Taking A Break In The Dungeon.

Gently rolling hills cascaded into the distance, interspersed with patches of lush thickets. Jagged stone slopes lay exposed across the terrain, flanked by small clusters of shrubs blooming with delicate white flowers. A flock of birds streaked across the sky, chasing the sun as its brilliant luster slowly faded into the horizon.

It was twilight—that fleeting hour where the contours of the world soften into hazy, dim silhouettes. The sunset looked a hundred percent identical to the view I had been forced to gaze at from the back of the carriage during our long journey to the “Starting Village.”

For a brief moment, I lost myself in the scenery, captivated by the comforting, deeply nostalgic view—

“ Wait… we’re still underground.“

“Ah, you’re right!”

Vetting the environment more closely, an actual structural ceiling was anchored perfectly above our heads. Calculating the mechanics of the floor, it appeared the surface world was currently dipping into dusk as well. Because the sun-synced solar stones were actively fading out, the upper atmosphere of the chamber had turned comprehensively dark, masterfully mimicking a starlit night sky.

“Good grief, though… that ceiling is exceptionally high…”

Cutting my eyes upward to run a proper diagnostic, the vertical scale was completely incomparable to any floor we had traversed so far. Furthermore, the sheer, boundless depth of the spatial architecture was pure insanity. While the fifth and eighth floors had completely overwhelmed my senses, they still possessed enough visual constraints to let you barely calculate that you were inside a dungeon.

But this stratum flipped the script entirely. It was a flawless simulation that suffered absolutely zero drop in quality compared to the surface world.

“To construct an anomaly of this caliber deep underground… how on earth is this mechanically possible?…”

Ethan-san squeezed the words from his throat, thoroughly blindsided by the scale, while Paula smoothly picked up the conversational loop. Her beautiful eyes flashed with a brilliant luster as she delivered a detached, matter-of-fact murmur.

“And every single square inch of this domain belongs entirely to you, My Lord… Ah, what a comprehensively magnificent sight.”

Right, let’s just run an automatic skip on that comment for now. However, I was in absolute agreement regarding the magnificence of the view. While I had secretly harbored high expectations for this stratum, my intuition was explicitly confirming that we had hit the ultimate jackpot. Since this was a designated “Special Floor,” I had absolutely zero complaints.

“Wow, it’s seriously massive~! Anyone would guaranteed miscalculate this zone for the outside world~! Look, they even have actual birds flying around up there!” Mia cheered.

“Yeah. Actual birds… wait, what?!”

Gazing up at the airspace as the words left my lips, a distinct structural anomaly registered in my vision. The wings on those “birds” appeared a tiny bit too large to fit standard avian metrics. No, evaluating the texture, those looked strictly like insect wings. Their flight vectors were completely erratic and fluttering, too.

Furthermore, the absolute volume of the swarm defied all logic. It looked as though the sky was being systematically carpeted by a black mass.

“My Lord!”

“This is a disaster, retreat immediately!!”

Faced with a colossal mass that resembled a racing black cloud, I barked a high-volume warning. We pivoted on our heels in a single heartbeat and executed an immediate dive back toward the safety of the staircase behind us.

The exact fraction of a second we breached the perimeter of the cramped underground landing, I let out a massive sigh of relief and rapidly audited the party logs to verify everyone’s safety parameters.

“W-What on earth was that thing?!” Mia gasped.

“It appeared to be a massive swarm of oversized moths,” Paula analyzed calmly.

“Whew… yeah, judging by the layout, those were undoubtedly Great-Eyed Moths. Their baseline power parameter shouldn’t be an issue, but that absolute volume is pure insanity.”

The creature was a textbook moth anomaly; the exact moment it fully extended its wings, the span scaled from a human fingertip straight to the elbow, featuring a massive, hyper-realistic pattern mimicking a giant eyeball etched across its back. While its physical attack metrics were incredibly low, its behavioral programming allowed it to deploy a barrage of exceptionally tedious status afflictions.

“Alright, everyone is accounted for. Let’s call it a night and log our progress here.”

“Mhm, my stamina pool is completely depleted~. Ahh, I am so jealous of Yoru-chi and Kuu-chi.”

Mia cast an incredibly envious look toward the two little beast-girls, who were actively snoozing atop the Blue Slime mattress, treating the high-velocity insect ambush as if it were a completely non-serving event. To be perfectly honest, looking at the logistical data of having to manually march all the way back to the surface right now, my own mental fortitude was right on the verge of breaking.

“Let’s at least calculate the absolute shortest navigation route back…”

Because our mapping matrix for the ninth floor was only fifty percent complete, we simply executed a mirrored retreat along our initial path. We cleared the mine shaft in a brisk fifteen minutes, but the upcoming eighth floor was an exceptionally grueling stretch. Even though we charted a perfectly straight line right through the absolute center of the zone, the transit loop clocked a full hour.

Arriving at the staircase landing, it was time to close the loop with our fairy scout. Bidding us a friendly farewell, she joined up with her incoming companions and vanished into the canopy of the forest.

“See you later~!”

“How do those entities handle their rest cycles during the night parameters?” I asked Ethan-san.

“They possess a massive hollow nested inside a tree at the western corner of the sector. They utilize that coordinates as their permanent roosting hub,” he explained with a polite nod.

Then, peeking into my eyes with a trace of anxious hesitation, he queried, “Nino-sama… I highly want to eventually construct a private cabin for my own use within this sector… Would that fall within your approved parameters?”

“Oh, that is an excellent proposal!”

Securing another localized rest area where the party can recharge its batteries when missions run late into the evening is an exceptionally high-value asset, after all.

The seventh floor merely required us to navigate a maze-like sequence of corridors, checking out in a clean twenty minutes. The sixth floor strictly entailed retracing our steps along the perimeter of the subterranean salt lake, wrapping up in fifteen minutes.

It took us just under two full hours of continuous marching to breach the threshold back into the fifth floor—but the exact fraction of a second we did, a brilliant illumination rushed out to greet us.

While the ceiling’s solar stone had completely drained its payload for the night, the scattered glow-stones positioned across the village plaza were radiating a dazzling lumen output. Hearing the rhythmic, cheerful beat of drums intersecting with a massive chorus of laughter completely dissolved my lingering stress.

Before I could even process the atmosphere, the Village Chief sprinted toward our position, his features twisted into a wave of panic.

“You have successfully returned without disaster, Nino-sama!”

“My apologies, Chief. The mission parameters took a bit longer to calculate than anticipated.”

“Please, do not fret over such boundaries! As long as your frame has suffered zero structural injuries, that is all that matters. In fact, our counsel was just locked in a fierce debate regarding whether we should deploy a rescue unit to verify your coordinates.”

“It appears I accidentally triggered a wave of security anxieties. I am deeply sorry.”

“Yo! You took your sweet time getting back, big bro! Seriously, what kind of random side-quests were you distracting yourself with out there?!”

Heimo the blacksmith had cleared his schedule to wait for our return alongside the rest of the village. Forcing a boisterous, angry grin across his face, he gestured toward a towering, massive heap of oversized bones stacked nearby.

“Go ahead and run a diagnostic check on that payload! Absolutely magnificent, right?!”

“Oh! Don’t tell me the event actually triggered?”

“Yes, My Lord. Everything unfolded in perfect alignment with your original calculations,” the Village Chief confirmed.

“And our casualty metrics… zero injuries, it seems. Did the platoon require a heavy expenditure of our medical supplies?”

“No, sir. We checked through the entire encounter without utilizing a single potion.”

It appeared the local vanguard had effortlessly repelled a massive horde of Assault Birds completely independent of our high-tier intervention. While I had harbored a baseline trace of administrative anxiety regarding their solo performance, the Chief and his men had flawlessly delivered on my expectations.

“ …Remarkable work. My immense gratitude to every single one of you for your service.“

“To receive such excessive praise from your lips is an absolute, overwhelming honor for our people!”

The Chief instantly dropped to his knees, preparing to bury his head against the soil, but I hastily intercepted his frame to block the movement. Good grief… his behavioral patterns are far too intense, he acts exactly like a textbook holy knight.

Stepping into the central plaza where the Goblins were actively holding their boisterous festival, an incredibly savory aroma drifted across the crowd. A group of local women immediately swarmed our position, masterfully ladling out bowls of steaming soup heavily stacked with delicious bird meat.

“You’ve been pushing your system until late in the evening. Please, eat your fill, Sensei-sama,” one of them urged warmly.

“This looks exceptionally delicious. Thank you very much.”

Scooping up a mouthful with the wooden spoon, I let the warm fluid glide down my throat, tracking the sensation as the heavy payload hit my stomach. While the seasoning was strictly restricted to basic salt, the flavor profile was pure heaven to a thoroughly exhausted body.

“ …Let’s just log a stay here for tonight.“

My remaining physical stamina was hovering so close to absolute zero that the mental calculation required to stand up and march out of the dungeon was completely non-serving. Evaluating our operational data, we had successfully traversed two entire strata in a single day, after all.

Since the Chief and his inner circle had already factored that arrangement into their logs, our entire party resolved to crash at the Goblin settlement for the evening.

We gathered around the simmering cauldrons, sharing updates regarding the day’s events until drowsiness began to claim our systems. The exact fraction of a second I pulled out the iron ore deposits we had harvested, Heimo’s eyes lit up, and he immediately demanded permission to establish an official forging workshop directly inside this dungeon. Ethan-san promptly back-ordered the request, volunteering to personally secure all mandatory charcoal logistics for the facility.

As the two of them locked into a fierce planning loop to calculate the optimal coordinates for the smithy, their goblin apprentices joined the conversation with boisterous bursts of laughter.

When I presented the exotic, high-grade ingredients harvested from the eighth floor to Karina-san and her culinary contingent, an immediate female-only focus group triggered. They began rapidly pitching a barrage of highly creative recipe configurations to one another, their faces filled with pure amusement.

Furthermore, regarding the massive payload of raw Assault Bird meat, Ethan-san suggested deploying a smoking process to lock in preservation, a strategy that Red-Feather aggressively validated on the spot.

Finally, the conversational loops shifted toward the data on the tenth floor. The revelation that it boasted a geographical footprint vastly superior to the fifth floor triggered an immense wave of fascination across the entire settlement. A barrage of diverse opinions and strategies flew across the plaza, culminating in the Village Chief delivering a high-intensity, deeply passionate speech regarding the future structural trajectory of their community well into the midnight hours.

And just like that, our comprehensively long day reached a beautifully gentle, peaceful resolution.