Dirty tactics

As the door slid open, everyone tried to be the first to see what's inside. Not that there was any worry to get a nice spot for that in the first place since the new corridor revealed was even wider than the main one we currently stood in. It didn't really make sense either but we disregarded the architecture of the dungeon for now.

In the end there wasn't much to see aside from the new endless corridor anyway. The end happened to be so far in the back that no one of us could spot it. We were once again left with no other choice than following the path for a while.

This seemed to be a reoccurring theme of the dungeon by the way. Whenever a new path opened it had to be followed for a while to find out where it leads. Not a single one of them gave away its destination at a first glance.

Since we had no other choice, we followed the path. However we were traveling a bit slower than usual and at first I didn't really get why. Then I noticed how Iris always maintained a solid grip on her sword and the two boys also had their fists ready for whenever a monster appeared.

I felt slightly embarrassed to not have realized what a path this wide might imply. The strength of the monster at the end could probably correspond with the size of the room and the path towards it.

With that now in mind I also tightly griped the katana hanging from my hips. Emilia and Althaia also got their staffs ready; they seemed to have missed it too.

Now all ready for battle, we were soon stopped by Iris as she had spotted something. The corridor took a turn and right after it opened up to a room. I tried to take a sneak peek and what I saw almost frightened me.

A ton of monsters stood in this new room, probably around twenty or so. From what we had been told, monsters shouldn't group up in this dungeon so this was quite weird.

I took out the book again and I browsed through it. Most of the monster looked similar to the one we fought yesterday, a horde of . But the one in the middle of them stood out. It wasn't as bulky as the rest and unlike the crude weapons the ordinary monsters used, it had a staff similar to one a mage would use.

With that in mind I soon found it in the book. This monster was a , one of the only intelligent variants of monsters in the dungeon. It isn't as strong as the normal monsters but it has the fearsome skill to gather other monsters to protect it. These act as a meat shields and the monster itself attacks with spells of different elements, which also explains the staff. Despite it being rather weak by itself, it is still classified as a C Rank monster.

I tried to find out its strength or rather if it happened to be an ordinary one or a lesser. According to the book, the power level of the monster itself can be estimated by its staff size. The larger the staff, the stronger the monster is.

This one probably had to be on the border from lesser to ordinary, I couldn't really tell exactly from afar. I shared my information with the rest and now they also looked worried.

"I'm not sure if we can or should take this one head on. With the amount of other monsters around, things might go wrong quite quickly. Has anyone any idea how we could tackle them? If we can't come up with a decent plan, we just will have to leave again. They haven't noticed us yet after all."

Iris tried to speak as softly as possible, for obvious reasons. The others looked towards each other puzzled, none of them had any clue how we could possibly attack them.

So I had to come up with something I guess. Finally my time to shine.

"I have a rather risky idea, but I think it will be worth to give it a shot. If we manage to defeat all of those, our progress in the quest skyrockets after all. Well I don't want to beat around the bush any longer, here is my idea: Instead of fighting all of those monsters at once, we could try to lure them from the group and finish off each one individually. We have to be very carefully to not alarm the rest though when we fight the singled out one. If we do happen to alarm them, we can still either run away or we could even try to collapse the corridor to bury them underneath the rubble."

The others looked at me with wide open eyes and Iris immediately accepted my idea.

"Good plan, I guess we couldn't be any safer than that. But how exactly will we lure them out one by one?"

Iris good instincts kicked in and she had realized right away what the flaw of the plan was. I couldn't see any way to lure them out one by one. Once we showed ourselves, all of them would likely charge at us at once.

"We could knock some stones of the walls and throw those at them."

Unexpectedly, Emilia gave in her thoughts which also happened to be the solution to our problem.

"Yeah, we can give that a try. I don't see any other way than that. Iris should probably throw them since she is always quite skilled with that kind of stuff." I didn't dare to be the one ruining this opportunity and Iris really was skilled with any kind of weapon, probably even a stone.

Iris walked back towards the entrance to collect a variety of stones from the wall by swinging her sword at it. If she had done so where we stood, the monsters probably would have noticed her.

Once she came back with different stones of all sizes, she took one and threw it right at the nearest monster which happened to be a bit singled out from the rest.

"Jackpot!" Iris triumphly exclaimed in a low voice. She had hit the monster right at the back of its head and it soon started to move towards our location.

Now the only challenge left was defeating it without making too much noise. To achieve this, we moved back towards the entrance by a fair bit so that he monster would still spot us once it reached the corner.

And just like we had planned, it saw us and charged directly towards our location without warning any of its comrades.

I felt kind of ashamed to have suggested such a cheap tactic. Iris on the other side had a wide grin across her face.

It was finally battle time again.