Saitama Dungeon by Yamaguchi Yuuko

 

Episode 16: Second Floor, Feeling Happy

Having descended to the second floor, I relied purely on my intuition and began began walking through a tunnel where I thought there might be fewer adventurers. My plan was to hopefully find areas where monsters hadn’t already been defeated by other adventurers. Even if I just walked around aimlessly, my sense of direction and location is pretty good so I won't get lost. Probably. Even if I did lose my way there were stone markers at corners and forks in the tunnel network to indicate my location so I wouldn't get stranded. Probably.

According to information on the internet, only slimes, large centipedes and giant rats appear on the second floor one at a time. I’d prefer monsters to appear in groups so I could collect cores quicker but I’d have to wait until I went to the third floor for that to happen.

A centipede’s core is in its head but in the case of giant rats the core is located in its chest area. As an aside, the carcasses of giant rats can be sold at the purchasing counters for about 5,000 yen each. You need a special plastic bag to carry it back to the dungeon center with you and these bags can be rented at the counter that specializes in buying monster meat. Apparently a single giant rat carcass weighs around 20 kilograms so I wasn’t going to bother doing that. You see, I could carry maybe three giant rat carcasses back to the purchasing counter after each dungeon dive. That effort would earn me maybe 15,000 yen extra but I’d use up most or all of a day in travel and exploration time. Instead my plan was to defeat a lot of monsters on the second and third floors every day. The monster cores I’d gather were worth 10,000 yen each. If I just concentrated on collecting cores, I’d earn 50 million yen and get my C-rank license promotion quicker.

There was no sign of lamps or lanterns up ahead so it looked like there was no other adventurers around, meaning I could use magic without being spotted. After a while, I sensed a monster's presence so I moved forward cautiously, unhooking my mace from my waist belt. After a few more steps I saw two red eyes brightly reflecting the light of my helmet lamp. It was a giant rat which immediately charged towards me. Having monsters come at me like that was handy since it saved me from having to chase them.

The giant rat got to within two meters of where I stood and then it jumped towards my face. I took a step to the side and slammed my mace down on its head as it flew past me. Crunch! The giant rat thudded to the tunnel floor and laid still with its skull smashed in. Success!

The body of the giant rat was about 60 centimetres long from the base of its tail to its nose, and its tail was about the same length again. The rat's mouth was not that big but the fabric on the sleeves of my stab-proof jacket is relatively thin and the rat's sharp teeth might have been able to penetrate it. Fortunately, the giant rats in the dungeon don't seem to carry any strange diseases so a bite would only cause an injury but not infect its victim.

I turned the rat over and plunged my knife into its chest, making an incision and severing several ribs. I then thrust my gloved hand into its chest and groped around to locate its core before removing it. A giant rat's core is about marble-sized, larger than the monster cores normally found on the first floor. I don't think the size difference is that great but the purchase price of these cores is roughly 10,000 yen each, more than double the price paid for first floor monster cores.

Since the core, my knife and my gloves were covered in gore from the inside of the rat's chest, I washed them off with water I created using water magic and then I threw the giant rat’s corpse over to one side of the mine tunnel. As I had learned in the license training course, dead organic matter gets absorbed in some way by the dungeon over the span of a few hours. Excrement and other waste is also absorbed in the same way, so the dungeon does not become polluted with filth. This is a common feature in all dungeons, apparently.

After walking on a bit from where I defeated the giant rat, I came to a point where the tunnel forked. There was a stone signpost there so I cross-checked with my smartphone map to verify my current location. I was relieved to find the reported position matched my internal sense of direction and location.

I walked straight on, choosing the larger tunnel ahead of me. A bit further on I sensed several presences and then I saw some lights flickering on the tunnel walls ahead of me. It appeared that three adventurers were fighting monsters nearby.

I wasn’t close enough to make out who the adventurers were or what kind of monsters they were fighting, but contrary to the information we had received during the license training lectures, it looked like they were fighting multiple monsters which shouldn’t happen on the second floor. Because of that, the three of them were having a hard time. It seemed odd to me that B-rank adventurers would be struggling with monsters on the second floor, but since they were having difficulties there must have been a fair number of monsters attacking them.

 

I would have preferred to watch the action from up close but I didn't want to be accused of messing with their fight. That could lead to trouble and arguments so I decided to observe them from a little distance away. I decided fifty metres was close enough and then I turned off my cap lamp.

A team of three people, two men with spears and one woman with a crossbow, were fighting three giant rats. Since a crossbow would only get in the way in close combat, the woman had backed off to reload while one of the spearmen guarded her to stop any of the giant rats from getting to her.

Since there was only one man left to actively fight the giant rats, he was having a hard time against the three relatively fast-moving monsters. The battle finally ended after about five or six minutes and then the man who had been fronting up the fight against the giant rats collapsed in exhaustion. It looked like it had taken a lot out of him.

I don't know what they’d do do with the giant rats they defeated here but at least they’d be able to get some rest now. Thinking that, I turned on my cap lamp and walked past them. At that moment, my eyes met with a woman who was removing the cap of a plastic bottle and giving water to the slumped man.

"A high school student? A B-rank high school student…?" I heard her mutter.

Starting in April this year, 16-year-olds could get an adventurer's license but almost everyone would assume that high school students wouldn’t be able to earn 10 million yen on the dungeon’s first floor in just a few months and get promoted to B-rank. It's only natural that they might be surprised at seeing me on the second floor. The clerk at the license renewal counter earlier had been similarly surprised.

Thinking about it, both the woman and the two men had clearly earned over 10 million yen each to reach B-rank so they were definitely not amateurs but they were struggling to defeat just three giant rats. Is this okay, dungeon administration?

After walking a little way past the three adventurers I sensed the presence of a group of monsters up ahead and heading towards me quickly. I didn't really want to engage them too close to the adventurers who might witness my fight so I hurried to meet them.

The approaching monsters turned out to be giant rats, six of them this time. Great, a big catch! It seems my wish was granted. Saying that it's supposedly not normal for groups of them to appear together like this on the second floor, but for me the more the merrier since I could earn lots of money faster this way. Come to Papa!

I plunged in among the giant rats before they could pounce on me, knocking down three of them with the first swing of my mace and then I took down the remaining three with the backswing. I don't mean to sound like I’m criticising, but is it really okay for a team of three B-rank adventurers to struggle with defeating a small group of low-level monsters like these giant rats?

I looked back and saw the lights of three cap lamps pointing in my direction. All three of them seemed to have been watching me fight the rats, although I couldn't really call it a fight.

I hooked the mace back on my belt then I took my knife from its sheath and started the messy process of retrieving the cores from the six giant rats I had defeated, cutting into each rat’s chest and reaching around inside to find the core and pull it out. After recovering all the cores I threw the giat rat corpses over to the side of the tunnel to dispose of them, just like the first giant rat I had killed earlier.

I now had a total of seven giant rat cores which were worth about 70,000 yen. I had been making good progress since it had only been an hour or so since I had entered the dungeon’s first floor though the vortex. This means my wage rate was 70,000 yen an hour, pretty good earnings for my part-time job as a newly-promoted B-rank adventurer. This was entirely due to the Rainbow Slime from yesterday. Thank you, Rainbow Slime-san!

It seemed the other adventurers were still watching me but since they were quite some distance away, I turned to block their line of sight with my body and then I used water magic to wash my gloves, my knife and the six cores. After packing everything away I then left in the opposite direction, feeling good about my progress. C-rank here I come!