"Haa... haa... haa..."
In the empty corridor of the underground labyrinth, Leo's breathing, which had grown ragged at some point, echoed clearly, and didn't settle for a long time.
Wounds all over him, drenched in blood, Leo gripped the short sword with a trembling hand and stood in the middle of the pale blue passageway. For a while he couldn't do anything at all, just stood there in a daze, looking around.
The Kobold pack that had been so numerous was gone, every last one. All that was left were glittering shards of magic stones scattered on the floor, gleaming with a strange luster.
Besides the magic stone shards, there were also some sharp claws and fangs on the ground, obviously from the Kobolds.
Leo stared blankly at the scene, then a moment later collapsed to a sitting position, nearly going flat onto the floor.
Sharp pain shot through him from every direction, telling him just how badly he was hurt.
His head felt like it was being stuck with needles, throbbing in pulses. He pressed his temple, sick the way you are with a hangover, miserable.
"Burned too much Mind, huh?"
He understood his situation right away.
To get out of the situation he'd just been in, he'd cast Magic a dozen-plus times, and on more than a few of those he'd burned extra Mind to add extra strikes. His Mind hadn't bottomed out yet, hadn't dropped him into Mind Down or knocked him out, but it was close to the edge.
This was what it felt like when your Mind was almost gone.
"Lucky it didn't trigger Mind Down outright and knock me out. Any monster wandering past would've taken my life."
Still shaken, Leo thought it and quietly warned himself: he was never doing something that reckless again.
Running out of stamina just meant you couldn't move. Running out of Mind meant you couldn't even sense danger. You were just there for the taking.
The seniors in the Familia had said it too. The thing you had to watch most carefully when using Magic was leaving yourself a margin. You had to count what Mind you had left, and you couldn't let yourself drop into Mind Down and get knocked out.
For anyone who used Magic, pushing yourself to the limit was never a good idea.
"At least all the enemies are down, so I don't have to use a Magic Potion outright."
Leo touched the one Magic Potion in his pouch. He hesitated, then hesitated again, and in the end put it back, fishing out a regular potion and a High Potion instead.
He drank the regular potion first, putting his stamina into rapid recovery, then pulled the stopper from the High Potion and poured the dark-colored liquid down his throat.
The next second, something amazing happened.
The wounds all over Leo's body started to mend visibly. His pale face flushed back into healthy color at an unbelievable rate.
In moments, his injuries were gone, as if they'd never been there. All that remained were the bloodstains soaked into his ruined clothes, silently testifying that the damage he'd taken had been real.
"A High Potion really is worth tens of thousands of valis. It can't match an Elixir that heals any wound on the spot, but for injuries at this level, it barely takes any time at all."
Leo got to his feet, as if the pitiful state he'd been in moments ago had never existed, and started moving his body with his usual expression.
"Didn't think I'd run into a situation on Floor 4 that needed a High Potion to fix. Life really is unpredictable."
Leo couldn't help the feeling.
Generally speaking, Floors 1 through 4 weren't supposed to put your life in danger. Even a rookie adventurer who'd just received the Falna and was barely stronger than a regular person could rarely hit something dangerous on these four floors.
Adventurers here rarely even ran into monsters in groups. Even on Floor 4, you'd just see a few lonely Goblins and Kobolds wandering around.
On this floor, two or three enemies at once was the norm. Running into five or more was bad luck. Running into ten clustered together, like Leo had, was unheard of.
What came after was even more absurd. The Dungeon had openly pulled a dirty trick and singled him out, forcing Leo to face an entire battalion of Kobolds.
That last wave alone, Leo had had to deal with twenty or thirty Kobold monsters at minimum.
Without Magic, in his current state with every ability still at zero, getting beaten to death by the swarm was the only ending.
Thinking of his Magic, Leo couldn't help raising a hand and looking at his palm.
"So that was my Magic..."
He muttered it.
It really was something else. Casting Magic gave you a real, tangible sense that you weren't just an ordinary person anymore. You were someone the gods had blessed.
Magic really did deserve its name as a supernatural power, a crystallization of miracles. Once you cast it, most situations could be turned around. It was a hell of a lot more reliable than running into a pack of monsters alone with one sword.
"No wonder so many people want Magic."
Power like this was the single clearest way to show how you were different from everyone else.
"Mine's supposed to be an ultra-short chant spell, and it already had the power to turn a fight around. I can't imagine what the wide-area annihilation spells with ultra-long chants can really do..."
Magic was generally divided into ultra-short chant, short chant, long chant, and ultra-long chant. The longer the chant, the stronger the Magic.
Wide-area annihilation Magic in particular, true to its name, was AOE Magic with a massive attack range. If such a spell fell into the ultra-long chant category, the power was simply unimaginable. Saying it could destroy heaven and earth wasn't an exaggeration.
The vice-captain of Loki Familia, the High Elf Riveria, had wide-area annihilation Magic as her specialty. As a natural-born magic race, royalty among them, and one of the fewer than ten Lv.6 adventurers in all of Orario, even her short-chant wide-area annihilation Magic carried enormous force, enough to flip the outcome of a fight, or even a war. Her firepower could even wipe out enemies above her own Level, and countless people feared it.
That was why Riveria was called Orario's strongest Mage. At least in raw firepower output, no one in all of Orario could match her.
Leo's Meteor Dance was clearly an ultra-short chant spell. The chant was extremely brief, and it wasn't wide-area annihilation type, so in pure Magic power it was definitely far below a same-Level Riveria.
But ultra-short chant had its own advantages. You didn't need teammates carefully protecting and supporting you. You could cast at the fastest possible speed. You could use it anywhere, anytime, in combat.
Take the situation he'd just been in. If his Magic had been the kind that needed time and concentration to chant, he wouldn't have managed to cast it. The Kobold horde would have torn him apart before he got a word out.
"The power's nowhere near the spells that need time to chant, but this one can clearly be cast often, and that'll give a nice boost to training the 'Magic' stat too."
Leo flexed his hand, weighing it in his mind.
"And my Magic can also be boosted in power by spending extra Mind. If I'm willing to throw everything in, ignore the Mind cost completely, and push the power up, then mine might not lose out to the long-chant spells that need time."
On top of that, the extra-strikes trick. Maybe it could also be used to widen the attack range?
Countless meteors streaking across the sky and crashing down, leveling the earth, flashed through Leo's mind.
If he could actually pull that off...
"...the potential of this Magic is honestly terrifying."
Right now he was still weak. Not just Lv.1, but with his "Magic" stat at a flat zero, so the spell's power was small.
Once his Level and "Magic" stat both climbed, the spell's power would undergo a stunning transformation, and the picture he was imagining would become real.
"A Magic with this much future, can even the natural-born magic race, the Elves, get one this good?"
Leo's brow furrowed.
He was just a "perfectly average" Human. Why had he gotten a Magic with this kind of potential?
He'd never thought of himself as exceptionally talented. Especially not in this world, where Humans were innately far weaker in talent than Elves, Beast Humans, Dwarves, Amazonesses, and so on.
When it came to Magic, the Elves were this world's authority. Few Humans had any real Magic talent. Even Humans who could cast were rare, let alone Humans who got Magic this good.
He also wasn't one of those people with a heavy past, carrying some intense obsession or wish inside.
If you had an intense obsession or wish, that could be drawn out under the Falna, blossoming into fruit as a force called "possibility," and you'd end up with Magic or Skills tied to it.
But he didn't have anything like that. So suddenly getting a Magic this promising didn't quite add up.
Did he actually have Magic talent?
Or maybe...
"It's because of that Skill?"
Leo thought of the special Skill that couldn't be read: Stranger from Another Star.
"Permanent removal of all-abilities limits... could 'limits' here also include racial and individual talent and potential?"
If racial and individual talent and potential counted as a kind of limit, then with Stranger from Another Star removing that limit, his getting a high-potential Magic that even natural-born magic races couldn't always get would actually make sense, wouldn't it?
Meteor Dance. The name was suggestive too. Like Stranger from Another Star, it had the word "star" in it...
"Star attribute... never heard of Magic with that attribute either."
Most Magic belonged to natural element attributes like earth, water, wind, fire, with light, dark, ice, lightning at most. Star attribute really was unheard of.
"Forget it. If I can't figure it out, I'll stop trying."
Leo shook his head and shook off the tangled thoughts.
Getting good Magic was a good thing, end of story.
After seeing the convenience and versatility of Meteor Dance, Leo had at least a rough idea of the kind of path he should walk going forward.
Carrying that thought, his wounds healed and his stamina fully back, Leo started to clean up.
He gathered the magic stone shards scattered across the floor and put them in his bag. Every one of them was money.
"That many Kobolds, finally some drop items showed up."
Leo picked up the sharp claws and fangs too, smiling.
Kobold claws and Kobold fangs were both drop items that could be used to craft weapons. They sold for a lot more than magic stone shards.
"Wonder if I can make back what I spent on that High Potion."
Muttering to himself, Leo picked up the small shield he'd tossed aside earlier and strapped it back onto his left arm.
He took out a pocket watch, checked the time, then walked up to one of the passage entrances.
It was the path leading down to Floor 5.
"...Should I go down?"
Leo hesitated.
If Floors 1 through 4 of the Dungeon were basically a harmless zone with no real danger, then starting from Floor 5, things changed completely.
From Floor 5 on, the Dungeon turned into a different beast, and the difficulty of clearing it climbed sharply.
That difficulty included, but wasn't limited to, the monsters appearing in much greater numbers, more varied species of monsters, more troublesome opponents, and the Dungeon's structure and terrain becoming more complex, throwing more obstacles in adventurers' way.
Floors 1 through 4 were built of pale blue walls, populated mostly by low-tier monsters like Goblins and Kobolds. Few species, not particularly strong, and not appearing in large numbers. Even on Floor 4, rookies usually didn't die. It was a very easy area to clear.
As long as you didn't get surrounded alone by multiple monsters, or you were in a party, an adventurer absolutely wouldn't die here. Otherwise a rookie like Leo, just starting out with weak stats, wouldn't be able to operate up here at all.
But from Floor 5 on, things were different.
Lots of troublesome monsters showed up here. The interval between monster births was much shorter than on Floor 4. Just walking down a corridor, you'd often have several monsters lunge at you, and every so often a monster would climb out of the wall and cut off your retreat, turning many a rookie who'd gotten used to the floors above into a corpse here, never to return to the surface.
So from Floor 5 onward, the Dungeon's cruelty and brutality started to show. You could call it the first real wall adventurers had to clear.
To set foot on Floor 5, you needed a certain level of stats, plus enough experience, gear, and adventurer's discipline to back you up.
By that standard, a fresh rookie like Leo definitely shouldn't be going down to Floor 5. His original plan hadn't included it either.
But now...
"With Magic to protect me, going down for a look should still be doable, right?"
Having seen Meteor Dance in action, Leo's mind started to move that way.
"...Just a peek near the entrance."
In the end, Leo couldn't hold himself back, and stepped onto Floor 5.