A day passed in the blink of an eye.
Other than the punch Gauss had given him, Serandur really didn't show any other physical abnormalities. After thinking it over and discussing it at length, Gauss and the others decided to open the path to the fifth floor of the labyrinth today.
More precisely, it had already been nearly a week since the battle against the magic frog lord ended.
More and more people had entered the fourth floor in that time.
By now, both the Red Dragon Company and Gauss's name had spread throughout the entire Timber Labyrinth. Even newcomers who had only just arrived knew that it was Red Dragon Company who had slain the fourth-floor lord and would soon be opening the way to the fifth floor.
"Ready?"
Gauss looked at the teammates around him.
Though the past week hadn't been pure rest—not when you considered the logistics work everyone had been doing, except for those in seclusion breaking through—compared to fighting and traveling, that workload was basically just a warm-up for battle-hardened veteran adventurers.
Looking at the energetic faces turned toward him, Gauss understood what they were saying without words.
He nodded.
As his right hand tightened, the translucent keystone instantly crumbled into powder.
Boom!
A strange, vortex-like pull rose from the empty ground in front of Gauss.
That pull grew stronger and stronger, spiraling downward as everyone watched.
First, a doorway took shape. Then, step by step, a staircase slowly descended, each stair aligning itself neatly, leading all the way down into the depths below.
Everyone knew this was the stairway to the fifth floor.
Gauss took the lead and walked in.
In truth, this was the first time Gauss had ever been the first person to enter a new floor of a labyrinth.
Up until now, he had always been the one following behind others.
But this time, because he had been the one to kill the floor lord, the role of pioneer had naturally fallen to him and his companions.
Maybe because it led to the fifth floor, the passageway felt unusually long compared to the others.
The only sound in the tunnel was the echo of footsteps.
And yet, if one listened closely, there was also the soft, intermittent sound of water dripping onto the stairs.
As they advanced, the air also seemed to grow more and more humid.
With his Perception as high as 16, Gauss could tell for certain that he wasn't imagining it. The moisture in the air really was increasing rapidly.
After about ten minutes of silent walking, they finally reached the end of the passage.
Ahead of them was a wash of blue-green light.
Gauss stepped through the exit and entered the fifth floor of the labyrinth—an area no one had yet explored.
"Light."
He cast the spell, summoning several floating balls of brilliant white light that illuminated the dim surroundings.
They had emerged into a vast cavern. The air was cold, and water droplets were continuously falling from the stalactites overhead.
Plink. Plink.
The droplets splashed as they hit the ground.
Suddenly, Gauss noticed something strange about the water. There was a faint trace of magic inside it.
"Careful."
He gave the warning while looking up.
Clusters of brightly colored slimes were dropping from the ceiling.
Some were large, some small.
They fell straight toward the group that had just emerged, their mouths splitting open wide as they descended.
So this is a slime nest?
Gauss remained perfectly calm. He had already been mentally prepared for an ambush the moment they stepped out.
The Level 5 spell he had been holding ready in the passage instantly activated.
"Bigby's Hand!"
An enormous amount of mana gathered overhead. In an instant, a pair of silver-glowing giant hands more than ten meters long formed above the exit, shielding it completely.
Before the slimes could fall onto the Red Dragon members, they landed in those massive palms.
"Grasping Hand."
Gauss's thoughts shifted, and the giant hands clenched.
Squelch!
Dozens of slimes burst open like overripe fruit.
Sticky fluid dripped from between the fingers of the giant magical hands.
Gauss casually glanced at the bestiary.
That single crushing motion had already killed several dozen slimes.
Under the effect of a Level 5 spell cast by Gauss, they really were far too weak.
By then, the other Red Dragon members had also reacted and begun attacking the slimes hidden in cracks, grass piles, and shadows around the cavern.
Arrows and spells shot upward.
Slimes hiding in crevices and vegetation were dragged out and skewered through their cores.
Gauss's attention, meanwhile, settled on the largest slime farther back.
It was about two meters across.
It was the biggest slime Gauss had ever seen since becoming an adventurer.
Slimes were one of the common low-tier monsters.
Compared to goblins, though, they normally didn't organize themselves to attack villages or caravans, so their presence rarely stood out.
In fact, most slimes didn't even have formal challenge ratings at all. Seeing a Level 1 or 2 slime was already fairly unusual.
By Gauss's estimate, this slime chieftain was about Level 4 or 5.
Which meant that, within the generally weak slime species, it was already a rare prodigy.
Sensing Gauss's gaze, the huge slime rolled backward, with a few slime guards instinctively shifting to protect it.
Splat!
Then, without any visible warning, several of the slimes in front of it suddenly burst apart, their remains instantly corroding the ground and eating a pit twenty or thirty centimeters deep into the floor.
The stronger the slime, the more corrosive its internal fluids were.
And as slimes rose in level, they gradually learned how to manipulate mana.
Most of their spells, though, tended to be water- or poison-based.
Without any more curiosity about its abilities, Gauss decisively called Bigby's Hand over.
"Crushing Fist!"
At his command, the silver light coating the giant hand suddenly intensified.
The enormous palm hardened, then slammed down at a speed completely at odds with its huge size.
In the instant before impact, the air beneath it seemed to vanish.
Boom!
The whole cavern shook twice.
Then the air fell silent.
When Bigby's Hand rose again, the slime was nothing but a puddle of muck, thoroughly dead.
Although he felt it was impressive for a slime to reach that level of power, Gauss showed no mercy.
Slimes were hardly a friendly species.
They didn't attack human settlements simply because they weren't very good at gathering information. But if they encountered humans in the wild, they had no problem feeding on them.
Research had shown that a slime's path to strength often depended on increasing its affinity for mana and its intelligence. Killing intelligent life was one shortcut toward that.
After collecting the shattered slime cores into his storage pouch, Gauss glanced around. The other slimes had already been dealt with by the Red Dragon members in short order.
"Rest for a while first."
He had the others clean up the cave.
If nothing changed, this would likely become the base camp for future adventurers on the fifth floor.
After that, he took out the map crystal.
At the moment, the crystal contained information only up to the fifth floor. This was the deepest layer for which he still had clear guidance.
And on the map, a distinct monster icon was marked.
If he was right, it indicated the location of the floor lord, just like the magic frog lord on the fourth floor.
There was still a considerable distance between them.
Because Gauss and his people were the first to arrive on the fifth floor, he wasn't in as much of a hurry as he had been when first reaching the fourth.
No adventurer could possibly beat them to the lord now.
Besides, he also wanted to gather some information about this floor first.
Once he was sure the cave was secure, he called Shadow over, and the two of them slipped away from the chamber.
The moment they left the cave, the environment remained damp and gloomy.
Moss and puddles were everywhere.
Frogs, mosquitoes, and all sorts of insects hidden in cracks and dense plants could be found all around.
Gauss immediately raised his right hand.
The Weaver's Mark on the back of it lit up.
This was as good a time as any to test what the talent could do.
Soon, with the aid of Weaver's Mark, he felt as though he had connected to some vast but loose web of awareness.
Countless large and small nodes flickered in his perception.
"Welcome, master!"
"Welcome!"
The upgraded Weaver's Mark really was completely different.
Before, he had also been able to hear insect noises, but those had always been chaotic mutterings that only irritated him.
Now, under the control of this talent, even insects that could never have had true individual awareness seemed able to produce clear sounds.
Of course, it wasn't that the insects themselves had changed. It was that the ability had been strengthened. When "communicating" with them now, he could actively guide or support them.
From now on, neither he nor his companions would need to worry about mosquitoes or venomous bugs.
And when it came to true insect-type monsters with independent awareness, he would also be able to disrupt them through the voice carried by Weaver's Mark.
Before long, through that communication, Gauss identified the two most numerous monster groups on the fifth floor.
Unlike the fourth floor, the fifth floor had two truly dominant species.
One was the slimes he had just encountered at the exit.
The fifth floor's humid environment was extremely well suited to slime reproduction. The only reason that normally weak low-tier species could persist in such great numbers was their absurd breeding ability.
Just like goblins, if you found a single slime, it usually meant there was already a whole cluster of them nearby.
The other dominant group was the myconids.
These creatures also naturally preferred dark underground environments.
From the insects, Gauss could even sense something like fear toward them.
They were a much greater threat than the slimes.
Gauss mentally reviewed what he knew of myconids.
They existed in the normal world outside the labyrinth too, though ordinary people almost never saw them.
Even adventurers rarely ran into them.
Gauss himself had only encountered them once, a long time ago during a dungeon exploration. Back then, he had even envied their terrifying regenerative ability.
Myconids communicated through collective meditation via psychic force.
That meant that once even one myconid spotted an intruder, the information could spread through the entire colony almost instantly.
So although they weren't common, they were definitely not to be underestimated.
Aside from their strong regeneration and decent combat ability, the myconid king could also produce living spores, resurrecting other creatures and converting them into spore thralls.
Those thralls retained most of their former strength and obeyed the myconids without question.
So when fighting a myconid colony, one wasn't only fighting myconids themselves, but also all kinds of spore thralls with a wide variety of abilities.
Once Gauss had gathered that information, he had Shadow help move him quickly through the surrounding area using her ability.
There was far more wildlife on the fifth floor than on the fourth.
And then Gauss noticed something that genuinely surprised him.
He found large numbers of slimes being raised in captivity.
Some were kept in caves like the one they had emerged into. Others were packed into huge pits.
Countless spherical slimes wriggled inside those pits.
Which meant that the information he had gotten from the insects had been just slightly off.
The slimes really were on par with the myconids in terms of population—but the slimes were being farmed.
Obviously, they weren't putting themselves into those enclosures.
And aside from the slimes themselves, the only ones likely capable of doing that were the more intelligent myconids.
So they're raising slimes as stored food?
The thought intrigued him.
He already knew that some monster species were highly intelligent, but seeing this kind of purposeful husbandry—the sort of thing one would normally associate with humans—still made him pause.
And before long, that guess was confirmed.
A three-meter-tall mushroom-like figure slowly emerged from the grass ahead, moving like some old farmer. It walked to the edge of one of the pits, looked down, then tipped a container and dumped a mass of dead leaves and weeds into it.
~~~
Patreon(.)com/NotEvenMyFinalForm
— Currently You can Read 100 Chapters Ahead of Others!