I sat cross-legged in the mansion’s basement and gazed at my new bullet. Given the effect, I decided to call it the force-drop round. Or drop round, for brevity’s sake. When fired, any monster it hit would drop an S-rank drop’s worth of stuff.
Whether it killed or not, one bullet would yield one S-rank drop. It worked the same on every enemy, but I believed that its true value lay in being used on rare monsters.
I took the rusty keys out of my pocket. In total, I had gotten seven from Prince Ryo today─six from the drop rounds and one from finishing him off.
He appeared often, though, so I wasn’t that excited about having seven.
Say for example, though, the Bicorn appeared at Selenium. If I took a hundred drop rounds─by no means a difficult number to obtain─I could get a hundred Bicorn horns in no time. In this way, I considered them stronger when used against monsters that appeared more rarely.
Now that I knew its properties, I had also figured out how I’d use them in the future.
A part of me wondered if there was more to them, but for now, I left that aside, turned the seven rusty keys into outsiders to make them golden keys, and left the basement.
It was evening now. My friends would be coming home soon. I’d decided to give them each a key to the chamber.
Suddenly, I heard cheerful humming from afar. Upon investigation, I found Emily had gone into the kitchen.
“Oh…” I let a sound slip.
“Ah, welcome home!” Emily turned to me. She might be as small as a child, but she looked so very warm and divine when she was in the kitchen with her apron, backed by the setting sun. We’d lived together for over a year now, but I was still taken by the sight of her.
“Yoda, is something wrong?”
“Huh? Oh, no, uh…” I thought for a moment and blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “You’re really good with a knife, huh?”
“Thank you.” She smiled happily and looked forward again. Her knife danced on the cutting board again, cutting cabbage into thin strips.
I watched again. Another compliment naturally came out, “A downright master.”
Her chopping was as smooth as could be. It didn’t look fast at a glance, but cabbage strips came off one after another and piled up in the bowl next to the board. It reminded me of a sword as still and calm as water, like in fighting manga.
With masterful movements, she continued to slice it.
“Thanks for always making food for everyone.”
“I just love cooking.”
“Heh. Thanks anyway,” I repeated.
Emily giggled to herself and started preparing potatoes.
“Potatoes, huh?” I asked her.
“Yes. They’re freshly picked.”
“Does that mean you got them yourself?” I recalled breakfast.
✦ ✦ ✦
I wouldn’t call it reporting exactly, but before we all left for work in the mornings, we typically announced where we were going each day. Nobody had mentioned going to a potato-producing floor.
“That’s right. I got potatoes for everyone from the slime families.” After saying that, she smiled nervously. “I need to get a little stronger. If more people join the Family, the slime families will get a little too strong for me to get enough potatoes.”
“Ah, right, that’s how they are.”
Slime families lived on B6 of Tellurium. They’re called families, but each family is a single monster. The more of the “children” you defeat, the more drops you get from the “adult.” But in return, the adult becomes much stronger defensively.
The main thing to know about farming on that floor is how many kids you can kill before you go for the adult.
“…Hm?”
“Yoda, what’s up?”
“…”
“Yoda?” Emily cocked her head and looked at me.
I didn’t have time to reply; a flash of inspiration had lit up my mind. As soon as the image came together, I whipped around and ran off.
“Yoda?!”
I ran through the halls to the warp room, leaving her in my dust. I then activated the warp gate and designated B6 of Tellurium.
I pushed my magic cart, which I kept in this room, since I could go to any dungeon from here, through the swirl of light. In no time, I was on that floor.
Many adventurers and slime families were here. Among them, I picked out a slime family and went into battle.
First, I fired off growth rounds to kill all the children and maximize the adult’s drops. Next, I used a restraining round at the parent─its defensive stats were akin to S-rank now, though its other stats remained the same. I then pushed my magic cart over next to it, pressed my guns against the slime, and fired repeatedly at point-blank range.
I was alternating drop rounds and recovery rounds.
Every drop round generated the maximum number of potatoes without killing it. S-rank drops plus a maximum-power slime family made for a massive number of potatoes, which went into the magic cart and to the mansion’s branch office. I then fired the recovery round, which healed off the minor damage it had sustained from the drop round.
With another drop round, I’d made another mountain of potatoes in no time.
Again, they were warped to the mansion. Again, a recovery round. I continued alternating, sending ungodly quantities of potatoes to the mansion. I’d estimate that I was making tens of pounds of potatoes in just a few seconds.
I always tried to think of new and novel methods instead of mentally slacking off, so this had come to me in no time. My excitement grew, and so too did my pace.
“Yoda! Wait a second!”
Emily suddenly appeared and stopped me. She was still wearing her apron; she must’ve followed me from the kitchen.
“Emily? What’s wrong?”
“You’re going so fast that Erza’s burning out!”
“Oh…” I imagined what was going on in her office and laughed.
It seemed I was going so fast that I’d exceeded the processing speed of our poor dedicated drop manager. This was the first time that had happened, so I was happy with my idea.