More than a year of growth had long since made Leon's party a different beast than before.
There was a time when all he could do was envy the easy composure of the Loki and Astraea Familias as they moved through the Dungeon. And now... the wheel had turned, and it was their turn to become that enviable picture of looseness in other people's eyes.
It was just that, lost in the soaring Excelia, the leaping Basic Abilities, and the chance to burn off all the energy they'd stored up day to day, none of them had the slightest idea they'd become objects of admiration themselves.
...
[Slew a Lv.1 monster, Excelia +0.1]
...
[Slew a Lv.2 monster, Excelia +0.1]
[Slew a Lv.2 Rare Species, Excelia +1]
...
[Assets]: Reserve Funds: 4.13 million | Cash: 610 million (Fixed Monthly Income: 10,236)
[Excelia]: 233 (points)
...
The 17th floor: vast, empty, riddled everywhere with traps and pits, a dangerous one-way road that had earned the nickname "One-Way Street."
Leon glanced at the System messages scrolling and refreshing in the lower-left corner of his panel, then over the slowly climbing Excelia bar, and a faint, satisfied smile rose to his face.
Raise a daughter for a thousand days, and there comes the day you need her...
With the Familia's numbers grown so large, even though killing monsters below Lv.4 only earned a tenth of the Excelia, with the sheer stacking of headcount and monster count, the accumulated haul added up to a tidy sum.
They'd only just reached the 17th floor, and merely from clearing out the odd monster blocking their path along the way, without lifting so much as a finger, he'd already banked over two hundred points of Excelia lying down.
Watching the slow but steady climb of the bar, Leon observed the gorgeous, flowing magic and elegant fighting forms of Iri, Margaret, Laurier, and Aura, and remarked:
"It's not much Excelia, but at least it gives me something to look forward to."
"Man, these days, leveling up really isn't easy..."
"No wonder so many Lv.1 types spend their days coasting in the upper floors, the taverns, and the Pleasure Quarter."
"Those old hands can rake in a decent income just by subjugating a few monsters here and there, and the key thing is... up in the 'upper floors' you don't have to worry too much about your life, either. Tch... it's got me wanting to coast myself."
Leon really did want to coast.
These days, if he wanted to reap Excelia fast, his only option was to target monsters at Lv.4 and above. And enemies like that only showed up in any number deep in the lower depths.
As for the threshold of the so-called "deep floors"... that was the 37th floor.
Which meant that if Leon wanted to "clock in and grind monsters" like he used to, his commute would have to cross straight over the upper floors, the Middle Floors, and the Lower Floors, all the way down to the deep floors.
The gap was like commuting in a fifth-tier town versus commuting in a first-tier city. No, more extreme than that, because the Dungeon had no vehicles to ride...
On top of that, the trickier part was that an ordinary commute in his past life was just a matter of distance, at worst a bad day stuck in traffic on the highway for hours. But in this Dungeon, crossing floors wasn't a simple change in distance; you also had to face the constant stream of sudden situations along the way: things like a [Monster Party], a [Strengthened Species] ambush, a [Floor Collapse], and all sorts of pits and environmental traps... every one of them a matter of life and death.
One slip, and you might leave your life down here forever.
...
Beside him, Persephone, who was jotting something in a notebook with a magic-item version of a quill pen, heard Leon's remark and lifted her head to shoot him a look.
"You shouldn't go saying that kind of thing out in the open. Someone hears it, you're liable to get beaten to death."
"'Leveling up these days really isn't easy'? Are you sure your 'not easy' means the same thing as everyone else's?"
As the earliest of his bedmates, Persephone of course knew the secret of the 『Beloved's Crest』, and although the skill's name sounded none too decent, its actual function was indeed not very "decent" either...
What proper 『skill』 needs "deep intimate exchange" to activate?
Especially as her nights of pleasure with Leon grew more and more frequent, more and more varied, and more and more uninhibited, and the intimacy between them grew ever tighter, Persephone gradually came to sense the hidden potency of the 『Beloved's Crest』.
Potential enhancement, hyper-accelerated growth, and on top of that a disguise strong enough to fool the gods.
That one 『skill』 alone was enough to remake her from the ground up.
It was precisely the reason she'd been able to break through from the peak of Lv.2 all the way to her current Lv.4 in just three short years.
Persephone knew full well that, purely in terms of an adventurer's gifts and talent, she wasn't all that outstanding. That she'd become captain of the Demeter Familia owed in large part to her professionalism and her knack for coordination and management.
If she had to draw a comparison, she was probably the Tsubaki or Asfi type: high-end talent who, beyond combat ability, were masters of other specialties as well, the kind who could walk on two legs.
Persephone's words struck a chord with Jeanne and Rose too.
"Don't push your luck once you've gotten the good end of the deal," Jeanne said, folding her arms, her expression serious. "Our abnormal leveling speed, even with the levels we've underreported, anyone who's seen us fight and isn't an idiot can tell our real strength doesn't add up."
"They just hold back from asking us to our faces out of personal privacy and unspoken etiquette."
"Who knows how they're studying us behind our backs."
With that, Jeanne's expression turned even graver:
"So our cautious, low-key, steady way of doing things, we have to keep it up just the same from here on out."
"Things aren't what they used to be. As our strength keeps growing, it's only natural we'll draw the eyes of plenty of people, intentional or not, just like Freya and Loki, whose every move has countless gazes fixed on it..."
Rose stepped lightly forward, rose on her toes to brush the dust off Leon's cloak, then gave a playful wink and said warmly with a smile:
"Darling, if you don't want to pay a hefty back-charge in management fees, or get dragged into some kind of trouble... then please, whatever you do, remember not to be too flashy, okay?"
Leon: "..."
It seemed that the kind of arrogant invincible-protagonist script where you flaunt it all just wasn't something he could throw around anymore.
But on second thought... an effortless reveal that flows out on its own might actually carry more class than a stiff, deliberate show of bravado.
Once his mind turned that corner, he felt a good deal lighter.
"O flames, a gift of pain bestowed upon my foe!"
"Boom...!"
A searing sea of fire erupted in the passage ahead, the terrible heat warping the very air.
At the heart of the blaze, Margaret stood quietly like a queen of flame, clad in a high-slit red robe-dress that hugged her striking figure, black suede over-the-knee high-heeled boots on her feet. She watched the monsters turn to ash in the fire, her face calm, her long fiery-red hair streaming back in the waves of heat, the whole of her like a queen who commanded the flames...
That bone-deep pride left Laurier, locked in fierce combat with a Minotaur, staring slack-jawed...
"Wow!!!"
"Margaret! You look just like a queen right now!"
"So cool, so fierce!"
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