Chapter 43

Chapter 43

Lili would have liked to present a proud image of a skilled and useful support but when the four-foot woman had to stand on her tippy toes to push the cart's handle that was right at her faces height made it very hard to take her seriously.

We didnt even make it past the tenth floor before we all lost our patience at how stubborn she was at pulling the damn cart, because every time she hit a decent sized crack, the weight of the cart as it tipped back literally threw the midget in air as she held onto the handle like a parent playing upsie and throwing there kids in the air.

Seeing as I was the strongest other than Ryuu and Bell would have been better at running around to kill any monsters approaching us I took the responsibility of pulling the cart and even put Lili on top of the cart to play sniper.

"Jake I can't be sure whether I should be mad that you mounted me on top of here like a child or thank you for how convenient it is to shoot monsters from here." Lili grumbled reloading her bow gun after shooting some of the flying monsters following us.

Pretty sure that's the definition of short girl problems. Finding the irritating convenience's in mildly awkward positions.

Well either way now that I was the one pushing the cart, we were making pretty good time and seeing as there was certainly no Goliath or other Monster Rex to impede our path, we quickly continued our way into Rivira without any problems from other monsters.

"Ok so Ryuu do you know any secluded places on the floor we can setup?" I asked and she nodded.

"Yes, I do."

We followed the taciturn elf as she led us to one of the surrounding hills within the deep forest and against the rock wall of the hill there was a thick covering of vines and moss on the walls. "It's here." She pointed and I saw a decent sized rock covered in moss in an awkward position. Ryuu proved my thoughts of it being a hidden little cave as she was able to roll it easily to the side and as we walked in, I was surprised to see a number of what looked like jail cell's and supply's already here.

"This was the holding area for criminal Adventures detained in the dungeon as no one in Rivira is trustworthy, so we had to have a place where we could detain criminals and not risk them being freed."

I on the other hand already did plenty of homework studying the layout of publicly available maps of those damn jungle floors as most of them aren't even fully explored and there are numerus dangers in there that frankly don't belong at such a level like several level five predatorial plants that somehow got there. But in those five floors between the nineteenth and twenty fourth there's more variety of monsters there than from the first to the eighteenth.

So, in other words I will be milking my quests to level up even faster than before.

The next day before we left, I decided to try to be try my idea on making an anti-poison accessory and it was only when I fused several dozen antidotes and a gem that I was able to get one that would do so I put the anti-poison gem into a necklace and just wore it beneath my armor.

We were already starting off strong as I gutted open a Bugbear for my first monster of the day after moving into the nineteenth floor.

"Jake you should be wary of the Bug-Bears deceptive speed." Ryuu warned me and she was right as the big foot looking monster was much stockier than a minotaur but had the same fighting style and was much stronger and faster despite its size.

Despite coaching us on the monsters within the floor Ryuu wasn't just staying back watching us. No she danced around the jungle trees and low hanging vines to kill the monsters flitting around them as they ran at what they assumed to be the easier prey.

But even as our small party started to get surrounded by larger groups of monsters, we still had plenty of ways to clear out large groups of monsters with Bell and I being able to create large firebombs around us and with how moist the surroundings were with it being a jungle we weren't in too much danger of making an uncontrolled fire.

The most annoying thing so far was the groups of lizard men as they had a decent amount of heat resistance, so they were able to survive a good amount of our firepower along with naturally being within a group.

'Thankfully they aren't as strong as Bugbears.' I thought as I stabbed into one of them and used my shield to block the attacks of a duo on my side but they both combined couldn't hit as hard as a bugbear punching my shield.

I was already glad that I had the poison necklace as having a literally giant mushroom monster spray a thick cloud of poison spores over your group while fighting another group of monsters was annoying but instead of choking and dying on the toxic monster's spores, I just coughed like I breathed in some chalk dust after clapping the chalk board wipers and my response was to gleefully throw a huge fireball at the annoyance.