That was pretty sad… did those three leave because they couldn't stand Marie anymore? How exactly was she planning to clear the dungeon in one week when she didn't have a party? Considering her usual behavior, she would probably go alone instead of asking for help. Regardless, putting aside her circumstances, it was quite weird for someone as strong as her to use knives… she said that they used hammers to deal with the cold golems, after all. Or her friends were the ones who used and she tried to stab them until she got lucky and hit their cores?
In any case, they entered the dungeon and as if she didn't know the meaning of strategical thinking, Marie charged mindlessly toward the crabs. Fortunately, she was strong enough to pierce their heads with a single strike and kill them.
"You can leave all these to me, in exchange for that, you will deal with the golems," Marie said.
Billy shrugged. At least they will save energy by doing that. In any case, Billy still had to take some time to gather the materials… maybe he should negotiate to work for them for the next few days to carry those… they didn't have the luxury of wasting a single minute, after all.
"Hey, Billy, I was thinking…" Lily said.
"That is a dangerous hobby," Billy said.
"What do you mean by that…" Lily frowned. "Anyway, don't you think that I could focus all my mana into one of my arrows to make it super powerful?"
"Unless you have an absurd amount of strength, a single arrow will need to be used several times to consume all the mana you put into it…" Billy said. "Unless you focus a lot of mana into a single point of the arrow, like the very end of the tip. But that would require quite some control."
Not even Billy was sure that he could pull that off. Still, that might be the trick of developing a new skill… enhancing the very end of the tip of the arrow and then enhancing one's arms with mana to boost their strength. The arrow certainly has one heck of a piercing power. Nevertheless, Billy decided to tell that to Lily later since they didn't have room to experiment with skills right at the moment.
In any case, the group crossed the next floors in a hurry, so they reached the fifth after just three hours. Even though she didn't use the same tactics and skills as them, Marie had been pretty useful. She could easily block the attacks of both hands of the enemies with a single knife and then slice their throat with the other. As expected of a guild master… she was on another level. Even after killing dozens of those, she didn't break a sweat.
"We can only fight there at the same time in the front line, so I will stay behind for the time being," Billy said. "To make things easier for us, try to kick the monsters that you defeat behind you in order to avoid accidents and to give me the chance to get materials before we return."
Billy imagined that things wouldn't go that smoothly, but he was surprised to see that things went as planned. It was all because of Marie though. The woman was like a tornado and wherever she was blood was bound to rain down. Thanks to that, Billy had to work insanely fast to keep up with their fighting speed.
In any case, in just a few minutes, one hundred or so Aquatic beasts were killed. However, they didn't find an end to the horde in front of them. There was no sign of their numbers decreasing… Once again, Billy called for a retreat to make his friends rest a little and recover their mana as well.
"I guess it is about time for you to explain to us how things are on this floor," Billy said.
"There is nothing to explain, the core of the dungeon makes the monsters spawn, even when no one is on this floor," Marie replied while she was cleaning her knives. "When I cleared this last floor last time, the core spawned around fifteen hundred monsters every day, but the numbers never increased even when no one came to this floor for an entire month."
It seemed that those basic features of the dungeon changed… certainly there were more than two thousand monsters there. Did something happen inside the dungeons that caused that change, or was it due to something else?
"Did anyone suspicious use this dungeon since the last time the dungeon was cleared?" Billy asked.
"How should I know?" Marie asked.
Billy was foolish in asking that, of course Marie wouldn't pay attention to who uses the dungeon, even though she was supposed to monitor it with her staff. Billy began to wonder what might have happened in a while that might change the dungeon, in the first place, the possibility that a human-made something to the core of the dungeon was rather dubious. In any case, one thing came to his mind… It was the discovery of the new dungeon.
"Come to think of it, these monsters are created by mana and probably ate fed by mana given by the core when they don't get any food," Billy thought. "So, most dungeon monsters don't have to leave the dungeon… with that in mind, why did we end up facing that thing when we were about to capture that guy?"
Billy already knew that dungeons could break… but it didn't make any sense for a single monster to escape. In the end, Billy ended up biting his lips in annoyance since he still couldn't understand many things. Being a person from a modern world didn't make him automatically good at understanding things that were weird in a magical world, after all.. Nevertheless, Billy's job didn't change and they had to decrease the number of monsters and see if they could stop the dungeon break.