Ice Lances blasted out like a string of cannon fire, each one faster than the last, carving countless ice-blue afterimages through the air as they slammed into Goliath's massive body in an unbroken stream!
Watching Leon pour firepower into the Monster Rex with that fanatical look on his face, as if he had an endless supply of Magic, Margaret and Irisviel, seeing this "twitchy" combat state of his for the first time, just stared, dumbfounded.
The two of them turned their heads stiffly toward Aura and stammered out a question:
"A-Aura... is Leon always like this once he gets going in a fight?"
"This is way different from how he was up on the surface, isn't it?"
Maintaining her wide-area buff magic while drawing and nocking arrow after arrow to cover Laurier and Kureha as they struck at the Monster Rex's toes and shins, Aura let her mind wander for a moment, then said thoughtfully:
"Oh... Mr. Leon does have a bad habit. Once he gets excited in a fight, he goes a little... twitchy."
"No, not twitchy... In his own words, it's the rush of saturating everything with firepower. It gets to your head real easy..."
Irisviel & Margaret: "..."
Circling the Monster Rex, looking for an opening to strike, swapping positions with Kureha and Laurier from time to time, Persephone noticed the firepower behind her had cut out and quickly turned to remind the rear guard:
"Stop chatting! The Monster Rex is attacking again! Cover Kureha and Laurier first..."
"Huh? Right!"
"Iri, let's go!"
"Okay!"
The two nodded, then went back to directing the falcons woven from mithril thread, and the Karmic Flame Calamity All-Slaying Heavenly Maiden rejoined the fight once more...
Flashing blades, fireballs and Ice Lances all interweaving, the booming, the slashing, the impacts, all mixed together with Leon and the others' occasional shouts, combined with the riot of colorful magic light and the Monster Rex's roars, made the whole enormous chamber a chaotic, lively spectacle.
"Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom...!"
After weathering the boss's ultimate attack, the battle settled back into a steady damage phase.
By now Goliath was just gritting through the blizzard and every kind of debuff, taking chained attacks from every direction. Leon's rapid-fire Ice Lances, plus the ranged suppression from Margaret, Irisviel, and Aura, left it no room to fight back at all. All it could do was cover its head and defend.
If it didn't, the close-range assault and sharp slashes from the melee group alone, from Kureha, Persephone, and Laurier, would have been enough to hack its defenses to ribbons. Even though it was the one Monster Rex specialized in defense and endurance...
...
...
And at that very moment, while Leon and the others camped on Goliath and pounced on it the instant it "respawned"...
Floor 18, the Under Resort, Rivira Town.
"Move your asses, come on, come on! Pick up the pace, all of you!"
Bors planted a kick on some dwarf's backside, cursing and hurrying them along:
"Goliath's been born! This time we have to take it down!"
He took a hard drag on his cigar, swung the cleaver in his hand, killing intent blazing in his single eye:
"This time! There's no way I'm letting those bastards up on the surface swoop in and snatch it again...!"
"Once or twice, fine, whatever! But snatching the kill every single time, right down to the second? What the hell is that!"
"Does Rivira have no pride at all?!"
"Goddammit, especially that Loki Familia..."
"Bunch of bastards!"
Bors spat on the ground, and just as he was cursing out the big surface familias, a dog-man underling came scrambling and stumbling over, panic written all over his face.
"B-Boss Bors! It's bad! It's really bad!!!"
"Smack...!"
A massive slap spun the underling around on the spot like a top. Quick as a flash, Bors grabbed him by the collar and hauled him up close, his single eye practically spitting fire, the tip of his nose nearly pressing into the underling's face:
"Kid, if you can't spit out a damn good reason right now, you're shoveling brown-bear shit for the next year!"
Pinned under the glare of a Lv.3 old hand, never mind that Bors was also the head honcho of Rivira's underground black market, with all that pressure bearing down on him, the underling was so scared he wet his pants right then and there.
His expression went from panicked to ghostly white, bean-sized beads of sweat rolling off his forehead, the tail behind him bolt upright, his voice shaking to pieces:
"Th-that... the Monster Rex... it, it got swooped on again!!!"
"..."
The vicious look on Bors's face froze in an instant, the light draining from his eye.
The underling swallowed hard, over and over, feeling that his boss right now was a thousand times more terrifying than a moment ago...
Then the hand gripping his collar began to tremble violently... and looking at the boss's bald head, no... his whole head, it flushed red with blood in a heartbeat, going full crimson!
"Say. That. To. Me. Again?"
The underling, white as a sheet, mustered everything he had and shouted:
"The Monster Rex Goliath got stolen by someone!!!"
"Holy shit!!!"
"Grab your weapons! Everyone, with me!!!"
Bors was about to lose it!
Goliath, the giant Monster Rex of Floor 17, had always been Rivira's all but guaranteed cash cow, a steady few million Valis every half month. This was the unspoken arrangement between the top surface familias and the underground black market.
Normally, even when the surface folks had a need to subjugate it, they'd bring Rivira's people along to leech a little experience.
And even if they weren't let in on the fight, afterward Goliath's drop items, the harvested materials, the magic stones and so on, some portion would still be sold off to them, letting these local snakes skim a layer of grease off the top.
When it came down to it, anyone holding this prime patch of Under Resort, any big familia coming down from above couldn't get around Rivira no matter what.
Unless it was Loki, Freya, Ganesha, Astraea, or Hephaestus, the kind of heavyweights with fists harder than theirs. Then, naturally, they'd have to put on a friendly face. But other than that? Didn't matter who you were, if you passed through Rivira and didn't leave a little "toll" behind, did you really think you'd still be operating in the Dungeon afterward?
Don't let their average level fool you, most of them only at Lv.2 or Lv.3.
Send them deep into the Lower Floors or into the deep levels to pioneer new territory and they might not have the chops. But... all they had to do was throw a few obstacles your way, stir up a little trouble... drag another familia down into failure with them, and they could absolutely pull that off.
After all, in a treacherous place like the Dungeon, who could tell which "accident" was chance and which was manmade?
A textbook case of useless at building anything, but plenty good at wrecking it.
So any team with the ability to come and go through Rivira would stay on decent terms with its people, at least to some degree. Even if they didn't get along, they'd keep up the bare minimum of a surface relationship.
It was just... they never imagined that the one snatching the kill this time would be no small fry.
...
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