I went to the mansion’s basement alone for my next test: the special bullet.
Specifically, I wanted to know what bullet the outsider made by dexterity seeds would drop.
I was certain that it would drop a bullet. Given the rules I’d learned so far, I was 99.99% sure, in fact. The only question was what the bullet would do.
I placed a pouch of dexterity seeds I’d gathered in the corner, backed off, and waited for outsiders to spawn.
By the way, I hadn’t been working much with Leia lately, despite her ability to use Revive. This was one of her ideas; for some reason, she had been going to Selenium’s chamber every day.
Leia Selenium was spirit-blessed, so she had good reason to visit her spirit. Rather, I knew she wouldn’t suggest that without a good reason, so I let her do what she wanted.
As such, I was waiting for outsiders to spawn like the old days.
After the usual amount of time, a zombie dragon outsider had spawned.
“Repetition.”
When farming in dungeons, I thoroughly tested options without slacking off like this, but I always used Repetition to kill things in the mansion’s basement.
My friends lived here. I couldn’t do anything stupid, so I always used the fastest and safest means available.
The zombie dragon outsider died and dropped a new bullet. I approached, picked it up, and inspected it closely.
Its appearance was clearly different from that of my other bullets, but I knew that appearances wouldn’t tell me what it did.
I wouldn’t know until I fired. That was true of all monster drop bullets.
I loaded it into my gun.
To create test targets, I scattered some bean sprouts I’d grabbed in advance. After backing off, I waited again for an outsider. The instant a slime spawned, I aimed and fired my new bullet straight through its center.
The slime was blown away and burst open. Out popped normal bullets.
“Hm? Twice as many?”
There were two bullets on the ground─twice what I normally got.
Just in case, I spawned another slime and shot it with a growth round. It dropped only one bullet.
There was an obvious difference. I’d never gotten two bullets from one slime before today.
Did the zombie dragon’s bullet double drops? At least it was obvious that, unlike acceleration and recovery rounds, this bullet was intended to be shot at the enemy.
For the sake of further testing, I turned my remaining dexterity seeds into outsiders and made them into special bullets.
This time, I used the warp room to go to a dungeon.
B1 of Tellurium was basically my backyard by now. There, alongside a veritable crowd of adventurers, I shot an attacking slime with my new bullet. It dropped bean sprouts─again, twice as many as usual.
Those who had witnessed it spoke up in amazement.
“Whoa. What was that?”
“Can slimes drop that much?”
“Nah. That’s just Ryota being amazing, as usual.”
S-rank drops already dropped lots of bean sprouts, and I’d doubled that. Compared to the average C-rank drops, I had gotten ten times the bean sprouts from one kill. No wonder they were amazed.
I’d tested what I needed to test here.
After that, I returned to the mansion via warp gate and went to several other dungeons I’d been to before. In each one, I defeated a monster with my new bullet.
Veggies, meat, minerals… All kinds of drops had been doubled. Incidentally, in Arsenic─which was always under the drop-doubling lunar eclipse thanks to Emily─my drops were four times the base.
There was no doubt now that this bullet doubled drops. It was weak, by the way. About as strong as a normal bullet. I’d have to weaken enemies with other things and then finish them off with it to double drops.
Hmm… Strong, but kinda meh at the same time, I thought to myself.
But suddenly, the air inside the milk-dropping Plumbum changed. The dungeon master had come.
“Whoa!” I abruptly jumped to the side. A bullet whizzed right by me. Murderous malice instantly drew closer.
While evading, I caught sight of the assailant. It was none other than Prince Ryo, the dungeon master.
He appeared so much more often than other dungeon masters. It happened every few days─more than ten times as frequent.
I evaded the hotter Ryota’s ferocious attacks and reflexively aimed my gun and fired.
“Crap!” I quickly realized my mistake: the new bullet was still loaded into my gun. Given how weak it was, it was far from enough to kill Prince Ryo.
As expected, despite scoring a direct hit, it didn’t deal much damage.
Prince Ryo was alive and well. Worse, he was getting ready for his next attack.
Ugh, what a waste…
Or so I thought.
“Huh? It dropped?!” I was so surprised that I screamed. The moment the bullet struck him, the rusty key had dropped─despite him still being alive. “Wait…”
My brain worked at max speed and uncovered a new hypothesis. Then, I loaded all of my remaining new bullets and fired them at him.
Four of them struck him directly. And then, four more keys dropped. He was still not that badly hurt, so he attacked again. I fended him off and picked up the keys.
“It doesn’t double drops? It just forces a drop… It’s like using Steal?” If that was true, then they were extremely useful. I’d be able to mass-produce drops from rares despite their rarity.