Wetland Zone: Acid from Above
The first Merman lunged with a hideous shriek. “Kreeeek!!” Its eyes gleamed with bloodlust, claws scraping its own throat, but I swung my greatsword without hesitation and carved a diagonal gash across its torso.
Whoosh. Splat!
“Krrk.” The creature coughed out a death rattle, blood spraying from its chest as it toppled backward.
“Kyaaah!” The other Mermen paid their fallen kin no mind. They charged on all fours, jaws snapping. Simple linear attacks like that would never reach me.
Just like the rumors said—ugly as sin. I’ll give them that. They’re worse than goblins.
Their faces were the most grotesque I had seen in the Labyrinth so far. I slammed the flat of my blade into the nearest one’s disgusting snout, then spun the greatsword like a windmill. Flesh split; bodies were cleaved clean in two. I stepped over the corpses and drove forward.
BOOM! Another Merman was blasted away by a merciless strike.
“Kreeee—!” One clever specimen scrambled up the wall and raked at me with venom-coated claws. I could have dodged, but after the fight with Karyx I had sworn never to fight alone again. My job wasn’t to react to every attack—it was to eliminate threats to the party.
“Sacred Light’s Protection!”
Divine Shield
Clang! The Merman bounced off the barrier and flew backward. I swung the greatsword like a baseball bat and sent it rocketing into the three that were still charging.
“Kiiih!” It exploded on impact, bowling the others over.
Strike. Nice.
I coated my feet with mana and dashed forward, switching to a one-handed sword. “Hup!”
Slash! Slash! Slash! Three flowing strikes—one for each throat. They dropped before they even realized they were dead.
“Kik…” Only one Merman remained. It hesitated, then turned tail and fled.
So monsters don’t always mindlessly attack adventurers. Especially the humanoid ones seem to have varying levels of intelligence.
“Hand that Grasps the Night.”
Lugen’s Grasp
Crunch. “Kii, kiiik!” Lumia’s magic seized it mid-run. I could have chased it down myself, but this was cleaner.
“Where do you think you’re going, you sneaky little thing? You fail as a monster.” I finished the last one off. Thud.
I caught my breath over the corpses. “Hoo.”
Chaos praises your skilled combat.
The first battle on the second floor had gone smoothly. The monsters were faster than those on the first floor, but that was all. They lacked the coordinated formations the goblins had used. Just mindless charges relying on raw stats. We weren’t soft enough to be threatened by that.
If I compare this to the goblin village raid, our numbers are a bit low, but the third floor shouldn’t be too bad… though getting out of the second floor comes first.
Once the fight ended, Yeriel and Lumia stepped over the bodies.
“Eww. I knew Mermen existed, but this is my first time seeing one. They really are that ugly…” Yeriel wrinkled her nose at a severed head.
“Come to think of it, Yeriel, which zone did you land in when you cleared the second floor with Derick’s party? You said it was gross, so… the Insect Zone?”
“Yeah. It was crawling with bug-type monsters. Huge maggots, centipedes, that sort of thing.” She made a gagging face. “Mermen are just ugly, but that place was actually disgusting… physiologically unbearable. I’m glad we landed here instead.”
Ugh. I hated bugs too. Back on Earth I’d been pathologically disgusted by them—especially cockroaches, mosquitoes, and midges. I vaguely remembered reading about giant mosquito monsters called “Moskito” that appeared in swamp areas.
…Just imagining it makes me nauseous.
I shook the horrible thought away. “The byproducts we need are the large fins, right? Let’s harvest them quickly and move on.”
I cut the darker, protruding sections from the backs of the corpses, pocketed them, and stored them in my pack.
“Lumia, any presences nearby?”
She closed her eyes and focused, ears twitching. “…No. Neither monsters nor adventurers.”
Good. The Mermen had appeared so suddenly we hadn’t even checked our location yet.
“Let’s see… Wetland Zone.” I pulled out the map and compass. Of all places, we landed in an awkward spot.
Judging by the wall markings, the wide straight path, the lack of shelters, and the still-thick darkness, we had crossed the central area connecting the zones and were now in the middle of the Wetland Zone’s entrance section. The second floor’s darkness supposedly thinned the closer one got to the portal leading to the next floor, but we still needed torches.
“We’ll have to keep moving. At least until we reach the area with shelters.”
We resumed walking. One advantage of this half-avoided route was that almost no adventurers deliberately passed through here.
We were advancing cautiously when—
“At this rate we’ll reach a shelter soo—”
Chaos warns you to be careful.
Time slowed. Where?
I scanned the area. Nothing in front, left, or right. Not behind either. Then—above!
I instantly summoned the greatsword and raised it overhead like a shield. Splat.
“Ugh.”
“Hyaah, Aren?!”
A massive blue slime—larger than an adult man’s torso—had dropped from the ceiling straight onto my head. Fortunately the sword blocked it, but the creature clung stubbornly to the blade, trying to corrode the weapon.
“Get off!”
Hiss. Smoke rose as I swung the greatsword downward with all my strength. The slime was flung away and splattered across the ground, only to begin regenerating.
“I’m fine! Both of you watch the ceiling and fall back! Yeriel, put up barriers overhead!”
“Be careful.”
“Okay—Sacred Light’s Protection!”
Divine Shield
Once the barriers appeared above them, I looked up. One, two, three—more slimes wriggled on the ceiling. We had to deal with them to proceed.
The only way is to run underneath and lure them down. We have no archer, and Yeriel’s Holy Arrows won’t reach from here.
Head cold, judgment swift, I charged forward with the greatsword raised overhead again. Splat. Splat. “Kugh.”
The information from the library was correct—amorphous monsters on the lower floors had little to no intelligence. They kept dropping the moment I tried to pass beneath them.
“Damn it, get off!” I shook them off with powerful swings. They splattered and began regenerating on the floor.
Two types of slimes appear in the Wetland Zone: Cave Slimes that bounce around honestly, and Acid Slimes that crawl along walls and ceilings.
The latter were rarer, had tiny nuclei that constantly shifted position, and required magic or wide-area destructive attacks to neutralize. Their acidic bodies also corroded equipment and flesh.
And I got ambushed by the rare Acid Slimes on my very first day here. Yeah, forget luck stats—my plain old luck is just terrible. I’ll just have to survive anyway.
I switched to the sword and approached the nearly regenerated slimes. “The nucleus… I have to destroy it in one strike. Where is it?”
They were tiny, just as described. Most adventurers would have given up and moved on by now. But I was different.
…There they are. The nuclei are the same color as the bodies, so they’re hard to spot at a glance.
I stared without blinking. Three nuclei moving inside the slimes came into view.
Crack! Crack! Thud! I struck each blue nucleus with the tip of my sword. The slimes shuddered once, then melted into the ground, leaving only fragments the size of a thumb joint.
“They’re rare, so the byproducts should fetch a high price.”
I collected them all and returned to the girls.
“Aren, you took care of yours, right? Lumia caught the last one.”
“It kept trying to escape, so this was the limit. Not having area attacks is painful.”
The first slime was still writhing inside Lumia’s black hand. I asked if she could crush it completely, but she shook her head.
“It’s an amorphous monster and it’s struggling too hard.”
“Can’t be helped. Thanks for the hard work. Want to release it? I can see the nucleus.”
She nodded. The black hand vanished. The freed Acid Slime, fully regenerated, tried to flee like spilled water, but—
Bang! Not a chance. I dashed forward and shattered its nucleus in one strike.
After storing the final fragment, I spoke. “The second floor really isn’t easy either. We have the strength, but sudden situations and special traits make it hard to relax.”
“Right. I thought slimes would be really weak monsters…”
“That sound from your weapon earlier sounded serious. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I can repair it with mana.”
I brushed off Lumia’s concern. Long live self-repairing weapons. The greatsword I received from the guild master was proving incredibly useful. Without it, I would have had to rely solely on my kettle hat.
“Then, no one’s hurt? We’ve collected the byproducts and there don’t seem to be any more on the ceiling or walls, so shall we move again?”
Everyone agreed. After checking our gear, we resumed walking toward the end of the zone.
***
A treasure chest. A sturdy-looking treasure chest, tightly locked.
“Waaah! This is my first time seeing a treasure chest inside the Labyrinth!”
“I wonder what’s inside?”
Chaos is curious about the contents.
Yeah. My heart was racing too, and I was curious about what was inside… but could we even open it?