The seventh floor of the Dungeon.
No matter when or where, the accident called an [Adventure] always arrived right on schedule, without the slightest warning.
For most rookie adventurers, it was only from the sixth floor onward that the Dungeon held true, life-threatening danger.
Unlike floors one through five, where weaklings were everywhere, the sixth floor brought out the “rookie killer” War Shadows, and the seventh floor teemed with the swarming, colony-dwelling Killer Ants, both of them monsters the Guild had warned newcomers again and again to heed or avoid.
The same principle held true for the monsters themselves, who treated one another as enemies and as food.
With no adventurers intruding on their territory, they were each other’s greatest rivals and greatest threats.
And on this seventh floor, amid the monsters hissing in a standoff, an obvious note of discord suddenly slipped into the mix.
A Stitch Rabbit no more than ten centimeters tall came bounding in from who knew where and planted itself right in the middle of the monster gathering that was about to erupt into slaughter.
This feeble little creature, which could only carve out a foothold on the seventh floor by living in colonies, gave off, for some reason, an aura so obnoxious that neither side in the standoff could ignore it.
So utterly weak, and yet impossible to overlook, appearing in a place it clearly had no business being.
The swarm of Killer Ants turned their gaze.
The reptilian monsters, each the size of a grown man and clad in natural armor from birth, hissed and crawled toward the loathsome little thing before them.
The bipedal, humanoid War Shadows, with their striking single red eyes ringed around their heads, bared their razor claws and closed silently into a circle around the Stitch Rabbit.
And the cute little bunny standing in the center merely tilted its head, sitting perfectly still, as if oblivious to its own deadly plight.
Only after the drawn-in monsters had packed themselves into a dense ring did the white rabbit, which had played the harmless weakling all this while, finally make a different move.
Its nimble, dainty little body slipped past a Killer Ant’s razor mandibles, and it sprang up off the creature’s smooth shell.
And then — An impossibly enormous rabbit head appeared in midair along with its leap, and it opened its gaping bloody maw at the buffet that had delivered itself to its door.
Nom, nom — Ptooey, ptooey.
After a couple of chews, a very human look of disgust crossed the little rabbit’s face.
Ugh.
As expected, for someone who’d grown used to cooked food, chowing down on raw meat straight off the bone was still a little hard to stomach.
[Devourer (monster eater)] The overpowered magic Artorias had only just awakened — no chant, no wind-up, zero startup frames.
Actively cast, its effect was, in the most literal sense, to eat the monster before him clean.
And whatever this magic devoured would become part of the buffs upon his body.
[Magic: Devourer progress requirement met] [Devoured target: Kobold] [Ability gained: Kobold Transformation (Sturdy H)] … [Devoured target: Purple Moth] [Ability gained: Purple Moth transformation (Poison Add-on H)] … [Devoured target: Stitch Rabbit] [Ability gained: Stitch Rabbit transformation (Escape H)] Although he’d received a PVP-specialized exclusive skill from Tia-Mama, Artorias, who had made a promise to Adi and never much wanted to raise a hand against adventurers in the first place, had completely given up his old trick of using rookie adventurers as bait.
Now he’d switched to using himself as the lure to fish for monsters, and he intended to fully unleash all the magic he’d obtained.
Having chosen to go on the offensive, Artorias soon set off a species-wide extermination against the monsters on the familiar floors one through five.
And perhaps because he’d played head chef Goblin on those floors for so long, the monsters that had once charged at the sight of him and torn into him without mercy gradually learned to flee the moment they caught a Goblin’s scent.
As time went on, the area where he’d mainly operated became all but an empty floor.
Even freshly respawned monsters, if they weren’t eaten by him at once, would vanish without a trace in the blink of an eye.
With his old friends on floors one through five nearly hunted to extinction, he at last smoothly completed the unlocking of his Development Ability.
The rookie-killer War Shadows that first appeared on the sixth floor had also reached fifty percent progress, and the Killer Ants on the seventh floor had gleefully surged straight toward the seventy percent mark, with new abilities within arm’s reach.
“If the seventh floor is only this level, then I guess it’s about time to think about pushing on to the floors past the tenth.” Belching contentedly, Artorias — who’d decided every monster on these floors was small fry — pondered how he ought to develop next.
The more skilled he grew at farming the upper floors, the better he understood one truth.
That is, the experience gained from beating things down had its limits.
He could certainly grow stronger in a simple, straightforward way by farming en masse for magic stones.
He could, in his usual cautious playstyle, max out all his stats, and then use the numerical edge of a lightsaber to brutally club cavemen.
But if he relied on that method alone, he’d never reach the first-rank adventurers who dared to venture.
Those who flee from adventure can never grow — that was the truth of this world.
The reason he hadn’t pressed deep into the lower floors before was, aside from worrying that his trait of drawing monster aggro made him more prone to being swarmed without kin to cover him, mainly that he’d never had much of an obsession with so-called getting stronger.
Since going down still carried unnecessary risk, and he didn’t have infinite resurrections either, he might as well stay in his comfort zone and be his own Ten-Mile Slope Sword God.
But things were different now.
Now that he had a goal he wanted to pursue, he couldn’t keep lingering in his cozy comfort zone any longer.
The very instant Artorias made up his mind — A suffocating wave of pressure crashed down.
The walls split, the earth trembled.
Artorias’s brow furrowed.
Instinct told him that something ominous was being born inside the seventh-floor chamber where he stood.
[No matter when or where, the accident called an [Adventure] always arrives right on schedule, without the slightest warning.] Thud.
The violent tremor made the ground quiver faintly.
It wasn’t light being blocked, but some pure, malice-forged entity blotting out Artorias’s line of sight.
The colossal thing that leapt down from atop the wall burst the passage before Artorias apart, filling nearly every inch of the space.
It was a special Killer Ant.
Several times larger than its kin, its whole body was pitch black, and over that ferocious head there was even a layer of white bone mask that Artorias found oddly familiar.
The blood-red compound eyes beneath the mask were fixed dead on Artorias.
At the same time, the corresponding information surfaced in his vision.
[Rare Enhanced Species: Human-Faced Killer Ant] [Estimated Level: LV2] [Special Tags: Heal, Toughness, Phasing] “Hit the jackpot.” A flash of white light, and Artorias switched from the rabbit that served as bait into the Goblin chassis he now operated so fluently, twin weapons already gripped in his hands.
A Rare Enhanced Species flagged with special tags.
Without a doubt, this had to be the trial monster mentioned by the Power of the Beast (over beast) that Tia-Mama had bestowed on him, and perhaps it would also be the first hard fight he faced since coming to this world.
——————————— [Author’s Note: One thing I have to gripe about — the Killer Ant is actually one of the small mobs on the upper floors that the original novel describes in fair detail.
It’s the size of a grown adult, armored, tanky, and it deals damage, and it even summons its comrades when near death.
In a game it would be pure early-game garbage, the kind of monster designed to make you miserable.
Then the anime made the Killer Ant about the size of a dog, and back when I watched season one I kept wondering how this not-very-strong-looking monster managed to one-shot that adventurer who was harassing Lili around a single corner.]