Chapter 42: Fight—and Yearn for a Monster Feast!

Page 1 of 3

When he left the familia’s base, Hestia was still sleeping soundly in bed. After making all the preparations for exploring the Dungeon, Liang Yue wasted no time.

The two weapons that Tsubaki, captain of the Hephaestus Familia, had lent him could be said to be on their final day of use.

As for today’s objective, he had already planned it before setting out: squeeze every last bit of value from the borrowed weapons and advance as deeply into the Dungeon as possible.

Through repeated battles with monsters, he would improve every aspect of his abilities.

The process itself was, of course, the dull and monotonous business of exploring the Dungeon. But today, Liang Yue’s desire to explore was running high!

“Can I possibly…”

“Raise every ability except magic to an S-rank rating during today’s exploration?”

After an adventurer’s level was elevated, all the ability values on the status sheet would be reset to zero. But only the figures on the sheet were cleared.

The values gained through training would remain, and his actual strength would only increase!

After all, he would be improving those abilities from their existing foundation.

By raising every ability to its limit at each level and accumulating those gains bit by bit, he would obtain the capital necessary to fight opponents above his level.

As for his future development, Liang Yue’s goal was very clear: rely on the skills provided by the Sword Soul Template in battle, and use the Falna system to strengthen his physical abilities.

By combining the two,

he would ultimately become a full-spectrum numerical monster without a single weakness—not only in the Dungeon City of Orario, but throughout the entire world of DanMachi!

—

If anyone truly questioned whether Liang Yue was cheating, he would consider them narrow-minded. They saw only the cheat and the numbers.

They failed to see the sweat and effort he had invested!

Take Orario at five in the morning, for example. Looking across the Central Plaza, there was not a single adventurer gathered there.

After yesterday’s experience exploring the Dungeon, he understood how crucial it was to extend his combat endurance.

He had specially bought a double portion of breakfast after waking the restaurant owner and getting him to open for business. He had also filled a jug with clean drinking water.

The patrol squad of the Ganesha Familia stationed before Babel was already maintaining order. After checking his adventurer identification, they let him pass without asking any questions.

As he descended the spiral staircase connecting to the depths, Liang Yue looked at the familiar floor before him with an expression of long habituation.

Yet his heart was filled with anticipation.

“Let’s go!”

After passing through the safe floor, the footsteps of the monsters that had not yet been cleared out by adventurers echoed through the cave passages. Goblins, kobolds, and other low-level monsters were naturally drawn toward him.

But with his improved ability values, enhanced weapons, increased Sword Soul class level, and the buff from the prematurely unlocked Flowing Heart skill, Liang Yue merely swung his sword.

The resulting sword aura tore them apart!

Page 2 of 3

His objective was clear.

He did not bother picking up the drops from the monsters he killed. Compared with the brief amount of time available for exploration, the value of those magic stones was clearly less important.

Monsters such as subterranean lizards and geckos were equally incapable of stopping his advance.

Whenever large numbers of monsters gathered in a straight passage, Liang Yue ignored the drain on his stamina and simply used a skill to clear the way.

“Three-Stage Slash.”

As he killed monsters and gained combat experience, his experience points also continued to rise slowly.

…

The sixth floor.

The seventh floor.

…

The ninth floor.

…

The goddess of luck did not continue to favor him. He encountered a rare monster, the Blue Moth, and dealt with a Unicorn Rabbit that had been trying to ambush him from underground.

For monsters from comparatively deeper levels, Liang Yue still had enough time to automatically collect the magic stones they dropped. They would serve as another contribution toward equipping himself with better weapons in the future.

“Is this passage the route to the tenth floor?”

After clearing the monsters from the current area, Liang Yue stopped before the passage that had finally appeared before him. A trace of curiosity flashed through his eyes.

Recalling Eina’s explanation from the previous day, he knew that all kinds of Dungeon mechanisms would appear here.

The most dangerous were the thick clouds of fog that obscured one’s vision, making it difficult for adventurers to distinguish the dangers lurking nearby.

Without Ashura’s ability to sense killing intent, he had relied purely on the instincts of a hunter honed through his recent battles to deal with the Unicorn Rabbit’s attack.

The possibility of danger on the floor ahead still could not stop Liang Yue’s advance. However, compared with the reckless speed at which he had rushed through the earlier half of the Dungeon, his attitude had gradually become more cautious.

After passing through the winding passages, he arrived at the tenth-floor area, where the danger level rose sharply.

The surrounding environment had changed drastically. Unlike the previous floors, it no longer consisted of tangled cave passages.

It looked more like…

A lost forest. The absence of sunlight had left the trees withered, while fog surrounded the entire area like a festering curse clinging to the bone.

“Visibility is terrible.”

“If monsters like the Unicorn Rabbit appear here, it would be easy to get attacked…”

Standing at the entrance to the relatively safe passage, Liang Yue swept his gaze around the area. Drawing on his experience, he quickly reached a conclusion.

Exploration of the floor could not be rushed.

And in the tenth-floor area, the first monsters resembling pig-headed men would appear. Their overall threat was absolutely incomparable to that of the Minotaur!

Page 3 of 3

He did not stop.

The mechanism had produced dense fog, reducing visibility to a mere five meters.

Even though this was still an area that Level One adventurers could reach, Liang Yue did not let the swelling of his ability values make him careless.

The danger lay in the extremely poor visibility, which allowed lurking monsters to attack adventurers without making a sound.

“It would be easy to lose my bearings…”

The occasional crisp snap of a dry branch beneath his feet made the surrounding environment increasingly eerie. Just as Liang Yue was choosing a direction to explore,

the sense of danger forged through countless battles surged from the depths of his heart.

His body instinctively dodged to the side and slightly backward. At that very moment, the enormous axe wielded by an orc cleaved through the fog,

shattering a withered tree trunk into pieces.

After creating a safe distance, Liang Yue noticed the monster that had suddenly appeared behind him and to the side. His tightly furrowed brows did not relax.

It looked exactly as he remembered: a bloated humanoid body even more massive than that of a Minotaur.

What drew the eye most was the pig’s head growing from the neck of that bulky body. Its scarlet eyes were especially conspicuous within the fog.

“An orc?”

“…”

Taking it as a polite return for the ambush, Liang Yue raised his hand and swung his sword. The sword aura swept rapidly toward the orc ahead.

The air cleaved by the sword aura gradually cleared the view in front of him.

He could barely make out the grotesque features of the pig-headed orc, but the fierce slash gave it no chance to continue its attack!

The blow severed the orc’s enormous body in two.

The monster’s corpse transformed into gray dust and completely dispersed within the Dungeon. The magic stone that fell onto the muddy ground made no dull sound before—

“It feels like the intensity of the training still isn’t enough…”

With the various buffs provided by the Flowing Heart skill, there was simply no monster in the upper floors capable of withstanding his sword aura.

Put another way,

now that he had finally pushed his exploration to the current area, Liang Yue was eager for challenging battles through which he could raise his ability values.

Through that brief fight, he clearly realized that the true danger of the tenth floor did not come from the orcs, but from the fog mechanisms that made the surrounding environment so treacherous.

“So…”

“What are the conditions for triggering a Monster Feast?”

Liang Yue looked somewhat annoyed. He could only blame himself for not thinking things through yesterday. He had actually forgotten to ask how a Monster Feast was triggered.

Surely he could not place his hopes of maxing out his ability values on the rare appearance of a Young Dragon boss, could he?