Chapter 98: First Raid On The Sixth Floor

Today we were going to explore the sixth floor for the first time. I had 25 tickets that I hadn't used yesterday, but out of these, I spent 5 on spellbooks for Bea, then for the remaining 20, I tried half of them on the spirits banner, but didn't really have any luck with it.

The amount of people and our levels are still not enough to create the ideal environment for spirits.

The remaining 10 tickets were all spent on skills, to which I didn't get anything new, but the results weren't bad either.

The 3 levels I got in [Culinary Arts] were probably what excited the girls the most.

But aside from that, I also got 2 levels in [Greater Might] and [Mana Shield], as for the rest, a single level in [Faster tree climbing], [Heat resistance], and [Sight Enhancement].

Aside from a single ticket, the others all landed in something at least occasionally useful.

I could also claim today's tickets, but I wanted to see how we would fare right now on the sixth floor.

This is a pretty terrible floor overall due to the monsters that inhabit it. They are big, incredibly tanky, and strong, but it would be no problem to deal with all of that.

The thing that makes them the worst is what they are made of.

The inhabitants of this floor are all... glitched humans...? It's hard to tell exactly what they are, but for example, you can find giant eyeballs fluctuating around, or ghost hands without a body crawling like a damn spider. Not to mention stretched faces, skeleton hands, or blazing skulls.

Some things shouldn't go together, like eyes popping up from disembodied hands, sometimes a mouth, and many other nasty combinations.

Frankly, it's just nightmare fuel.

Miwen: "And with that said, I'm giving you permission to wreck the place completely."

Claire: "Suddenly I feel like taking things slowly though?"

Ah... so much for my loyal killing machine...

Miwen: "Are you sure? Mia might pull ahead in your game..."

Mia: "Nah, I think we should be careful this time, the variety of enemies is too large."

So it's a rebellion.

I thought everyone would want to be done with this one as soon as possible, but they seem surprisingly okay.

I don't know whether it's mental fortitude or if they are simply used to it, if so, I'm not setting foot on their worlds.

Miwen: "Licia, I'm getting bullied... can you tell those two to comply?"

In a move of desperation, that [Severed Hand] grabbed and broke a piece of the ground to use as cover against the incoming flames.

If calculated, it was a smart move, but it gave me an opening to propel ice spikes from the ground it had grabbed. This time, I applied a lot more mana and managed to pierce through the thing, leading to a gross shower bath.

It was finally enough to put an end to that miserable existence.

Our raid continued as we found more groups of monsters, including balls of hair that attacked like tentacles and a new addition to make this floor even more fun, elf ears that attacked like a ghost sword from the air.

Since the barrier on the dungeon was lifted, this floor has presented more combinations, including eyeballs and hands with wings, horns emerging from the stretched floating hands, and even tail fins appearing instead of the wrists on the severed/disembodied hands.

As if this place couldn't get worse.

Due to the pace we were going, it didn't take us long to get tired, and we had to find a place to rest for a while.

I was trying to avoid going deep down through paths that would lead to the strongest monsters and as a result, we had yet to find a monster at the level cap.

Even still, this much was fine, and we had actually managed to get two level-ups thanks mostly to Claire and Licia quickly eviscerating most things that appeared on our way.

We went back after a while, but it didn't take us long to find a ghost womb spewing forth giant eyeballs.

Those things attacked solely with magic, and normally they lead to a pretty difficult encounter when in large quantities.

Thanks to Bea and Claire though, we managed to kill them quickly, albeit they had to spend a lot of mana to do so.

As for me, I didn't want to deal with this at all, so I also helped them burn these things away.

After all was said and done, we managed to get back home safely, got 3 level-ups overall, and even made a whopping $1043 thanks to good drops.

Once inside the kingdom, I took a few quests with Mia. Most consisted of killing or capturing horned rabbits, but after hunting for a while, I got a notification that said I had killed enough monsters in this area to gain control over it.

What it basically implied was that, when looking at the map of the kingdom, I could now decide both the spawn rate of monsters for this area, as well as the spawn limit.

For the spawn rate, if I wanted to, I could set it to zero, but if I paid kingdom points, it was also possible to get it past the current 1x rate.

The spawn limit was self-explanatory, after hitting it, monsters would stop spawning in this area, though, they could still be born through natural reproduction or if monsters from the other area came here.

I only got control of half of the forest area, so, I couldn't change the values of the second territory that was recently added to the kingdom, but it was good to know that I had more control over it than I thought.

I decided to reduce the spawn rates and spawn limits on the first forest area to zero, that way, no new monsters would spawn in that area, and the monsters I would kill from now on would be mostly from the second one, thus making it easier to gain control of the second area as well.

To commemorate this newest discovery, I used rabbit meat to make a stew for today's dinner.