The Butcher of the Third Floor

Kieek!? The vampire bat twisted in midair, already turning to flee, then jerked to a halt as if something had snagged it — and the spearhead streaking in ran it clean through.

It hit the cave floor with a thud. All around the body, corpses of its own kind lay strewn in heaps.

"Done."

Stumbling on a cave packed with vampire bats on the sixth day had been nothing short of luck. Even with every spirit's senses open, I could tell nothing larger than a rat was left alive in here. All I could see was the single blue portal that had opened earlier — back when I'd cut down ten of them, and the message came that the ordinary quest was finished — and, now, this.

Another blue portal bloomed into being. Just like that, two exits stood in the same place.

"Hsss."

Needless to say, I had no intention of stepping through either of them. ...Better to dress the kills here, right? The most important work was still waiting.

The thought had barely formed before I touched my belt and hauled out everything stored inside. Thud after thud, carcasses spilled across the cave until they choked it — army ants the size of a forearm and jungle slimes the size of a human head, the grim haul of the last ten days, and with them the twelve thornvine snakes, each a full five meters long.

And here I'd thought the thornvine snakes would be the hardest quota to fill. They even had an innate stealth, but to me now they were easy prey: sit quiet, then end them in one stroke. The longspear from Edelin — Attack +9 — needed no windup at all. A plain thrust punched clean through an unwary snake's head. Those giants, five meters and more, had actually been the simple hunt.

The army ants, of all things, had been the hard part. I wasn't about to repeat my mistake from the first floor, so instead of razing a single nest I went looking for more than twenty of them. That was what ate the time.

I shuddered, turning the miserable stretch over once, then set my eyes back on the largest snake. It's finished either way. Time to butcher. Thornvine snake hide went into stealth gear, and the venom fangs into neurotoxin weapons. The hide was worth far more. All right. Let's get started.

Schlick. Schlick. The butchering knife I'd set aside beforehand parted hide from fang without a hitch. The instant I committed to the work and triggered the trait, a clear map surfaced of exactly how to take them off clean. Back in Korea, a snake a meter long would've sent me running. This savage world — the slaughterhouse, more than anything — had made me far too easy with blood and corpses.

Shhk. Shhk. A rip.

Twelve thornvine snakes later, I had a considerable pile of hide. Hmm. Looks like I got every bit of it off clean... For a moment I wondered whether synthesis was even worth the trouble, then immediately thought better of it. Right now, knowing precisely what the Goblin Basket could do mattered more. Let's try it.

Fangs first. There were only twenty-four of them, small enough that the whole lot would fit in the Goblin Basket at once. And if I dump something actually useful in all together...?

A flash. A moment later—

"...Oh!?"

Twenty-four venom fangs, each about a handspan long, had become a single fang the length of my forearm.

"Nice!" Even at a glance, the glossy fang looked like it sat near the top of high-grade materials. Ten seemed to spike the quality hard. So twenty changes the grade itself? Holding four back would have confirmed it. Whatever. The quality ought to be that much better for it. That was the feeling, anyway. Even if I was wrong, the gap wouldn't be huge, and I still had other materials to test. Now the hide.

Schlick. Schlick. The hides were sizable, so I cut them down to fit a Goblin Basket no bigger than a small watermelon. Twelve snake skins became a little over a hundred pieces, and I fed them in one after another.

Flash. Flash. This time I synthesized them two at a time across ten rounds, then took those results and synthesized them again, some apart and some together. I synthesized the synthesized hides once more, and checked.

"Knew it. I was right!"

Ten brought a dramatic jump in quality. Twenty raised the grade itself. Two at a time or all at once, the result was the same. And so the hundred-odd pieces of thornvine snake hide became five pieces of elite thornvine snake hide. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Needless to say, the latter was worth far more. I considered cutting them smaller still, to push the quality higher, then let it go. What would I even do with hide that small? I've got the principle well enough. Experiment or not, I didn't want to ruin goods that had finally started looking respectable.

There'd been an unexpected gain along the way. The more I synthesize, the faster it gets. It wasn't my imagination. I'm sure that even stones took a good ten seconds at the start. Now ordinary junk flashed the moment it went in. Is the basket evolving too? The thought almost made me laugh, but either way, it was good for me.

So what's left... Something like a hundred and several dozen vampire bat carcasses, more than a thousand army ants, and jungle slimes beyond even that.

"Ha..."

Daunting, yes. But the junk drops off third-floor monsters sold extremely well, and with numbers like these, once I ran them through synthesis again and again—

"...Let's make a killing!"

I pumped myself up and threw myself into the work. Schlick, schlick. A long rip. Shhk, shhk.

"Huh?"

An unexpected chime made me pause mid-cut. Does a skill evolve this easily? Even a life skill? It was a little absurd, but good was good. From then on, the butchering was unmistakably faster, and the parts I'd stripped soon stacked into small piles beside me.

The byproducts of the army ants and the vampire bats sorted themselves out piece by piece. What came off the jungle slimes was a little stranger. Calling this butchering feels off. Less butchering than sorting the clumps they melted into the moment I killed them.

Junk that could only be measured by volume or weight. Still, it was perfect for testing synthesis — honestly, this was the part I was more curious about. Let's start with these. I didn't honestly expect much. The Goblin Basket was full of gaps. Powder or liquid had no business staying in it...

Glug, glug.

"...It holds!?"

As if some formless membrane stretched across the weave, the slime jelly I poured from the big water barrel I'd brought didn't leak at all. It sat inside the Goblin Basket. And that wasn't all. Flash, flash — every bit I added gave off a faint light as it synthesized, and so more than five hundred liters of slime jelly poured endlessly into that little basket. The result:

"Whoa! That's insane!" It had jumped three grades in a single go. I had no idea why it wouldn't concentrate any smaller than that. Is a three-grade upgrade the ceiling? Or is there a minimum volume for liquids? I had a way to settle that on the spot. The mana-infused dew.

Glug. I poured the high-grade material the jungle slimes carried in small amounts back into the Goblin Basket. The result was even more astonishing.

"Oh!?"

What was this? It had gone past being a material. The thing itself was, for all practical purposes, a mana potion.

"Holy..."

Did anything that held mana behave differently? Ability Stones were the lowest grade, and even those took forever to synthesize. Materials finish almost at once. What's the difference? Mana seems to affect the synthesis, but... Either way, it was pointing in a good direction, so I wasn't complaining. The volume's about what I expected. Only an extra effect got tacked on. I still couldn't see the ceiling on synthesis grade, but for liquids, concentration seemed to stop somewhere a little under 100 ml. Probably at or above 50 ml, and no higher than 100. The jungle moss powder that followed proved it.

Flash. Flash.

As expected. For liquids and powders, the limit of synthesis seemed to land somewhere between 50 and 100 grams. The small differences I can chalk up to the items themselves. That was enough for now. I moved straight on to the rest.

Flash. Flash.

"...Done!"

I hadn't landed a single jackpot item the way I had on the first and second floors, but I'd stacked up a heap of junk upgraded through synthesis. Satisfying enough that the Perfect Clear felt like a bonus. Let's go. The moment the items were sorted, I set my hand on the exit that had just appeared.

"Return."

A flash. Light flared, and the System's voice followed.

Proof I'd cleared the labyrinth quest. A little annoying that the random stat landed on Stamina. Still, I didn't feel bad about it. I opened my eyes with the rise of the stat still warm in me, satisfied, and there was the wall of Bartus — familiar enough by now to feel almost welcoming. Let's see.

Level and the other skills were unchanged, but Butchery had gone so far as to evolve. Aside from the Stamina the labyrinth had paid out, Mana had risen by one as well, from running the Cheol-woo Training Method in actual combat. And if I counted the items sitting in the spatial pouch on top of that— Good. Just keep going like this. I couldn't help smiling.

"Third floor of the labyrinth... whew, eleven days to come out. Congratulations on your return."

The flicker of disdain that crossed the soldier's face was easy enough to smile through.

"More than ten days on the third floor — I thought something had gone wrong, you brat."

"I told you. I was being careful."

"Careful to that degree is a sickness! Well. You came back in one piece, so fine."

Even Jerik's worried scolding only made me smile.

And then.

"You. Were you late because you were butchering for coin?"

"...Yes. There's a bit of that to it."

I answered him and started to bring the goods out, then stopped cold. I had walked out of the third floor with a mountain of supreme- and high-grade materials. Rare-grade pieces among them, even. Does this make any kind of sense? One astonishing item, like on the first and second floors, could be written off as luck. These could not. They were not materials a Novice could obtain on Floor 3. Anyone with eyes would know it.

"What's the matter?"

"Ah, well..."

How was I supposed to put it? I turned it over, and my eyes met Jerik's — that gaze, warm as ever. The man who had hauled my life up out of hell.

Ha... My conscience prickled at the thought of lying to a benefactor like that. Even so, I knew with perfect clarity that the Goblin Basket was still far too dangerous a thing. So reason and conscience split the difference.

"...I think I gained an ability that randomly improves material items. Maybe because my Butchery level went up. I want to keep that a secret, and I want to move the things I brought out."

"What did you just say!?"

Jerik looked more shocked than I'd expected. No. Was a reaction like this only natural?