The crawl space led Vivi directly to another fangling brood chamber.

This one was huge, ten times the size of the previous brood chamber with a tall roof. Crystals and vegetation had been hacked off; the whole room was covered in web and brood. The only light came from blinking pupae and the red eyes of the broodmothers. There were at least five spread across the room.

The broodmothers had smaller legs than the fanglings, but their stomachs were larger, and their faces were bigger. Their claws were small, and they had four thin additional arms to help tend to brood. All screeched as Vivi entered.

A larger shadow hung on webs in the middle of the room. It had large claws, sharper than the tanker's, but not as bulky. It didn’t have legs at all; the being seemed to be immobile, hanging purely from the webs.

“A brood queen!” Lucius shouted. “That’s dangerous. Be careful.”

Vivi swiped the immediate surroundings clear of webs right away. She slashed through eggs and larvae alongside. The eggs offered no ether, but each larva offered up to a single wisp. With the sheer amount of larvae, killing them all offered a lot of ether.

The nearest broodmother spat something at Vivi. Acid. The projectile was fast; Vivi stepped to the side, barely dodging it. She was amazed by her instincts. Ether didn’t just empower strength; it made her more aware as well. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t have seen the attacks at all.

More acid came immediately after. She tried slashing at a blob of acid from range as a test. The slash merely spread the blobs into smaller splashes. An acid droplet hit Vivi in the foot. She grimaced; skin burning off. Lucius directed ether into the leg, protecting her. Still, the acid hurt like fire. A single clean hit would kill Vivi.

Vivi would need to kill the broodmothers before they could kill her. She cleared more webs for space, then slashed at the nearest brood mother, killing it in one shot. The broodmothers weren’t fast, relying on the acid for offense as well as defense.

“Watch out!” Lucius called. “From above!”

Vivi dodged to the left just in time. A claw crashed down at Vivi, landing right next to her. The brood queen’s claws thrust forth from above with enough force to pierce into the stone ground.

Vivi swiped at the monster’s belly as a counter-attack. The brood queen let out an angry screech. Vivi’s claws left a mark on its exoskeleton, but she didn’t pierce through.

Vivi was forced back to the defensive. She had a lot of acid to dodge, all of which would kill in one blow. A part of her wanted to retreat back into the crawl space to reassess her strategy. She needed a shield.

No, she didn’t. Her strategy had never relied on defense. Vivi’s best defense was her offense.

She dashed forth, rolling to the side as another two acid shots blew past her head. Webs stuck to her raincoat from the ground, but she stood, cutting another brood mother in half as she recovered.

Three more remaining.

With each kill, Vivi had fewer projectiles to worry about. The remaining broodmothers were far away. Go for the brood queen! she thought.

Her plans were cut short when a squadron of fanglings and destroyers arrived from the next room over. The fanglings charged at Vivi with their usual suicidal style, while the destroyers took a defensive position to protect the brood queen.

Damned insects! Vivi shouted in her thoughts as she slashed at the fangling onslaught. Killing them barely required concentration; Vivi’s attention was on the real threats. The three acid-shooting broodmothers, and the queen’s long claws.

The queen’s claw crashed down at her. Vivi dodged. Then she growled, cutting the claw in half. The queen let out a screech.

This really pissed off the fang destroyers. They approached Vivi with hateful steps, forgetting their defensive formation.

Come at it, then! Vivi thought. She put all her might into a heavy swing, hitting the destroyers.

Two died at once.

Vivi blinked. Yesterday, she struggled to kill the destroyers, requiring multiple hits. Now she could one-shot two at once?

“We’re growing,” Lucius said. “That’s how it usually goes with hunting. Once you defeat one monster, the next one of the same type will always be easier. Eventually, you’ll grow strong enough that the monsters no longer pose a challenge.”

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What, so these monsters are easy? Vivi thought. She swiped again at a fang destroyer. The critter was cut in half. The exoskeleton wasn’t strong enough to withstand Lucius’s claws.

What was Vivi afraid of? Her attacks killed in one blow. She just had to land an attack.

She rushed for the brood queen, dodging acid while simultaneously killing the last fang destroyer. Long-ranged attacks weren’t powerful enough to kill the brood queen. Close-up, however, the claws did a lot more damage.

The queen attempted to slash Vivi with its remaining claw. Vivi met the attack head-on with her own claws.

Vivi’s claws were stronger. The monster’s blade snapped in half.

Ether filled Vivi’s hand. Immense amounts of power. She drove her claws straight through the brood queen’s exoskeleton, piercing its intestines.

The queen didn’t die in one blow. Vivi swiped again, then again, each time cutting open a larger part of the screeching queen’s lower body. Ether bled out of the monster’s open abdomen.

As a final blow, Vivi slashed upward, cutting the monster open from the inside. The brood queen disintegrated into ether.

The remaining brood mothers stopped shooting acid. Instead, they were running for an exit. Vivi promptly killed them.

With that, the room was cleared.

Vivi turned to their prizes. The entire room sizzled with ether. “How much did the queen drop?” Vivi asked.

“The boss is always collected last,” Lucius said. “To savor the prize. The queen wasn’t a boss, but it was the biggest monster we’ve defeated so far.”

He collected the ether from all the slaughtered larvae and fallen fanglings. The fodder kills brought their reserves to 1442. Then, he stood proudly before the queen’s corpse, ether sizzling within.

The brood queen brought their reserves to 1575 ether. “It was worth 133 ether,” Lucius said.

Insane, Vivi thought. That was more ether than Grandpa gained in a month running his smithy. And how long had this fight taken? Five minutes?

Lucius saw Vivi’s expression and grinned. “You’re starting to understand. The reason why hunting is so amazing.”

Vivi took a deep breath. “We still need to gather fifteen thousand ether. It won’t be easy.”

Pink eyes stared at Vivi from one of the crawl spaces. With the room clear of monsters, Eem carefully slid down. Her face grew wrinkled as she stepped over the fallen webs. Eem walked on bare feet. She had nothing to protect herself from sticky surfaces.

How much ether does she have? Vivi asked. Can you tell?

“It’s hard to read,” Lucius said. “Probably not enough. She might steal from our kills.”

Vivi ignored Lucius’s complaint. To her, Eem seemed far more hungry for food than ether. If ether and monster corpses were what Eem was after, she would have already dashed for the brood queen’s corpse.

“We’re going to clear the rest of the fanglings now,” Vivi said, smiling at Eem. “Watch and learn.”

***

As Lucius had claimed, the fanglings no longer posed a challenge. Clearing the rest of their lair was merely a question of time and exploration.

Each fangling wielded around a hundred ether worth of power. Compared to Vivi’s fifteen hundred, the monsters were fifteen times weaker. The gap was simply too large, and it only grew with each kill. Vivi simply had too much ether for the fanglings to deal with.

This didn’t mean Vivi was invincible. Most of Lucius’s ether was used purely offensively to strengthen his claws. His defensive abilities were almost nonexistent. Vivi was tougher than a regular human, but a fangling claw could have pierced her neck. Still, her perception of her surroundings grew with ether. Sensing ambushes was far easier through both sound and vision.

Vivi imagined this was how cats perceived the world, hunting in the dark. When Lucius focused ether into her eyes, she could identify the faintest of shapes hidden within webs. She could see insects beneath the thickets of flowers. It almost felt like she could see the world’s natural ether, tiny wisps on every surface of vegetation. Monsters and fanglings were especially easy to make out, ether oozing out of their exoskeletons.

We will have to look for stronger monsters soon, right? Vivi asked. Cleaning weaklings won’t make us strong.

“Actually, slaughtering infestations is the best way to earn pure ether,” Lucius said. “There exist plenty of ether hunters who maxed out their ether reserves by slaughtering easy dungeons. Killing a thousand fanglings will grant you the same amount of ether as killing one surge boss. A thousand fanglings one by one is far easier, and the slaughter can often be quicker than fighting bosses.”

So we have no reason to fight strong monsters? Vivi asked.

“We do, but not for pure ether,” Lucius said. “Ether is only one aspect of strength. If carrying a lot of ether made one strong, rich idiots would be the strongest fighters in the world. That is not the case. Ether is really just a resource. After a spirit is maxed out, at around five thousand ether, gaining more ether will only improve endurance.

“True strength comes from something else entirely. Skill wisps. Even a single low-ranked skill can decide the fate of a battle between a fighter who doesn’t wield a skill. Low-level hunters who spend all their time in easy dungeons won’t stand a chance against someone who has gathered skills by fighting boss monsters.

“That is the reason we must descend. To fight bosses, and to steal their skills.”