Departure For The 10th Floor Sightseeing Tour.

Even though I had only just assigned everyone their new duties, there were so many people eager to see the lower levels that we decided to take a trip down to peek at the tenth floor first.

The tour group was quite a large crowd. Aside from the usual four—myself, Paula, Mia, and Ethan-san—the familiar Village Chief, his wife, and Heimo joined us. From the textile team, we had two female mages, and from the youth alliance, three warriors and two archers.

On the monster side, we had Yoru, Kuu, and the Blue Slimes, Sue and Loo. Plus, Gob-chi and two other goblins who were highly skilled with bows volunteered to come along, acting as the vanguard to scout out potential base locations on the eighth and tenth floors.

“Alright, let’s head out then. Is everyone ready?”

“Yes, yes~! I can go anytime~!”

“Departing~!”

“Kyuu~!”

“Whoa, hold on. Riding on that slime looks like a blast! Where’s mine?!”

“Nino-sama, am I clearing the requirements to participate as a swordsman today?”

“Dear, please refrain from doing anything reckless.”

“Word is the next floor has a massive ocean on it.”

“Huh… I wonder if it’s bigger than the Dragon’s Inland Sea.”

It was easily several times noisier than our usual trips.

The path on the sixth floor splits into east and west, and the correct route with the stairs is to the west. Today, however, we intentionally advanced from the east.

“First, I calculate I’ll have you guys try fighting a giant crab.”

Crabs and turtles manifest at the dead-end of the eastern path as well, but executing a full gathering loop there usually clocks around forty minutes. I figured since the youth alliance was done with their escort duties and their schedules were clear, I’d have them hunt there instead. However…

Having only faced monsters up to the fourth floor, the young men were undoubtedly overflowing with confidence. They aggressively challenged the crab, but the final yield of their performance parameters was terribly subpar.

“T-The spears won’t bite! This thing’s shell has an insane defense metric!”

“Ugh, arrows are completely non-serving too! It’s swinging those giant pincers around. Fall back!”

“What the—look at those water bubbles! Is that even allowed?!”

Against the crab’s armor, bone spears carved from wild dog bones and standard goblin shortbows suffered from a distinct lack of raw damage output. The female mages acting as support launched a barrage of <Fire Bullet>, but the projectiles were effortlessly neutralized by the crab’s <Water Bubble> array. Deprived of a definitive lethal strike, they blundered into the absolute worst-case textbook pattern when a giant turtle joined the fray.

Unable to watch any longer, the Chief and Heimo intercepted the hostiles. Thanks to their high-tier intervention, the party barely managed to scrape together a messy victory.

“Your level metrics are part of the problem, but it seems utilizing dog bones has reached its absolute limit of viability.”

While my stock of White Magic Stone clusters was running low, letting our active labor demographic suffer structural injuries would tank our long-term efficiency anyway. I reached into my interface, <Restored> two iron halberds dropped by the Skeleton Bosses on the seventh floor, and handed them over.

“These possess the proper parameters to bypass their defense. I can’t supply enough for the whole platoon, so ensure you rotate them among yourselves.”

“W-We’re comprehensively grateful, boss!”

“Let me touch it next!”

Right, instead of focusing on reforging swords, my immediate queue should have prioritized manufacturing iron spearheads and arrowheads, I calculated.

Since the raw power of my Dark Mace was already certified, and both the Chief and Heimo actively participated in combat from the start, the subsequent crab-hunting loops concluded with zero friction. Based on these updated metrics, leaving them to manage this sector felt entirely safe. Even if a statistical anomaly triggered, crabs and turtles have exceptionally sluggish movement vectors, allowing the volunteers to easily retreat to the safety of the fifth floor.

Including the subjugation of the Giant Crab boss, our exploratory loop of the sixth floor wrapped up in about an hour and a half.

Next up was the seventh floor. I assigned the two mages from the textile team to focus their training metrics on the Shadows here.

“U-Um, I’m cleared to fire, right?!”

“Is this genuinely safe?…”

Replicating a textbook wave of panic I felt like I’d seen somewhere before, they unleashed their fireballs, systematically dismantling the shadowy lifeforms one after another. Since the tactical loop strictly required them to maintain a safe distance and deploy magic, this floor was an exceptionally high-value zone to harvest easy experience points.

At the central Skeleton Tower, the Chief and his wife displayed an incredible, highly synchronized combo array that put in massive work. We meticulously harvested all the fractured, rusted swords and shields discarded by the skeletons. The colossal Skeleton Boss at the top was a bit too high-tier for the volunteers, so our regular elite unit stepped in to handle the cleanup.

“Whoa… their combat metrics are pure insanity…”

“S-Spectacular velocity…”

Witnessing Yoru and Kuu unleash their overwhelming combat parameters, a chorus of praise spilled from the youth alliance.

By the time we checked off these milestones, roughly three hours had elapsed since the start of the tour. With midday rapidly approaching, we resolved to log a brief rest cycle on the upcoming eighth floor.

“Hah! Nothing but brittle bones and weird shadows. Total trash mobs, the lot of ’em!”

Heimo had been thoroughly bored by the gloomy atmosphere and his distinct lack of deployment windows up until now, but the exact fraction of a second the timber corridors of the eighth floor loomed into view, his eyes went wide with astonishment.

“Whoa! What the hell is this place?! You should’ve fast-tracked this view to my coordinates from the start!”

“ ……Ahh.“

“ ……M-Massive scale.“

The young men of the youth alliance simply stood frozen on the landing, their jaws dropped to their absolute failure threshold, completely forgetting to move their frames. Even the Chief and his inner circle seemed profoundly impacted, their shoulders subtly trembling at the sheer majesty of the forest.

“Kee-hee-hee!”

“Khoo-hoo-hoo!”

Ethan-san let out a soft whistle to summon a few local fairies, instructing them to guide our navigation vectors straight toward the massive hollow tree he had mapped out. The trunk opening—so spacious a full-grown human could comfortably step inside—was elevated roughly four to five meters off the forest floor. Yep, anchored at that vertical coordinate, the wolves’ airborne strike vectors won’t reach even if they max out their jump parameters, I calculated.

Gathering beneath the massive roots, we formed a circle to indulge in lunch. Today’s menu featured roasted wild rabbit rubbed with fresh rosemary, the remaining payload of yesterday’s hotpot, and a batch of dense, hard bread the youth alliance had brought along from the surface.

“This is an undeniably magnificent landscape, Nino-sama.”

“I have never registered a tree of this colossal scale in my entire career. Truly majestic,” the Chief’s wife added, her voice laced with an immense volume of satisfaction.

Offering a polite nod to maintain the conversational loop, I replied, “Granted, given that its structural mass is this colossal, executing a logging operation here will be an exceptionally grueling labor cycle.”

“Ah, when you factor in those constraints, that is entirely accurate.”

“Our hand-axes would hit their durability failure threshold in a heartbeat. Quite a tedious bottleneck.”

Right, I need to ensure manufacturing high-tier wood-felling axes is added to Heimo’s production queue as well, I noted.

Our meal verified complete, we immediately initiated our wolf-culling operations. Along the navigation path, a chaotic dispute triggered when Heimo and Gob-chi tried to hijack the Blue Currant harvesting queue, but we still managed to completely systematically eliminate the Black Wolf pack in just under two hours—a faster runtime than yesterday. This metric spike was driven by the fairies’ improved coordination arrays, intersected with the excellent fire support delivered by Gob-chi’s new archery detachment. I should definitely permanently station a few goblin archers on this floor.

Come to think of it, while we were advancing and gathering vines, a cryptic mechanical error manifested: the plant vines flatly refused to be collected into my item inventory interface.

When dealing with an anomaly that wasn’t coded into the original database of Draclo 2, the spatial storage loop occasionally fails to process the item’s signature. That said, certain undocumented drops can be digitized and stored without a single issue, making the underlying system mechanics a complete mystery.

“Alright, a mere two floors remaining.”

Turning the isolated Boss Wolf into a literal pincushion with a barrage of arrows, we effortlessly harvested its high-grade fur and magic stones. Interestingly, perhaps because the flavor profile of the meat I fed them previously was entirely subpar, Yoru and Kuu flatly refused to consume the boss wolf’s flesh. They ran the exact same exclusion protocol against the Wererat boss on the ninth floor; I suppose their behavioral programming simply dictates a total block against consuming humanoid entities.

Before crossing the threshold into the ninth floor, I placed a spare glow-stone on the second step of the landing, injecting a burst of my mana to ignite its lumen output. This served as a definitive material checkpoint to confirm our unit had cleared the sector; I had systematically mapped identical markers across every single staircase we traversed. This allowed the trailing Chief and the youth alliance to audit the signal and instantly calculate whether the corridor-clearing sequence had been completed ahead of them.

By feeding it a direct charge of my raw mana, the stone’s illumination loop was locked down for half a day, eliminating the risk of accidental shutoffs throwing their calculations. Furthermore, it operated as a tracking beacon to trace our exact depth. The frantic warnings delivered by the youth alliance this morning had made me realize that entering a crisis state where return logistics become compromised was a non-zero probability.

“Whoa, now this is a properly dark and dingy hole! Yep, this environment perfectly fits my metrics!”

Perhaps because beast-kin naturally possess an evolutionary bias toward burrowing in subterranean dens, the abandoned mine shaft aesthetic of the ninth stratum aligned beautifully with Heimo’s comfort parameters. Well, that calculation held completely solid—right up until the exact fraction of a second he encountered the local hostile demographic.

“What on earth are these freaks?! This layout is comprehensively unsettling!”

I mean, facing down a giant basketball-sized pill bug followed by a humanoid entity topped with a hyper-realistic rat face would throw anyone’s stress metrics.

From this boundary onward, our long-range artillery units took absolute command of the battlefield, and since our roster was heavily stacked with ranged options today, navigating the encounters was an effortless exercise. As far as raw loot was concerned, the Wererat hoarding alcoves failed to yield any high-tier equipment drops, but we successfully mapped a seemingly artificial stone spring tucked away at the absolute rear of the western passage. It appeared this stratum suffered from zero water scarcity issues as well.

With zero hazardous anomalies triggering across our loops, we seamlessly filled in the remaining blanks on our navigation interface. Within roughly forty minutes of steady marching, the final staircase loomed into view.

“Alright, everyone. A single push separates us from the tenth floor. Let’s execute a rapid cleanup sequence.”

Despite pumping up our morale parameters for a massive climax, the area boss was strictly a basic cluster of standard Wererats. Kuu casually vaulted high into the airspace, deployed her purple electrified feather blizzard, and wrapped up the entire encounter data in a mere few seconds.

“Excellent. Let’s harvest the drop components and clear the zone.”

Based on the tracking logs, the area boss should have been this ninth specimen right here.

……Wait, what?