"Oh wow, it really is a Monster Party!"
Alise blinked those bright, energetic eyes of hers, and instead of tension, her face lit up with a look of dawning realization.
She drew her beloved sword in one fluid motion, the blade carving a silver arc through the dim light, and thrust it skyward with a shout.
"Ha! Perfect timing! Everyone, get ready to fight! Think of it as a warm-up before we take on Goliath. Time to get the blood pumping!"
Kaguya rolled her eyes with trademark exasperation, but her body snapped taut like a coiled spring. Her slender fingers settled firmly on the katana at her hip, her center of gravity shifting forward beneath her kimono as she sank into a flawless iai stance, her breathing slow and still as pooled water.
"Here they come!"
Ryu's voice cut through the air, short and cold. Her masked face turned toward the rock walls on either side, eyes sharp, the faintest currents of air stirring around her.
"AWOOOOOOOOOOOOO..."
As if answering her warning the instant it left her lips, the cracked walls on both sides of the passage split wide open.
Hellhounds poured through the fissures like a black flood, one after another, reeking of sulfur, fangs bared, scrambling over each other to hit the ground. Their deafening howls shook the corridor, crimson eyes burning with feral malice, and in the span of a heartbeat they had the entire party of Adventurers bottled up in the narrow passage.
"Well, well. Hostile crowd."
Lyra let out a low whistle. Not a trace of fear on that young face. She licked her lips, twin short blades dancing between her fingers like a snake testing the air, and watched the swelling tide of Hellhounds with obvious relish.
"A Hellhound Monster Party... now that's interesting. First time I've run into something like this on Floor 13."
Beside her, Ryu's expression was far more serious. She spoke low and sharp.
"Stay alert and keep your distance. Their fire breath covers a wide area, and it hits harder than you'd expect."
Where the Astraea Familia's Level 3 veterans looked relaxed, even excited, the rest of the combined expedition told a different story. The moment the other Adventurers got a clear look at what was spawning, the tunnel erupted.
"Holy shit, Hellhounds!"
More than a few couldn't keep it in.
"God damn it, I'd rather fight ten Minotaurs than deal with these fire-breathing psychos!"
"No kidding. Their flame attacks are the real deal. Fast, vicious, and they can hit you from range. Total pain in the ass."
"The real problem is getting boxed in somewhere this tight. That's a death sentence."
"Heh... thank god I dropped a fortune on a Salamander Wool liner ahead of time." One Adventurer patted his chest with visible relief. "Otherwise I'd be charcoal by now."
Hearing the chatter rise and fall around him, and that pointed mention of Salamander Wool, Leon's composure cracked. His expression twisted like he'd bitten into a chunk of raw ginger mid-meal.
"Damn it!"
That was all he could manage.
"?"
Jeanne, Rose, Laurier, and Aura all turned to stare at him, question marks practically floating above their heads.
Meeting their confused looks, Leon let out a long, hollow sigh, his voice dripping with the particular agony of someone who'd overlooked the one thing that mattered.
"I screwed up. I was so focused on weapons and supplies that I forgot the single most important thing for mid-level exploration. We don't have any Spirit Cloth."
"Spirit Cloth..." Jeanne pressed her lips together. She understood immediately.
Spirit Cloth was fabric woven with a spirit's own magic, granting the wearer its protection. Salamander Wool offered fire resistance and doubled as insulation against cold. Undine Cloth offered water resistance and, by the same logic, helped against heat. Beyond those two common varieties, other elemental types existed as well. They couldn't cover every situation, but within their specific element they reached extremes that surpassed even the work of top-tier smiths.
"We'll manage," Jeanne said, calm and even. "Focus on keeping Laurier and Aura safe. Rose and I can handle ourselves."
The lack of fire-resistant gear didn't register on either her face or Rose's. Their eyes stayed steady and sharp, backed by absolute confidence in their own strength and armor.
As for Leon, the man whose entire survival philosophy revolved around being maxed out on every possible defensive advantage, he wasn't worried about himself either. His build was stacked enough to handle a pack of oversized huskies.
The real weak links were Laurier and Aura. Both elven girls were stepping into live Dungeon combat for the first time, and the mid-levels had greeted them with a Hellhound ambush. It was a brutal trial. Keeping them safe left zero room for carelessness.
...
"GRAAAAH!"
The monsters' combined roar was deafening, and in that instant the battle ignited.
"Watch the fire breath! Standard gear won't stop it!"
Someone's shout lit the fuse, and every Adventurer in the tunnel surged forward, weapons drawn, closing on the horde in swift, disciplined waves. Their faces showed determination, caution, but nothing close to fear.
"Hyah!"
A silver axe blade ripped through the air and sheared clean across a Hellhound's throat. Scalding beast-blood erupted like a geyser.
"One down!"
The tiger-man wiped the stinking gore from his face with the back of his hand and split into a wild, blood-flecked grin.
"Idiot! Behind you!"
His teammate's roar hit like a thunderclap.
Barely ten meters behind the tiger-man, another Hellhound had its jaws wide open. Distorted waves of superheated air shimmered around its maw as violent flame gathered in its throat, and then...
"BOOM!"
A searing fireball ripped loose, screaming through the air on a dead-straight line for his back.
"CLANG!"
At the last possible second, a massive tower shield slammed into the ground like an iron wall. The blast struck the shield face-on, detonating in a blinding flare of light and a wave of scorching heat.
"Ngh... hell of a punch."
The dwarf behind the shield gritted his teeth, arms tingling and numb.
"Owe you one, pal!"
The tiger-man bared his fangs in a savage grin, eyes blazing hotter than before. He locked both hands around the heavy double-bladed axe on his shoulder, snarled, and launched himself forward in a low, explosive charge.
...
Clang, clang, clang! Metal crashed against claws in a relentless storm.
The wet, heavy sounds of blades tearing through flesh came one after another without pause.
The brutal melee between Adventurers and monsters had gone white-hot from the very first exchange.
At the rear of the formation, Leon stood in front of Aura and Laurier, staff raised, and spoke the incantation under his breath.
"Scorch."
A flicker of pale light at the tip of his staff, quiet and understated, and the Hellhound trying to flank Jeanne was tagged with a nasty little debuff.
"AWOOO!"
The creature's fur blackened and smoked instantly, and it shrieked in agony.
"Fireball!"
The follow-up came without a breath between.
BOOM!
The explosion rocked the rear of the formation. Flame and concussive force swallowed the Hellhound and the unlucky few clustered around it.
Smoke and shattered stone sprayed in every direction. Leon gave them nothing, not a second to recover. The one-two combo reduced them to cinders on the spot.
Almost simultaneously, another Hellhound lunged at Rose and clamped its jaws onto the rim of her kite shield, fangs grinding against metal with an ear-splitting screech.
A cold smile touched the corner of Rose's mouth. Her right hand drove the double-edged sword backward in a viper-quick reverse thrust. Silver flashed, and the blade punched clean through the monster's throat.
"Rose! You okay?!" Jeanne yanked her lance tip free from a Hellhound's skull, the strike having punched straight through, and immediately turned to her shield-bitten companion with concern.
Rose flicked her wrist, shaking the thick, dark blood from her blade, and returned a composed smile.
"I'm fine. Nothing I can't handle."
Fwip, fwip, fwip-fwip-fwip...
Behind them, Aura and Laurier weren't standing idle. They held position at Leon's flanks, short bows loosing a steady stream of arrows to cover Jeanne and Rose up front. The Hellhounds' fire was dangerous, but their physical toughness wasn't much different from the other monsters on Floor 12. The arrows couldn't land killing blows, but they forced the creatures to dodge or flinch, and that bought the two fighters on the front line the breathing room they needed.
Leon held the middle, cycling a burst of firepower into the horde every ten seconds or so while keeping a constant eye on the other squads' sectors.
Boom, boom!
The explosions kept rolling. Under that savage barrage, the monster count at the rear thinned fast.
The noise Leon's group was making, combined with his fire magic that he'd tried to rein in but still came across as borderline unhinged, kept drawing stunned looks from the other squads.
"What the... that team over there is brutal!"
A Pallum Supporter bracing a crossbow on his left forearm to cover his front-liner caught a glimpse of the fireball erupting from Leon's staff and sucked in a sharp breath.
"Sure, that's impressive, but honestly I think their two front-line girls are even crazier. Especially the one with the polearm..."
A warrior beside him panted the words out between breaths.
"Moron, that's a Banner Lance! Heavy cavalry weapon. I've seen them in the armies outside Orario."
The squad's resident know-it-all jumped in to correct him.
"Shut it! Eyes front! More dogs incoming!"
Their captain's bark dragged everyone's attention back to the fight.
...
At the head of the formation, the Astraea Familia's section of the battlefield looked like the aftermath of a storm.
Slash, slash, slash...
Invisible cutting arcs tore through the air from different angles without warning, and seven or eight charging Hellhounds split cleanly in half, spilling blood and viscera across the stone.
"Man oh man..."
Lyra dragged an oily rag along her short blade, drawing out the words with undisguised envy.
"Must be nice having magic like Kaguya's. Elegant, efficient... meanwhile the rest of us poor souls have to get our hands dirty. Stab, slice, repeat."
"Lyra." Ryu's voice remained cool and level, as though the mountain of monster corpses at her feet were set dressing. "Your mine magic has wider area coverage. Your efficiency is comparable."
A plain statement of fact.
"Huh?!"
Alise whipped around as if she'd just heard the scoop of the century, eyes comically wide, finger jabbing back and forth between Ryu and Kaguya.
"Ryu! You! You're actually defending Kaguya?! Did the sun rise in the west today?! You two are always at each other's throats, and now you're on the same side?! That's suspicious! Very suspicious!"
"Alise! Shut up!"
A vein pulsed at Kaguya's temple, and she cut off her perpetually oblivious captain through sheer volume.
Forcing down her irritation, her gaze swept the battlefield like a blade. The monster count had dropped sharply. Fighting in the other sectors had mostly wound down, with the last stragglers being mopped up. Only then did the tension in her shoulders quietly ease.
Against a fully armed strike force assembled to take down a Floor Boss, this handful of leftover Hellhounds was nothing.
Good. No casualties. The thought settled in the back of Kaguya's mind. If an expedition under the Astraea Familia's watch started taking losses before they even reached the target, the Goddess of Justice's reputation would take a serious hit.
...
"Awooo..."
One last Hellhound, mangled and dying, let out a fading whimper.
Shk.
A cold blade found its vitals and ended it.
Leon and the other seasoned Adventurers moved through the corpse-strewn, smoke-choked corridor like veteran hunters, eyes sweeping the field with practiced attention. Every so often someone paused to deliver a clean finishing blow to a twitching carcass on the ground.
The battle was over.
Over a hundred Hellhounds, wiped out in under ten minutes by a few dozen Adventurers working in concert.
The tunnel was a wreck. Adventurers slumped against the rock walls or stood with hands on their hips, gulping air. Some quietly cleaned the blood from their weapons. Others tipped back waterskins and drank deep, replenishing what the fight had taken out of them.
Nothing left but the sound of heavy breathing and the faint clink of gear.
Leon glanced across the scene, took it all in, and looked away.
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