"Goliath."
The moment the name came out, Loki, who'd still had her finger in her mouth sucking the blood, sprayed her finger and her spit out together on the spot.
She sat there with a trail of drool at the corner of her mouth, her usually narrowed eyes suddenly going wide, staring blankly at Leo.
That look was exactly like watching some unlucky kid who'd abruptly gone haywire, run off to smack his head against a wall, and knocked his brains loose.
"You... who'd you say?"
Loki's voice had even gone off-key.
"Goliath." Leo said it with perfect calm. "I already told you, didn't I? The Floor 17 Floor Boss, who else could it be but Goliath?"
That utterly natural tone, as though he weren't talking about Goliath but about a Goblin.
"Are you out of your mind?"
Loki could tell Leo wasn't joking around, and she shot to her feet at once.
"You know who you're talking about?"
"A Floor Boss! That's a Floor Boss!"
"Even if you don't know what a Floor Boss is, you unlucky kid, you oughta at least know it's two whole Levels above the strongest monster on its floor, right?"
Loki couldn't stop herself from grabbing Leo's shoulders and shaking him hard, like she was trying to shake him awake, with a touch of hysteria about it.
"That's a Lv.4 oversized monster! A Lv.2 like you wants to take that thing on? You're not planning to rack up great deeds, you're planning to be a cautionary example, aren't you?"
Lv.4, and an oversized monster at that. A boss-class monster like that, even if you put together a party where every member was Lv.4 to subjugate it, you'd probably still need a ten-man squad to pull off a clean kill. After all, Goliath was an Endurance-specialized Floor Boss; going purely by its Endurance stat, it could match a Lv.5, and even a ten-man squad all at Lv.4 would have to scrape and struggle to grind it down. A mere Lv.2, in front of a monster of that class, would just get stomped flat underfoot.
"You could at least pick an ordinary Lv.4 to challenge. A monster like a Floor Boss isn't something you can judge just by its classification Level. It's huge, for one thing, and it's got thick, tough hide on top of that. Even Ais-tan would have a hard time cutting into a thing like that, and to actually kill it she'd have to go all out before it was even possible. And a Lv.2 like you wants to go solo it?"
Loki was so furious her lips were trembling, and she just cursed it right out.
"You've gotta be getting cocky, right? Hurry up and tell me you got cocky because you grew too fast, too smoothly, so I can knock some sense into you with a clear conscience!"
You couldn't blame Loki for reacting like this. Soloing a Floor Boss was just too absurd a notion, even if Goliath was the weakest Floor Boss of them all.
There were untold thousands upon thousands of adventurers in Orario, yet in Orario as it stood now, the adventurers who had successfully soloed a Floor Boss numbered exactly one.
That was Ottar: the city's strongest adventurer, Orario's only Lv.7, captain of Freya Familia, hailed as the ultimate weapon and nicknamed King.
No, even that King, Ottar, hadn't succeeded in killing a Floor Boss.
He'd only beaten the Floor Boss half to death before his Familia comrades cut in, which kept him from completing the feat of subjugating a Floor Boss alone. Word was he'd held it as a lifelong regret, and that he'd flown into a rage at his Familia comrades over it, even coming to blows.
Of course, the Floor Boss he'd challenged wasn't Goliath, classified as Lv.4, but the strongest of the four Floor Bosses discovered so far, the one dwelling on Floor 49: Balor.
The highest monster classification on Floor 49 was Lv.5, and the Floor Boss that dwelled there was without question classified Lv.7, with certain abilities even reaching Lv.8. Even for that strongest man in Orario, soloing such a monster was a thing of immense difficulty, and to have the kill snatched away midway in those circumstances, well, there was no way he wouldn't have lost his temper.
For this reason, the feat of soloing a Floor Boss had never once been completed to this day. Perhaps someone among those two Familias that had once reigned over Orario had managed it, but they'd never reported the accomplishment to the Guild, and the Guild had never publicly declared that anyone had done it, so even if someone had managed it, they'd managed it without anyone knowing.
At the very least, out in the open, no one had yet accomplished the feat.
And when not even the Lv.7 King had fully succeeded in soloing a Floor Boss classified at Lv.7, here was a Lv.2 Leo wanting to leap across two Levels to challenge a Lv.4 Floor Boss?
If this wasn't getting cocky, what was it?
And yet, Leo was actually quite calm.
"Right now, the only opponent left that I can think of worth challenging is Goliath, isn't it?" Leo looked at Loki and said this. "With my abilities, who else is there in the Middle Floors I could subjugate to accumulate the great deeds I'd need to level up?"
At these words, Loki was instantly speechless.
You could tell just from Leo's Status: at this point he really had no match in the Middle Floors.
He was only Lv.2, but back at Lv.1 every one of his abilities had already broken past the limit, four basic ability stats reaching SS and his best one reaching SSS, which left him with extraordinarily powerful potential accumulated after leveling up, making him far stronger than an ordinary freshly-leveled Lv.2 from the moment he ranked up.
Now his Status had broken past the limit once again, four abilities at SS and one at SSS, which had pushed his strength beyond the bounds of Lv.2 entirely.
Loki believed that with Leo's Status as it now stood, even up against a Lv.3 opponent he'd absolutely never come out the worse for it.
And Lv.3 already exceeded the strength of the Middle Floors. By the Guild's standard, you were perfectly cleared to head to the Lower Floors to adventure.
A Leo like that really would have a hard time finding any opponent in the Middle Floors worth a fight.
Unless he ran into an Irregular, became a target of the Dungeon, and met a crisis far beyond what a Lv.2 could handle, then if he wanted to adventure, to accomplish great deeds, to complete a level up, he'd surely find it hard to manage in the Middle Floors.
But that kind of Irregular wasn't something you could run into just because you wanted to.
That being the case, Leo's settling on a Floor Boss was understandable enough.
After all, Goliath, the Floor 17 Floor Boss, appeared on a fixed schedule every two weeks and never left the room where it was born, so as long as it hadn't been subjugated, heading to that room meant you were certain to run into it.
In a situation like that, would Leo choose to gamble on luck, deliberately manufacturing an Irregular to ramp up the difficulty of the fight, or would he choose to challenge an opponent he was guaranteed to encounter?
The answer was already obvious.
"B-but that's a Floor Boss! And you're only Lv.2!"
Loki hadn't let go of her grip on Leo's shoulders, her face full of conflict.
"I may only be Lv.2, but with my Status as it is now, an ordinary Lv.3 is no match for me, never mind that I've also got Magic. Going purely by firepower, I'm already on par with a Lv.4 now, aren't I?"
Leo spoke to Loki as though to reassure her.
An ordinary Mage, even if they could push their Magic stat to the highest S upon leveling up, would still be far weaker than Leo was now.
Leo had pushed his Magic stat to SSS back at Lv.1, two stages above the highest S, and at Lv.2 he was still two stages higher. Stack the two together, and his potential Magic stat was probably not much lower than that of Lefiya, now at Lv.3.
Even though Lefiya had H-stage Mage to support her and held a better staff than Leo's Emerald Staff, as long as you set aside the magic amplification her Skill Fairy Canon brought, her firepower at this stage probably wouldn't be all that much higher than Leo's.
And with Lefiya's Magic strength, even without Skill support, her firepower wouldn't lose to an ordinary Lv.4 Mage.
After all, most Mages didn't have that kind of potential. They couldn't push their Magic stat to the highest S at every Level, and some could only push their Magic stat to the D stage needed to level up before hitting their ceiling. A Mage like that, even after leveling up, would be far weaker than a Mage who'd leveled up with higher potential Magic.
Some Mages couldn't even acquire the Mage Development Ability that proved one was a high-tier Mage. A Mage like that, even at Lv.4, couldn't possibly have magic more powerful than Lefiya's.
Naturally, the Leo of now wouldn't lose to that kind of "bare-minimum" Lv.4 Mage either.
In other words, he'd preliminarily earned the qualification to take on a Floor Boss classified as Lv.4, at least to the point where he could break through its defenses.
"Even if Goliath specializes in Endurance, I can raise my magic's power by spending extra Mind. I'm confident that's enough to deal damage to it."
This was the reason Leo would think of subjugating Goliath.
Meteor Dance's baseline firepower already reached Lv.4 level, and as long as Leo was willing to throw his Mind into it, raising that firepower to Lv.5 level and dealing damage to an Endurance-specialized Goliath wouldn't be very hard at all.
"But like that, will your Mind hold up?"
Loki's brow knit tight; she still wasn't budging.
"I'll bring plenty of supplies." Leo said it flat out. "If my Mind runs short, then I'll prop it up with a load of Magic Potions. I refuse to believe I still can't challenge a Floor Boss even like that."
Loki said nothing more and began pacing back and forth around the God's Chamber without stop.
Leo wasn't in any hurry either, quietly watching Loki, waiting for her to make her judgment.
He was doing something this reckless, so if his goddess didn't agree to it, that would be understandable too.
Even Leo himself hadn't exactly failed to entertain the thought of whether this was courting death. After all, he was leaping across two Levels to challenge it, and the opponent was a Floor Boss besides.
In truth, he could have skipped all this risk entirely.
After all, barring anything unexpected, his Skill Stranger from Another Star had the effect of lowering the difficulty of leveling up; he didn't need to take such a huge gamble challenging a monster of that class to gain the great deeds he'd need to level up.
But Leo still wanted to try.
For no other reason than that he wanted to walk back, in this way, into that safe floor that was so deeply special to him, and tell the self of that time, the one who'd stood there in dread, not knowing the future, that the him of a year later was no longer the man who'd needed someone to lead him by the hand just to walk back out trembling.
That even the self who'd been nothing at all back then could, a year later, forge a legend to leave the people of this world dumbstruck.
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