Chapter 68 - Shortcut

"Well, that was unexpected," Tom said, watching how the corpse of a massive rat dissolved into the nothingness. 

"I don't think there was any rule that forbade the monsters from taking over two or more floors consecutively," Claudia said, expressing her own point of view. But while she didn't seem to be influenced by this strange occurrence if one were to judge her words alone, her expression told Tom that the girl was actually mindful about this strange situation. 

"Wel, it works for us," Tom said, shrugging his shoulders. 'There is no point dawdling on this topic,' he thought, casting a quick, stealthy glance at the girl. 'The more we would talk about it, the more worried she will become,' he told himself before shaking his head to forget about the topic himself. 

"Well, there is no point waiting like that," Tom threw his words in the air when the mass of huge rats ahead finally dissolved into nothingness. Given how Claudia was scared of the rodents like those, Tom didn't even account for the possibility of making her walk through the scene of the massacre. The scene that he created with a few short bursts from his pulse rifle. 

Their progress in the dungeon was relatively quick. Relatively, because whenever Tom checked the time, he made sure to not account for the time he spent mingling in slime with Claudia. But even with that small loss of time on their side, they didn't need long to pick up the pace. 

Passing through the fourth floor was a no-brainer. With only rodents trying to swarm them at every corner, Tom managed to repel them all at the cost of just emptying the first magazine that the weapon came with. 

The boss of the fourth room wasn't any challenge for them either. As if there was some kind of rats infestation of this route in the dungeon, the boss turned out to be a slightly bigger rodent as well. 

But that was the end of its similarities to the normal rats, as both the agility of its movements and the strenght of its hits was abnormally high for a monster of that level. 

Thankfully, it was just as vulnerable to shoots as all its lesser brothers, freeing Tom and Claudia from the burden of fighting it at close quarters after just five shots to its head. 

The fifth floor... Didn't pose much hardship either. While according to the unspoken rule of danger spiking up considerably every fifth floor, there was hardly any difference in the difficulty of the run. 

On the fifth floor, the slimes made their second appearance. But not as the immobile blobs, free for anyone to kill. The slimes that Tom encountered as soon as they descended to the fifth floor were of green color, signaling just how much more potent the dissolvent in their inner fluid was. Outside of that, with how they continued to spit the dissolved stone ahead of them, those slimes could reach the speed of a walking adult, making them all the more dangerous. 

"Fuck," Tom cursed openly when his rifle finally proved to be useless. While the shoots could easily penetrate the outer shell, the acid within the smile was just too potent. Even when Tom made precise shots aimed at the slime's core, the pellet was just small enough for it to dissolve before any danger to its core could become real. 

"How are we going to deal with them?" Claudia asked while jogging beside's Tom. Given how they could no longer just walk past the slimes, they could at least outrun them in the vast labyrinth of the dungeon's corridors. 

"You know, I think I have an idea," Tom said after a moment as a weird smile flourished on his lips. "Do you remember this piece?" he asked as he threw his backpack on the ground only to rummage through it for a bit. Then, he pulled out a slightly rusted silencer that he used to drain the insides out of the slime on the very first floor. 

"Don't you think this is too much?" Claudia's eyebrows rocketed up in surprise when she looked at what Tom brought out of his backpack. "The insides of those slimes are way more acidic. Won't it just blast through it in a second?" she asked, concerned about the situation. 

'Well, no one said it's going to be easy,' Tom thought, unwilling to share this opinion with the girl. While he didn't mind going for his sneaky tactic himself, he didn't consider sharing the potential dangers of such endeavor with the girl. 

Tom moved into action before the girl could protest. With a gun in one hand and the rusty pipe in the other, he approached the closest slime. 

Contrary to how small the packs of the monsters were on the first floor, here, on the fifth, rather than sticking to trios and maybe quarters, the packs could no longer be counted down even if one used the fingers of both his hands. 

As such, there was no point in finding a solution to kill a single slime. Just showering it with bullets would be ultimately enough, as with every shot, it would lose a part of its inner fluids. But given how there were roughly twenty slimes blocking Tom's path forward, he just had to find another way to deal with them. 

Once almost in close quarters, Tom raised the barrier of his gun and shot the pellet right at the thickest part of the slime. 'It would be bad if it went through, creating more than one hole,' he thought, quickly pushing the rusty silencer into the opening created by the shot. 

Before Tom could react in any way or form, the insides of the slime started to spill out. But at the same time, the rate at which the metal of the silencer started to deteriorate was even quicker than he expected. 'I guess it was already damaged from before,' Tom thought as he rushed to...

Pick the slime up. 

With one of the specimens in his hands, Tom turned around and directed the pressurized stream of liquid towards the pack's other members.

In an instant, what was an impassable obstacle before, turned into an evergrowing puddle of melting slimes. 

"Just like I thought," Tom muttered as he threw the last slime away. With most of its fluids already gone, he crushed the core directly through its outer shell, saving his gun from the damage of the acid. 

"Who would've thought that they wouldn't be resistant to their own acid from the outside," Claudia commented, clearly in awe of Tom's ingenuity. "But that doesn't mean I can approve this," she said after a moment, destroying the happy smile that she previously put on Tom's face. 

"What did I do wrong?" Tom asked. He felt as if he was treated unjustly. 'Didn't I just solve a huge hurdle? Without losing half of our ammunition at that!' he protested in his mind.

"Don't act like a scolded puppy now," Claudia said as she shook her head powerlessly. "I don't want you to do it ever again because of how dangerous it was," she said, as she looked Tom directly in the eyes. 

"But didn't you just scold me?" Tom protested, keen on keeping up the act. Even though his feeling of unjust treatment was already gone, he couldn't help but want to tease the girl a little. 

"Yes, I did scold you, but I did so for a reason," Claudia replied before releasing a long, deep sigh. "Hey, isn't that a boss room?" She asked after a moment with a shocked voice. 

While there was no rule for how far one had to travel from the entry of the dungeon to the boss-room where the portal to another floor would be, it was pretty rare for anyone to only encounter a single pack of monsters before reaching this specific place. 

"That would explain the massive pack earlier," Tom said, turning his head around and looking at the massive pile of dissolving fluid that just a few moments ago was a pack of slimes. "The huge number of those slimes in one place... I was worried about it before, but now I see that we just randomly used a shortcut," he said, only to shrug his shoulders afterward. 

"A shortcut?" Claudia asked while raising her eyebrows. She then leaned her head over to her shoulder. "I didn't know there were any shortcuts in the dungeons," she added, clearly wishing for an explanation. 

"In short words, it's believed to be a feature added by the developers for the professional players," Tom explained with a sour smile on his lips. "By taking a shorter route from the summoning room to the boss room, one will have to face a greater number of monsters. This bigger pack of monsters will reach the levels of five floors below. In other words, one can save some time by going through a fight way harder than anything one would meet on this floor otherwise," Tom explained as he looked towards the corner beyond which the room of the boss would begin. 

"But that puts my mind at ease," he added after thinking for a moment. 

"What, you are worried already?" Claudia asked, more shocked by what Tom just said than his earlier explanation. "If you can't handle it while we are still on the fourth floor, do you really think we will be able to reach the fiftieth floor?" 

"You know that's not what I meant," Tom said with his voice turning slightly darker. "I'm just glad that the boss we will get to fight in a moment won't be even stronger than that pack of slimes from before!"