Danmachi- Hell’s Forge

I left shortly after that when Mama Mia glared at us and Freya had to get back to work. The dungeon square was bustling as adventurers were making their way to the guild or the dungeon itself. Some were like me and packed for a long dive while others were in basic kit since they only intended to hit the top floors. I saw hopeful newbies and nervous ones as well. Veterans who were well used to the dungeon and even the regular porter that was treated poorly.-

I never liked the way porters were treated as it seemed like a good way to make enemies of those who may one day become powerful. While it's true that no porter is there for their combat prowess that isn't typically because they are weak so much as just not strong enough to deal with those higher leveled foes. Even more mistreating a porter seems like an easy way to get fucked over in a critical time in the dungeon. Keep in mind these people have all your stuff, potions, food, water, weapons, the works. Treat them badly and they might "accidentally" take too long getting a critical item thus letting you get killed by a monster or flat out bleed to death.-

Shaking my head to chase away these thoughts I joined the throngs of adventurers heading into the dungeon. I was barely paid any attention as everyone more or less knew to mind their business when going into the dungeon or risk getting ambushed by those who found their prying eyes unacceptable. Getting killed over such a matter was rare but it wasn't all that unheard of for people to beat others as a lesson in adventuring etiquette.-

Besides that it was pretty rare for two parties to run into each other the further you went into the dungeon as the floors got bigger the further you went down. I along with several people took off straight towards the stairs once we got on the first floor to quickly head down further. Of course I was the only one not pacing themselves as unlike the others being exhausted didn't actually put me in much danger with my technique. Anything short of destroying my brain or body or cutting my head off entirely was life threatening to me.-

Like this I easily dropped from the first floor to the seventh before even I had to take a break as my lungs were burning. Running the distance of all seven floors was the equivalent of lapping the entire city topside, no small distance to run. While my endurance was quite high I wasn't quite at the level of going full tilt for an entire hour. What I could do however was recover from such a level of exhaustion in a few minutes. My body wasn't tired or sore or anything after all, merely out of breath. Once I recovered fully I headed down even further until I finally found the "shortcuts" that lead further down by dropping down.-

These holes for lack of a better term went from the upper floors to the lower in a semi random manner so there was honestly no telling what floor you'd land on until you eventually hit the seventeenth floor that housed the Goliaths room alone. I got a bit unlucky with my hole jumping and went through seven different holes before finally landing in the seventeenth floor. I didn't even bother looking for the rex as I knew it had already been slain a day ago and thus needed a week to spawn again.-

Sliding down the tunnel to the eighteenth floor I kicked off the wall at the end and pushed a dense amount of hellfire out of my feet and hands to send me rocketing across the floor to the stairs. I didn't doubt at all this got a lot of attention but frankly speaking I didn't care as I was in a rush to get to the great tree labyrinth and water palace floors. I'd given myself a month for this expedition and didn't want to waste even a second of it.-

One of my goals for this expedition was to stock up on Battle boar meat which was why I wanted to get to the tree floors but in truth most of my time will be spent exploring the water palace floors. The craze for the dread grubs drops had finally faded a bit so when I finally set foot on floor nineteen there was a whole hell of a lot less people here. I wasn't picky and just randomly started walking off into the wooded floor. The first monster I found didn't include a battle boar but did have a Mammoth fool. The beast charged me by I simply pointed a finger at it and a ray of erasure shot out and through it's head killing it instantly.-

I whistled casually as I strolled over to the corpse and refined the tusks of the beast before cutting open it's chest and ripping out the magic stone which caused the corpse to burst into smoke that flowed into my tattoos under my clothes. With a flex of my technique I also shed the blood on me from the stone retrieval. I stored away the tusks as ivory was always a nice thing to have for my works.-

I got attacked by some fire birds and blew those little bastards up with my flame I did, teach them not to dive bomb my ass. It didn't really but it made me fell better so shut up about it. After what felt like hours of walking around mindlessly and killing anything that so much as twitched in my vicinity I finally found a battle boar that had some lizardmen with it. That was fine by me as I simply shrugged and a pillar of fire rose from me and formed a massive serpent that shot forward and devoured the lizardmen in an instant.-

The battle boar I took care of by dashing forward and jumping ever sop slightly above it's tusked face and swinging my weapons axe side down on it's neck. With a single erasure imbued chop the head came right off and rolled away from the body. I ignored the squirting blood and laid my hand on the still twitching corpse and began carefully refining the choicest cuts of meat on it. The haunches, belly, backstrap and ribs were all preserved with my technique as I extracted the magic stone turning everything else into smoke that I absorbed.