“This ans we passed the exam, right?”
Feim said while peeking down the stairs leading down to the next floor.
“Yeah, but we’re going to go for the deepest floor.”
As Ain nodded and declared so, Cloud nodded as well.
Al had a satisfied smile on his face, and Feim looked back towards Loren and Lapis with a slightly worried face.
“No reason to look over here. We’ve got nothing to say.”
“We’re only proctors, after all.”
Loren answered with dissatisfaction on his face, while Lapis answered with a smile on her face, but with her voice filled with sarcasm.
After glancing at the two of them with hostility in his eyes, Ain looked back towards his party mbers and said to them with fresh resolve.
“Okay, we’re going to reach the bottom floor and take Volf’s fortune and show the whole school that we’re this capable.”
“Yeah then all those noble brats will be so frustrated.”
“We can do it. Even if we can’t do it alone, if we work together, we definitely can.”
As they huddled and got ready, Loren watched them in silence, dissatisfaction still covering his face.
He really wanted to tell them to head back, but when he cald down and thought about it, Loren and Lapis had business on the bottom floor as well, and in order to get into the tenth floor, they needed the permit that was given to the students.
Putting that into consideration, although telling the students to go back was appropriate suggestion, having them go on was better for their own business.
“Can I ask you sothing?”
Lapis interrupted Ain and his party’s conversation.
Since Lapis was the one that called him, not Loren, Ain gave her a questioning look, but Lapis didn’t take any notice and asked what she wanted to.
“About the permit to the bottom floor. May I ask what it is and who has it?”
“Why do you want to know?”
As expected, the one who started was Cloud.
But he was a lot quieter than when he lashed out as Loren.
Lapis was a neat and clean priestess when she didn’t say anything, and even when she did, as long as she didn’t expose her wickedness, so to say, she was affable, and on top of that, she was quite beautiful.
It seed that Cloud couldn’t lash out at her in the sa manner as he did to Loren.
“I’ve heard that it will beco more dangerous from here on, so I want to gather as much information that could be useful in the case of an ergency.”
“In that case, I have it.”
Ain answered Lapis’ question.
Ain took out a silver necklace from underneath his breastplate, and on the chain was a silver ring.
“May I take a look?”
“Y-yeah, I don’t mind.”
After asking for permission, Lapis defenselessly walked up to Ain, took the chain around his neck, and took a careful look at the ring on her palm.
The chain was still around Ain’s neck, so Lapis’ body was very close to his, and as Loren saw Ain’s face get flushed, he couldn’t help but get a bored feeling.
“I see, this is the key. Thank you.”
After examining the ring for a while, Lapis pressed the ring and the chain onto Ain’s chest and thanked him with bow and a smile on her face.
This made Ain’s face even redder, but Lapis imdiately walked back to Loren without taking any notice.
“T-that was good enough? Then let’s go down to the sixth floor now.”
Ain managed to declare so, with his face still flushed and voice slightly flustered.
No one disagreed, and the group, led by Ain and Cloud, were t by a totally different sight than what they had seen in the previous floors.
“What…is this?”
No one in Feim’s party could answer her question, while Loren and Lapis were speechless at what they were seeing.
At the bottom of the stairs was a stone corridor, like the previous floors.
But the difference was that there were transparent, but at the sa ti clouded, mucus scattered everywhere.
On top of that, the mucus was squirming its body and slowly moving along the floor and walls of the corridor.
“This is pretty disgusting.
Behind Ain and the others, who were standing there speechless, Loren couldn’t hide his disgust as he looked around at what the light from the lantern was shining on.
Lapis, who was looking around curiously at the sight, squatted down beside the nearest blob of mucus and stared at it for a while, then stood up and told them the identity of the mucus.
“These are slis.”
“Slis? You an slis as in those kinds of slis?”
Even Loren, who had grown up on the battlefield, heard about slis before.
Of course, he had seen so, since they sotis popped up after battles had ended.
They were indefinite blobs of liquid and were categorized as simple and inferior monsters with no will or emotion at all.
They possessed different elents sotis, based on the environnt they live in, but they were slow with low defenses, and could be easily killed by destroying their cores with sothing as simple as a stick.
“I think these are probably slis.”
“Oh man…we’ve co to a bad place.”
The students’ gazes focused on Loren when he muttered that.
Feim gave him a puzzled look, while the other three looked at him as if he was stupid.
“It’s only a bunch of slis. What are you so scared for?”
Cloud crushed one under his boots as he said that.
It was easily crushed since it was mostly liquid, and it spread across the floor weakly as its core was destroyed.
“What I’m scared of is none of your business.”
‘Ha! If you’re scared of monsters like these, you must not be much in the first place.”
Cloud continued to make fun of him, but Loren ignored him.
“Lapis, do you have a torch?”
“Yes, I do.”
Loren pulled out his large knife hanging from his waist with his right hand and held the torch Lapis had handed him in his left.
Lapis lighted the torch with a flint, and Loren raised it high over his head.
“What’s he doing?”
“Don’t mind him. Let’s go. We haven’t t Par’s party yet, so they should still be ahead of us.
Nodding at Ain’s decision to move one, Cloud moved next to him at the front and started walking ahead.
Walking behind Feim and Al, Lapis said to Loren, sounding slightly impressed.
“Loren, you know how scary slis can be.”
“These guys are dangerous. They don’t have any unnecessary thoughts or emotions, after all. That makes them able to accurately respond to prey. It’s true they’re slow and can be killed easily…but if the conditions are t, they could even take down experienced rcenaries.”
“Any experience?”
“In a battlefield before.”
Loren said with a grim look on his face.
Loren went silent for a mont, recalling that ti, and started telling her the story.
“It was a terrible battle. Well there aren’t any battles that aren’t terrible. Anyways, I’m not sure who was playing around, but there was a lot of magic used, and lots of allied and enemy soldiers died, so after the battle there were way too many bodies to clean up.”
“That’s…According to one research, slis are creatures that appear in places where mana is built up or disturbed, so I guess a sli spawned there.”
Lapis told Loren that if enough magic was used in situations such as battles, the mana in the area becos disturbed montarily.
And when water, blood, and corpses are added to that disturbance, slis are born.
Loren had experienced such a battle, but in general, slis were creatures that ate anything they found that could be consud.
“There were so many bodies, we decided to let it eat so of them.”
“Ah…I can already see how it ended.”
“We knew it would grow bigger as it ate, but we didn’t expect it to multiply.”
Regardless of how it spawned, slis were living creatures.
Of course, they would grow when they ate, but slis proliferated by splitting into two after they had gotten large enough.
The slis, which had an abundant supply of bodies to consu, grew rapidly and multiplied, and continued that cycle.
“In the end, there were so many slis, they beca like a giant tidal wave in the battlefield.”
Loren muttered about how much of a nightmare that was.
The slis ate everything they could, including water and dirt along with the bodies, and multiplied in number and size, then started consuming everyone in the area, allies and enemies alike, and that was the horror that Loren had experienced.
“A giant wave full of lting bodies mixed with a lot of other things…”
“I don’t need an explanation. What will you do if I start imagining it?”
“I still have nightmares about it sotis.”
“You’re making lose my appetite…Well, at this rate, today’s dinner will be disgusting rations…”
Since she rejected an explanation with such a disgusted face, Loren didn’t need to force one.
But when he looked around, hoping that the students would now feel so of the feelings of dangers that he was feeling, but they just had disgusted expressions on their faces and didn’t seem to feel any sense of danger at all.
Seeing that, Loren decided that it was hopeless, but then Lapis snuggled up next to him a lot closer than she needed to.
“Lapis?”
“It’s nothing special, but I just thought that this is probably the safest place right now.”
Loren could understand so of what Lapis ant by that, so he didn’t say anything and continued walking.
To those who didn’t understand the situation, it seed like they were just flirting with each other, as Ain imdiately looked away, while Cloud clicked his tongue and glared at Loren.
Al imdiately lost interest in them and turned around, but Feim was looking at Lapis, who was hugging Loren from the side.
“Are you two in that sort of relationship?”
“What do you an, that sort?”
“You know…”
“Feim, there may be a little bit of what you are expecting, but this is different from that.”
Feim turned red as Lapis interrupted her question in a flat voice.
“If you understand our current situation, you would understand that this is the safest position…but I guess it’s a bit difficult for you to that.”
“Safe?”
Since Lapis had used the word safe, it ant that they were currently in danger.
But Feim seed like she didn’t feel the amount of danger that Lapis was currently sensing.
“Feim! Don’t mind them. Hurry up, we can’t move on because you’re the one with the lantern!”
Feim was still wondering about Lapis’ words but chased after the others when Cloud called her.
“Man, it’s full of slis. What do we do about this?”
“It’s a lot of work, but let’s crush them one by one. It won’t hurt to lessen every possibility of danger.”
Agreeing to Ain’s suggestion, Cloud and Al started stomping and hitting the slis on the floor and walls one by one.
Ain also started running his sword through the slis’ cores, so their progress slowed down.
“They won’t last two seconds if sothing attacked us right now.”
Lapis, who was still clinging onto Loren, said it like it was soone else’s problem, but Loren’s eyes followed Ain and his party.
“Do you think there’s sothing that would attack with all these slis around?”
“I wish there would be.”
Lapis lowered her tone and hung her head.
Slis were creatures that consud anything that they could.
In a situation where so many slis existed, Lapis couldn’t imagine sothing other than slis being there.
“Hey! I found sothing!”
Lapis’ thoughts disappeared as she heard Cloud’s loud voice.
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