In the meantime, I also prepared Durandal and assumed my usual combat stance, ready to take on the Cheap Sheep that retreated along with the goat.
The Escape Goat is not as ferocious as Minos were, but it has the same stern look on its face as they did, and much in the same vein, is not cute-looking at all, even though the goats I remember from earth all looked so docile and passive that they probably would not hurt a fly even if it attacked them first. Unlike Cheap Sheep, the Escape Goats horns are like ice picks that are curved slightly upwards, so getting skewered by them is undoubtedly going to hurt like all hell, and probably do more damage to me than Minos horns since this guy right here is Lv.7, which is admittedly pretty darn terrifying now that my brain starts overthinking it.
Okay Michio, just keep calm and do what you always do. Ready the sword, wait until the enemy, who has slipped past Roxanne when the Cheap Sheep suddenly changed its direction to charge right at her, is going to be as close to you as possible now move to the left to avoid the tip of the horns going through you thats right, just like that and now when the Escape Goat is exposed give it the good old Durandal bitch slap! Or I should probably say a good old one two, because since this is a Lv.7 enemy, it did not fall down after that one strike, even though it hit it right in the torso. In that case there in no reason for me to even try busting my magic build out, since if Durandal was not able to one-shot the goat, then magic will not do any better.
*Snort* *Snort* Meheee
After it went forward a bit due to the momentum that carried it, Escape Goat turned around towards me and once again held its head low, pointing its horns towards me. Heh, if only it learned from that previous hit it sustained that it will not amount to anything. I just have to wait for the right moment again and dodge!
Thanks to me being constantly vigilant, I was able to avoid the escape Goats second rush attack. Now its only a matter of turning around and delivering the second strike!
The Escape Goat that was slashed for the second time let out its last Meheebefore collapsing and turning into green smoke. Hehe, how do you like that, huh?! I have to say, I am pretty proud of how I was able to dodge two of its attacks in a row without messing any of my dodges up halfway through. Now that if what I call growing up as a fighter!
(All that is left now is the Cheap Sheep that Roxanne was fighting. Lets see how shes doing.)
Since I took care of all the Escape Goats, all Roxanne had to do was to finish the Cheap Sheep. Being at Lv.7 naturally means that it will be tougher than the ones we met on the lower floors, but since it is not an Escape Goat then at the very least it will not try to run for its life whenever it feels threatened. Instead, it only tried charging straight at her whenever she was in front of it or kick her with its hind legs whenever she was moving towards its backside. That one shot of Fire Storm was obviously not enough to kill it, and since Scimitar is much weaker than Durandal, their battle was still ongoing. Well, since I am already done with the other two then there is no reason for me not to go and help her a bit, so I moved over to where Roxanne and the Cheap Sheep were and slashed it from the side, collapsing it on the spot. I dont know how many times Roxanne managed to hit the Cheap Sheep with her Scimitar, so I am only going to calculate the damage that only I have done to it: one slash from Durandal and one fire Storm. Whatever damage Roxanne did to it plus everything that I have inflicted was enough to kill it, and now it simply perished and disappeared in a cloud of smoke like two other monsters we fought. And since we are already on the topic of Escape Goats
Its great that we were able to finish the battle without letting any of the enemies escape, but I have to admit that this ability of theirs is pretty troubling.
Back on the fifth floor, instead of just one attack, I was able to defeat all of the monsters with two attacks from Durandal. As Roxanne and I have already established, that probably means that from the fifth floor onwards, I will need at least two attacks to defeat the enemies that are going to stand in our way, and that amount will most likely only keep increasing the further into the Labyrinth, or in this particular case, the higher we will go. Also, judging my that one shot of Fire Storm that managed to catch all three of the enemies in it at the start of the battle, I would hazard a guess that the Escape Goats ability to escape from the battle activates itself when their HP falls to about fifty percent of its original value.
After the encounter that concluded just now we proceeded through the seventh floor only to happen at the lone Cheap Sheep Lv.7. Since there is only one enemy, this is going to be a great occasion to test exactly how many magic shots I am going to need in order to dispatch a single enemy with it. There was no need to use Fire Storm, so I launched a Fireball at it. And then the next one. And the next, and then two more of them. All in all, defeating a single enemy took five shots of magic, one more in comparison to the enemies on the sixth floor, who still required only four of them.
The enemies on the seventh floor require five shots of magic in order to be defeated, huh? Looks like I will have to resolve myself to fighting longer battles from now on. I only hope that the increase wont be significant.
Do not worry, master. At our current level, I do not think we should have any major problems with defeating enemies here as long as we remain focused and keep our vigilance about us at all times.
I am afraid that this is easier said than done. The longer the battle lasts, that means more time when we will have to fight against the monsters. In turn, fighting monsters for a prolonged period of time means that the number of times where we will be attacked by the monsters is definitely going to increase.