"So what would happen if you were using Aura and I was in the area of effect, then my arm got cut off? Does it… cut your arm off instead of mine? Would I lose my arm but not feel any pain?"
"What makes you think I have any idea what the answer to that would be if I didn't know that my vision would return?" Astrid groaned as she responded. "Don't go doing anything stupid, by the way. I don't think I'm currently willing to try something like that out for you."
"I wasn't about to get my arm chopped off just for fun," Benedict protested. "I can be impulsive, but I'm not a bleeding moron… hey! I see that face, Skandr, and I want you to know that I disapprove of it."
The Storm Wizard chuckled as he turned his attention back to his meal. Astrid was fairly certain that the entire party was taking something of a perverse amount of pleasure from eating grilled flame spitter tail. The monsters had given Astrid enough of a hard time that there might have been some strange relish displayed in spitting the flesh over a flame and, in an ironic turn of events, cooking the beasts.
"Are we going to rest now," Muti asked, "or will we push through the twenty-sixth floor?"
"I think we push through," Astrid replied, looking at the rest of the party, "and then count that as our final day of pushing through two floors, barring circumstances that allow us to go further and faster."
"This next floor—it's harpies, right? Hunting in pairs, wind magic, things like that?" Felix asked as he looked at Astrid for a confirmation.
Astrid nodded as she said, "And I don't want to underestimate another magical monster, given what happened to me this time. Might be worth it to slow our approach, though."
The other Humans in the party slowed and nodded, but Muti replied, "Challenges are meant to be confronted. If they are not, then one does not grow."
Astrid grumbled wordlessly to herself as she scratched the edge of her jaw. The point that Muti was making was one that Astrid herself had agreed with not too long ago, and was she now letting fear dictate the way that she acted? Or was it prudence? Her responsibility, as the party leader, was to make sure that the party was progressing steadily to a greater future than their present. Did the party need rest? Or did the party need to push themselves towards greater challenges?
Perhaps a better way to phrase the question was if she herself needed the emotional respite of rest, or if she needed to push herself harder. After all, the rest of the party had largely been fine through the ordeal that had taken Astrid's vision, however brief her suffering was. So could she honestly evaluate her own mental state?
"Let's go, then," Astrid decided. "Skandr, more than anything, you'll be assigned to keep them on the ground. I don't care what it takes, we have plenty of draughts to keep your general mana recovery up, so don't worry if you use a couple to make sure that you're ready for each fight. This will probably be the first floor where we really feel any discomfort from Muti being a melee fighter instead of a ranged one.."
"I am more than competent in the throwing of knives. You know this." Muti kept her face collected as she protested Astrid's statement.
"And you know that knife throwing is never going to be as accurate and deadly from a great distance as a bow or a crossbow," Astrid shot back. "I'm going to be throwing stones as best as I can, but I'm not a ranged attacker either, so we'll need to focus on Felix using Guardian's Wrath and Skandr using wind or lightning to get the monsters at a range where we can deal with them. Even Benedict can't do much to the harpies if they decide to hover fifty meters above us and throw blades of wind down."
"Guardian's Wrath will help somewhat," Felix grunted, as he stood up and gathered his cot into his spatial pouch. "But the range of it is only fifteen meters, so if we can't get them down here in the first place, it'll be nearly impossible to keep them down without Skandr using a ton of mana."
"We can jump on them. Creatures that fly cannot support large things and continue to fly." Muti's suggestion was simple, but made sense.
"That's an option," Astrid hedged, "but it's isn't the best one. After all, we can't fly, and if we miss, we're wide open targets for the monsters."
"Do we, then, want to just push through more quickly and focus less on gaining levels?" Benedict jumped back in. "As it is, our attributes are pretty consistent with the monsters we're facing, at least overall. The flame spitters weren't particularly hardy, but they had some serious magical power tied up in there as well. We won't be outclassed any time soon."
"Yes, and the harpies are going to be even more well-rounded than the flame spitters," Skandr nodded along. "They have higher Alacrity at a sacrifice of lower Magical Potency. Plus, sometimes they pick people up and drop them from high up, so their Power won't be too low either. More of an all rounder type of monster than the flame splitters."
"Then we push on." Muti repeated. The conversation continued for a short while, but the decision was effectively already made. Only planning of how to approach the floor remained, but no plan could survive contact with the enemy.
***
The first harpies that the party fought were, blessedly, unable to ambush the party. They tried, but Muti caught sight of them as they darted forward towards the party. From about fifteen meters above, the two monsters that looked like a human woman with wings instead of arms and taloned feet instead of legs, began their attack. They whipped slicing winds down at the party, slicing at whatever was within range. They tried to avoid Skandr's pet storm above him, to limited success.
They split up to circle around the cloud, obviously able to tell the danger that it posed, but the spell extended almost like a snake to wrap around the monsters' wings and drive them down. As they tumbled through the air, Felix grounded himself and activated Guardian's Wrath. Both harpies, though they fought to stabilize their flight and attempt to escape, were forced to turn their attention towards him instead of the skies. They flapped their wings heavily, hovering in place as they sent flurries of razor sharp winds at the Guardian.
Astrid could hear the clanking of Felix's armor as it caught and dissipated the strikes. He tried his best to avoid most of the blades, but they were so many, so fast, and so long, that he was forced to withstand a rain of blows that made his armor ring like a bell. For the first time, Astrid watched the secondary effect of Felix's armor truly display itself.
Astrid hadn't thought deeply about different types of metals before she received her Class. After all, she'd planned on her armor being one of the many leather armors that existed, and didn't think deeply about the material of whatever blade she used. The majority of magifighter Classes, with the exception of Rune Fighters and other heavy armored Classes, thrived most with leather armor. She hadn't known much about dusksteel, but Felix's armor puffed smoke whenever it was struck, reminding Astrid of how much she didn't know. That smoke was the metal itself becoming gas to disperse the force of the blow, and Felix's frame was quickly obscured by the dark gray smoke that refused to dissipate in the fierce winds. Between its troll hide underlayment and its nature, the armor continued to reincorporate itself over him as the attacks continued to fall.
The harpies remained at least seven meters in the air, far out of reach for Astrid's hammer, and she grabbed several stones in her fist and threw them with a power that surprised her. She knew that Blunt Weapon's Mastery, now Iron tier and rolled into her equipment Skill, also applied to stones she threw, but it had been long enough without her attempting to throw a stone as a weapon that she'd forgotten the sound they made as they smashed into bone. Also, somehow, the aspect of Blunt Weapon's Mastery that was rolled into her equipment Skill helped every throw to be painfully accurate. With three throws, Astrid managed to cripple one of the harpies, sending it careening to the ground in a whirling flurry of feathers. When it hit the ground, its face twisted up in a rage, baring long, needle–sharp teeth as Astrid closed in. There was nothing the monster could do to her, though, and she smashed her shield into its face and forced it to twist its body or have its neck snapped.
Knowing that the beast was largely stunned after the hit, Astrid twisted with her whole body and nearly decapitated the harpy with the strike of her hammer into the base of its skull. The kill notification showed her that the monster was level 28, but the party hadn't had any issues with it. Now there was just the other to deal with…
As the thought crossed her mind, Muti jumped five meters into the air to tackle the remaining monster. The second airborne beast fell to the ground in a smoldering bundle of feathers as Muti howled and plunged her sword deep into its breast. Skandr's pocket cloud had apparently pushed the beast near enough to the ground to allow Muti, with her attributes as well as her boots assistance with jumping, to pull it out of the sky. She rolled away from the ferocious creature, and Felix strode forward like a headsman. With a single swing of his axe, the beast was dead.
Gust Harpy slain. 1440 experience gained, split among a party.
A level 29, then. Astrid picked up a couple perfectly sized stones and slipped them into her spatial pouch as she considered what she had done with these rocks. After all, as a child, her original plan had been to be a Spellblade, and if she were a level 25 Spellblade, she would have plenty of magical Skills that would be able to deal with flying monsters. She could be like her mother, who specialized in flame and wind, with a single healing Skill. Or, she could have specialized in stones, conjuring and throwing them like missiles.
She certainly wouldn't have followed the path that she was on now, were she a Spellblade. An Immortal Warrior? It made sense for a Warrior to become nearly unkillable. A Spellblade, however, would become faster, more deadly, not gaining an indestructible body. And what kind of armor would she be wearing? Would she have progressed more quickly than she had until now? Would she have been in the Trials at all?
After all, magifighters were Classes that were well rounded instead of focused on a few particular attributes. Astrid couldn't help but think of what her attribute distribution would look like right now if she had been a Spellblade. Would she have been able to do everything that she had to qualify for her boon and evolution? After all, she was self-aware enough to now, two years later, recognize that she hadn't put in very good practice for being a Spellblade, largely neglecting the magical aspects in training. Could she have qualified for Quick Recovery as a Spellblade? Or was that a Skill that was incompatible with the Class? After all, Spellblades were quick, powerful killers, not nearly so hardy and tough as Warriors.
With a grunt, Astrid stopped thinking quite so much about what could have been, and instead focused on what was. She cut the first four feathers on the harpy's left wing free, along with the flesh underneath. These were, apparently, the most valuable feathers on the monster, as well as the trophy for turning into the Guild for payment. A brief thought crossed her mind about why the Guild was paying for these trophies when the extermination of the monsters in the Trials wasn't going to serve the same purpose as those in Dungeon branches in human lands, but she decided against thinking about it.
"Skandr," Astrid called out, "what do you think? Should we focus on killing these? Or is it going to put us at too much of a risk to keep you spending your mana the way that you did for this fight?"
"Let's not avoid any fights," he answered after a moment's thought, "But let's not look for any either. I should be fine through the floor, but the experience return isn't worth the mana spend when we're in the middle of the Dungeon. It's too dangerous, and I really don't want to come across one of the higher level, exceptional individuals while we're in recovery from another fight."
Astrid nodded and gestured for the party to continue on the path towards the floor guardian. Muti, as always, could sense the flow of mana well enough to guide the party pretty directly to where they needed to go. Until then, Astrid's job was to throw stones. And that wasn't too bad of a job.
***
"Is the next floor that has a lot of flying enemies the thirty–fifth?" Benedict asked the question with a groan of displeasure. He looked at Astrid with hope in his face as she cut the feathers from the dead body of the floor's guardian. The harpy matriarch had been particularly frustrating to fight, as her arena had allowed her to swoop high above and continue to dodge Skandr's attempts at grounding her. Her death had finally come when, after being forced to come down to maybe ten meters, Muti and Astrid had exchanged a look. Without a word, Astrid prepared herself and, with Power-aligned mana flowing down her arms and legs, threw Muti into the air.
As it turned out, a whirling, enraged Barbarian with two swords could put a damper on the strafing attempts of a harpy. A painful, bloody damper.
"I wish," Astrid answered, feeling much the same as Benedict did. "The next floor is full of enemies that can fly, though they apparently prefer to run most of the time. Then, it's the twenty–ninth floor, and, worse still, that'll probably be the best experience farming floor for quite a while."
"The twenty–ninth, so… lesser vampires?" Felix clarified. "Aren't they… kind of person–like?"
"No." Muti replied. "Lesser vampires are closer to bats than to people, if you're looking at them. They fly in swarms, overwhelming with numbers more than anything. They will attempt to latch on and use their blood magic to drain our strength."
"Maybe I should pay attention when Astrid's talking about what's happening on the floors that are coming…" Benedict mused as he stripped off his armor and put it into his spatial pouch. "But I really don't think that you said anything about what these monsters are like, right? Just that they're not as dangerous as their true counterparts. Right?"
"Yes," Skandr answered in Astrid's place, "but I think everybody kind of assumed that you were going to ask questions about things you didn't know."
Benedict didn't say anything, but moved his hand in a mocking approximation of a mouth moving. Even before he finished the movement, he sighed and shook his head. "My bad. There's really no reason for me to be so grumpy with you. So, they'll try to swarm us. Got it. And they use blood magic, so are they undead? Astrid, is Spectre Burst going to strengthen them?"
"That'll be one of the first questions we need to ask and get answered on that floor. However, before that, we have the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth floors, which will be hard enough to require planning here, " Astrid replied. "We should probably focus on them for now. The twenty–seventh and eighth floors are lesser manticores, which will be the first time in a while that we all need to work together to kill the monsters. According to the brief, they're anywhere from level 27 to 31, so most will have the additional Skill Chilling Gaze. Usually, we would have Felix in the front, dealing with the heads, but I think it'll be better to have you in the back to deal with the tail."
He nodded in understanding before asking, "To chop off the tail?"
"Yes," Astrid confirmed. "I can probably crush the tail's head and keep it from stabbing any of us, but cutting through chitin will probably be better to make sure nobody gets poisoned. With Guardian's Wrath, you can get past the tail's most effective stinging range and chop it off right next to the body without too much issue, so long as I'm keeping its attention in the front."
"Would it not be more efficient for myself to take the position of cutting off the scorpion's tail?" Muti asked. " I am faster and can hide from the monster's awareness to strike the crippling blow."
"If I'm wrong, correct me," Astrid replied, "but I'd prefer that Felix, who has a higher Fortitude, as well as armor focused on being a frontliner, be the one approaching the back of the manticores. Just as you did with the harpies, I'd prefer if you deal damage and take it out of the sky if it tries to escape. You only did it a few times, and I appreciate you showing restraint when you could have secured kills faster by fighting more riskily. The manticores are solitary hunters, so we won't have to worry about getting pulled out of the sky if we come up to them."
Muti nodded once. "Then I shall do as you command."
The rest of the party continued their discussions, leaving behind the dead body of the harpy matriarch and setting up camp in the passage between the twenty–sixth and twenty–seventh floors. Astrid found sleep evading her, and spent much of the night questioning her confidence in rushing forward so quickly. Was she leading her allies to dismemberment? Or even death?