S-Rank! A Great Deed Accomplished?

Kashu Animusphere

LV.1

Strength: F (324) → A (852)

Endurance: I (74) → G (235)

Dexterity: G (217) → B (762)

Agility: G (222) → B (784)

Magic: E (415) → S (959)

--Magic--

--Skills--

Loki swiftly copied Kashu's latest status onto a sheet of parchment and casually handed it over, her expression utterly calm.

"Congratulations. Your abilities have improved tremendously. Your magic is even close to hitting the ceiling."

Kashu took the parchment and looked it over, shooting Loki a sidelong glance.

"That's all the reaction you've got?"

Loki snorted. "At this point, even if you leveled up tomorrow, I wouldn't find it strange."

Out of habit, Kashu folded the parchment in half and put it away, murmuring thoughtfully.

"Leveling up..."

There were countless adventurers active in the Dungeon, yet they were clearly divided into two categories.

Lower-class adventurers made up of LV.1s, and upper-class adventurers who had undergone a level ascension.

Among them, LV.2 adventurers were known as third-class adventurers, while LV.3s and LV.4s were second-class adventurers.

Only those who reached LV.5 or above qualified to be called first-class adventurers.

For adventurers, if they could not level up, they would never rise above obscurity.

For Familias, without upper-class adventurers at their core, they could never truly grow powerful.

However, adventurers had to meet two prerequisites before they could level up.

First, they had to raise at least one basic ability to D-rank.

Second, they needed to obtain high-quality experience far beyond ordinary training: a great deed.

Forging powerful divine weapons, developing extraordinary inventions that spanned centuries, defeating terrifying opponents far stronger than oneself, surviving life-or-death adventures, and so on.

Any accomplishment capable of astounding the gods could be called a great deed.

"Inventing things, defeating powerful enemies, life-or-death adventures... An adventure still seems best suited for me."

Hearing Kashu's words, Loki lazily waved a hand.

"You don't need to worry about that."

"A rookie LV.1 ran into a Monster Feast, encountered a Floor Boss, and still returned in one piece—if that doesn't count as a great deed, nobody else can ever level up."

Kashu's eyes lit up. "You mean I can level up now?"

Loki scratched her head and, unusually enough, explained carefully.

"Theoretically, yeah. But your situation's a little special."

"You've got enough of a great deed to level up, but you definitely haven't fully tapped your potential at LV.1 yet, so..."

Kashu understood at once. "You want me to fully develop my potential at my current level first?"

Loki nodded in approval. "You should know this too. After you level up, your basic abilities reset to zero, but the ability values you worked so hard to build up don't just disappear. They turn into hidden abilities."

"When children undergo level ascension, their vessels evolve as well, and the hidden abilities they accumulated before receive a corresponding boost."

"So an LV.2 who rushes to level up the moment one ability barely reaches D, and an LV.2 who levels up only after pushing an ability to S, gain completely different amounts of strength."

Loki had made it very clear. Kashu naturally understood the barrel principle as well—before leveling up, he needed to reinforce his weaknesses as much as possible.

Looking over his current status, his strength and magic had soared spectacularly, but his other abilities appeared rather lackluster.

Endurance in particular. Although he had deliberately spent a long time tangling with the Floor Boss Goliath, its growth rate was still painfully slow.

It's not like I have some weird obsession with getting hit. Looks like I'll have to spend time specifically training my endurance.

Having made up his mind, Kashu stood, put on his mystic code, and waved with a smile at Loki, who was practically drooling nearby, and Fou, who had been waiting for ages.

"Come on, come on, let's get steak! I killed so many Minotaurs, but not one of them dropped any beef. Terrible reviews!"

"Fou!"

"Hiss—You're actually thinking of eating monster meat?"

On the twenty-fifth floor of the Dungeon, the Water Labyrinth.

Amid the complex terrain of intersecting cliffs and rushing abyssal streams, Kashu was fiercely battling more than a dozen enormous snakefish.

A violent gale tore across the water's surface, raising towering waves. Within the exploding spray, several snakefish were always being brutally swept into the air.

Suddenly torn from their familiar waters, the snakefish frantically twisted their slick bodies, their thick tails cracking through the air like whips.

Dull impacts rang out against Kashu's body one after another, after which the snakefish dropped helplessly back into the river.

Some snakefish tried to flee this vortex of death, but the invisible storm always precisely swept them back to where they had begun, as though they were toys being played with in someone's palm.

Other than futilely attacking again and again, they had no choice.

And so the snakefish were lifted, attacked, and dropped, over and over, until despair spread among them.

Fortunately, no other adventurers witnessed this bizarre sight. Otherwise, they would surely have thought they were trapped in a nightmare.

Not only because it was impossible to imagine someone toying with powerful deep-level monsters so casually, but because Kashu was currently standing firmly atop the raging water as though he were on solid ground.

Within the small area beneath his feet, the water remained perfectly still, as if an invisible force had completely smoothed it flat.

Kashu had only vaguely noticed this peculiar ability after venturing deep into the Water Labyrinth.

Though it was only a hazy feeling, he was certain that he had received water's protection.

Hiss—!

Unable to bear the humiliation any longer, the snakefish let out despairing cries. They stopped attacking and instead began accelerating along the vortex's pull, seeking only to escape the demon before them.

Seeing that these monsters had completely lost the will to fight, Kashu clicked his tongue in mild dissatisfaction.

"Running again? Can't you learn from the Minotaurs and fight to the bitter end with bloodshot eyes?"

"Collect."

With the brief incantation, a complex and precise crimson magic circle abruptly bloomed from Kashu's fingertips.

The magic circle grew brighter and brighter, its outline resembling the cylinder of a loaded revolver poised to fire.

"Cast."

The command was issued like a trigger being pulled.

Crimson magic bullets tore through the water and shot forth with overwhelming force, precisely piercing the bodies of the snakefish attempting to flee underwater.

Kashu cleanly fired two volleys of magic bullets to clear the area, then skillfully bent down to collect the magic stones and dropped materials scattered nearby.

"Fou~"

Fou, who had been obediently lying on his shoulder, gave a lazy yawn, seemingly displeased by the scent clinging to Kashu.

"A fishy smell? No, there isn't. My mystic code has a cleaning function built in. Did you smell it wrong?"

Fou: (〃￣︿￣)

The pure white beast could not be bothered to argue with such a fish-brained human and simply lowered his head to continue sleeping.

Kashu suspiciously raised an arm and sniffed it. He truly could not smell anything unusual, so he could only let it go.

"Come to think of it, I've been down here for five or six days. I feel grimy all over. It really is time to head back to the surface and take a proper bath."

Thus, Kashu changed his plans. Though he had intended to stay another day, he now decided otherwise.

He made his way to the eighteenth floor with practiced ease, found his old acquaintance Bill, packed up and sold the materials he had collected over the past few days, then headed straight back to the surface with a receipt from the Vanir Familia.

Old Bill watched Kashu disappear into the passageway, happily counting the various materials he had just acquired, the wrinkles on his face practically blooming with joy.

Though the twenty-fifth floor was only the entrance to the deep levels, snakefish scales and teeth had countless uses. On the eighteenth floor, they were absolutely hot commodities that could be flipped for a huge profit.

"Old Bill, you fleeced another fat sheep, didn't you!"

"Yeah, yeah. Aren't you afraid you'll offend some tough Familia someday and suffer for it?"

"Pah! Bunch of sour grapes!"

"My dealings with Lord Kashu are perfectly fair, understand? Besides, he's from the Loki Familia. If you've got the guts, go fleece one yourself!"

"Seriously? Didn't the Loki Familia's main force go on an expedition? Where'd an upper-class adventurer acting alone come from?"

"None of your damn business! Maybe Lord Kashu is some expert the Loki Familia just recruited from outside the city!"

Hearing that, the surrounding merchants' eyes instantly turned red with envy, cursing Old Bill's damn good luck in their hearts.

This sucks!

Watching that old bastard make money hurt even more than losing money myself!