After breakfast, and when my arm was mostly healed from feeding Mezu we entered the next floor. This time it was Lefty, Paeris and I. We were in a stone room without any windows or torches.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Welcome to Floor 32: The Den

Description: After the old Vanhart castle became the home of a behemoth spider mother, the castle quickly became infested. The spiders fed off the surrounding land scaring the inhabitants away and creating a wasteland. Your team, the mystical pest control, was hired to clean out the spiders.

Completion requirement:

Complete the pest control

Completion Progress:

Small Spiders 0/300

Medium Spiders 0/100

Large spiders 0/50

The oldest children 0/10

The mother 0/1

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“This just feels ridiculous, it’s still less than the ants but this time there are size differences.”

“Well, luckily Fluffy will be fighting with us this time,” Paeris said.

“Let’s just get going, even though we can go through this floor quickly, we won’t be able to start the next one till I’m healed.”

I looked around for the door.

“Well, it’s not like we’re in that much of a rush” Lefty said.

I found it and started heading forit.

“Even so, it’s better to climb with a consistent pace. There’s a time limit in the rest house for a reason, the tower is meant to be climbed not a place to relax in.”

I heard Paeris close behind me.

“It’s not like I was suggesting that we would just stop climbing entirely. Just a break once in a while couldn’t kill anyone.”

I heard some scuttling in the distance and pulled one of my new swords from its sheath.

“Well Fluffy will get bored if we stop for too long. I’m sure last time the only reason he wasn’t energetic was because Quartz was passed out.”

Paeris wasn’t wrong, the scuttling got closer and out of the darkness a spider about twice the size of my head jumped out at me.

I swung my sword but only smacked it away. I looked at it and then back at my sword, then I looked back at it for mana.

I saw a small core in its center and mana lines connected to the exterior shell.

I went over to it and condensed aura along the sharp edge of my blade before slicing through its over turned body.

“I think they’re made of mithril.”

I squatted down and with aura enhancing my fingers I broke off a piece of the outer shell that still had mana in it.

“Interesting, a bio-organic material that’s like mithril” Paeris came and squatted down by the corpse.

“It’s just in the tower, do you really think it’s a real creature? It’s probably just some weird mechanic made by whoever built this place.”

“No, all the tests I’ve done show that they are as real as the monsters in the dungeons outside the tower. Though their base is slightly different than-“

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

I heard more scuttling and stood turning away from Paeris who kept talking. I stepped forward to attack them as they came.

If I hadn’t been picked by my monarch, I think that he’d prefer the nerd that Paeris seems to be.

I finished the spiders that were in the area and heard Lefty shout, “you can’t be serious Paeris!”

“You should already understand. Didn’t you cook the boar that Dodger brought back from the twenty-nineth floor? If you still don’t believe me, I’ll take these pieces back and show you. I’m sure Dot will take some pieces back too.”

I looked back at them, Paeris had his hands filled with parts of the spiders, but he only seemed to have the exterior shell not any of the legs.

“That was different, we have boars, there aren’t spiders that are this big and made of material like that.”

“Is there something wrong with the legs? Why don’t you just take a full one?”

“The legs aren’t useful, and I don’t want the heads since the venom of spiders is usually secreted from glands in their mouths. The bigger ones probably have good sized legs though. But I don’t need a lot,” he stuffed them inside his bag, “just this amount is good enough.”

I turned and started walking again.

“Now that you’re done messing around with corpses could you light the way or something?” Lefty said.

I light from behind me glowed the way in front of us. We ran into some more smaller spiders before we arrived at a staircase. After going up we ran into larger ones. They were probably the medium ones, they were slightly more annoying than the small ones.

The mana core was larger, so their shells were harder (not that it really made a difference) but these would attack with their legs as well as their fangs.

Paeris found out that the spikes on the legs were covered in a sticky poisonous substance. He took occasional pieces from their backs and took one or two of the cores. The cores themselves looked like mana stones, and each had a different color to them. But they were all each only one color, so only had one inherent mana.

“Why’re you taking more things?”

“I want to see if there’s a limit to what we can take. Every other floor we’ve been on hasn’t just had cores intact after killing the creature.”

“Just curious?”

“Of course,” it was like there was a slight sparkle in his eyes, “mana stones are so expensive because they we either all mined from the earth thousands of years ago or are hidden so deep in the crust that we can’t find them, so when the rare dungeon that was a mana stone mine would open up, you’d see the country’s wealth skyrocket. Of course, there was a limited supply in them, but those dungeons are so rare. So, it begs the question, if I can take these from this floor, and bring them out of the tower, why hasn’t anyone done that? Or if they have, why is no one talking about it.”

“Wouldn’t they still try to make it look like there’s a small amount and keep charging ridiculous prices?”

“Well they could, but there are people who would pay those ridiculous prices or make deals, but Even at the current prices it was still hard to come across them in elven lands. Given Winged Mercy is an elven run guild, if they had access to replenishable sources like this they would’ve done everything to get them for the country.”

I started walking again, I still hadn’t heard any sound of absurd destruction, so we were probably far from Fluffy and the others.

“Speaking of Winged Mercy, you and Sailhin are elves, why didn’t you just join them?”

Paeris sighed, “it’s because it’s run by high elves. A forest elf like me would’ve been treated like a servant, and I don’t even want to imagine how the non-elves are treated.”

“Sailhin’s a desert elf right?”

“Yeah, even among non high elves there’s a hierarchy. Valley elves are treated the best, but that’s only because they’re so close to the high elves. Dark elves and forest elves are treated the next best and since snow and desert elves are physically the furthest from the capital they’re seen as even worse than the rest. We left elven lands to get away from all that shit, why would we join a guild that kept those things up?”

It was hard to argue with. If they still went to Winged Mercy, they probably would’ve received more support than at the shadow seekers, but what’s the point of being supported if you have to treat others as superior just because of their race.

“So, you know why we joined, why’d you pick Shadow Seekers?”

I slashed through two more spiders, and we made it to the stairs, this time as we went up webs became more and more abundant.

“They picked us on the twentieth floor, we were both in one of their training houses. Suggested we go with them if we wanted to climb without being bothered. It wasn’t that hard of a choice; they weren’t asking for anything in return. Plus, out of the four main guilds, Winged Mercy was a no, Plain Striders is a human run guild, and you know how they are about beastkin and well, we’re lazy. They reached out to us, so why bother reaching out to another guild.”

Paeris chuckled, “What about you Quartz?”

Luckily a spider came down from above giving me an excuse not to respond right away.

I didn’t really want to explain everything to them, the easiest I could say was “a friend of mine suggested it to me.”

“Why didn’t you climb with that friend?”

I guess that was a fair question. They all climbed with someone, but it was just me and Fluffy.

“He didn’t want to climb the tower, just suggested them since I was going in.”

This was the most we’d ever talked about things concerning the tower that weren’t specific to the floor challenges or our own individual fighting styles. I’d climbed almost ten floors with them at this point and I really didn’t know much about them. They knew more about me than I did when we first met, but it’s not like they knew everything.

Given Paeris didn’t say anything about Sailhin being half high elf, they were hiding a bit so I didn’t feel bad that I wasn’t open.

“So, I know that Brick and Dodger call me mom and Sailhin dad, but why do you guys do it? Don’t tell me we’re mostly a party of orphans or abandoned kids?”

Lefty laughed, but it didn’t sound like his normal cheerful one.

“I had parents……. but they died when I was younger, and Dot was shipped off to the mage tower when she was young. Are you and Sailhin parentless too?”