CH 162

After sufficient rest, we are facing the dungeon again.

We’re here a day later than we planned, because Talia gave us a lecture about traps.

She can’t come to the dungeon with us, but she visited us after school with Leila and taught us all sorts of things.

We treated them to dinner as a thank you, but I honestly don’t think that makes up for it, so I also gave them an assortment of potions too. That was good, right?”

“Do you think you can disarm them?”

Rurika and Hikari are crouching down and looking at the ground.

I’m sure they’re itching to try out their new weapons, but unfortunately for them, there aren’t any monsters on this floor. It’s all traps.

It looks like they’re facing the traps with cool heads without getting impatient, so that’s a relief at least.

All they did before we came here was a few practice swings in the guild’s training area.

Mithril weapons stand out too much, so they could only go there for a brief period when there was no one around.

“Master, it’s done.”

Says Hikari. I nod in response, and we advance.

Everyone else is also taking turns watching the traps being disarmed, even if they don’t touch them.

But just watching is an experience too. And I can’t just tell them to go over there and try disarming them.

Incidentally, I’ve only done it once.

But I didn’t actually follow the instructions in the reference book I read. I found out that if I use Appraisal on the traps, it shows me how to disarm them. It even tells me what kind of traps they are and what happens if they’re activated.

Furthermore, I can tell where they are with Magic Energy Detection, and I can see where they are if I use it along with Map. As always, I feel like I’m on easy mode.

But unfortunately, it doesn’t show me treasure chests. If I’m going to look for them, I’ll have to do it the old fashioned way.

Not to mention that if there are other people around, they’ll probably find and open them first. And Map is showing me a lot of people.

No one knows when treasure chests are placed on this floor, or when traps are rearmed. Apparently they tried to look into that at some point, but ended up not learning anything, and the mystery goes on unsolved.

Map is getting filled up as we advance and disarm more traps. I already know where the staircase is, but we should take the opportunity to get more used to the traps.

From this point forward, traps start appearing randomly on every floor, along with monsters. We could very well be attacked while disarming traps, so it’s definitely a good idea to accumulate experience here.

“Ah, don’t disarm the next trap you find.”

I want to try something.

The next trap we find is one that shoots a poison arrow from the wall if we step on it.

The poison isn’t deadly if we have an antidote, but the arrow itself could be depending on where it hits, like the neck or the head.

I follow Appraisal, and throw on the ground a leftover I got from taking apart ore with Alchemy.

That activates the trap, and I use Appraisal again when the arrow shoots out. Apparently, as long as you don’t disarm it, the trap keeps shooting arrows every time you step on the ground.

And it looks like they fly out from different places depending on where you step.

Looking at it more closely, every arrow is shot from a pretty low position, like they’re actually focused below the waist. Are they designed to cause pain, rather than death? That’s pretty sick.

I use Appraisal again after disarming the trap, and it says it’s on stand-by, and shows a timer. All traps show this, but the time changes depending on the type of trap.

I assume they get rearmed when the timer reaches zero, but I haven’t seen that happen, so I can’t say that with absolute certainty.

“Thank you. Let’s stay watchful and keep going.”

The floor itself isn’t all that big, but having to be careful about traps means it takes us about a day and a half to get to the staircase.

We could keep going, but we decide to call it a day early and rest.

There aren’t any monsters here, but I see a lot of adventurers, so we need to keep watch anyway.

It’d be one thing if this was a party of rugged guys, but we need to be careful with so many girls here.

Along the way we passed by some people who looked this way with lustful eyes, and even heard indecent comments.

Now that I think about it, there was this one guy that looked ecstatic when Hikari looked at him with a scornful expression… It’s best not to think too much about that.

After a nice rest, we step into the twelfth floor the following morning.

This floor has slime. They’re usually the weakest monsters in games, and apparently that doesn’t change here. But despite that, they’re the monster that pops up in people’s minds when they talk about troublesome monsters, and they’re high up on the list of monsters people don’t want to find.

They’re easy enough to defeat if their core is destroyed, but slime melt things and spew acid. It doesn’t have much effect on people, but I hear it melts equipment.

Women in particular hate it, because a simple mistake can lead to it melting their clothes.

This floor is responsible for breaking up parties of both men and women who were exploring with sort of crazy guys. Some people really are no good, are they?

Also, striking their core means touching slime with weapons, which can also ruin them. Doing it a few times will render a weapon unusable. Of course, it’s fine if the user tends to their weapon every time, but that also means having to spend the items to do it.

And so, people here use specific weapons and robes while exploring. They’re made specifically so they don’t deteriorate as fast, but even they have limits.

Of course, high rank weapons like mithril and weapons with magic attached don’t deteriorate, but some people still hesitate to use them. I think that’s just human nature.

Hikari and Rurika also have those specialized weapons, and Sera and I have shields with a special coating.

They’re weak to magic, so we’re going to try to take them down from a distance.

But since defeating every slime like that is going to empty our MP, we’ll use magic when there are a lot of them, and have the others deal with them when there are few.

Although we’ll still use magic even if there aren’t a lot of them if there are traps nearby.

We cheat a little, and get through this floor in a day. Map tells me where the staircase is, and I guide them indirectly in a way that we follow the shortest route.

Still, it’s true. This floor really is mentally exhausting.