted due to the rapid succession of slimes we faced. It was slowly recovering on its own thanks to one of my cheat traits, but that wasn’t going to be enough to keep fighting this way. Eventually, we’d come up on a slime while I had no mana and we’d be forced to either waste a significant amount of time fighting with sword and fist, or we’d have to run away and come back once more of my mana had been restored. So, in other words…
“This isn’t working,” I said after taking a deep breath and sighing it back out. “Yua, can you find any more of them?”
Standing back up by pushing her hands down on her knees to straighten them out, this time without any snarky remarks, she tilted her head back and twitched her ears. It was the same gesture she always made when trying to locate more enemies for us, but I couldn’t come up with a valid reason for why the slight change in angle made so much of a difference to her.
Regardless, from where I sat against the wall across from her, the non-existent light sources allowing us to see all seemed to have put a spotlight on her and I was forced to notice that her hair, slick with sweat, was sticking to her flushed face in a way that made her look even more enticing. I watched as droplets of sweat slipped down her delicate neck and down into the forbidden valley between her breasts as they rose and fell with every lightly labored breath she took. Her already tight clothes were clinging to her shapely body even more thanks to this, which only made it harder not to look so much.
I already thought she was beautiful, obviously, but now she was downright sexy. She’d been fighting all this time, but the appearance she wore now gave off the impression she’d just undergone an intense night of passionate love-making. And to think, I almost shared such a night with her and likely would have if Alphonse didn’t screw us over.
“Master… Can you calm your heart down? The sound of it pounding like that is distracting. Just take a seat and catch your breath for now.”
My cheeks heated up as I asked, “You-You can hear my heart?”
“If I focus on my ears, I can hear all sorts of things.”
“Ah…”
So that’s how it works. Good to know…I guess.
Hopefully putting mana into her brain doesn’t give her the option to read my mind. That groping incident earlier just made it harder not to think of her in a sexual light and I’d really rather her not know that.
We’d been fighting together for a good hour or so, but in all that time, we hadn’t spoken much and whenever we did, it was only to convey the location of an enemy or the way we wanted to approach fighting them. I felt a good portion of this was due to Yua being more than a little apprehensive towards me after said groping incident, but she worked through her anger and discomfort quickly enough. The rest of it was due to my inexperience sharing in casual conversation making it incredibly difficult to think up something to say.
I always had this problem when trying to speak to people, but it was even worse with her now that she’d become my slave. It definitely wasn’t the same as her being my girlfriend, or even just a regular friend. Me “owning” her didn’t somehow unlock the ability to speak casually to her or share any sort of intimate thoughts. Moreover, due to the negative nature of what little of a relationship we did have, it was still entirely on me to put in the foot work and make something happen.
And I had nothing to show for it.
Between every battle, I spent every second made available to me by none other than Yua’s diligent ears thinking of how to progress things both with her on an emotional level and on the task before us, but I couldn’t think of anything.
Why does this always happen? At this rate, after trying this much with Yua, I could only imagine how much I would have embarrassed myself if I actually managed to speak with that jogging woman. Even after all the snark and barely hidden insults made at my expense, I still found something that demanded I acknowledge there was more to her. That her treatment of me was born of lingering resentment for her enslavement, not because it was who she was as a person.
I’d noticed as much during our fights against the monsters. After she worked through her initial anger, each time she defeated a wolf, she’d turn back to me with a beautiful smile, as if wanting to be praised for her skill, only to then wipe it off her face the moment she saw that it was me she was looking to for approval. Her strength was truly amazing, enough to make her want to brag about it boisterously, but not to me. But those smiles…
None of these brief smiles were directed at me when I cast my magic on the slimes, though. How could she find any sort of pride in that when all I did was point my hand at the slime and essentially work my imagination to make them die? She was in there fighting through the danger while all I did was raise my hand and fling fire balls at moving puddles of goo. It could hardly be considered a fair division of either skill or work.
But those occasional, bright smiles were more than enough to suggest her rough outer shell just needed a little wearing down. I’d known her for less than half a day so far and yet I found myself wanting almost desperately to see that other side of her. To just experience it once and see who she really was beneath that snarky exterior. Even if that really was just who she was as a person, I wanted to see the sides of her that didn’t hate my guts. Even just a glimpse at the truth I didn’t deserve to see would be enough to settle my heart, but in all our time in the dungeon so far, she never spent more than a second or two looking my way.
No matter how I worked my brain and forced whichever parts of it were in charge of coming up with casual banter to lighten the mood between us, I think up with anything even remotely worth trying. And I was starting to think that buying her might have robbed me of ever having the chance to make this work. Well, logically speaking, I suppose I didn’t need to think it might, it already had. I tried to focus on the dungeon, but the more time we spent together, the harder doing so became.
After a few minutes of her silent searching and my trying not to get flustered by just looking at her so she didn’t hear the inner argument between my heart and brain, Yua’s chin finally fell back down. And the look on her face was not a happy one.
“Master, I think we’ve finished off the last of them already.”
“Shit… We don’t have anywhere near enough loot yet. Isn’t there anything else we could do?”
“Hmm,” she tilted her head and swept her sweaty bangs out of her eyes. “Well, the only thing left to do on this floor would be to fight the boss. Unlike the regular monsters, the bosses always respawn once every hour. We’ve been here for at least that long, so we should be able to face it now.”
“The boss already, eh? What is it? Do you know?”
She nodded while pulling her long chestnut hair off of the back of her neck. When she realized she had nothing to tie it up with, she sighed and let it fall back down.
“It’s another wolf. But much bigger and much stronger.”
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“That doesn’t sound too bad.”
“It’s not,” she said with an honest shrug. “I fought it once all by myself and managed just fine. As long as we continue as we have been so far, it shouldn’t be anything to worry about.”
I had a pretty good idea of how she fought so far, so I knew she was already very capable, but if she said she could manage the boss all on her own, then that was a huge relief. I’d still help, of course, but if she was telling the truth, we could fight the boss, head to the next floor and explore it for an hour or so before returning to fight the boss again. Bosses always gave better EXP and dropped better loot, so this could be a viable path for us to take to speed up the money-making and leveling processes.
“Alright, if the boss is all that’s left here, we might as well go for it. If you’re ready, can you lead us to it?”
“Sure.”
I wished I could give her more of a break since her style of fighting relied so heavily on her stamina, but she didn’t complain. She knew as well as I did that the sooner we pressed forward, the better. And true to form, she looked a little excited to challenge a stronger foe. Which was truthfully a little concerning.
According to the information she dumped on me earlier, regarding how the dungeons worked, the boss was likely guarding the door to the next level, so facing him was a must before we could progress deeper. I had no idea if the General waiting outside of the dungeon would let anyone jump to any level regardless of how far they’d gone on their own power, but I doubted it. The deeper levels would likely offer nothing less than instant death for lower-level people like us. We, however, needed to press on as fast as possible and the boss would be a good benchmark to tell if we were capable of progressing deeper and taking that risk. Yua already said she made it past this floor all on her own, but she had her skills to help her along. The best I could do now was see if my numbers were up to snuff.
The faster we get through this and level up, the deeper we could go. And hopefully, that meant we would find better loot.
“The boss room should be over here,” Yua said, pointing down one of the halls we hadn’t travelled yet. “It’s the only monster still making any noise and I recognize its footsteps. It’s definitely the boss.”
She turned back to grin fiercely at me as she walked, her swishing tail displaying her eagerness. There was still a faint pinkness to her cheeks. The thought of a better fight definitely seemed to excite her a bit.
“Hey, Master, what do you think of the dungeon so far?”
“It’s not bad. Feels like it would make for a good workout… if you wanted to be lazy for a day.”
She seemed to be getting some good exercise, but I was sweating just from the walking. It wasn’t exactly tiring to cast spells, after all. My new body was most definitely in better shape than my old one, but that didn’t mean I was used to so much physical activity. Not to mention there wasn’t exactly a draft down here to cool us off. Maybe I could just lie and say the heat from my own Fire Balls was responsible for the sweat.
To my surprise, she giggled at my little joke and turned back to me, noticeably at ease since we were free of random monsters. I was once more faced with the honest-to-goddess truth that this girl’s smile was abnormally beautiful as I deliberately left out the part about not having enough loot to sell in my assessment of the dungeon, since she looked like she was having a good time. As much as that smile made me want to protect her future even more whenever I saw it, at this rate, she was as good as dead. The odds of us paying off what I owed Alphonse were growing slimmer every second.
Snap!
We continued while I alone worried about our futures, but we both stopped moving entirely when we heard the loud snap of some kind of unseen rope being stretched to its limits and as it tore itself apart to relieve the tension. We both instinctively looked at our feet. Yua lifted up hers and a small section of the floor started to rise where it had been. She had stepped on some kind of pressure plate.
There are traps in the dungeons?!!
The second I realized what had happened, but before I could contemplate how a non-man-made dungeon could produce traps, a wide section of the floor we were standing on fell away so instantaneously that it might as well have never been there to begin with. With a mutual yelp of surprise, we fell right along with it as the edges of this new hole were too far away to grab hold of to stop ourselves, so the relentless force that was gravity pulled us down into the darkness of the pit.
Before I could fear an army of spikes, waiting at the bottom like a bunch of madmen raising their spears at us to force us to impale ourselves at the end of our decent, putting an abrupt end to my and Yua’s new life, we hit the very solid, very flat floor beneath us. And we hit it hard. I thankfully never had to experience the pain of a broken bone due to the protection of my self-isolation back on Earth, but it felt like my pelvis had been shattered on impact.
The hole we’d fallen into was at least eight feet tall, too tall to jump and grab hold of the edge of it. Reeling from the new pain in my ass, only moderately sure nothing was actually broken, I checked our surroundings for some sort of ladder or something we could grab onto to pull ourselves back up, thinking that this pitfall trap was just meant to slow us down, but I found nothing but smooth stone. I suppose we should be thankful we didn’t actually break anything, but it still hurt like hell and now were going to have to work our battered bodies to find a way out.
Before I could check on Yua’s condition, there was another snap, this time from above. We both looked, ignoring the pain of the fall, and saw that a large cube of stone belonging to the ceiling had been knocked loose and was falling straight towards us.
About eight feet wide on both sides, the mass of stone looked large enough to not only fill the hole perfectly, but it also fell precisely where it needed to in order to do so. The precision of this magically-designed trap was relentless. I could tell at a glance that the stone was guaranteed to slip right into the pit and crush us.
Reluctantly, already sure that there was no route for escape, I readied myself to accept my fate. I instinctively covered my head, knowing it wouldn’t do anything against the weight of the chunk of ceiling and hoped the Goddess would forgive me for all my indiscretions when we met again. Yua shot back up to her feet.
The mass of stone collided with Yua first and I felt myself every bit the pathetic excuse of a man I always knew I was. I was going to die knowing that nothing had changed in that regard.
I waited for death, a brief, flitting thought, a hope really, that I wouldn’t feel any pain just how I didn’t with the truck, but it didn’t come. Death didn’t come.
Confused and scared shitless, I looked to see what happened and found Yua standing in the center of the pit. Standing. Her body wasn’t bent and broken, left to awkwardly hold the mass of stone until her weary bones finally gave out and let it continue to crush us both. Impossibly, she was holding up the massive stone that had to weigh at least a ton with nothing but her bare hands.
She gritted her teeth, flexed the muscles on her thin arms to fill them with enough blood to carry out this feat and did all she could to stop the stone from continuing on its crash course with our heads. Her overall thin frame suggested that this should have been impossible, but she was doing it. She was somehow exerting even more power than she had when she brutalized the wolves earlier.
“Master, run away! There’s an alcove in the wall behind you. Get under it now!... Ghh… It was probably designed as a failsafe in case any of the monsters managed to fall in. It might lead back to the main floor!”
Seeing me practically cowering on the floor while she struggled enough for thick droplets of sweat to pour off her forehead, she yelled for me to flee. She wanted me to leave her there to die. I myself was resigned to die just now, it certainly wouldn’t be my first time, but I couldn’t allow for it to happen to her. Not this girl. Not when she just pointed out the escape route I missed.
“What? No way! I’m not about to let you die for my sake!”
“Arrghh!”
As if my protest were an insult to the trap, it seemed to increase in weight and forced Yua’s trembling arms to give it some ground, decreasing the gap between it and the ground.
“Just go! I’m done for no matter what. Don’t you realize that?”
Fuck!
I hated it more than anything, more than the trap itself, but she was right. If I did as she said, the stone would crush her. If I stayed and tried to help her, we’d both die. If she somehow let me switch places with her and I died, the slave spell would just kill her right back because it would inevitably decide she let her master die. This wasn’t a noble sacrifice; it was simple logic. No matter the scenario, she was going to die.
“Just go. At least that way…”
Her voice grew more and more strained the more she tried to convince me to flee. Her face had gone entirely red with the strain and her impressive strength was beginning to fail. The knees only just barely holding her up were starting to buckle beneath her. The grip she had on the stone looked to be losing strength. The grinding of the stone against the walls as it forced its way down on us was almost deafening as it played the song that would act as her final elegy.
“No, no, no! I won’t let you die! I just got to meet you! I haven’t told you how I... T-there’s no way I’ll let you die here!”
Still. Not even now? What the hell is wrong with me? One or both of us might die and I still can’t summon up the courage to tell her how I really felt. Love at first sight was supposed to be a cliché, a ridiculous gimmick of storytelling that could never happen in real life, but it alone forced me to stay put, even if it went against her wishes.
Her pained expression broke for a second as she looked at me, pleading with her big emerald eyes. She was a fighter to the core. If death was inevitable, she wanted for at least one of us to live.
Maybe, if she were to die, I would be exempted from my need to pay off Alphonse. A loophole all in itself, after all, the goods I promised to pay for would be gone.
The thought pained me to no end.
I ignored her pleas for me to think of myself and quickly opened my menu to see if I had anything, any abilities that could save the both of us.
I read through everything I had as fast as I could. Every second I wasted would only prolong her struggle and her pain.
“Come on. Come on! There has to be something I can do!”
“Just… go!” she cried; the trembling of her arms almost audible over the sound of stone sliding against stone. The longer this went on, the more light from the rest of the dungeon was cut off. I had to read faster.
Finally, I came up upon an ability I never even thought to try, but remembered seeing on my list of abilities. Material Destruction. If it did anything like what its name suggested, it might be just what we need.
God dammit… why didn’t I test all of this out before coming in here?!
Shaking, Yua’s legs were on the verge of giving in all together. I decided to take a chance with this ability and ran to her side. If it failed, then at least I would get to meet that beautiful goddess again and thank her for the chance she gave me. And if I was lucky, Yua would be there too. Anything would be better than trying to live on like nothing happened after sacrificing this girl to save my own skin.
I was a piece of shit. A lazy, incompetent bastard so lacking in confidence that even I was embarrassed of myself, but leaving her to die was something that not even I could stand for.
In one swift, sloppy motion, I wrapped one hand around Yua’s waist, thrust the other towards the stone whose weight she delayed and yelled with all my strength.
“N-no! Run…!”
“Material Destruction!”
“Ahhhhhh!”
Yua screamed and her arms finally gave out. I pulled her close just as the giant stone block fell right on top of us, enveloping us in a pitch-black darkness so deep, that even the thought of light seemed impossible.