DanMachi 4
The morning started with a large breakfast joined by Hestia. Olive was the one who woke up the earliest and she made enough food for all of us. After the meal, Hestia had to go to her job at the potato shop, but before she left she pulled us to the side.
"Be careful and take care of yourselves! Before you enter the dungeon go and pick up some potions and antidotes." She told us.
"I don't think we will need them. We will only be exploring the first few floo-." I say but I'm interrupted by a pointer finger jabbed right at my chest.
"No! As your goddess, I order you to go get some potions and a fist aid kit!" Rolling my eyes, I agree with her and she leaves for her job. Sighing, I turn towards Olive and ask.
"Ready to head out?" to which I receive an affirmative nod. A few minutes later we were fully geared and heading toward the dungeon. On our way there, as promised to the loli, we got six antidotes, six standard health and mana potions, and two high health potions, we even got a first aid kit. Just in case, I get knocked out, half of these items were placed into our bags and the other half into my inventory.
At the entrance of the dungeon, we were stopped by guards and asked for our adventurer certificate and after confirming our identities, we were let in.
The fists floor of the dungeon was basically a large cave system. The walls were made out of blue stone and housed large hallways. It mostly spawned Kobolds and Goblins and very rarely Jack Birds. All of these monsters could be considered level 1 spawns and as you went down the dungeon their levels and attributes slowly increase.
According to my knowledge, the stronger the monster you fight the more excelia you will accumulate. Hopefully it only counts our falna status and not our Library one, otherwise it will be a pain to level up.
The first monster we encountered was a group of three goblins, not wanting to risk Olivia's life I went in a killed two of them, leaving the last one for her.
The goblins were green and plum, humanoid-looking monsters, with large eyes and are considered the weakest monsters in the dungeon. My current Agility could be considered to be in the mid-level twos, while my Dexterity, in the high-level threes, dispatching these monsters was a quick process. Not even worth mentioning. The sad part was I didn't get any experience from them, however, I did gain excelia, albeit a low amount. That alone did confirm, that only my Falna system was taken into an account when accumulating excelia, otherwise i wouldn't have gained a single point.
I hold my breath and prepare to intervene, as I watch Olivia fight with the goblin from the side. The goblin baring its fangs jumps towards her and tries to swipe at her using his sharp claws, but he ultimately misses. Olivia moves to the side easily dodging the attack and bringing her sword right down at the goblin's neck, separating it from its body.
She stops frozen in her place looking at all the blood and the now dead monster, dropping to the ground she starts puking and shaking. 'I knew this will be a problem.' I move towards her to comfort her, tapping her back, I commend her on a job well done. Taking out a rag from my bag I clean her face from all the bile and snot. She shakily stands up hugs me tightly and starts crying.
'Maybe this is how you should feel after taking a life, even if it's a monster. I wasn't like that, was I?' While patting Olive on her back, I try to remember how I felt after my first kill. After a few minutes of this, she calms down enough to speak.
"Does it always feel like this?" She asks. "I felt the blade going through its flesh, while its blood gushed out at me. I can still hear it's scream." She starts uncontrollably shaking.
"It gets better over time." I say trying to placate her. "And these monsters have no thoughts, they aren't even alive, just made out of mana." I say pointing to the deceased goblin that started to dissolve into motes of mana, leaving behind only a Magical Stone. "See?" That makes her feel a bit better and after a few more minutes she fully calms down.
"Do you want to continue?" I ask her with concern in my voice.
"Yes. I need to get over this. I can't grow stronger for you, if I'm like this." She says with determination in her voice. Her hand now balled into a fist, but still shaking a bit.
"That my girl." I say bringing her into a tight hug. "I was a bit scared you would want to quit, right at the beginning."
"I leveled up." She says with a forced smile.
"Good job." I pat her head and we move on. Doing some mental calculations, considering she was level 1, for her to gain a level from just one kill, the goblin she just killed should be worth around 100 experience. Not long after we run into two kobolds. I quickly took care of one of them and left the other for Olivia, while standing near her, just in case. Kobolds are dog-headed lizards the size of a 6-year-old child. They smell horrible and have muscular tails.
The fight went a bit different, the kobold jumped and swiped at her, and she tried to repeat what she did in the goblin fight, but the kobold was faster and rotated itself 90 degrees to the side, swinging his tail and hitting Olivia right in the abdomen, making her drop her sword and fall to the ground.
The kobold happy with his successful strike, bared his fangs, bent his knees, and attempted to jump on the, now, grounded Olive. That was the moment I moved to intervene and without any fanfare removed the kobolds head.
"You okay? Need a potion?" I ask concerned, checking if anything is wrong with Olivia.
"Nah, I'm fine, it just caught me by surprise." She says while coughing.
"You need to be careful. Let's try and find another group." I say, she catches my hand and I pull her up. She nods and we continue deeper into the dungeon.
While we were running around the dungeon I moved my mana around and tried to replicate the [Telekinesis] spell I often used in the Harry Potter world, but ithout any success.
The laws governing mana in this world are too different from the Harry Potter ones. They are blocking all my attempts on interacting with the world using onlu mana. Without knowing the magic system of this world, I cannot start creating spells, I'll need to find someone to teach us or-
"I'll need to get us both grimoires." I say it out aloud pulling Olivia's attention, her head tilted to the side as if asking what I'm talking about. I shake my head and say "Nothing, just thinking out loud."
Two hours later, I have already killed around 40 goblins and 25 kobolds, unsurprisingly, without me gaining a single point of experience, so I checked my Falna Status.
[Falna Status] (Andrew)
Level: 1
Strength: 0 (I) > 61 (I)
Endurance: 0 (I) > 25 (I)
Dexterity: 0 (I) > 80 (I)
Agility: 0 (I)> 112 (H)
Magic: 0 (I) > 0 (I)
D.A.: None
Magic: None
Skills: None
The good thing about this system was that we were gaining falna even while fighting weaker enemies, and at the same time, the falna system updates by itself, without the need for a goddess. I just hoped it doesn't automatically level us up and take away Hestia's only real job.
To be honest, I felt that I was progressing too slowly, I barely any got gains, but considering I was fighting monsters way weaker than me, it was understandable. Olive had similar gains with 15 goblins and 6 kobolds. The biggest growth was her Library System stats as she reached all the way to level 11. With her movement speed almost tippled, Olivia could now easily handle two or three enemies at once. So we decided to descend to the second floor.
[Falna Status] (Olivia)
Level: 1
Strength: 0 (I) > 82 (I)
Endurance: 0 (I) > 67 (I)
Dexterity: 0 (I) > 55 (I)
Agility: 0 (I) > 45 (I)
Magic: 0 (I) > 0 (I)
D.A.: None
Magic: None
Skills: None
Now for the sad part, i collected samples from both the Kobolds and Goblins, but couldn't turn any of it into Race cards. Whichever part of the monster i used, i always got the same error message.
[Race card creation cannot be completed, biological mater inadaquet.]
The second floor was almost the same as the first one, the only difference was that, to the guild's knowledge, Jack Birds didn't spawn here. This floor only had Kobolds, Goblins, and rarely a Dungeon Lizard. Dungeon lizards were ambush predators and preferred attacking from the ceiling, they were brown quadrupled lizard-like monsters with sucker discs on their feet. As time progressed Olivia had an easier and easier time coping with the kills. I was baffled by her fast progression, till I noticed she gained a skill for it.
[Mental Wall LVL:1/100]
- Decreases all mental trauma the user would suffer.
- Allows the user to have a clear head while in stressful situations.
- User can suppress emotions he deems unnecessary while in combat.
To be honest I didn't know how to feel about her new skill. The emotion suppression didn't seem healthy, but the clear head part was really good. Now the first part of the skill was problematic, I didn't know how it would affect her later on, would she be indifferent about killing, or would it simply help her cope with issues she is going to face? I had no idea, and it scared me a little. After our first dungeon dive ends, I'll have to focus on her mental health and pamper her all day long. I don't want her to become an emotionless killing machine, similar to me.
We moved around and killed larger and larger groups of monsters with ease. Until Olive stopped gaining experience at level 22. I even let her kill a Dungeon Lizard alone, but she didn't get any experience for it. We descended another level and she started gaining experience again until she gained one more level and it stopped again. Thinking about it, I remembered what happened to me in the slime world. I stopped gaining experience after level 21, and the same thing happened in the HOTD world when I gained 20 levels over my enemies. The same thing was happening here and it seemed the system counts the monsters on floor one as level one monsters and floor two as level two monsters. Considering I'm level 55, I would need to descend to floor 36 to start gaining experience. This kind of killed my enthusiasm for this place.
On the staircase leading to the third floor, we made a small break and had lunch. Our talks revolved around how to improve ourselves and how to increase our excelia gains. That was the moment Olivia decided on setting her Inventory stat for Wisdom, granting her two inventory slots for the moment. But with item stacking that should allow her to put 198 items into them. I suggested that we start ignoring the easier floors and rush down a few levels and farm higher-leveled creatures. She reluctantly agreed but said we should do it from tomorrow because we already spent so much time on these early floors.
Thankfully, our map system worked in the dungeon and we could track the locations of each staircase. Later on, I was planning on mapping out each and every floor, by just running around. After our meal we packed and descended to the third level, completing another quest. The rewards were kind of mind-boggling. Unfortunately, we only got the quest reward once, but even those increased our WP by 48.
I already knew that when you complete a quest in a higher-tier world you get a multiplier. But, seemingly, as the world is 3 tiers above us, the reward multiplier was exponentially larger. The multiplier should follow the formula 2^(Tier Difference) and that makes me really want to go to a world with an easy quest and a huge tier difference. Thankfully, my wits won against my greed, as in those worlds I wouldn't even be considered an ant.
[Quest: [Dungeon diving 1] Completed 1 WP(x8) Received]
[Quest: [Dungeon diving 2] Completed 2 WP(x8) Received]
[Quest: [Dungeon diving 3] Completed 3 WP(x8) Received]
After spending nearly 10 hours in the dungeon, we decided to end today's dive and headed back to the surface. On our way there, I let Olivia handle most of the enemies, as her proficiency was drastically increased with her level up's and status gains. On our way up I checked her status. Her largest skill level gain was her [Large Blade Mastery] which jumped from level 3 to level 13 in just one session. Her [Mental Wall] skill, thankfully, only went up to level 5 and she unfortunately gained and leveled the [Pain Tolerance] skill after being hurt by a kobold. At one point I even needed to use a health potion on her so she the wound a scar.
Olivia Lane
[Global LVL: 23 XP: 7,954/ 8,850]
[Class: Samurai LVL: 23/50 XP: 7,954/ 8,750]
[Titles: None] | Race: [Human] | Tier: 1]
[WP: 48] [UC: 2,048.71] [HS: Healthy]
Stamina: 70 (7.00/m) > 434 (43.40/m)
Mana: 0 (0.00/s) > 231 (0.18/s)
STR: 3 > 6
VIT: 10 > 14
DEX: 7 > 30
AGI: 8 > 31
PER: 8 >29
INT: 9
WIS: 7 >28
CHAR: 10
LUCK: 7 >29
P. Res: 0
M. Res: 0
Skills:
Defence:
[Soul Resonance] *[Dodge 1>5] *[Pain Tolerance 1>2] *[Counter 1>4] *[Mental Wall 1>5]
Offence:
[Small Blade Mastery 2] [Large Blade Mastery 3>13]
Misc.:
*[Cooking 1>2]
We exited the dungeon at 19:00 and were written up by the guards. Seemed like the Guild kept track of who goes in and when they come out. Probably, to log if the adventurer went missing, at the same time it could be used by dark familias, with connections, to track an adventurer's whereabouts.
Considering we were fighting for almost 10 hours straight, we were a bit tired but relatively clean, well I was, Olivia had a few smudges of green and blue blood on herself and her hair was a mess. Still, we went to the Guildhall, to the exchange counters, and stood in line. The one thing I love about my inventory, especially now that it can stack items, is how easy transporting heavy stuff is. Our first dungeon dive netted us 223 low-tier Magical Stones and after waiting for 15 minutes in the exchange line, we sold them together with all of our drop items for 72.900 Valis, or around 116 Dollars. Which was a really good sum for 10 hours of work.
Happy with our gains we went home and washed up. That's when I got smacked for not telling Olivia how her hair looked. I just laughed and apparently "You looked cute" was not the correct reply, because it gained me another smack, and her an apology and a promise that next time I will tell her, or else I would be sleeping on the sofa for a month. Yep, I'm weak to the sofa treatment, I love sleeping next to my life-sized warm and squishy hug pillow.
"Wanna go out for a walk and maybe get dinner somewhere?" I ask Olivia after she exited the bath.
"Sure, want to call Hestia, too?" I reluctantly had to agree. We dress up and go downstairs,
"Hestia!" I call out to the goddess who's lazing in her own room. "Were heading out, wanna join?" There was no response, only a quick door opening, then shutting and the tapping of the feet could be heard. The little goddess almost jumped from the top of the stairs and tackled me. I moved out of the way but caught her with my hand just before she hit the floor.
"Why did you move out of the way!" she yells at me after she straightens her dress and fixes her hair.
"I didn't want to get hit with a goddess bullet. Plus, I'm not sure how Olivia will react to me getting so much affection from another girl." Olivia looked at us with her pursed lips, her eyes were a bit squinted, and she looked annoyed. She moved to my side and hugged my left arm pressing it tightly to her bosom, marking her territory.
'Territorial Olive is cute.'
So after our little skit, the atmosphere quickly got better and we started discussing where to eat. Hestia was adamant about going to the Hostess of Fertility, but both me and Olive were against it. We didn't tell her about Freya, but we did say that to our knowledge, that place was overpriced. So with that talk done, we headed straight towards a smaller, but still well-known establishment called "The Tipsy Fairy".
"Greeting my name is Anna and I will be your waitress tonight." Said the cat-eared waitress girl in a maid outfit. After she sat us down at a free table, she gave us three menus and asked. "Would you like to drink something while you wait for your meal?"
"What are our options?" I ask.
"We have multiple types of Ale, Wine, and Juice. You can find it all on the first page of the menu." She said pointing towards the menu she just gave us. After looking through it, we all ordered wine, steak with a side of vegetables, and potatoes. After our waitress left I turned towards Olive and whispered into her ear.
"I would love to see you in one of those outfits." Moving back, I give her a little wink, while she blushed lightly.
During the meal, Hestia asked us about our day and how our dungeon dive went. I retold her the happenings, only leaving out the dangerous parts where I had to step in to save Olivia. After a few drinks, the goddess started to get drunk, so we decided to call it a night and went home. On our way home the loli fainted from all of the drinks she had and I had to carry the knocked-out goddess over my shoulder. It must have been a sight because I was receiving quite a few glances from people. After arriving home and placing her into her own bed, I went to our room only to find a naked cat girl laying on my bed. Raising an eyebrow, I quickly noticed Olive under those cat ears and my face was plastered with a wide smile.
"Purr" says the kitten.
After the purr, I couldn't hold myself back anymore and quickly closed the door and jumped into the bed. That night loud purring and moaning could be heard from our room, but the knocked-out goddess never knew about it.