Taking a step downwards

I looked around but Mr. Black was nowhere to be found. I wished I could obtain such an ability. With that the giant wouldn't even had a glimmer of a chance to notice me.

Iris came running over to me and asked: "Are you okay? That hit you took looked quite nasty."

"I'm fine, I guess. Thanks to Emilia's healing that is. If not for her, I might be in serious trouble. Thank you, Emilia, for healing me right away."

"That's my job, no need to thank me."

Emilia was as proud as always when it came to her skills; she saw healing as her duty and refused every bit of gratitude shown for it.

I stored the crystals from the giant away in Lisa's bag and then we started to look around the boss room. But aside from the giant's corpse, nothing else was there.

"According to Mr. Black the giant should reappear in a short while. For now, we will take a break and if it hasn't spawned by then, we will hunt in some other nearby rooms."

Iris moved out of the room as she had told us her plan. We took bits of the giant with us and left the boss room following Iris lead. As soon as we got out of it, the door closed by itself and refused to be reopened again. The boss room seemed to have a different functioning compared to the ordinary ones.

All of us sat down in the corridor right on the floor. The battle made us quite exhausted but after a short break we should be fine for another round. While sitting there, Emilia healed me once again to make certain no inner wounds remained in my body. She sure was always worried when it came to me. Not that I wasn't worried about her either, she happened to be my best friend after all.

Of course Iris stood up first and scouted the nearby rooms. Most of them had an above average strength monster inside them but only a single one of those. No <Demon Beast Mage> to be seen. Those seemed to be quite rare, we were actually lucky that we found one so soon. Another party might call it bad luck though.

"Haven't you finished resting yet? I still want to fight some monsters today, so get ready."

Iris was as motivated as usual and dragged us go along with her. We entered one of the supposedly harder rooms she had found and easily overwhelmed the monster in there. Iris especially overdid it against that one, she fought it like the giant from earlier but the poor thing couldn't even hold out against a single full-out strike from her, which left it remaining in a similar state to the said giant.

As we left the room again, Emilia noticed that the door to the boss room had opened up slightly by itself. On that note Iris sprinted towards it and told us to hurry and come along.

Taking a look inside made the reason behind her excitement obvious: The boss had respawned already.

Mr. Black surely knew an awful lot about this dungeon. He must have been here before but with his skills he wouldn't have stopped on the first floor. Surely he had gone way further down below.

Anyways, we once again got into the same formation as earlier and approached the giant. Its behaviour didn't change; it still didn't care about us as long as no one had attacked it yet. We went with basically the same tactic as earlier but thanks to our acquired knowledge, we beat the giant after a 15 minute fight. Aside from some minor injuries here and there, we killed it without a sweat.

While the rest of us took a break, Iris had already gotten her hands on the crystal and handed it to me. With the amount of energy she had spent, she should be sound asleep already. But for some reason Iris was still going strong today. She even got us to get out of the room as fast as possible so we could hunt even more loot today. It really felt like Iris carried us in not just one way.

So we got back to the corridor and I noticed how Iris had stopped and was currently giving the stairs down a weird look.

"What do you think? Should we give it a shot?"

I knew what she referred to, but the others just stared at her smug smile questioningly. Iris, however, ignored them and took the first step downwards.

Before anyone of us could even move to either follow or stop the reckless girl, a figure suddenly appeared before us, holding his blade to Iris throat.

"If you really want to go down there, I might as well kill you myself. At least then your death will be less painful."

And he was angry, very angry. After all Mr. Black spent like half an hour warning us not to do what Iris just did.

Iris, scared by Mr. Black's sudden approach, took a step back up the stairs immediately and shuttered in fear. She hadn't seen this side of Mr. Black yet, but neither had the rest of us.

Nobody dared to say another word and we went towards the room we cleared earlier. We had already decided that it would be where we would spent the night. When we entered the room, I tried to turn around to spot Mr. Black but he had vanished once again.

We all fell into our sleeping bags after a short dinner and slept in right away.

The next couple days were spend on hunting more monster for their crystals. After around a week we had roughly doubled the required amount. To achieve that we had killed the giant enough times that I didn't bother counting any longer. With every fight our teamwork got better and better and in the end we managed to beat it in around five minutes. Despite that, no one got the cocky idea again to go for the lower floor. When we weren't fighting the big one, we hunted the small fry for an absurd amount of E and D grade crystals.

And with all the loot we had collected, we decided to finally head back home….