Divine Luck: SSS-Rank Battle Maid Harem

Nora and Alzara looked at Zach. He was right. If they were confined to the Labyrinth, a place that seemed fixed in time, while fully aware of an entire world just on the other side of a gate, they would stop at nothing to leave.

But they hadn't even heard of elves before this, much less anything about them leaving the Labyrinth. Either, the elves were more different than their long ears suggested, or something was deeply off about the entire situation.

However, it was impossible for them to confirm anything without more information.

"Is this something we need to care about, Master?" Alzara suddenly asked. They didn't know about the elves until just now, and it didn't seem like the elves were plotting their destruction or anything. They were just living their lives.

"...I guess that's true. But it just feels like we're missing something."

Alzara suddenly reached out and grabbed Zach and Nora, plucking them away from the monster that suddenly burst out of the ground in a shower of sand. The big, rat-like thing covered in sand-colored armor lost its target and dove back into the ground. No, it tried to dive back into the ground.

The dagger lodged in its spine, paralyzing it, stopped the monster.

Zach undid the barrier around Borso.

"Get ready," he said while covering the ground beneath them in a barrier. Several thuds immediately rang out as more of those monsters crashed into it when they tried to dive at Zach.

But they couldn't kill them if the monsters were trapped underground. Fortunately, the monsters weren't obsessed with ambushes. They crawled out of the ground outside the barrier's range before trying to get to Zach. They did not get past Alzara and Nora. Some of them managed to sneak past Borso.

Alzara had always been swift and agile with movements like a ghost whenever she fought.

But on the desert sand, where not even the armored rat-like monsters couldn't guarantee their footing, she was unstoppable. She didn't disturb even a single grain of sand when she flickered across the desert around Zach, dicing the monsters and feeding the yellow sand their red blood.

Nora, who usually fought similarly to Alzara, didn't even try to imitate her this time. Those moves weren't something a human could imitate. It would be like a human trying to imitate a fish swimming in the water.

Instead, she secured her footing on the barrier around Zach and fought defensively. She didn't need to kill the monsters. She just needed to stop them from getting to Zach. Alzara could do the killing.

It didn't take long for Borso to understand why Zach was worried about him being a dead weight. Alzara dominated the sandy dunes.

However, compared to her, Nora was only slightly better than him. And Zach wasn't doing anything at all. Who was the real deadweight?

Determined not to be outdone by either Alzara or Nora, Borso doubled his efforts in cutting down the monsters until no more came. While they gathered the central pieces of their armor, a diamond-shaped rock-solid part from the monsters' chests, Borso looked over at Zach.

"Are you cursed?" He couldn't help but ask.

He had accompanied the hunting parties on the first nine floors. Even when they used lures, lures that stank, they had not gathered this many monsters. And by the unsurprised looks on Zach's and the other two's faces, this wasn't the first time.

Borso had also noticed how all the monsters had gunned straight for Zach like their lives depended on it.

"I might as well be," Zach answered with a sigh. He didn't elaborate. Borso didn't push. He could tell that it had brought Zach some suffering over the years. He gave the young man with dyed black hair a sympathetic look.

Zach just didn't want to talk to Borso more than necessary. In fact, his monster-attraction ability had brought him a great deal of convenience. He never hungered. He could gather almost endless, though mostly basic, alchemical materials for Alzara. And it was a great source of levels for his summoning interface.

But it was worrisome.

Lexi had mentioned it was due to something leaking from him. Alzara and the others had mentioned something similar.

But they had no idea what that something was, nor what do do about it. The world essence energy had helped when it floated around in his body, and his more threatening familiars could suppress the monsters' ravenous instincts with their bloodlust.

If something from the depths of him that was precious enough to whip most monsters into a frenzy was leaking from him, Zach wanted it to stop. He wanted something that precious all for himself.

The strange thing was that it hadn't been noticeable before he became a summoner. And it only became worse as he grew stronger.

Zach didn't like it, but there wasn't anything he could do about it, either.

With another sigh, Zach and the others teleported to the twelfth floor.

They looked around in confusion.

"...Didn't Viomin say all the floors up to the twentieth were desert?" Zach asked, glancing at Borso who had the most contact with Viomin.

"She did…" He nodded slowly, looking around in confusion.

There was not a speck of sand around them. Experience tales at My Virtual Library Empire

The only thing around them was glass. The ground was a seemingly endless floor of wavy glass. At the bottom of the glass, the darkness might be desert, but it was hard to tell with how the glass bent and tricked with the light.

"This…" However, Zach remembered something. It was something he had first read in a book and then seen for himself during one of Alzara's experiments.

"Sand can turn to glass under extreme heat, right?"

Alzara nodded. It wasn't as straightforward as all glass turning to glass just by heating it a little. To make proper glass, a few other materials were needed and a specific and controlled temperature.

But there was no denying what Zach was hinting at.

Someone had torched the twelfth floor.