Danmachi- Hell’s Forge

Rivira

"Fascinating, you caught me off guard so I couldn't observe this process last time with the minotaur very well but it appears that this smoke from the monster gets sucked in through those tattoos. I thought they were symbolic?" Riveria pondered out loud.

"They are symbolic but they also have a practical function as well, I never said they didn't after all." I said with a grin as I picked up the drops from the ground to hand to her.

"Ah I see a half truth so that you didn't trigger the gods lie detection ability, seems unnecessary if you are willing to share this information like this." the high elf said confused.

"I was just messing with Hermes is all since the guy had plans to make trouble for me, you could see it in his eyes." I said with a laugh.

"I see." she said but clearly didn't approve.

Can't say as I blame her since I it was common knowledge that Hermes was an extremely well connected individual. Messing with him was a very dangerous game but I wasn't afraid of danger, if I was I wouldn't have just fought the Goliath as a level two even if I was working with powerful people like these.-

"What an odd skill, i've never heard about anything like it before." Finn said as he walked up with my bag and more importantly my ring.

I shrugged "It is what it is, suppose this is where we part ways as you lot are going to be skipping the next floor right?" i said casually.

Finn nodded "We will hit Rivira on the way back up but we don't need anything there at the moment." he said honestly.

"If you get back within two weeks I should still be camping out on the floor, if not you probably just missed me." I said casually.

"Usually takes about a month for us to get to our target floor and back so you'll be long gone by the time we come back up." Riveria said and I nodded.

We parted ways there as I slid down the stone slop leading to the next floor while the expedition group got everyone ready to do the same without crashing into each other. In two weeks roughly the Goliath would respawn and my goal was to get my last update and fight it at that time. -

The quality and volume of smoke I had from helping kill that Goliath was more than enough to raise my magic stat to the max and maybe bring my other stats to B rank across the board. From this it was clear that the Goliath was worth far more than anything found even a floor before it. Not all that surprising really since it was classified as a level four monster and only level two monsters were found at most in the floors before it. Not counting variants of course that could scale theoretically infinitely.-

'Not surprised it took so long for adventurers to get past that thing when they only had level two monsters to hone themselves on before suddenly finding themselves against a level four monster rex.' I thought with a serious expression.

As someone who had to solo the dungeon sudden jumps in difficulty like that were something I particularly had to be cautious of. Thankfully the next jump was one that I was uniquely suited to due to the properties of my flames in regards to water. The next jump was of course referring to Amphisbaena of the water palace floors.-

In the water labeled a low level six monster rex but out of water merely a mid to high level five monster rex. The reason for that distinction was that the monster was a huge twin headed water dragon so obviously it was much more dangerous in the water than on land since it wasn't well suited for terrestrial movement. My flames however treated water like it was gasoline so I was likely the single worst opponent for the monster rex even with that magic smothering red gas that it was famous for using.-

Anyways that was a thing to deal with in the future but for now I was on the eighteenth floor. My first impression was that it was a normal forest, the glowing stone and crystal ceiling high above kinda ruined that though. It truly did look like a normal forest too as it was full of grassy soil and lot's of trees with weeds and flowers that were all normal for a forest. The biggest issue with the forest though besides the ceiling that gave away that it wasn't a normal forest was that it was too quiet.-

There were no squirrels, birds, deer , wolves or even insects to be found besides the few that were brought in from outside the dungeon by research classification familias. The dungeon for whatever reason didn't actually have a functioning ecology structure despite what the floors designs made one think. At the same time however once a new animal species is introduced to the dungeon from outside it can live in and even thrive within the dungeon so long as it was an herbivore or had a prey species introduced as well. The REALLY fascinating part though was that fish of both freshwater AND salt water varieties can thrive in the dungeons waters and nobody has a fucking clue why.-

People had certainly used this to their advantage though as at the far "northern" part of floor eighteen was a manmade but dungeon filled fish farm that all of Orario got their fish from. It was made by creating an artificial structure that was the water body before redirecting water that flowed on this floor to the spot that was then stocked with fish of various sorts to be grown out and harvested sustainably. It was a clever way to get around the outrageous prices merchants charged to import fish from the coasts or lakes of this continent.-

Any who I walked to the left of the drop off point for entry to this floor from the seventeenth floor. I wanted to get as close to the entrance of the next floor which was the start of the Grand tree labyrinth as I could before I set up my campsite. Running my hand along the wall casually I froze about halfway to the stairs down, this part of the wall was hollow. My innate technique told me whenever something came from a living source but also told me of how hard , roughly anyways, it would be for me to do something with.-

The wall had suddenly gone from "alive/impossible/ungodly heavy resistance" to "dead/very difficult/ high resistance". Actually fully activating my cursed technique told me that this was a false wall that was hollow behind it and a HEAVILY enchanted one as well. It didn't belong and I knew it immediately. It was beyond my current ability to crack open at the moment though so I mentally made a note to come back here later to see what this was.