In the morning, I woke up, exited my room, and promptly bumped into Ina. She blushed awkwardly when we locked eyes.
“G-Good morning,” she said.
“Morning. Did you stay overnight?”
“Yep. At first, I planned to commute, buuut…” Ina looked around down the hallway─no─at the mansion as a whole. “It’s so bright, warm, and comfy here that I couldn’t help myself. It’s like there’s a spell making it so I can’t leave.”
“RIGHT?!”
My loud agreement startled her.
“Whoa!”
“It’s all thanks to Emily. That comfort, that warmth that gets you addicted to living here, it’s all her!”
“Huh.” We walked down the hall and chatted. Along the way, she asked, “By the way, do you think the rumors are true?”
“What rumors?”
“They say she cleaned Tellurium up and napped with slimes.”
“It’s true. Saw it with my own eyes.” I saw that a long time ago, when I’d picked her up from the dungeon.
After she’d cleaned up the dungeon to be as warm, bright, and holy as this very mansion, she’d gotten tired and took a nap there. I saw with my own two eyes how slimes had gathered around and joined her.
I remember thinking that she was the real dungeon master that day. She ruled the place.
Ina sighed. “That’s just amazing.”
“Isn’t it? People like to say that about me, but really, she’s the most amazing person in this Family.”
“I get it. Your amazing performance is all thanks to you having this home to come back to, right?”
“You get it!” I was excited.
Ina agreed, stopped, and then fully turned to face me.
“So it looks like I live here now. Thank you for having me,” she said and bowed once more.
Thus, Ina came to live in our mansion.
☆
On B9 of Nihonium, I used every measure I could think of to optimize my zombie dragon strategy.
“It’s just not working…”
I could guarantee a kill in two attacks using the method I’d devised early on, with the eternal flame round. Incidentally, said flame would serve as a sustained damage source as long as I wanted, but just guiding a zombie dragon toward it would reduce the counter by two.
It didn’t seem to just be counting the number of times you attacked the monster, but rather, the number of attacks involved altogether, so eternal flame rounds just wouldn’t work against ones with a count of 1.
This is one hell of a problem, I thought to myself.
A new zombie dragon appeared before me. The number over its head was a new one: 99.
“Wait…ninety-nine?”
All of the ones so far had been 1 to 5. I’d been doing this for a few days, and I’d killed hundreds by now, and this was the first time I’d seen an exception. It was clearly less than a 1% chance. And that meant…
“It’s a rare.” I could practically feel the glint in my eye.
I readied my guns and fired a few normal bullets to fend it off. The counter went down for each shot. Then, I lured it into attacking. It bit down, swung its tail, clawed at me with its forelegs, and spat miasma to make things harder for me.
I knew all of these attacks. It was the same style as any other zombie dragon.
“Is it just the same as others? Repetition.” I cast Repetition to confirm, and the zombie dragon died. The fact that I could kill it with Repetition meant that it had to be a normal zombie dragon.
The counter was different, yes, but it was otherwise the same─
And here I was proven wrong─a staircase appeared. Instantly after the zombie dragon vanished, instead of dropping a dexterity seed, it had dropped a staircase leading down.
“It’s finally time…”
I’d expected it to take longer, but the time came sooner than I thought.
I took a deep breath and went down.
A white chamber, as usual. This was the last room before the spirit.
There was a giant block there. Or more precisely, a structure. It was like a giant, fifteen-square-foot, six-sided die. But it was made out of something…gross: pulsating flesh.
The block was like those dungeons in video games that were modeled after the inside of a living thing, with internal organs and the like.
But it was rotting, like the rotting flesh and muscles of a zombie. The message was clear: it was just like the rest of Nihonium. I had to destroy it.
I fired a preemptive attack, fusing flame and freeze rounds into an annihilation round.
It struck, but nothing happened. The giant hunk of flesh was unwounded. I tried all kinds of attacks, even getting in close to punch, kick, and push it.
Yet nothing worked.
I didn’t think I could destroy it no matter what I did. It remained fully unwounded, pulsating irregularly.
Something felt wrong. It was unlike other monsters before. I knew instinctively that fighting conventionally would get me nowhere, so I circled around to the other side, and there I saw a status board.
“…”
Warily, I approached and operated it.
The usual screen showing my current stats appeared.
After that, the board glowed.
HP - SS
The top value lit up first. In response, the flesh cracked.
MP - SS
The second value lit up, and the block began to glow.
Stats lit up one after another, gradually destroying the thing.
However…
Dexterity - E
When it got to dexterity, that evidently tripped things up. The light there was weaker than any other, and it didn’t crack the flesh heap; in fact, the flesh and status board both disappeared.
I was in an empty chamber once more.
“I see.”
Other dungeons had plenty of different tricks and gimmicks in these chambers, but this seemed to be one of the simpler ones among them.
Mirror, magatama, sword. The three of them unlocked SS-rank stats, and the one that I had not raised to SS was clearly the issue.
All I needed to do was raise my dexterity to SS. That much was clear.
“Let’s do this.”
I turned around and went back up the stairs to B9.