Floors 8 and 9 of the Dungeon looked and felt different from the floors before them, both in scenery and in terrain.
The walls here were no longer pale green, but the color of wood overgrown with moss. The ground had turned into grassland sprouting short grass, and from the ceiling phosphorescent light drifted down like sunshine, giving you the feeling not of entering an underground labyrinth, but of walking across open country.
The terrain itself hadn't changed all that much. It was still a tangle of winding rocky passages connecting one chamber to another. It was just that on Floors 8 and 9 the chambers were more numerous and much wider inside, the connecting passages between them were short, and the ceilings, which up till now had been at most three or four meters high, rose to almost ten meters. When the light was bad, you couldn't even see the ceiling, which gave you a sense of how vast these spaces were.
As for the monsters that showed up here, you could call them a mixed bag drawn from every floor up to this point. No new species appeared. Instead, monsters like Goblins, Kobolds, Purple Moths, and Needle Rabbits from the earlier floors came back stronger, and if you misjudged their strength just because you'd already met them on the floors above, things were not going to go well for you.
In other words, as long as you didn't misjudge your opponent's strength, and as long as you handled them the same way you had before, you could generally make it through here without trouble.
So the difficulty of Floors 8 and 9 was still relatively low. At the very least, it wasn't that much higher than Floor 7.
But once you got to Floor 10, things changed again.
The layout of Floor 10 carried straight over from Floors 8 and 9, except that the ceiling's light no longer poured down as brightly as daylight. The brightness dropped sharply.
And the reason for that was a simple one.
"This mist is really getting in the way..."
That was the first thing Leo thought when he set foot on Floor 10.
Yes, Floor 10 had mist.
White mist thick enough to obstruct your sight blanketed the entire floor. So when Leo came through the rocky passage he'd been walking down and stepped into one of the broad chambers of unbroken grassland, he didn't feel that his view had opened up at all.
Standing there, Leo could only see a scattering of dead trees stripped of their leaves and branches around him.
The way those dead trees stood eerily in the mist made Leo raise an eyebrow, and he walked closer to one.
He reached out and touched one of the dead trees, which stood a little over a meter tall, only to find that the bark was far tougher than he'd imagined. The trunk was thick at the bottom and ridiculously thin at the top, an obviously abnormal shape.
"So this is the Dungeon's armory?"
The Dungeon's armory, one of the trickier features of the Dungeon.
These were natural weapons that this living underground labyrinth deliberately supplied to the monsters wandering the nearby area.
Starting from Floor 10, the Dungeon would begin to produce this kind of terrain here and there, specifically to strengthen its monsters.
It could be destroyed, but as a part of the Dungeon, it would naturally repair itself given enough time. Even if the monsters turned them into weapons and carried them off, after a while, in the very same spot, the same thing would grow right back.
Of course, this wasn't the worst part of Floor 10.
The truly difficult thing about Floor 10 was that monsters which hadn't appeared on any of the previous nine floors would start showing up here.
"Bugu uuuuuu..."
A low growl, like some great beast rumbling in the dark, came out of nowhere.
Heavy footfalls began to shake the ground, and along with them an enormous figure appeared at the far end of the mist, the impact carrying through the soles of his feet where they touched the floor.
Leo did not panic. He calmly looked toward the other end of the mist, at the massive figure plodding closer with its heavy stride.
Bit by bit, the figure parted the mist and revealed itself in full before him.
It was an extremely ugly monster, and one a good deal larger than Leo.
The thing's whole body was covered in brown skin. It stood over three meters tall, broad and heavy, with tattered old animal hide wrapped around its waist like a ragged skirt, every inch the wild beast.
Its limbs were thick, and on its neck sat a pig's head with yellow eyes, like some monstrous boar grown into a fiend, vicious and snarling.
"Bu OOOOOOOOOOOOO...!"
A terrifying roar burst from its mouth, and for a moment the sound rolled out in waves.
"An Orc..."
Leo's hand tightened around the short sword.
The Orc, normally the first large category monster an adventurer would encounter in the Dungeon.
On the floors above, the monsters adventurers ran into were generally small category. As the name suggested, they were the smaller-statured monsters, and Goblins, Kobolds, Purple Moths, and Needle Rabbits all belonged in that bracket.
Monsters like War Shadows and Killer Ants were medium category. Bigger than the small category, sure, but not bigger than an adult Human, and not the kind of thing you really had to fear.
From Floor 10 onward, however, adventurers would start running into large category monsters that hadn't appeared on the floors above.
This kind of monster usually had a body well beyond that of an ordinary adult Human, and its strength was far greater than anything in the small or medium category. Every one of them was the thick-hided, tough-fleshed type, harder to kill even than the carapace-clad Killer Ants.
And on top of that...
"Bu OOO!"
Roaring, the Orc stomped through the grove of dead trees with thunderous footfalls.
It reached out a hand toward one of the dead trees beside it and tore the thing up by the roots with its huge arm.
In that instant, the dead tree turned into a rough club, gripped in the Orc's hand.
This was the trouble with the Dungeon's armory. It turned itself into a weapon suited to the monsters' use, so that a monster you could have taken down bare-handed transformed, under that kind of support, into a special enemy you couldn't afford to underestimate.
The newly armed Orc snorted heavily, its yellow eyes turning to Leo, a savage glint lighting them up.
That was the look of a predator that had spotted its prey.
"Bu OOOOOOO!"
A few seconds later, the Orc moved.
A roar burst from its mouth again, and its feet crashed down on the ground, shaking the earth as it charged at Leo.
The rough club came down, and the Orc smashed a crater into the ground, sending up clouds of dust and broken stone in every direction.
Leo dodged that heavy blow with remarkable speed, with no intention whatsoever of going head-on against the Orc.
You could tell just from the difference in build. An ordinary adventurer had no way of blocking an Orc's attack head-on.
Even an adventurer who'd received Falna, if they weren't especially strong in "Strength" and "Endurance," then no matter who they were, they couldn't go toe-to-toe with a large category monster like an Orc.
Leo's "Strength" was only D, his "Endurance" only E. Even if he'd had both at A, he'd have had a hard time matching an Orc head-on.
So Leo dodged the swinging club without hesitation, and the very moment the Orc smashed into the ground and gouged out a crater, he lunged sideways at it.
Sword-light flashed from the short sword across the Orc's flank, opening a gash along its side and sending up a spray of blood.
Leo brushed past the Orc from the side and slashed in passing, wounding it.
Green blood spurted from the wound on the Orc's belly, and the pig-headed monster screamed in pain.
"That's tough."
Already past the Orc and standing behind it, Leo gripped the short sword in his hand and murmured.
It was the first time he'd ever felt his sword run into real resistance after striking a monster.
Up till now, even cutting into the hard carapace of a Killer Ant, with the sharpness of this short sword of decent quality in his hand, Leo could cleave straight through in one stroke. Even back when his "Strength" was still I0, that had been true. He hadn't felt any resistance at all.
This time, though, Leo had clearly felt it. The short sword had met resistance going into the Orc's flank, which told him the "Endurance" value of this large category monster was genuinely high.
"Roaaaargh!"
That Orc didn't seem to be very nimble. It roared for a while before it managed to turn around, then came at Leo a second time with absolute fury. Leo didn't even think. He sprang back hard, dodging the club.
The mist filled with the booming sound of the club hammering the ground, again and again.
Dust and splintered rock flew in every direction, and the bellowing Orc kept pursuing Leo only for Leo to slip away from it again and again.
With both his "Strength" and his "Endurance" outmatched by the Orc, Leo simply used his "Dexterity" and "Agility" to toy with it, letting it lose its mind little by little as it failed to land a single hit.
The club slammed into the ground once more, and the Orc, still locked in the posture of its swing, froze for a brief moment in the cloud of dust it had kicked up.
It was in that instant that Leo halted his backward leap and shot forward like a bullet, springing up onto the Orc's club and landing on it.
He didn't stop there. He ran up along the club and the Orc's thick arm, and in a flash he was right in front of its massive head.
A flash of cold light, and the short sword in Leo's hand plunged straight into the Orc's eye socket, running through its eye.
This was a weak point, no doubt about it. There was no way this would meet the same kind of resistance as his earlier strike to the belly.
"Bu OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO...!"
A scream of pain like nothing it had loosed before tore out of the Orc, and it began to thrash like a maddened thing.
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