Volume 3 - CH 4.09

Roxanne handed me the medicine pills she was keeping in her backpack in case of emergencies.

Not knowing what would happen, I gave Roxanne some medicine pills before the boss battle. This is a valuable lesson that I learned from the boss battle with Beep Sheep the other day: to always have an alternative method of healing available on hand, since I wanted to avoid making the same fuckup we did while fighting the Beep Sheep and falling prey to its Skill ever again. I also brought a few antidote pills with me, just in case if some of the enemies had Skills that could inflict poison upon their target.

「Wouldn’t it be better for you to hold onto them until we will see what are we going to be dealing with on the sixth floor?」

「It will be okay. In Quratar, the monsters dwelling on the sixth floor are Minos, just like the ones on the fourth floor in Veil.」

The monsters on the sixth floor of Veil’s Labyrinth were the same ones that live on the second floor of the one in Quratar: Naïve Olives. We have already fought plenty of them before, so taking care of them was relatively easy for us. As an added bonus, I was able to defeat all of the Lv.6 monsters on that floor with only four shots of magic, so hunting and grinding for levels on the sixth floor was a literal piece of cake.

As a way to celebrate our breaking through the Veil’s and Quratar’s Labyrinth’s fifth floors, I have prepared another bath. Well, I say it was a celebration, but the truth is that I simply wanted to force Roxanne to go in with me so that we could have a little slippery & wet fun. The thing that did not change since the first time I prepared the bath was how troublesome it was to fill the entire thing with hot water from scratch and then keeping it warm enough so that it would not go cold on us throughout the entire preparation stage. At times like these, I think we could really use some pipes and a faucet. All we would have to do would be to guide the pipes from the source of the water to the bathroom, twist the faucet and voila, worry only about making it hot enough. It would have been quicker, more efficient and allow me to not waste so much time to go back to the Labyrinth over and over again in order to recover MP.

The Labyrinth in Quratar is almost always too crowded to go on MP replenishing trips there, so we end up going to the one in Veil practically every single time, but that just puts me in a loop of back-and-forth trips that are not cost-efficient, because the eat up a good chunk of the MP that I have worked so hard to restore, so it always feels like a kind of a wasted effort. Not to mention that the process of constant shifting between Durandal setup and Magic setup and the need to collect all the items as well as taking my Magic Crystals in and out of the backpack so that they could collect the energy from defeated monsters.

If only there was not so many people in Quratar’s Labyrinth, then we could go there to recover my MP without any issues, and that would even make something as tedious as grinding the EXP more bearable, since higher floors with higher level enemies would naturally reap even more and better rewards. But since that is not possible, we have to stick to Veil’s Labyrinth whether we like it or not. It would have been a totally different story if I could fight the monsters without having to switch equipment, Jobs and Skills all the time and not worry about Magic Crystals, but unfortunately I am not quite at that power level just yet.

Anyway, back to the topic of bathing.

Initially my intentions were to prepare baths for us only on special occasions, but I can’t shake off the feeling that this conviction of mine has been thrown out the window sooner than you could finish spelling the sentence “Roxanne is the best girl in the world「. Why?

Because I realize that it was looking for more and more excuses to be taking them so that I could have my “fun” with Roxanne in the water (TL Note: I can totally understand that, soap and lotion plays are awesome), and taking a bath as a “celebration” after conquering another floor in each Labyrinth turned out to be just the thing I needed to make that happen.

Thanks to that, I have been more enthusiastic when it came to exploring the new floors in the Labyrinths and I tried that much harder during the Floor Boss fights. Some of you might think that it was a really scummy way of motivating myself to do something as crucial to my survival in this world, but that is just how it works, you know? And besides, every motivation is better than having no motivation at all in my book. It was exactly that mindset that allowed me to breeze through the sixth floor of Veil’s Labyrinth in no time flat. That should be no surprise, am I right? I might have it easier than most because of my OP Bonus Weapon and Bonus Skills, but that does not change the fact that trekking through both of the Labyrinths day in and day out is still a physically exhausting job to do, and no one with their brain intact can deny that there is no feeling in the world better than having a nice, long soak in the bathtub after a hard day at “work” followed by enjoying some sexy times with your girl right after that.

Besides, with the way that Labyrinths are constructed, meaning that Floor Bosses are always the same “type” of monster as the ones inhabiting the floor itself and that they are the same for every Labyrinth but spawning on different floors, fighting a few groups of them was always enough to give us the general gist of what we could be expecting from the big baddie. In the case of Veil Labyrinth’s sixth floor, the monsters there were Naïve Olives, on the sixth floor in Quratar had Minos and Hachinosu as its Floor Boss. Since we already had prior experience with fighting both of those types of enemies, we broke through both of those Labyrinth’s sixth floors with our eyes closed.

As we were going through the seventh floor, we saw two monsters, one we have already seen and two that we did not. It looked like a goat. This is the type of monster native to the Veil Labyrinth’s seventh floor? What is this entire Labyrinth, a giant ranch or what?

When I used Identify on it, it turned out that this monster was called Escape Goat Lv.7. Well yeah, it certainly looks like a goat. First of all, I will try using Fire Storm on both the Cheap Sheep and Escape Goat and see how many of them will I have to use to kill them.

(Fire Storm… huh?!)

The spell was successfully cast, but before it could connect with the enemy Escape Goat it… it literally escaped. What, the hell?!

「Uhm, Roxanne?」

「Yes, master?」

「Yeah, uhm… care to explain what just happened here? I’m afraid my brain is still too shocked to comprehend it properly.」

「That was probably the passive Skill that the Escape Goats possess. As the name implies, whenever they sense even the slightest whiff of danger, the first thing they will try to do before doing anything else is to run away until they won’t feel threatened anymore.」

Roxanne explained that to me while the explosions from the Fire Storm that I unleased just now were serving as a pretty flashy, but ultimately useless background to her short lecture.

(Then maybe inform me about such things ahead of time so we could avoid such nasty surprises in the future, okay?)

Well, if they got away now, then I guess there is nothing we can do about it except chasing right after them… huh? What in the…?!

「Mehe… mehe…. *snort*…!!!」

However, just as I was about to get a move on and chase after the Escape Goat in order to hunt it down, it came running back straight towards us with its horns pointing forward. Now this is confusing. An Escape Goat that, according to Roxanne’s words, was supposed to run away at the first sign of danger, and yet there it is now, charging at us as if it was actually an Attack Goat instead.

「Please stand back, master! I will handle this Escape Goat!」

Roxanne declared, stepping in front of me with her shield raised high.