Estelle suddenly fell silent and stared down at her food. It was easy to guess what she had been about to say, but I couldn’t just ask her if she wanted to move to a room for two at a different inn. Sure, I get it’s a little wimpy, but from my point of view, sharing a room at an inn is basically the same as living together as a couple! There’s no way a normal high school boy could suggest something like that to a girl he hadn’t even confessed to! Only a real womanizer could pull that off casually! I considered myself a man of integrity, so I just played dumb and nonchalantly grabbed a cup of wine.
“F-For now, l-let’s toast!” I said.
“S-Sure,” said Estelle.
Oh, uh, I guess both of us are flustered. I took a couple of deep breaths to calm myself down before speaking up again.
“Okay. To our first successful dungeon expedition.”
“Cheers. To our continued adventures together.”
Estelle and I raised our cups of wine, then gently clinked them together.
★★★★★★★★★
We fought our way past the goblins on the tenth and eleventh floor with relative ease. From the twelfth floor onward, the most common monsters were howling wolves and grotto wolves. The latter were somewhat smaller, but both varieties had blackish fur, so in the darkness of the dungeon, raiding parties—usually a bunch of grotto wolves led by a howling wolf—were hard to deal with.
We’d already cleared this floor back when we were trapped in the dungeon, though, so we knew how to deal with the wolves. Their fur was valuable and easy to transport, and the magicites of the howling wolves were worth about two gold apiece. Just in case the guild’s investigation didn’t turn up the room we’d found, we spent some time hunting wolves as a backup source of income. After two days of that, we arrived at the area outside the boss room.
“I’m kind of curious about what your blessing might cause this time, Sai,” said Estelle.
“Nah, there’s no way it’ll trigger again. I bet we’ll just end up facing off against a normal reptila.”
Still, I was a little nervous as I opened the door to peek inside. All I saw was an empty room, though.
“...Did my blessing spawn a different kind of monster?”
Specifically, I was concerned about some kind of slime or spider, so I took another look around just in case, but Estelle gave me a pat on the shoulder and pulled me back, then swung the door wide.
“If there’s nothing inside, I imagine it’s because the boss has yet to respawn,” she said.
Estelle illuminated the boss room with her lantern, but the light failed to reveal any traces of monsters anywhere, including on the ceiling and the walls.
“Yeah, I guess there really is nothing,” I said. “Is stuff like this common?”
“Well, bosses don’t respawn for a while after they’re slain. That much is nothing unusual,” said Estelle. “And there may not be many opportunities to defeat this boss—if there are any adventurers who primarily work between the sixteenth and twentieth floors, they probably slay it routinely.”
“Does that mean we just had bad luck last time?”
“Maybe, but there’s also the possibility that the boss simply hasn’t respawned since the last time we cleared this floor.”
Well, I have no idea what the usual respawn rate is for bosses, but it’s only been a little over a month since we were trapped in the dungeon. If the rate scales with a boss’s strength, I guess it’s possible that it could take multiple months for one to respawn.
“Wait a second, Estelle. In that case, what about the boss room on the twentieth floor? Won’t it be really bad for us if that room is empty by the time we get there?”
Even if we managed to reach the boss room before our opponents, there would be no point if it was empty, and if the respawn rate stretched out into weeks, we couldn’t just camp out in front of the boss room waiting for it. Whether or not we got the chance to fight it when it did finally respawn would come down to chance. If the respawn rate was a few months, that would be plenty of time for Broze and his servant to return, so depending on the timing, they might be in the ideal position to challenge and beat the boss before us.
But when I explained my concerns, Estelle just smiled like she was trying to put me at ease. “I don’t think there’s any need to worry about that as long as no other adventurers are purposely trying to hinder us. In addition, the guild has set up a teleportation device on the twenty-first floor of the dungeon, so high-rank adventurers simply skip all the way to the twenty-first floor, and low-rank adventurers only explore up to the eighth.”
According to Estelle, the monsters that adventurers could encounter from the ninth to the twentieth floors of the dungeon weren’t really the most efficient sources of income. A lot of them were pretty valuable individually, but the deeper you went into the dungeon, the farther you got from the city above, so it became more and more challenging to haul materials back—especially things like meat that could spoil.
Magic bags solved a lot of those problems, but most of the adventurers who had magic bags were higher in rank and made their money exploring the floors after the twenty-first. As a result, low-rank adventurers who were content just making a living stuck to the floors closer to the surface. Only the adventurers who wanted to get stronger and eventually tackle the twenty-first floor went beyond the ninth.
“Essentially, adventurer parties who want to explore the dungeon beyond the twenty-first floor are the only ones who challenge the boss of the twentieth floor,” said Estelle. “Large groups of stronger goblin variants aren’t worth much relative to the effort required to slay them, so few adventurers go out of their way to take them on multiple times. That’s one of the reasons I chose defeating the boss of the twentieth floor as a victory condition.”
“Oh, okay. I guess you planned everything out thoroughly.”
“Of course. This is a match that I absolutely can’t afford to lose, so I discussed the details with Elvira-san in advance in order to make sure we can achieve victory without cheating. That said, please don’t let your guard down.”
“Yeah, got it. I could never forgive myself if we lost due to complacency, so you can count on me.”
“I’m glad to hear that. Thank you for working so hard to help me, Sai.”