A Close Shave

On the next day at around 8 a.m., Isaac had made his way back to the stairs leading down to the eleventh floor once again.

With a confident smile, he unhesitatingly continued downwards. As the tenth floor hadn't been a challenge at all, he hoped to meet some worthy opponents today.

Environment-wise, the eleventh floor wasn't any different from the tenth one, so Isaac was a little bit downcast. If nothing changed, why would there be any new monster species? Thankfully, these worries were unnecessary, as just a few moments after entering the first spacious cavern beyond the stairs, Isaac noticed a monster he hadn't encountered yet.

It looked just like an armadillo, only a lot bigger: the hard armored. Its body was almost two meters long and its shell covered nearly the entirety of its exposed body. Stat-wise, it could reach up to B-700 which was quite a hefty jump from the orcs on the last floor. Still, it wasn't strong enough to be too much of a problem for Isaac.

The hard armored's trademark attack started with it bundling up into a shape resembling a car tire and then rolling towards its opponent as fast as it could. Evading this attack wasn't a problem. Its hard shell was.

During his usual research, Isaac soon noticed that he had no way to damage this monster's shell at all, no matter what he did. He was simply too weak. Only its eyes and the soft belly could be injured. And that is exactly why the shell, coupled with the rolling attack, was such a huge problem - neither of those were exposed when the hard armoured was in its tire-mode! Because of this, harming and eliminating the resilient monster took quite a lot longer than Isaac would have liked. He had to wait until it was done rolling around and showed its face again.

Nonetheless, he was still able to deal with a single hard armored in about a minute after he was done with his research. The next new monster species Isaac ran into would test his patience a lot more, however.

It was a species Isaac, as an avid DanMachi reader, was all too familiar with - the silverback. If one imagined a huge gorilla with red eyes and white hair, one only had to triple its size to have a silverback. As the name suggested, the part of the monkey's mane that was located right above its spine was silver instead of white. Still, that difference was barely noticeable. Now that Isaac finally faced one of these monstrosities, he was able to determine their strength - one of the silverback's stats reached up to A-850, almost double of his!

Fortunately, the mountain-like monkey still wasn't fast enough to actually hurt Isaac. Sure, his margin of error became a lot smaller, as the speed picked up a lot. Additionally, he would probably end up dead if he took a single of the monkey's hits head on. But no matter what, the only thing the monkey could do was to waste Isaac's time with its resilience. After he had dealt with the first few victims of his research, Isaac still had to spend a few minutes to deal with a single silverback.

Sometime during his early research after entering this floor, Isaac got a notification from the system.

[ You have killed 1000 Level 1 monsters.

Quest 'Kill 1000 Level 1 monsters.' completed. 100 AP rewarded. ]

Finally, Isaac's monster slaying efforts bore fruit! With his ridiculous pace, it wouldn't be too long before he racked up quite a lot of AP. Thoughts like these made Isaac smirk happily while torturing the 'innocent' monsters.

During the next few hours, Isaac slowly got used to fighting silverbacks and it got progressively easier. While he had been very close to his limit when facing a single one before, he slowly managed to defeat two and even three silverbacks at once later. All of this made Isaac realize that most likely, this monster species still wouldn't be able to actually make him reach his limit, no matter how many of them he was facing.

Luckily, after Isaac had dealt with yet another group of three silverbacks and came out unscathed, the shadow of another massive monster could be seen in the distance. That was definitely a new one!

With an excited smile, Isaac got closer to the monster to observe it from a distance.

It was about four meters tall, ten meters long and resembled a western dragon if you clipped its wings off. It had beautiful dark blue scales and exuded a certain majesty and beauty. Of course, Isaac didn't care much about such irrelevant aspects.

As it started to spawn on the same floor as the silverback and hard armoured, this infant dragon should still be within the bounds of a Level 1 monster, no matter how strong it was. At least, that was Isaac's conclusion and his reason for attempting to fight it, sure of his ability to escape relatively easily.

Little did he know that rather than a normal monster, the infant dragon was considered to be a rare spawn, a boss monster. It was almost twice as strong as all of the other monsters of this floor! That was because it had already reached Level 2, with stats reaching up to I-50. Now, while that sounded pathetic, if one were to try to convert its stats to Level 1, they would be up to SSS-1450. With almost triple of Isaac's stats, what Isaac was eyeing so covetously wasn't the next part of his research, it was deathly danger.

Right after he had started his assault, Isaac immediately noticed something was wrong. While he had already expected his opponent to have a breath attack, as it looked just like a dragon, its reaction was simply too fast! He had barely moved a step, when the infant dragon had already looked his way, opened its mouth slightly and a slight ember glow could be seen from its throat. For the first time since he had come to this world, Isaac felt the shadow of death looming over him.

He knew he had vastly underestimated his opponent. There was simply no way for him to deal with this monster by relying on his speed alone - he would easily be burned to a crisp. Still, there was nothing to fear, he still had one possible avenue of survival - psychological manipulation. If all else failed, this one was always a reliable ace in the hole.

If he wanted to cheat and blur his existence to escape, he could. It was simple. Still, that would be too easy. Isaac craved a challenge and hardship. That was why he was handicapping himself in the first place. If he died in the process, so what?

Without a moment of hesitation, Isaac feigned fleeing towards the left, making the infant dragon assume his path of escape. The very moment the breath attack was triggered, he instantly fled towards the right instead. It wasn't a complicated maneuver by any means, but if he hadn't had such near-perfect control over his body, Isaac wouldn't have been able to execute it with the speed he did.

Even though he had managed to dodge the first attack by more than a meter, the left side of his body and most of his equipment had heated up to an uncomfortable temperature already, causing Isaac to sweat a little.

Not wasting any time on being happy that he had prolonged his life for a few seconds, Isaac used the short amount of time the infant dragon needed to recover before using its next breath attack to scan his surroundings for anything that could be of help. Luckily, as he was in the dungeon, there were many nooks, crannies and boulders he could use to hide temporarily.

Seeing this, Isaac's confidence grew - he should be able to escape!

While he was taking cover behind different obstacles and dodging breath attacks, he had enough time to think about his next course of action. Speed-wise, he couldn't escape from the infant dragon. For some reason, however, it didn't use any other means of attack besides its breath - most likely because Isaac hadn't entered its melee range yet. Still, he couldn't just run around the dungeon forever, he had to get rid of this damn lizard tailing him somehow. Just keeping up his risky dodging maneuvers took quite a toll on his stamina that seemed so endless yesterday.

Two breath attacks later, Isaac finally came up with a plan: he would make his way towards the stairs leading back up to the tenth floor. For some reason, no monsters from the lower floors could be found on the upper ones. There had to be a reason as to why monsters didn't leave the floor they spawned on, except for on very rare circumstances. Was there something keeping them from doing so? Some kind of instinct? Admittedly, it wasn't much to rely on, but it was better than nothing. Only a few times during the DanMachi novels had monsters actually left for different floors. Because of how statistically unlikely it was to happen, it was the best thing Isaac could bank on.

Like this, Isaac slowly but surely made his way back towards where he had come from a few hours prior. Very, very painstakingly. The consumption of his stamina was insane. Luckily, whenever he met any monsters on his way, they would ease his burden a little, as they could be used to block another breath attack.

By the time he had finally made it back to the very cavern the stairs were connected to, Isaac was beyond exhausted. He was sweating buckets and barely able to control his spasming muscles. Compared to when he had reached this state previously, he had a furious infant dragon on his tail and most of his skin was slightly burned simply from being in the vicinity of extremely hot breath attacks for too long.

But at least, the goal was in sight… or it should have been. As if to spit in Isaac's face for having been so unbelievably lucky ever since he arrived, a group of seven silverbacks was bunched up right in front of the stairs. If anyone had told Isaac this was just a coincidence, he would have wanted to beat them black and blue. Either this dungeon was sentient, or there was a dungeon master! There was simply no statistically likely other way such a thing could happen. The biggest group of silverbacks Isaac had run into on this floor had been two. Whenever he had wanted to up the difficulty during his previous fights, he had to manually lure another one. But now, right as he was about to escape his doom and was exhausted beyond measure, a monster party just had to appear before his only avenue of escape? Ridiculous.

When the silverbacks noticed his arrival, they immediately got into a formation, trying to seal all of his possible escape routes. One shouldn't underestimate these particular monsters. Most likely because they were based on monkeys, their intelligence and teamwork were leagues beyond other monsters, who mostly got in each others' ways.

Sadly, Isaac had no time to appreciate such a fascinating phenomenon right now. Still, he noted it down for future research.

While seven silverbacks wouldn't be hard to escape from for Isaac under normal circumstances, now that he was at the end of the line, there simply were literally no paths of escape from this situation that could be found within the world akin to a chessboard. Well, there were actually quite a lot of them, they all would lead to more or less severe injuries, though. A better way to describe what was going on was this: There was no way for him to get out of this unharmed.

As Isaac had never tried to take on a silverback's attack before, he could only attempt to choose the one route that was least likely to get him killed.

Isaac unhappily gritted his teeth. Not to prepare himself for the coming pain but because he was annoyed at having to choose to get injured in the first place. Still, he didn't hesitate.

Very easily, Isaac slipped by the first perimeter of three silverbacks, which had surrounded him from the left, right and front. This also made the silverback who had previously been in front of him eat a delicious breath attack. Thanks for the assist, friend!

The second perimeter of four monkeys was the real problem. While Isaac had dodged around the first three, the other four had already launched their attacks towards him. Worst of all, they were very good at tracking him with their fists even after they had thrown their punches. So without another choice, Isaac got right between one of the silverbacks and the stairs, before turning to face the incoming punch he couldn't dodge.

'If I was faster, I could have dodged all of these attacks so easily…'

Resignedly, he crossed both of his arms in front of where the punch would land, the left one with the vambrace on top.

If Isaac had challenged himself to a 'no hit run', he would have lost right now.

A fraction of a second later, Isaac could feel a heavy impact and the vambrace on his left arm shattered almost instantly, very quickly followed by a cracking noise and a sharp burst of pain from that very arm. Thankfully, his right arm and the rest of the body got off lightly and 'only' got bruised. The rest of the impact, however, lifted Isaac off his feet and made him shoot out towards the stairs with high velocity. If he continued just like this, he would end up with a broken spine if he got off lightly.

Thankfully, Isaac's backpack was filled with many blankets to make it seem like he was actually using it, instead of relying on his inventory. Now, this came in handy and was the very reason for Isaac to judge this path to be the safest.

Isaac was only airbound for a second before he crashed heavily right onto the stairs. Even though the many blankets acted as somewhat of a cushion, Isaac still felt two more bursts of sharp pain - two of his ribs had been broken. Additionally, they stabbed right into a few of his organs. His heart and lungs were fine, though. By carefully, planning, Isaac had also managed to avoid hitting his head.

As soon as he was able to, Isaac got up on his now wobbly feet and dragged himself further up the stairs. By now, he wasn't even able to run. Too much of his stamina was spent and most of his upper body was bruised and battered, sapping him of strength.

While he got further away from the pursuing monsters, he didn't forget to keep track of them. And finally, he seemed to be in luck again. For whatever reason, neither the silverbacks nor the infant dragon set a single foot on top of the stairs. They just waited down there, roaring at their wounded prey. The infant dragon even let loose quite a few breath attacks but they were unable to reach Isaac, as he was far enough away from them by now.

Apparently, unless there were very specific circumstances, monsters really wouldn't use these stairs, which made them a temporary safe haven for Isaac. Having determined his next course of action, Isaac plopped down on the stairs and rested against the wall of the dungeon. Then, with his still somewhat intact right arm, he reached out and had a blue papilio wing appear from his inventory.

Although those could normally not be used to recover organ damage or broken bones, it was all Isaac had available for now. He was also quite confident in being able to get an even better healing effect if he manually controlled the process. Therefore, he swallowed the powder secreted from the wing and closed his eyes, concentrating fully on his recovery.

Loud cracking sounds soon rang out from his body, as he forced his dislocated and broken bones to snap back into the right places simply by using his own muscles. This caused him to spit up a few mouthfuls of blood.

——-

An hour later, Isaac made his way out of the dungeon towards the Guild's healing center. He was moving very slowly and carefully, trying to keep his injuries under control. In the healing center, which Yolanda had mentioned to him yesterday after his training session, some of the Guild's members and contracted mages would offer healing services in exchange for a fee. They would use the spells one paid for respectively.

As Isaac had already stabilized quite a bit, he only went with the 250.000 valis option. It wasn't like he could afford anything more expensive than that anyway. Just like that, he had lost almost all of the fortune he had amassed over the past few days. Well, he still had many magic stones to exchange for valis later, so he wasn't really in as bad of a position as his current savings would let one assume. By his own calculations, today's grind had earned him even more than yesterday's.

If Isaac hadn't stabilized his condition down in the dungeon, he would have most likely died very quickly on the way back to the surface, because of internal bleeding. But yes, he was able to prevent that. He would have even been able to recover all on his own in a few days. Was there really a need to waste so much time, though? He would rather go with the pay-to-win method and pay for his instant recovery.

After having dealt with his 'little injuries', Isaac took a shower and cleaned his equipment at the Guild's facilities in Babel, even though he still planned to go back into the dungeon today. That was because he didn't want his students to worry about him. In the end, nothing too serious had happened - he hadn't died, after all, and was perfectly fine now. No need to let them know about today's setback.

While he was on his way back to oversee his students for another hour or so, Isaac inspected his Status for the first time in two days.

[ Name: Isaac Blackshaw ]

[ Familia: Loki Familia ]

[ Affiliation: None ]

[ Race: Human ]

[ Level: 1 ]

[ Age: Unable to measure ]

[ Charisma: 14 ]

[ Stats ]

[ Strength: E-480 (+401) ]

[ Endurance: E-482 (+ 400) ]

[ Dexterity: E-484 (+ 402) ]

[ Agility: E-493 (+ 394) ]

[ Magic: D-511 (+ 396) ]

[ Magic ]

[ None ]

[ Skills ]

[ None ]

[ Development Abilities ]

[ Can be chosen from when ranking up: Huntsman ]

Upon looking into it further, Isaac noticed that any monster with less stats than him barely even gave him a single stat point, no matter how many of them he killed. As for monsters with higher stats, they enabled him to gain a lot of them. He was quite happy with how his Magic stat would already reach S if he had his Status updated again.

Still, there was one slight problem. The strongest monsters he could deal with at the moment were silverbacks. In the beginning, they gave him almost 100 stat points, but towards the end, the stats he gained from a single one of them dwindled down towards the lower double digits. If he updated his status now, he would probably gain less than one stat point from them - the difference was just that large. It would enable him to deal with that pesky infant dragon, though.

Should he continue grinding without updating until silverbacks didn't give him practically any stat points? Or should he update his Status and continue his grinding with stronger monsters?

To be honest, the latter was the wiser choice, especially because there was no reason for him to artificially slow down his growth and make life more difficult for himself. Honestly, it was quite ironic for someone who already handicapped himself in a lot of ways just to make life more difficult for himself to think so.

Just as before, there was only one reason for Isaac's stat gain to be this terrifying - his ability to battle foes well beyond his own realm of strength. Normally, an adventurer would only be able to battle against enemies who had about the same stats. The strongest and most talented of adventurers would be able to battle foes who were about 200 stat points stronger than them if they gave it their all. As for adventurers being able to fight against adventurers of a higher level than them, the reason for that was almost exclusively them having accumulated significantly more stats on the lower levels before ranking up than their opponents. Isaac, on the other hand, was able to battle against foes with about 400 higher stat points than him right now. The excelia gained would be nigh exponentially more.

The more stat points he accumulated, the vaster the stat difference he could bridge, which would lead to faster and faster stat gain over time. The only thing that would be slowing Isaac down in the future was the amount of time it would take him to reach the lower levels of the dungeon. If one factored in that he could spend AP to teleport… he was simply broken.

Now, to address the elephant in the room. Isaac had unlocked a Development Ability, that he could choose to imprint on his Status with the next rank up. Only one of those could be chosen every single time an adventurer increased their level. This specific Development Ability was exactly what Isaac had been aiming for.

[ Huntsman (I): When battling a monster one has already gained excelia from previously - 2% increase in all stats, 2% increase in excelia gained. ]

Most people were only privy to the Development Ability 'Hunter', who could exclusively be gained while an adventurer was Level 2. It had a similar effect and was very hard to get, as the prerequisites were quite insane. 1000 Level 2 monsters had to be slain within three days, while the adventurer was still Level 2. For most adventurers, this was impossible, as they had a very high stamina usage due to moving their body in inefficient ways during combat and having a slow stamina regeneration.

As for 'Huntsman', it was the Level 1 equivalent, which could only be gained if an adventurer killed 1000 Level 1 monsters while still being Level 1. Without even specifically aiming to do so, Isaac had already achieved this. Now that he had confirmation of the Development Ability's existence, Isaac's suspicions were confirmed. Most likely, every single level, an adventurer could gain such a Development Ability. Why would most of them choose a different one when ranking up? To get ones like 'Swordsman' or 'Blacksmith', the ones directly related to their profession and combat power. Although the 'Hunter'-series of Development Abilities also gave a combat power increase, it would be negligible until one stacked a lot of them. Additionally, the excelia gain increase from the skill wasn't even known, from what Isaac remembered from the DanMachi novels. Most likely, when only one of these was in effect, it was barely noticeable, that's why it had flown under the radar so far.

But enough with all of this rambling. What all of this meant was that Isaac's stat gain would increase even further… if the Development Abilities stacked, that is.

In conclusion: Someone like Isaac shouldn't exist.

At that moment, Isaac remembered his one year challenge with Bete.

'Maybe I should slow down a little so he doesn't get too terrified?'

There were at least two kinds of people: Ones who used cheats to make every obstacle in life a breeze and ones who gave themselves as many handicaps as possible to overcome challenges.

Isaac's whole existence was a cheat, and yet he tried to make life difficult for himself. One who wasn't in his position would more often than not fail to understand such a decision.