Episode 29.5

"<Flash (Liriom)>!"

Lecan cast <Flash> magic toward three magic beasts approaching him.

However, it had no effect on them.

"Lecan-dono, what are you trying to achieve exactly?"

"Thought it would work on them."

"No of course it won't. White Spectres do not have eyes in the first place."

"Heard it's effective on Soul Ogres, figured it might work on White Spectres as well."

When Lecan heard that only White Spectres spawn in this dungeon, he thought to himself that he should have brought Eda along. If he's not wrong, Shira mentioned how <Purification> is super effective against White Spectre magic beasts. But there's no point crying over spilt milk now.

"Well, I agree that it pays to do trial and error."

The two kept swinging their swords around while conversing, defeating the three magic beasts. Then they got down to floor 27.

"Is there something wrong, Lecan-dono. Why are you staring at your sword?"

"This sword, it handles badly."

By this sword he means, <Acceleration Sword>. A sword with <Sword Speed Increase> that raises sword speed by about 20 to 30 percent.

Lecan has been using it since they got it.

He found its effect which makes it swing faster with little effort put into amusing and wielded it for fun, but it just doesn't feel right.

Your sword swinging faster than you intend to turns out to be quite a huge liability. At first he thought he'd get used to it after a while, but the sense of discomfort never went away.

The issue with speed aside, how the feedback it deals on the opponent ends up turning out differently than what your body expects is another huge problem.

You get feedback when your sword hits something. In the form of impact, load recoiling on your wrist, elbow and shoulder. The timing of it comes sooner than anticipated, and bigger here. It only comes up as a slight discomfort right now since he's not swinging the sword as fast and forceful as he could, but Lecan will do just that once he's found a formidable foe to fight, which might hurt his wrist and elbow in the process.

Besides when you're slashing at the enemy, the moment the sword hits their body, you pull out your hand then push the blade forward to make it dig deeper into them. You can't use that technique with this sword. It's also unfit for parrying the enemy's sword and counterattacking.

"Lecan-dono. People who wield swords with <Sword Speed Increase> are people who fight purely relying on brute force alone."

"Sounds about right."

"They strike and slash at their foes without taking their own ability, or the sword's weight and speed into account. Never putting any thought into putting just the right amount of strength or speed into the sword, or what's their next move be once it hits, they just put everything into each and every swing."

"I see."

"This sword holds a tremendous value to those who employ such a style of combat. But for swordsmen who make use of advanced sword techniques like Lecan-dono, I'd suggest against using it too much. It will mess up with your techniques."

"Does your swordschool not use this kind of speed boosting sword?"

"We only deploy one in an attack that will surely end a match. To end it in a single swift stroke of sword when we're faced with an opponent that cannot be beaten by clashing techniques alone. At that exact moment, we swing our sword with every last bit of our ability and speed."

Lecan never considers himself as practicing the usage of advanced sword techniques. He thought he was just swinging his sword around in his own style. But looking again, he actually makes use of techniques. Lecan makes conscious decisions and efforts to chain his slashes just as much as he power swings. He's loathe to part with any of those.

"Fumu. I'm putting this away for a while."

He put <Acceleration Sword> away and grabbed <Sword of Rusk> out. The sense of safety of having this sword on his waist is just unlike any other. Lecan has grown fully accustomed to this sword before he realized.

Lecan and Arios had lunch and dinner in the dungeon, exploring until late at night, then they slept on floor 36 of the dungeon.

<TLN: Catch the latest updates and edits at Sousetsuka.com >

Lecan tested all kinds of magic that day.

<Fire Arrows (Veyart)> can kill magic beasts on late floor 20s. The magic can't instantly kill enemies on late floor 30s as you'd expect, but it still showed enough stopping power to grievously injure four magic beasts in an instant.

One cast of strongish <Lightning (Gwinbar)> was enough to turn four late floor 30s magic beasts into corpses at once.

He tried using <Concealment> in the fight, but it doesn't seem to have any effect on White Spectres.

Shira told him that <Concealment> works best on humans, but it's also not completely ineffective against magic beasts. The fact that it doesn't work on White Spectres might be due to the difference in sensory organs.

<Water Blade (Scutopinel)> can be used to slice off heads and limbs, but as losing limbs doesn't slow these magic beasts down, it wasn't worth preparing the water to use the magic. It's probably going to be useless as they go deeper down.

Same with <Ice Bullet (Siljin)>. It's got a good penetrating power sure, but unfortunately, White Spectres don't possess a vital organ that will kill them when pierced. Blowing their heads off kills them, but casting <Flame Spear (Bandroux)> with the same amount of mana will give off a much better result.

In the end, <Flame Spear> remains the most reliable, and <Lightning> can be very useful depending on applications. Lecan decided to focus on honing the quick casting and precision of those two magic.

During his magic testing escapade, they found out that <Red Body> has an obviously higher magic resistance than <Black Body>. Thus, magic that directly attacks with mana like <Lightning> suffers reduced damage. On the other hand, magic that uses mana to produce flaming bolts of flames that explodes upon impact, instead of being composed of mana itself, like <Flame Spear> deals good damage.

And it's finally been made clear to Lecan that the White Spectres move faster and more focused the deeper they go. They eventually reached a floor Lecan and Arios cannot easily break through.

They arrived at floor 51 the day after.

Something auspicious happened.

They got their hands on a <Life Drain Sword (Vudscylla)> from beating the giant variants on floor 50.

This sword has a <Stamina Drain> Grace. It's a Grace that turns around 10% of damage you deal to magic beasts back as heal and stamina.

Lecan has <Recovery> as well as Stamina Restoratives. Hence he probably won't need the sword.

Nevertheless, he's still got to test it out to see just what kind of Grace and how handy it might be.

Anyway, there sure is a lot of people here. He's been constantly surprised by the amount of people on the floors they passed through, but floor 50 is a whole other thing. He'd likely believe if someone told him there were more than a thousand people here. Due to that, the passageways were relatively packed, he had a hard time picking a route with no one around.

Arios has stopped complaining and follows him obediently now. Good going.

Floor 51 had fewer people than floor 50, but still far more than floor 40s.

(Well, we should see less people on tougher floors.)

Lecan couldn't wait to conquer more floors and go even deeper below.