Adam Smasher, Level 1 Adventurer, Hestia Familia
Unfortunately, they didn't make quite as much today as he was hoping to, what with them staying on the fourth floor and not getting another pass parade this time. They had reached their goal of five thousand and even surpassed it!
Barely. Six-thousand six-hundred valis in total, split into three accounts. He stared at the Guild receipt in his hands with a general sense of dissatisfaction and contempt, frowning at the number he knew many minutes in advance would be on the page, but still unpleasant to look at. Yesterday they had made seventeen-thousand, and today they were scraping around a third of that.
Forty-eight hundred from twenty-four lizards, eighteen hundred from seventy-two kids and dogs.
The issue was, more than anything else, that the monsters didn't spawn fast enough. Precious minutes and seconds burning away as they moved through the winding passages without anything to kill. Occasionally they'd spot another group of meatbags, and Scrappy would shout out 'need some help?'
Adam was planning on demanding half of whatever group of monsters they ended up killing from whatever group accepted, by so far none had.
They had yet to sell the drops, which might pull in a greater profit, and now that he was starting to track those he had noticed something.
"Your luck is way better, kid." Adam spoke, holding up the sole drop item he had gotten in the entire delve, a fist-sized chunk of random ore pulled from a lizard's ass as he tore it open. He glanced over again at Scrappy, sheepishly holding up a small handful of various creature-scraps carried in an annoyingly squarish section of dog-leather. Two claws, a fang, and what he was reasonably certain was a kidney-stone.
"Ehe… Sorry?" Scrappy half-apologized, half-questioned.
"Don't be. More loot is more loot." Adam grumbled the apology away. Now they could go back and see if either Blueboy or Shortstack wanted these, but he had something to do, and sending Scrappy alone with them was asking fortune to rob them. Anyone who hoped luck wouldn't fuck them over was wrong and stupid. So the correct decision was probably…
He handed the ore over to Scrappy, who took it with a blink. "Take that up to the smiths to sell, then do whatever you want for the rest of the day. I'll be pumping the Guildmeats for info until they kick me out."
Scrappy hummed. "Don't we want to take this to Miach-sama or Bruni-san first, to see what they can make with it?"
"We don't know if what they can make is what we want and holding onto loot is asking to get robbed."
"Ah! I see." Scrappy nodded. "Best to make sure we get something out of it instead of nothing."
Adam grunted in affirmative, and Scrappy continued. "Alright, I'll go sell these. Make sure you pace yourself, senpai, those lectures are a lot to take in!"
Adam waved the kid off, who got the hint, stuffed the drops into his side-bag, and made his way to the elevator. Watching him go to make sure he wasn't about to get robbed the moment he glanced away, Scrappy reached the elevator, asked politely to go up, and disappeared into a higher floor of the Tower.
Nodding in satisfaction, Adam turned his gaze towards the Guildmeat on the other side of the countertop. He stood with the light to his back, casting his face in shadows.
Scrappy's girlfriend waited patiently, fingers folded and hiding her mouth behind them. Noticing his attention on her, she raised her head slightly, causing a white glare to flash over her glasses and preventing him from seeing the pupils behind.
He was pretty sure he had seen this trope before. It was rather stale if he was being honest.
He maintained the facedown patiently, backing down wasn't in his style. The guildmeat put up a valiant defense against his glare. Eventually he lost patience, and simply moved along with the conversation. "Oi, Guildmeat."
She said nothing, merely waiting with fingers folded.
…Oh, that was her game huh? Adam had gotten a whole lot of practice with this against uppity executives that thought their last name was Arasaka.
"Scrappy's Girlfriend." He tried again with a redoubled glare and a grumble.
Her ears twitched violently and her face tinted pink. Still, her glasses remained glared-out and fingers folded. He leaned forwards, planting a hand on the countertop, and spoke bluntly.
"I didn't bother remembering your name, meatbag." Adam lied as easily as he breathed. Speaking with a smooth drawl and an unbothered loathing. "Either help or don't, we're going down to the fifth floor tomorrow."
She maintained her composure for a few moments. One ear twitched.
"...tch." she quietly muttered.
Victory.
"So you come to the Guild now, after so thoroughly rejecting our advice and wisdom for days? Have you realized the value in preparation while fighting desperately in the deeps of the Dungeon?" She began a long winded speech, which Adam cut off immediately.
"I've been fighting and killing since before I hit puberty. I know more about battlefield prep than most in this city, girlie." He bluntly replied with a glower and a rumble. "Look, I want tacticals here. Maps, enemies, known weaknesses and strengths, expected spawn rates, priority targets."
He leaned back and waved his hands back and forth on either side of his head. "I don't need fresh-faced greenhorn tips like 'try not to get surrounded' and 'healing potions are useful, buy some just in case!'." He spoke those theoretical tips with a false cheeriness that belied his disdain for such obvious bullshit. He turned his ever-present glare back to the guildmeat and finished his reply. "Scrappy is a farmboy, he needs to be told obvious shit like that. I'm a mercenary, I've been doing this murdering shit for awhile now."
"Now, can you get the fucking dramatics out of the way and stop wasting time for the both of us?"
Guildmeat stared at him for a few moments, before slumping and sighing. Then, pushing herself up from her chair and walking through a door on the side, she replied with a dull tone. "Follow me please.
That was more fucking like it. You're a bureaucrat, stop pretending like you have a soul.
The room she led him to was decently spacious, but more importantly, absolutely filled with maps, bookshelves, notes, and more. All useful learning aids and references if he was able to read any of it. As it stood, he would have to rely on verbal reading and reference images.
She moved to one side of a table, collecting a few large sheets of paper and clips, mounting some of the sheets on a plank shelf-like thing for a few moments. Looking at the pyramid-like diagram, he quickly realized that it was a visual representation of the murderpit, subdivided into floors and estimated locations and sizes. Judging from the small looking tower on top of the diagram, the murderpit got nice and big the further down you went.
Each of the floors was given a label, then a category label, then some other label that he didn't recognize. She clipped a few more pages to the board, mounting them for visibility. From what he could tell, a general overview of the dungeon itself on three large sheets of parchment. Then she moved to another section of the room, opening a drawer and pulling out several rolls of map-like parchment. Unfurling them onto the table and setting small weights at the corners, they were indeed revealed to be maps of the upper floors.
The first scroll was able to hold the first four layers, each top-down map view getting progressively bigger in accordance with his one mental mapping thus far. The next scroll contained three maps, each subdivided into sections in order to fit, of what he assumed were the fifth, sixth, and seventh floors. The second-to-last map contained two map-diagrams, divided into even more sections to fit on the roll of paper.
The last map only managed to fit a single diagram, broken up into many smaller chunks in order to fit on the scroll.
Guildmeat moved again, retrieving a weighty tome and setting it on the table. Turning to look at him with a blank eye, she spoke tonelessly and politely. "Here is all the general information available on the first ten floors of the Dungeon. I will have to observe you to ensure no damage is done to these copies, but you may read it at your leisure."
Adam grunted, staring at the maps for a second.
"I can't read this shitty language." He rumbled with loathing for the script.
She blinked, ears tilting downwards briefly. "Y-you can't read Koine?" There was a strange note in her tone, he ignored it.
"Look at it, the worst goddamn writing I've ever seen in my life." He grumbled. "It looks like a group of toddlers had a scribbling contest." He gestured with his hand. "You got something to write with, and on?"
She moved to provide him with such a blank page and a… pen? It had a fucked up tip. He looked at it blankly for a few moments.
"...Do you know how to use a pe-"
"I know how to use a fucking pen. This ain't a fucking pen. I don't know what the fuck you call it but it ain't a pen." He waved it at her with a glare. Her brows furrowed and she opened her mouth to reply…
Then closed it, moving over to grab something else and handing it to him. Something that looked like one of those old-ass pencils. He could use it, at least.
Grumbling, he started writing on a page. Decades of practice forced into him by Kagekaze and working for old man Arasaka, neither of whom accepted sloppy handwriting. Real pain in his ass, but he could deal with it. Pausing for a moment, thinking about what to write…
He grunted and just defaulted to an old song.
'You look like an angel'
'Walk like an angel'
'Talk like an angel'
'But I got wise'
'You're the Devil in Disguise'
Ain't nothing wrong with listening to the King from time to time. He used to be a big fan back in the day, wore his hair in a pompadour and went around in black leather, and all that.
Then, he wrote the same lines, this time in Japanese. The weak-ass graphite in the pencil breaking on him once in the middle of it, causing him to growl and mentally threaten to kill its family before finishing his writing.
Raising the sheet aggressively, he pointed at the page and snarled out. "This is what proper fucking writing looks like, not that garbage this whole fucking city seems insistent on using. Look at how those letters connect, look at how nice and compact they are. They don't randomly spill off half the fucking page or have random floating lines, now do they?"
She took the page in hands, staring at it for a moment and brows furrowing. "Y-you look like an angel…?"
He stared at her for a moment.
Then he leaned forwards, she glanced up and flinched back.
His furiously smoldering glare greeted her eyes.
"You can read it." It was not a question.
"I-b-barely." She replied, leaning back and holding the page up to defend herself. "It looks like a very bizarre regional dialect of Koine. It seems like it had been altered for some reason, but I'd have to bring it to a language expert to speculate on the s-specific differences."
He stared. "Write the page in 'Koine'." A demand.
She moved around him gingerly, setting the page down on the table and using the shitty pencil to write. He carefully observed as she did so, staring at the page.
Before his eyes, she wrote yet more gibberish. He stared at it for another few moments.
Same number of letters per word-block. Same sentence length. Same format.
He leaned forwards. "What the goddamn…?"
The 'Y' looked like an x on top of an I. The 'K' was an E. The 'A' was a d without the tail. The entire script looked like someone took English and mangled it for absolutely no reason. Almost every letter was fucked up in any number of tiny ways, the end result being essentially impossible to recognize from the base script at first glance…
…
He knew the reason.
It's because that makes it look 'exotic' and 'unique' without actually making a new language.
The most lazy-ass bullshit he had seen in awhile, and it made him think he couldn't read.
His nails scratched long lines in the hardwood table as he stared at the page before him.
"...Smasher-san…" Guildmeat questioned lightly.
He closed his eyes, and forced himself to focus on the task at hand.
"Information. Monsters. Fifth floor onwards. Skip Goblins, Kobolds, and Lizards." He calmly replied, going to the tried and true tactic of carefully storing his rage for later. That was useful in a fight, less useful when preparing for future fights. It was something that he had quite a lot of practice doing, back when he had his nice warframe on instead of this weakass meat.
He was quite done being emotive for the day. He was returning to a comfortable, robotic, malice.
Guildmeat coughed once, opened the book to a specific page, and began talking. On the page, a lanky figure with three clawed-arms was depicted.
"War Shadows are the most important monster to keep in mind when planning to delve into floors five or six, where they natively spawn. One of the two monsters commonly referred to as 'newbie killers', War Shadows are noted for their speed, both in reactions and overland travel…
—
Eventually, the Guildmeat's shift have ended, forcing his little learning session to come to an end for the day. Guildmeat started to rub at her throat occasionally about halfway through the lecture, and he had started to decode the infuriating script that they used from looking at the various pages of notes and explanations. He didn't have it mastered yet, but he would soon.
As soon as the briefing was forced to end, he made his way down to the Dungeon staircase again. There were two new monsters on the fifth and sixth floor, and they were indeed all that spawned there. Frog Shooters, which were apparently massive frogs with spike-like horns on the end of their tongues, and War Shadows, which were lanky, fast, and had knives for hands.
More importantly, they were known as 'newbie killers' for their combination of blades for hands and apparent speed. Scrappy was absolutely a fucking newbie, even if he was willing to put forth the effort.
Losing an asset this early on to a fluke would be an issue for his long term gains. Unacceptable.
So he was going to go murder a few War Shadows to verify their general parameters and capabilities first, make sure Scrappy could handle one with his current equipment, and if not, see if Scrappy could handle one with better equipment that was currently within their price range.
Information was Ammunition.
Stepping through the first doorway into the first floor of the dungeon, mental map reinforced by the tactical map he had just recently seen, he took note of a trend he had noticed as he was descending.
The route down each floor, for the first few floors, was exactly the same length in overall distance required to travel.
A dog, he crushed its skull.
The average meatbag's sprinting pace was about ten miles per hour. He had grown very familiar with that figure in his cleaner jobs. Knowing exactly how fast something was moving let him pull all kinds of neat tricks, like blowing off their legs through a few walls of concrete with a decent-sized railgun.
Ten miles per hour. One mile per six minutes.
A pair of kids, he smashed them into the walls.
The route from the start of the first floor to the start of the second floor was exactly six minutes. It involved a winding path around various sections for the optimal path down, so the actual travel distance wasn't a full mile unless stretched out straight.
The optimal route from the start of the second floor to the start of the third floor? Six minutes almost on the dot at standard meatbag sprinting pace.
The optimal route from the start of the third floor to the start of the fourth floor? Six minutes.
A lizard, he tore out its core and tossed it in the bag, corpse turning to ash in his wake.
And now, map of the fourth floor burned into memory both from personal experience and guild record, he was about to time the route and confirm a suspicion. From his hunch, looking at the distances involved?
Six minutes.
A group of dogs, thirty five seconds wasted on butchering them.
He kept his breathing nice and steady, and forced himself to run at that speed. Exactly ten miles per hour. You got a sense for these sorts of things as a borg, being able to run as fast as you wanted for as long as you wanted, up to your top speed.
Meat frames tired in a way borg frames didn't, but Adam wasn't about to accept any kind of weakness of his personal meatframe. It was going to keep up with him or he was going to have to drag it along, either was fine by his standards. It would get with the program eventually.
His pace slowed comfortably as he approached the next set of stairs. His lungs were complaining as he settled into a walk towards them.
A green kid leapt at him as he rounded the corner. An absentminded backhand shattered its face.
Accounting for the time lost to the dogs? Six minutes, give or take ten seconds. A consistent pattern. It wasn't particularly useful information, but he remembered it regardless. He didn't remember seeing it anywhere in the Guild notes, but that might be because he could still only barely read their shitty writing.
Enough wasting time.
He started moving down the stairs to the fifth floor.
Time to find himself a 'War Shadow'.