After agreeing with limiting our strengths, we activate the inherited skill we got from Mother, the Extra Skill Limiter, to lower our Levels down to Level 100. With this demoted strength, we can now fight fairly will the Redcap.
Just after we lowered our Levels, the goblin suddenly crouched and like a loosed arrow, it launched at me with a speed my nerfed stats barely perceived. With its daggers pointed at me, I did a quick side step and successfully avoid the swift blades.
“Whoa! I almost got hit! It’s been a while since I am this sluggish. It feels like I turned back when I was just ten.”
Even with the same Level of 100, the goblin’s AGI stat is higher than mine. My stats were allocated more to magic and attack almost equally, so my speed was inferior compared to the roguish stats of the goblin.
My thinking speed was also affected by the lowered stats, which made me hard to catch up with the goblin’s speed. That’s why I activated a Level 8 Space-Time Magic.
“Future Prediction. Now I can see its movement a second ahead.”
Future Prediction is a time spell that allows the user to peek a glimpse of the future for a short time. But it sucks my mana too much that I have to use it for only a minute.
“…”
The goblin charged at me again then slashed its daggers rapidly and made a barrage of attacks. I use my katana to deflect the raging daggers. I used my ability to see the future to slash my blade in a fluid motion and deflected two of the attacks at once.
As I am repelling its daggers, Sister didn’t waste the opportunity to slash her blade at the occupied goblin from behind.
“?!”
As if having an eye behind its head, the goblin rogue suddenly withdraw one of its daggers from attacking me and slashed it upwards, successfully deflected Sister’s slash.
Using a Dagger Art technique, the goblin skillfully maneuver its daggers and parried our blades at once. Even though I can predict what move it would make, its movements were too fast for my limited me to react.
Me and my sister stepped back then charge to the goblin and thrust our blades from the both sides. Since I was the one who is slower, the goblin just avoid my sword by rotating its body, and reacted only to Sister’s blade by parrying it.
My future sight showing me a blade going straight to me neck and a front kick to my stomach. Due to its fatality, I decided to use my blade to block the incoming dagger and let my body being kicked.
Even though I have Blast Resistance, I was knocked back for several meters due to the power of the kick. I held my sword with both hands and struck it to the flood to stop myself from knocking any further.
With a knee on the floor, I watched the duel of my sister and the Redcap.
After exchanging of blades, the goblin stepped back and crouch down. Like before, the goblin launched itself to my sister while crossing its arms.
The daggers glowed a pale light, indicator of a technique. When the daggers reached its target, my sister’s neck, the goblin swiftly swept both its arms forming a pair of pincers of daggers.
(Level 4 Scissors!)
Clank.
As I am screaming the name of the technique inwardly, a sharp clanking of metals echoed throughout the room. Sister raised her sword in time and barely block the trajectory of the pincer attack. If she haven’t stopped the daggers, her head would have sent flying.
The daggers glowed again and the goblin furiously attack Sister. Even though Sister was being attacked simultaneously, she just parry, block or evade all of it.
Even though she cannot use the same future-seeing spell as me, she had a technique that works the same as the Future Prediction. The Level 8 Martial Art: Foresight.
When I asked my sister for details, she said that even though it cannot predict the future, she could see streaks of lights which was the trajectory of incoming attacks.
After recovering my stance, I charged at the goblin. Sensing my approach, the goblin slashed the left dagger horizontally. I ducked to avoid the blade as its forming a beautiful arc.
I stood up just after the blade pass then did a roundhouse kick and hit the goblin’s occiput with the intention of dragging its head to the floor. Sister use that opportunity and swing her sword in a fluid motion.
With its head being pushed downwards, the goblin couldn’t do anything to stop the sword aiming straight for its neck. The blue blade met the goblin’s green skin and buried through its flesh, cleanly decapitated the goblin like a heavy guillotine.
Being separated from it body, my foot kicked the decapitated head to the floor. It bounced sequentially then rolled before stopped by the wall.
“Skilled dagger user are hard to deal with.”
“Yeah. Even though their range were limited, they have faster attack speed and can freely mobilize their body.”
“Since daggers are lightweight, you can wield two at once. Not only that, you can even activate two dagger techniques at the same time.”
The goblin gave us a hard time despite fighting two opponents with the same Level. But that was because we weren’t using any sword techniques. If we did, the fight had concluded in a matter of seconds.
“Seems like our rewards are here.” I said as I keep the corpse and the blades in my Inventory.
After defeating the Redcap Goblin, this floor’s Domain Guardian, a block of dark grey stone at the furthermost top of the room move, creating a two by two meter square pit. Then sounds of moving rocks echoed through the room and a wooden chest slowly ascend from the hole.
At the same time, an odd five meter high, five meter wide stone slab on the wall, right beside the chest, sunk into the floor. Upon sunk down to the floor level, a flight of stairs of stone revealed behind the wall.
“Dungeons were like straight out of RPGs.”
“RPGs?”
“Well… how do I explain it… In my previous world, we play games to entertain ourselves. RPG was one of those. RPG is a type of game where one or more players assume the roles of characters and will interact inside a fictional world. There were dungeons inside those worlds.”
“I see… I don’t get it.”
“It’ll be easier if I just show it to you.”
I conjured a video footage of RPG in the air using the Projection spell. I explained the concepts of it to my curious sister as I am playing the video. She couldn’t understand most of it and it takes her many replays and several minutes to at least grasped a gist of it.
“So there were systems in your magicless world?”
“There’s not. It existed only in video games. But I’ve been wondering about this since I was born… How do an RPG-like system exist in this world in the first place?”
“Isn’t it something from your world?”
“I don’t know. Even if a Reincarnator wished for it, it might be impossible.”
“Why is that?”
“That’s because… RPGs only existed in my era. And there were evidences of the system dated back at least two thousand years ago. That was one of the mysteries that I’ve encountered in this world so far.”
“What are the others?”
“…Just leave it in your imagination.”
“Did you just started at my chest?”
(Of course! One of those mysteries keeps a mystery raising!)
“Oh, look! Our rewards!”
“Hey! Don’t ignore me!” .𝙘𝙤𝙢
Ignoring her rants, I approached to the wooden chest, which contains our rewards, and opened it. Since it’s the reward for defeating the first Domain Guardian of this dungeon, the chest was rather small, about a meter in length.
“Sigh. Just like other dungeons, our reward was just two bars of iron ingot.”
“What can we expect of the first reward?”
“Don’t worry, Sis. We can get higher grade rewards as we go further.” I tried consoled my sister as I throwing the ingots into my subspace.
The reward that we got was a pair of iron ingots. Even though it just iron ingots, it’s already pure and void of impurities. That means it had higher quality than the mined ones.
The quality and rarity of rewards are proportional to the difficulty of the Guardian. The deeper the floor, the better the rewards. Our parents’ weapons were the rewards for defeating the Dungeon Guardian of a 70-floored dungeon.
By the way, the rewards that we got was common-grade and there were many other items under this category like low-grade monster’s raw materials. While our mothers’ weapon are legendary-grade.
“Then we have to delve deeper. Let’s go, Raphael. You’ll be my transporter.”
“At your service, my queen.”
After talking our rewards, we passed through the five-meter wide spiral stairway and descent down the 11th Floor. From here on, going to the next will be a lot more difficult.
Unlike Floor One to Nine, floors with unicursal labyrinth, 11th to 19th Floor were constructed with circular maze structure. These floors had twice the diameter than the first ones.
The paths are still ten meters wide but the ceilings are now fifteen meters high. The walls that separates the paths had the thickness of a meter, still made of the same dark grey stone from the Labyrinth Floors.
If a person explore the Maze Floors for the first time, it would take around a month to escape a floor. A day or more if memorized or guided by a map. The monsters lurking in these floors are around Level 51 to 119.
However, my Omnidirectional Perception, Clairvoyance, and Warp made us clear a floor less than a minute. A few seconds to draw a map of an entire floor. More seconds for me to solve the maze manually in my head. I had a maze solver app but I want to solve it on my own.
Just a few minutes, we already passed the Maze Floors and reached the 20th Floor. Since it’s almost time for our curfew, we decided to fight the 20th Floor Guardian the next time.
I tried to teleport outside but didn’t work. But for some reason, teleportation between floors seems to be working. Since it works, we warped back to the 1st Floor’s entrance then existed the dungeon.