Chapter 78: Weak and Unlucky

I had the Merchant teach me how to make temporary contracts so that I could show Apollo to everyone. It's also useful that this lets him borrow mana and power from other sources.

It's also possible that one of the girls unlocks spirits-related skills by maintaining a contract with him.

While the chances for that are pretty low since no one has a Gift for taming or interacting with spirits in the first place, having an alternative to simply relying on lucky rolls in the gacha is simply better.

We also found out that Apollo can follow me when I leave and enter the kingdom which seemed to help the Merchant cross out a few theories of his.

As for me, I was glad to have made a contract with a spirit since it allowed me to take a peek into a world I was pretty unfamiliar with as there was no point in even looking into it to begin with.

Even though he isn't really useful in a fight, this little guy improves the mood quite a bit as everyone treats him like a pet of sorts. That alone makes him a great addition as far as I'm concerned.

Anna, Claire, and Mia tried a lot to convince me to summon a combat-oriented spirit for them, but there were a few problems with that.

First, there's the fact that, as the Merchant said, an "inferior creature" can't contract many spirits at once without reaching a certain level.

There's also the mana density in this place to consider. Only weak spirits can maintain their form long enough to form a contract, so a strong spirit is out of the question right now.

Seeing as after I summoned 18 of them, only 4 managed to last enough to form a contract, this banner is not really cost-effective for the time being.

A solution would be summoning them on Earth where the density of mana is bound to be better. But in that case, they might manifest as evil spirits and attack the others. And so, since we don't have anyone with light magic to purify them, we'd have to put them down.

As such, I noted to myself that I should try this one out again in the future when we have better conditions.

Aside from our newest addition, however, there was nothing much to note as the day went as usual until we went to rest.

The day after, we proceeded to the dungeon to try and fight the boss of the fourth floor.

We took the quickest route to the boss room on this last expedition to waste as little of our resources as possible.

Though to be honest, I find it pretty impressive just how fast we managed to reach this point.

Not that I'm complaining though, I'll take any opportunity I can get to leave this floor as soon as possible.

The threat that every hit poses here has been unmatched and makes for an extremely stressful experience as every move we make has to be calculated and in battles where we would normally trade blows, we have to bide our time and wait for a perfect opening so that we don't incur any risks.

I can't even imagine how hard this would've been if our members weren't so disciplined.

Even Claire and Mia made me proud by taking a careful approach to every encounter and setting aside their usual antics to focus and prevent any problems from happening.

With that being said, I believe this battle will be just perfect to scratch their itch to go all out a little bit.

As soon as we enter through the doors, we are instantly cursed.

In this room, the more time passes, the weaker you become.

Every hit you take speeds up this process.

As for the opponents in the room, there's only one.

A single skeleton wearing rusty brown armor, standing two meters tall and carrying a greatsword who's also subjected to the same effects.

The catch here is that every time he hits, depending on the damage he deals, his curse gets weaker, and if he kills in this room, his curse is reset, meaning he gets all his status back.

It's a battle of endurance where he holds all the cheats.

The strategy for this one is a bit simple though.

His choice of targets, while sensible one way or another, only managed to put him in a worse position.

The last thing you wanna do is attack Mia thinking you can get an easy kill on her.

And this monster found that out in the worst way possible.

Not only did she manage to avoid all of his attacks, she did so at the last possible moment every time.

This made it hard for him to disengage and go for another target, every hit seemed like it was just about to hit, but alas, it never did.

Licia: "She's surprisingly mature... Instead of trying to hit him back, she's completely focused on dodging."

Going for a counterattack could potentially put her at risk, it's simply not worth it when Ellie is already hitting him from a safe distance since the gains would be minimal.

The curse is making her tire faster and is also making her movements slower, but the same could be said for her opponent on a much greater scale.

I think she's got this, but it would be wise to run away and change with someone else for the last stretch...

Claire: "Do you think so? All I'm seeing is her playing with her prey."

Miwen: "Nah, you don't think that. Even I know she's doing a good job. Just admit it."

Claire: "Don't wanna. And if you like her so much, why don't you go play with her too?"

As expected, Claire came to the same conclusion I did. When it comes to sheer speed I'm only behind Mia, so if the battle is all about dodging, I can probably do it as much as she can.

Even more so since this morning I got myself some levels of her [Movement Speed Up] in preparation for this battle.

Convincing her to battle pass would be a bit difficult though, if I believe she's capable of winning this, the girl herself must be brimming with confidence.

As such, I tried to forcefully take the skeleton's attention away from her by hitting him with a few attacks.

In the beginning, it didn't seem to have much of an effect aside from making Mia mad at me, but when the monster was close to dying to the curse, he finally decided to switch targets again and focused on killing me.

He already had a bunch of debuff effects applied to him, some of which decreased his speed too, courtesy of Ellie of course.

Thanks to that, avoiding his attacks wasn't as troublesome as it was for Mia in the beginning.

I wasn't as confident to try and dodge his attacks at the last second though, so I kept creating distance between us whenever possible.

It was a bit hard though since I also couldn't go too far or else he could switch targets again. Staying too close would be problematic too since he could do a last-ditch faint or surprise attack.

In the end, thanks mostly to Ellie's and Mia's efforts, the battle ended without many complications.

Seems like today was our lucky day too since the boss dropped an item for us which upon further inspection seemed to be quite useful.

[Ginnor, Curse Of The Weak

Filled with the shame of weak men who perished in battle, this bottle contains a soul-binding poison that lowers the enemy's defense by half.]

I don't think I've ever seen anyone comment about this drop before, but then again, this floor is pretty unpopular, so who knows how many even challenged this boss to begin with?

The effect was pretty good though the bottle itself was small and I probably wouldn't get many uses, but still, in a pretty hard battle, we could coat this into a blade or arrow and make our lives that much easier.

As such, we secured the loot and unlike other times, proceeded to the next floor without resting for even a second.

The curse wouldn't go away for as long as we stayed in this place, so even though we'd have to battle our way until we could find somewhere to rest on the next floor, we didn't really have a choice.