Chapter 13: The Treasure Floor Reward.
.....
With Lili accompanying Hestia on a visit to the Hephaestos Familia, Kihara headed back into the dungeon alone to finish what he'd planned the day before.
No Lili meant no need to keep up appearances. He stepped into the mine elevator and arrived directly at the fifth floor. Shinobu's radar, freshly powered by last night's doughnuts, was operating at full capacity — she reported a party of adventurers over three hundred metres away, noted their composition, and then mentioned, entirely unprompted, that one of the women in the group appeared to be on her period.
[You really don't need to tell me that. You could bite a lighter if you're bored.]
[Her blood just has a very distinctive quality. I am a vampire. These things register.]
He cleared floors at a pace that had nothing to do with Level 1 conventions. Most monsters never saw the attack coming — a flash of red light, dissolution into black smoke, magic stone left behind on the stone floor. A handful managed to react in time to avoid the first strike. None of them managed to avoid the second, which was where the twin pistols came out and the situation concluded in the American iaijutsu style he'd developed some fondness for.
The ones who put up a fight dropped larger magic stones and had better odds of yielding rare materials — elite variants, probably, or natural mutations. Worth the marginal extra effort.
As the floors deepened, the dungeon's ecology diversified. He passed several instances of multi-species monster conflicts — territorial disputes that had attracted three or four different creature types into the same space, all of them tearing into each other with genuine commitment. Standard practice for most Level 1 parties was to wait these out, let attrition do the work, then clean up the survivors.
Kihara had a schedule. He took a running start, hit the middle of the melee left-hand Crimson Blade and right-hand Kurogane, and the resulting thirty seconds of sword light and muzzle flash cleared the entire corridor.
Floors seven, eight, nine.
Then ten — and the environment changed completely.
The natural cave walls gave way to dressed stone, grey and ancient, like the walls of something built rather than grown. A faint white mist drifted through the air at knee height, disrupting perception in a way that felt deliberate. The temperature had dropped several degrees.
Beside the mine elevator, a stone archway opened into a side passage he hadn't seen on any previous floor. He checked it carefully before entering — torch in one hand, sword in the other — and found a short tunnel leading to a modest chamber.
In the centre sat a wooden chest.
"So this is how the treasure floor manifests."
He'd known they existed. Every ten floors in Stardew Valley's mine produced a single treasure room, accessible once. In the game, the rewards were equipment — boots, slingshots, that sort of thing. Whether the logic carried over to reality, or whether reality had decided to offer something more interesting, was about to become clear.
Given his track record with chance-based rewards, he reached into his shadow and pulled Shinobu out by the wrist.
"Up you get. Golden-haired vampire. You're European, your luck has to be better than mine. Open it."
"You can't open your own chest?"
"I have statistically documented evidence of my own misfortune. Please."
She complained the whole way across the chamber, then crouched in front of the chest with its carved surface, grabbed the lid, and heaved.
"Oh—"
"What is it?"
He was already moving at the sound of her reaction.
Inside the chest lay a single metal ingot — roughly twenty centimetres long, ten centimetres thick, emitting a faint and steady luminescence like starlight trapped in solid form.
[Orichalcum: A mythical metal of ancient legend. Rumoured to be the material from which a certain unkillable Saint's ultimate Cloth was forged.]
"Now that's a reward—"
Before he could reach for it, Shinobu picked it up and put it in her mouth.
Kihara stared. Then he grabbed her by the chin and attempted to see past her teeth.
"Why do you eat everything — where is it — let me see—"
There was nothing to see. Her teeth were neat and white, her tongue was small and pink and entirely uncooperative, and the Orichalcum had apparently ceased to exist in any recoverable sense.
Shinobu blinked at him with an expression of complete innocence.
[Master. I believe this material should be used to forge me a weapon.]
"I was never going to use it for anything else. Spit it out and I'll take you to Hephaestos — forge goddess, best smith in Orario, she'll make you something extraordinary with it."
[I'm going to enchant it first. I'll return it afterward.]
"That's not how enchanting works—"
[The affairs of a Cursed Tool are none of your business!]
"Fine. Fine."
He extracted his thumb from between her teeth — she made a point of running her tongue across the pad of it as it cleared her mouth, purely for the reaction — and received a thorough examination of her oral cavity as immediate karmic consequence.
The Orichalcum was a good find, but the main objective remained. He took Shinobu's radar back online and pushed deeper.
His focus was the seventeenth floor's boss — the Goliath, a giant-type creature rated at Level 4. Defeating it was his cleanest path to a Heroic Feat and advancement to Level 2.
The Level 2 threshold mattered for a specific reason beyond the level itself. Advancement came with a chance at a Development Ability — a passive enhancement shaped by the adventurer's accumulated experiences and natural disposition, distinct from skills in that it emphasised character rather than capability. An adventurer who spent their time on floors where Purple Moth poison was common might unlock Abnormal Resistance upon advancing. Hephaestos Familia members tended toward Blacksmith.
What Kihara wanted was Luck.
The records didn't specify the exact conditions for obtaining it, but the pattern in documented cases suggested it went to adventurers who had repeatedly gambled on uncertain outcomes and come out ahead. The problem was that his personal history with uncertain outcomes was not encouraging. He had once spent every available resource pulling for a single shipgirl and received nothing of note, while his gaming circle awarded him a permanent title that translated roughly to the unkissed by fortune and used it as a greeting.
Asking him to pursue luck-based conditions was approximately equivalent to asking Giorno Giovanna's enemy to pick up a gun — technically possible, practically inadvisable.
The advancement is under my control whenever I want it. Get the Heroic Feat first, worry about Development Abilities later.
He pushed the thought aside and kept moving.
When he reached the seventeenth floor, the torch mounted beside the entrance to the eighteenth told the story before he had to look any further. The Goliath had already been killed. The regeneration period — two weeks — had begun.
"Wasted trip." He considered the day's actual haul. "At least there's the Orichalcum. Not empty-handed."
Shinobu's response was a specific variety of laugh that she reserved for his misfortunes.
He turned back toward the upper floors — and on the sixteenth, came across something that gave him pause. A group of adventurers was moving through the passage ahead of him with the studied casualness of people who were trying very hard not to look like they were doing something specific.
Kihara suppressed his presence and followed at a distance.
At almost the same moment, from another direction, a slender figure in a travelling cloak was descending toward the sixteenth floor at speed. A few strands of green hair had escaped from the hood. The tips of pointed ears caught the torchlight at intervals.
'An elf?'
....
Thank you for reading.