Max
He exhaled slowly, letting the crimson-black energy of the Power of Destruction bleed out from his knuckles like cooling embers. His boots touched down on the cleared stone floor, and for a long moment, he just stood there, letting the heavy, suffocating silence of the boss room wash over him.
Instead of reaching for his rapier to sheathe it, he raised his left hand and stared at his fist. The skin of his knuckles was streaked with ash and dried, grey blood—the Goliath's. His hand ached with a deep, bone-level throb, the physical echo of a strike that had carried every ounce of his remaining will. He replayed the last seconds in his head. The compressed erasure driving inward. The resistance of the monster's biology snapping. The sudden silence where the giant's torso used to be.
A raw, electric thrill hit him first—the pure, animal satisfaction of a predator claiming its kill cleanly. But then, slower and heavier, came the pride. It wasn't the loud, boastful kind. It was a quiet, anchoring certainty that settled somewhere deep in his chest and just stayed there.
He had known, in his mind, that he could beat the Monster Rex. The math supported it. The theory was sound. But theory was a bloodless thing. The actual weight of standing in the silence afterward, with nothing left of a nine-meter apex predator except drifting ash and the fading echo of a single hit—that was a reality the numbers hadn't prepared him for.
Then the heat hit him.
It wasn't the agonizing, soul-tearing burn of crossing a depth threshold. This was a deep, vibrating warmth sinking straight into his marrow. Lux Tenebris was gorging itself, drinking down the massive, concentrated wave of Excelia like a man dying of thirst. The pure stat experience from soloing a Level 4 Boss was flooding his Falna, pushing furiously against the limits of his current container.
If just this—a mid-floor boss, in a contained room, in a controlled fight—feels this significant, Max thought, his gaze drifting to the shadowed ceiling, I can barely imagine what it feels like to push into the Deep Floors. To kill things that, if left unchecked, would eventually breach the surface.
To know that the millions of people in the city above were sleeping safely tonight specifically because he was down here in the dark, making sure it stayed that way.
That thought stopped him cold.
He actually wanted that. Not the heroic titles. Not the mountains of Valis. Just that specific, quiet feeling of being the wall between the light and the dark, multiplied by every monster he would ever put down for the rest of his time in this world. And the first step on that long road would always be wiping out Evilus and pushing his Level higher.
He knew, even without Freya running her ichor over his back, that he had just earned the "miracle" needed for his next Level Up. But he wasn't going to cash it in yet. It wasn't a fluke that he had beaten the Goliath as a Level 2 with only moderate effort; it was because he had relentlessly pushed most of his baseline stats to EX. A standard Level Up wasn't good enough anymore. He needed to push his stats to their absolute breaking point before taking the jump.
Max lowered his hand, suddenly realizing how utterly ridiculous he must look. Standing in a crater, staring at nothing with ash on his knuckles, making quiet, melodramatic promises to himself about the fate of the world.
Ah, the things we do for the greater good. Old man Dumbles, I finally get your vibe, he mused self-deprecatingly.
He smirked, making a mental note to force Gojo to deliver that exact line at the earliest opportunity. But right now, he needed to clear the air with his vanguard.
Snapping out of his introspective funk, he glanced across the room. Hogni was standing near the edge of the crater, Victim Abyss already sheathed. The Dark Elf was watching Max with an expression that was carefully, deliberately unreadable.
Max wondered what was actually going on behind those eyes. Does he look at me differently now? Like some magic-obsessed lunatic? Max wouldn't blame him if he did. He knew he had probably looked like an unhinged maniac out there—taking hits he didn't strictly have to take, refusing to use his magic that would have ended the fight in minutes, all just to see how far he could push the gap between his own limits and the Goliath's. All of it deliberate. None of it easy to explain to a veteran whose entire time adventuring revolved around lethal precision and destruction.
As Hogni picked his way across the shattered floor toward him, a blue blur shot past them both. Ki! Kairu had turned himself into a gelatinous boomerang, zipping crazily around the cavern to scoop up the scattered monsters before the dungeon could reclaim them.
Max turned his focus back to the elf. "How are you holding up?"
Hogni tilted his head, looking slightly confused by the casual inquiry. "I am... fine, Maximus," he replied, his tone guarded. He was clearly missing the underlying question about how he was handling the incredibly strange turn of events since his abrupt teleportation.
Max didn't press it. "Well, the need for you to watch my back is pretty much done since the Goliath is dead. Do you want to head back, or—"
He left the sentence hanging, genuinely wanting to let Hogni decide how to spend the rest of his evening.
He instantly realized he had phrased that terribly.
Hogni froze. His cool, composed Dark King persona shattered like fragile glass, replaced by a look of deep, wounded betrayal.
"You... w-wi-wish to di-dis-miss me?" Hogni asked, his voice dropping into a quiet, hurt stammer that made him sound decades younger. "Was I... a b-burden to y-you?"
The sheer heartbreak in the elf's voice hit Max squarely in the chest, invoking a sharp pang of guilt. Wincing, he quickly held up both hands in a gesture of absolute surrender.
"No, no, that's not it at all," Max explained quickly, kicking himself for his lack of tact. "I just figured you were bored standing around watching me test things out. If you want to tag along for the rest of my run, you're more than welcome. Honestly, having you around means I can go fully offensive without constantly watching my own back."
Hogni's posture straightened. The perceived insult evaporated instantly, replaced by a fierce, undeniable pride. He gave a sharp, formal nod, his hand resting on the pommel of his sword.
"The Vanguard of the Night does not abandon his post," Hogni declared, his voice regaining its theatrical resonance. "I will accompany you into the deeper dark."
Max smiled, a genuine warmth spreading through his chest. "Glad to hear it, buddy."
Rather than walking all the way back down through the winding corridors—especially since the cat was already out of the bag—Max channeled his mana and brought a teleportation circle to life beneath their feet.
With a now familiar VWOOM, the empty, ash-choked boss room vanished. They appeared instantly back on the wooden, moss-lit roots of Floor 22, right where Max had been standing before pulling Hogni into the fight.
-◈ -
Hogni
He had been wearing a frantic path into his expensive carpet.
The resolve had been building for three days—a strange, bubbling pressure in his chest that had no outlet and no name until this very evening, when it had finally crystallized into something actionable: he was going to challenge Hedin to a duel. He wouldn't wait to be dragged into the training yard. He wouldn't absorb the bespectacled elf's pointed, condescending remarks in controlled silence anymore. He was going to walk down that velvet corridor, knock on that mahogany door, and—
Knock. Knock.
Hogni's heart stopped.
Hedin? Had his rival somehow sensed his intent? Was he already here to duel him?
Hogni crossed the room in four long strides and threw the door open, his voice loud. "I accept your—!"
The hallway was completely empty.
He stood there, the bold declaration dying awkwardly in the air, until a soft, cheerful jiggle sounded near his boots.
"Ki!"
Kairu was bobbing on the floorboards, luminous and incredibly pleased with himself. Hogni looked past the slime, peering down the corridor—a familiar this far from its master was unusual enough to warrant suspicion—but the hallway remained utterly empty.
The slime did not wait for him to finish puzzling it out. It launched upward, landed on Hogni's shoulder with a soft splat, and deposited a sleek metallic bracelet into his palm with the proud air of a courier completing an important errand.
A tiny blue pseudopod tapped his wrist insistently.
Hogni turned the bracelet over. The construction was immediately interesting—it wasn't decorative or commercial. He did not recognize the magical framework. He tilted it toward the lamplight, trying to resolve what the inscription was doing, whether it was storage or a conduit or something else entirely. He was still turning it over when Kairu's pseudopod tapped his wrist again, more firmly this time.
Curious to see what the slime was implying, he slipped it on.
The bracelet hummed—and then the hum spoke. Max's voice came through with unsettling clarity, calm and unhurried, informing him that the Goliath was awake. The Monster Rex's roar followed immediately, transmitted so cleanly through the magical link that Hogni felt the vibration in his sternum.
The implications assembled themselves in short order: the boy was already in the boss room. He was alone. And Hogni was standing in his own suite, seventeen floors away, wearing his evening clothes.
He did not handle this gracefully.
What steadied him wasn't reassurance, but the boy's tone. Max didn't sound panicked; he sounded like a man inviting a friend over for tea. By the time Max told him to step into the teleportation circle Kairu was diligently drawing on his carpet, Hogni's breathing had returned to something approaching normal. He stepped into the glowing ring with his reservations intact and his dignity mostly assembled.
VWOOM.
The floor had disappeared.
-◈ -
The hour that followed had accumulated the way deep-sea pressure accumulates—not in single, crushing blows, but in a steady, compounding weight that gave no single moment to breathe.
The spells had come first. The barriers. Then the dungeon's unnatural coordination—the Minotaurs spawning where they should not, the Ligerfangs dropping from the ceiling, the clear, uncomfortable intelligence of a labyrinth that had stopped blindly reacting and started actively responding to the threat they posed.
Hogni had taken the flank without being asked while he watched from close range as the boy mapped the Goliath's tolerances the way a master smith tests a blade—methodically, deliberately, under immense self-imposed pressure—before doing something to its regeneration that Hogni simply had no framework for, and had no intention of pretending otherwise.
He added it to the list.
The list in Hogni's head had seventeen questions now. Possibly eighteen. He had lost count somewhere around the blinding lightning attacks.
When the Goliath's roar finally ended, the silence that replaced it was absolute. Hogni had stood in the grey dust of the boss room, the echo still fading from the stone, watching Kairu complete his retrieval with quiet efficiency. He had said nothing. There were too many questions, and not a single one rose above the others.
Then, Max had asked if he wanted to head back.
Hogni had processed the question for a full second before the meaning of it truly landed—and something underneath his carefully maintained composure cracked clean through. The boy had pulled him across seventeen floors, put him inside a transparent barrier in front of a charging Monster Rex, let him watch a display of magic that defied the laws of the world, and was now, apparently, offering to send him home.
As though he had been a mere convenience. As though the evening had been a transaction, and the transaction was complete.
He was aware, distantly, that his expression had stopped cooperating. What followed had not been his most composed moment. He was painfully aware of that, too.
But Max had corrected himself quickly—genuinely, not as a placating concession—and the misunderstanding dissolved as fast as it had formed.
Having you around means I can go fully offensive without constantly watching my own back.
It was a highly practical statement. It was also, Hogni understood, the closest thing to a direct compliment the boy had offered all evening, and it landed with far more weight than Max likely intended. It meant he was trusted. It meant he was needed.
He had straightened, filing the crack in his armor away.
"The Vanguard of the Night does not abandon his post," he had declared, the vow echoing in his own ears. "I will accompany you into the deeper dark."
And then, without ceremony, the teleportation circle had opened beneath them.
-◈ -
— and Floor 22 reassembled itself around them.
The transition was jarring — the dry, ash-choked dust of the boss room vanishing in a flash, instantly replaced by the thick, humid breath of the Large Tree Labyrinth. The cold, blue moss-light cast long shadows across the petrified wood, a stark contrast to the chaos they had just left behind.
Hogni steadied himself on pure instinct, his hand dropping to the hilt of Victim Abyss before his eyes had even finished adjusting to the gloom.
Max was already moving, though his steps lacked their usual effortless spring. He slumped back against a massive, moss-draped root with a heavy exhale, reaching into his pouch with the urgency of a man running on fumes. He pulled out four crystalline vials. He popped the corks off the first two—High Mind Potions—and downed them in rapid succession, followed immediately by two potent stamina restoratives to combat the deep, bone-weary ache of giving his all against a Monster Rex.
He tossed a fifth vial through the dim light. "For the reserves," Max said simply, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand as his breathing began to level out.
Hogni caught the vial mid-air. He stared at the shimmering liquid for a second before uncorking it. "My thanks," he muttered, the cool rush of restored mind immediately soothing the ache in his core. "In the rush of your... unconventional summons, I neglected to pack my own restoratives."
"Don't sweat it. Give me a minute to let these kick in."
Max leaned his head back against the damp wood, eyes sliding shut as his body processed the massive alchemical influx. As he rested, Kairu did not idle. The slime detached from his master and bounded forward, taking up a perimeter guard with a terrifying efficiency.
Hogni watched in silence as the Dungeon attempted to capitalize on their stationary position. A hunting party of Lizardmen hissed from the shadows, accompanied by the heavy, overlapping clicking of several Mad Beetles and the droning, erratic buzz of a small swarm of Deadly Hornets. These were Floor 22 monsters—solid Level 2 threats that demanded respect, spatial awareness, and coordinated party tactics.
Just as the Dark Elf's hand tightened on the hilt of Victim Abyss to intervene, Kairu dismantled the entire wave without so much as waking his resting master.
The slime didn't just react; it orchestrated a massacre. Kairu whipped out a flurry of pressurized water blades, forming a deadly, spinning lattice in the air that severed the wings of half a dozen Hornets mid-dive, dropping them to the mossy floor as writhing, helpless targets. Simultaneously, the slime expanded its mass outward to form a dense, gelatinous barricade to cover Max's blind spot. Three Mad Beetles hit the wall in rapid succession, their bone-crushing momentum entirely absorbed by the squishy fluid before Kairu forcefully contracted, crushing their hardened carapaces into dust with a sickening series of snaps.
The Lizardmen, attempting to use the Beetles' charge as a distraction to flank, found themselves completely outmatched. Kairu didn't even shift his core; the familiar simply extruded a dozen hardened, spear-like tendrils in a sweeping radial burst. The spikes pierced the throats and chests of five advancing Lizardmen with surgical precision, dropping them before they could even swing their crude stone weapons.
Hogni watched the seamless, unspoken coordination between master and familiar, and let the observation settle quietly into his mind. He had been doing a great deal of that tonight. Observing. Cataloguing. Saying nothing.
He knew Maximus had just achieved a feat that would effortlessly shatter his Level 2 container. Defeating the Goliath solo guaranteed the boy would reach Level 3 the moment they returned to the surface. Yet, that was merely the baseline. Max had been fighting with the destructive output and tactical instincts of an experienced Level 3, if not a Level 4, while still anchored to his current rank. With the massive influx of high-quality Excelia from a Monster Rex flooding his veins, Hogni could easily foresee the boy's raw parameters surpassing Level 4 entirely the next time their Mistress performed an update.
But looking at the speed and ease with which Kairu dispatched middle-floor monsters, Hogni felt a new, unsettling suspicion take root. Was the familiar in a similar league?
He knew from experience that monsters ate other magic stones to grow, sometimes mutating into irregulars of their own species or drastically strengthening their base forms. But this level of battlefield awareness, tactical intelligence, and raw, adaptable power... it almost made Hogni suspicious that the slime had been blessed with a Falna of its own.
Hogni shook his head, firmly closing that particular mental drawer. He had enough questions about the master; he refused to overcomplicate his reality by interrogating the biology of the familiar.
After a few more minutes, Max opened his eyes, the fatigue noticeably absent from his posture. He pushed off the root, rolling his shoulders with a satisfied crack.
Max turned to face him, producing another sheet of that strange, slime-textured parchment. "New terms," Max said lightly. "Permanent this time. I keep the magic stones. But every drop item, every rare material, every piece of loot we pull on these deep runs—my entire share goes to you. In exchange, you act as my companion and protector when we push into the lower floors."
He held out his hand.
Hogni didn't take it immediately. His eyes narrowed, scanning the boy's open, expectant expression.
Something about the offer felt profoundly unbalanced. Casual generosity of this magnitude simply didn't exist in Folkvangr. What was the actual benefit of this arrangement for Max? By the looks of it, it was a purely one-sided transaction. If Max had offered these exact terms to Hedin or Allen, they would have laughed, signed it without a second thought, and ruthlessly exploited the boy's labor until he was driven against a wall.
Hogni felt a sudden, fierce knot of protectiveness tighten in his chest. He is too open, the Dark Elf thought, a frown tugging at his lips. Orario will devour a heart that gives everything away for nothing.
He could not let his friend's generosity be mistaken for weakness in the harsh, unforgiving hierarchy of their Familia. Even their Mistress's absolute favor could only shield him so much; Hogni knew all too well how the other executives and bitter veterans could weaponize "malicious compliance" to break a favored rookie without technically violating Freya's orders.
Hogni opened his mouth, fully intending to reject the unbalanced terms and deliver a stern, senior-adventurer lecture about the brutal realities of Familia economics.
But then, his veteran instincts caught up with him. He paused, looking down at the faintly glowing parchment.
His mind flashed back to his most recent status update with the Mistress. At Level 5, gathering even a single point of Excelia was an agonizingly slow, grinding ordeal. Yet, his latest update had revealed a sudden, inexplicable jump in his parameters—a surge so significant it had visibly surprised Lady Freya.
Is this bizarre contract magic the actual secret to my abnormal growth? Hogni wondered, his tactical mind spinning as he connected the dots to their earlier, temporary pact. Does binding myself to these 'terms' somehow alter, siphon, or multiply the Excelia I receive?
It was a staggering theory. If this parchment was truly a world-bending tool capable of bypassing the established laws of growth, then Max was handing it out like cheap candy. That level of naive generosity wouldn't just get the boy exploited in Orario; it would get him enslaved or killed.
I will accept it for now, Hogni decided silently. I must test the true nature of this contract. I need to see the results of this pact firsthand to confirm if it is indeed the catalyst for my own leap in strength. Once I understand its mechanics, I can properly advise him on the danger of offering such miracles so casually. I will not let the others use him.
Satisfied with his silent vow to protect his first real friend in years, Hogni gave a small, resolute nod to himself and reached out.
"Agreed," Hogni said, clasping Max's hand firmly.
The parchment glowed, the magic sealing the bond between them with a warm, invisible pulse that faded into the ambient air of the labyrinth.
They fell into a natural formation without needing to discuss it further—Max slightly ahead, Hogni covering the left flank, Kairu ranging in loose, fluid arcs ahead to mark incoming threats. The Large Tree Labyrinth closed around them, the blue moss-light casting everything in cool, pale color, the air thick with the scent of damp earth and old bark.
He was still cataloguing. He suspected he would be cataloguing for some time. Then—
"I have a question," Max said, his eyes tracking the arching wooden ceiling. He glanced back, gesturing vaguely toward Hogni's waist. "Your sword. I've been running a rapier Kairu made, and it holds up better than I expected. But after feeling what that Goliath could do... I'm genuinely curious. Where is the ceiling? What actually goes into making a weapon that can handle serious dungeon combat?"
Of all the things Hogni had expected the boy to ask first—about Evilus, about his cursed magic, about the Goddess—metallurgy had not been among them. But it landed as a genuine relief. A familiar, tangible subject after the reality-bending enormity of the last hour.
"It begins with the base material," Hogni said, his voice falling into a steady, measured cadence. "Iron and standard steel are usable in the upper floors, but they will shatter on contact with anything a Level 2 or above produces at full force. For sustained Middle Floor use, you need Damascus steel or high-grade dungeon alloy. Reliable, replaceable, and sufficient for most adventurers operating in this range."
He paused, letting the ambient sounds of the labyrinth fill the gap for a moment—the distant skitter of something ahead, the soft drip of condensation from the canopy above—before continuing.
"Above that, the path splits depending on the wielder's role. Mithril is the ceiling for magical weapons—it conducts and amplifies spell output without resistance, which is why mages and magic swordsmen prefer it. Adamantite trades that conductivity for physical endurance. It absorbs the punishment of deep floor combat without warping."
"And above Adamantite?" Max pressed with interest.
"Orichalcum," Hogni said simply. "Indestructible within any combat parameter we have documented. Prohibitively heavy at sufficient purity and expensive enough that only a handful of adventurers in the world can make full use of it." He let a beat pass. "A skilled smith with the right Development Ability can also apply what is known as the Durandal trait to an Orichalcum weapon—it renders the blade immune to corrosion and nearly impossible to break even by Orichalcum's already extreme standard."
Max went quiet for a few paces, turning it over. The corridor narrowed slightly, forcing them into single file for a moment before opening back out. Hogni stepped back into his flanking position without breaking the silence.
"So the material sets the ceiling," Max said finally, "and the smith determines whether you actually reach it."
"Precisely."
Above them, the shadows shifted. A Mad Beetle dropped from the ceiling, its jagged mandibles clicking as it plummeted toward Max's blind spot.
Max didn't break stride. He simply pivoted on his heel and delivered a casual upward left hook. The black-red energy of Destruction flared silently at the point of contact. The Beetle's carapace ceased to exist from the sternum inward. Kairu darted forward and retrieved the corpse without breaking his ranging pattern.
Hogni watched the effortless execution and thought: he does not even register it as combat anymore. He filed that away alongside everything else.
They walked for a moment in comfortable silence — the specific, unforced quiet that only settles between two people who have fought beside each other and no longer feel the need to fill the space.
"And monster drop weapons?" Max asked suddenly, glancing over his shoulder. "Are they actually viable at the high end, or is that just a fool's errand?"
Hogni considered the question properly before answering — it deserved the consideration. "At the highest levels, they are often superior to anything a smith can produce from conventional materials. Certain creatures leave behind remains that carry properties no smelted metal can replicate."
He paused, watching Kairu seamlessly redirect an incoming Sword Stag into a nearby pitfall with a pressurised water whip.
"There is a sword currently in existence — forged by Master Tsubaki herself from the fang of a Leviathan. The material alone cost over a billion Valis to secure. The man who carries it is Leon Vardenburg, a dwarf, and the only Level 7 adventurer alive outside the Zeus and Hera Familias. His blade has never been damaged in recorded combat." Hogni's voice carried a rare, solemn reverence. "The monsters provide what no forge can manufacture — if you are strong enough to take it."
Max said nothing.
Then he let out a low, slow whistle — not the reflexive kind, but the considered exhale of a man doing arithmetic in his head and arriving at a number that radically changed the shape of his future plans. He glanced down at the slime-forged rapier in his hand. Turned the hilt once. The edge caught the moss-light cleanly, still true, holding up better than anything he had come across so far.
He looked at it the way a man looks at a tool he has gotten genuine use from and has already decided to outgrow.
Hogni watched him do it and kept his peace. The expression was answer enough — not discouragement, not intimidation, but the quiet recalibration of a conqueror plotting a new route on a much larger map. It told him more about the boy's actual ceiling than any spell he had cast tonight.
As Max fell into a contemplative silence, his mind clearly occupied with calculations of a distant, ambitious future, Hogni recognized an opening. The boy's stream of questions had finally paused, leaving a comfortable quiet in their wake. Hogni decided to seize it. The list of impossible anomalies he had been meticulously cataloging all evening was burning a hole in his mind, and the most glaring tactical impossibility demanded an explanation.
"The teleportation," Hogni said, his voice measured, cutting through the ambient hum of the labyrinth.
Max glanced at him, pulling himself from his thoughts.
"You used it to send Kairu to Folkvangr," Hogni continued, keeping his tone perfectly level. "You used it to pull me into the boss room. You have been using it to move between floors without the stairs all night." He paused. "How many markers have you placed?"
It was not quite a question. Max seemed to recognize that.
"Enough to make the dungeon significantly more navigable," Max replied. He reached into his coat and produced a folded piece of parchment, holding it out without hesitation.
Hogni took it and opened it carefully.
His first impression was the texture. Smooth in a way that was not quite paper and not quite hide — the specific, faintly luminous density of something Kairu-made, the slime's composition leaving a residue in whatever he produced that no conventional material could replicate. Hogni had handled enough of the familiar's work tonight to recognize it immediately.
His second impression was the circle itself.
He had studied magic circles his entire life — his own, Hedin's, the elaborate constructs of rivals whose names he declined to dignify. He knew what a standard framework looked like. This shared the basic geometry, but the inscription at its heart was profoundly different. The sigil at the core was compact and extraordinarily precise, each line carrying the same deliberate intentionality as the bracelet on his wrist — the same signature he had been stepping through all evening without knowing whose it was.
Not a standard circle. A tether.
Hogni turned it over slowly as they walked, the ambient light thinning as they pushed further from the last waypoint.
"Your network," Hogni said, without looking up from the parchment. "How far does it currently extend?"
"Floor 1 through 22," Max said without delay. "Anchor points at every major boundary. A few extras placed at high-traffic monster spawn corridors on the floors I use most."
Hogni's hand stilled on the parchment.
He looked up slowly.
"Every boundary," he repeated.
"Every boundary," Max confirmed pleasantly.
Hogni looked back down at the circle. He was quiet for a long moment, and then the quiet broke — not dramatically, but in the way a dam develops its first hairline crack, invisible until it is not.
"If the Familia were permitted use of this network," he said, more to himself than to Max, "the time-sensitive quests alone—" He stopped. Started again. "The Dian Cecht Familia's emergency supply requests. Floor break response. A party could be in the dungeon in minutes rather than hours." He folded the parchment once, absently, without noticing he was doing it.
"Rookies. The upper floors are necessary for adjustment, but the genuine acceleration happens in the Middle Floors. If access time were removed from the equation entirely—" He turned the folded parchment over in his hands. "The training gap between a first-class Familia and a mid-tier one is partly skill and partly simply time in depth. Remove the travel cost and that gap narrows considerably."
Max said nothing. Hogni did not notice.
"Sparring in the dungeon itself rather than the training grounds. Real floor conditions, real monster responses, without destroying Lady Freya's property in the process." A beat of silence. "Emergency extractions—"
He was aware, distantly, that he had been talking for some time. He was also aware that they had reached the final corridor of Floor 22, the walls close on either side, the labyrinth pressing in at its darkest, and that Max had been walking beside him in complete silence for the entirety of his spiral, watching him with the mild, patient expression of a man who had seen something interesting happen and decided not to interrupt it.
A hand tapped his shoulder.
Hogni stopped walking. Came back to himself. Became, with a degree of composure that cost him something, intensely aware of the mad gleam of possibilities that had been on his face.
"I'll consider it," Max said simply.
The relief that moved through Hogni was disproportionate and he knew it and did not particularly care. Something in his chest eased that he had not realized was braced. He straightened, offered the parchment back with both hands, and managed — just — to keep the immense gratitude on his face from becoming undignified.
Max smirked. "Keep it."
Hogni looked down at the circle in his hands. Then back up.
He folded it carefully, tucked it into his inner coat pocket, and said nothing. Some things did not require a response. He filed the warmth of it away with everything else, in the same catalogue, but as the reality of the last few minutes settled in, the sheer embarrassment of having just babbled like an over-excited Guild clerk finally caught up with him. Heat rushed to the tips of his pointed ears. The "Vanguard of the Night" had just lost his composure over logistics. Mortified, Hogni clamped his jaw shut and stared rigidly straight ahead, desperately hoping the boy wouldn't point it out.
Fortunately, the Dungeon intervened before the silence could become agonizing.
As they stepped into the final, wide chamber separating them from the stairs to the next floor, the shadows along the petrified roots writhed and detached. The Dungeon, seemingly taking offense to their casual stroll, threw a veritable army to cut off their descent.
The ground trembled beneath the thunderous footfalls of hulking Mammoth Fools, their massive, woolly frames acting as living battering rams. They were screened by a skittering frontline of Mad Beetles and flanked by agile, razor-horned Sword Stags. Behind them, spear-wielding Lizardmen formed a secondary wall, while the air above grew thick with a buzzing, lethal cloud—a deadly mix of diving Deadly Hornets and sniper-like Gun Libellulas hovering in the canopy to rain down projectiles.
Hogni didn't just draw Victim Abyss — he welcomed the violence. He used the horde as an outlet for his flustered nerves, moving with a silent, blistering lethality. He didn't even pause at the towering bulk of the lead Mammoth Fool; his dark blade flashed in a singular, devastating arc that bifurcated the giant beast mid-charge. It turned to ash before its halves could hit the floor. He didn't stop there, flowing into the enemy lines and turning Mad Beetles and Lizardmen into corpses before they could even screech.
Max and Kairu fell in perfectly alongside him, completing the wordless dance of destruction. When a trio of Sword Stags blurred forward, antlers lowered to skewer Hogni's blind spot, Max intercepted. A quick jump paired with a Destruction-coated horizontal slash severed all three beasts simultaneously, their momentum carrying their dissolving bodies harmlessly past the Dark Elf.
Meanwhile, Kairu handled the aerial bombardment. As the Gun Libellulas fired their organic projectiles from the high roots, the slime flattened across Max's back and erupted into a rapid-fire anti-air turret. Pressurized water bullets and hardened slime-buckshot swatted the Libellulas out of the air with sickening snaps, while a sweeping, whip-like tendril sliced through the diving swarm of Deadly Hornets, clearing the skies.
It was an absolute, systemic dismantling of a floor-clearing horde, erasing the massive chamber in under two minutes.
When the final Lizardman became a corpse and Kairu finished vacuuming up the last of the monsters, the embarrassment in Hogni's chest had finally bled away. He sheathed his sword with a crisp click, his breathing steady, his composure fully restored.
They resumed their march toward the stairs. Hogni glanced at the blue-haired boy walking beside him, his analytical mind snapping back to the next item on his mental list.
"The spells," Hogni said, his tone back to its cool, measured baseline. "The ones you used on the Goliath."
Max glanced at him.
"I assumed they operated on a similar framework to Riveria's magic," Hogni said. "Multiple named spells drawing from a fixed number of slots — three slots, nine named spells at the upper tier. Each one developed over years." He paused. "I was clearly wrong about the count. I lost track somewhere around the fifth distinct incantation."
"Very wrong," Max agreed — and there it was, that shift in tone Hogni had been waiting for without knowing it. A warmth and animation that hadn't been there before. The specific energy of a man about to talk about the thing he loves most. "It's not a slot system at all. It's a Grimoire."
Hogni frowned. "A Grimoire. As in—"
"An independent spellbook bound to my Falna. Every spell I learn is permanently mine. No slots. No upper limit on the number of spells I can hold." He said it with the easy casualness of a man for whom this fact had long since stopped feeling remarkable. "I can just keep learning."
Hogni stopped walking.
He stood in the middle of the moss-lit corridor and was completely still for a long moment as he processed.
No upper limit.
He thought of Riveria. Nine spells across three slots, and she was by any reasonable measure the finest mage currently operating in Orario. He thought of the sheer, grinding years behind a single named spell brought to combat reliability. He thought of what he had watched tonight — not two spells, not three, but a continuous and uninterrupted sequence of entirely different incantations, each one precise, each one landing, each one drawing from a reserve that had not appeared to diminish until the very end of a fight against a Level 4 Monster Rex.
No upper limit.
The full weight of it settled over him the way deep water settles after something very large has moved through it.
It meant that, given enough time and study, the boy would possess the tactical coverage of an entire Elven battalion. A normal mage, even one as legendary as Riveria or Hedin, possessed blind spots dictated by their specific elements or spell types. Because they were defined by limits, they could be countered. They could be planned against.
But how did one plan against an opponent with an infinite, ever-expanding arsenal?
There was no counter-strategy for a variable that could rewrite itself to solve any equation. It meant Max would never encounter a monster whose resistance he could not eventually bypass, nor a battlefield hazard he could not neutralize. He was an entire magical artillery corps, a defense grid, and a tactical vanguard compressed into a single frame. It meant the boy wasn't just shattering the ceiling of what a mage could be in Orario's history—he was erasing the very concept of a ceiling entirely.
He looked at Max, who was watching him with mild interest, apparently entirely unaware of the absolute paradigm-shattering nuke he had just casually dropped into the conversation.
And that was precisely what stopped Hogni from speaking.
Not the revelation itself — though it was the largest single piece of tactical information he had received in years. What stopped him was the ease of it. The complete, unguarded ease with which the boy kept handing things over. The bracelet sent before the invitation was even extended. The teleportation circle pressed into his hands and told to keep. The logistical network shared without negotiation. The nature of his magic offered in passing, as though it were simply a fun fact about himself rather than a secret that would reshape every strategic assumption Hogni had ever made about the upper limits of mortal power.
Max was not being generous. He was not buying loyalty or building leverage. He simply — trusted. Openly. Without apparent calculation. And that, Hogni realized with a quiet, unsettling clarity, was more disarming than anything else he had witnessed tonight.
He did not know what he had done to warrant it. He was not certain he had done anything at all.
He chose, very deliberately, not to say what he was thinking.
"I see," he said instead, his voice remarkably steady.
Max raised an eyebrow. "That's it? Just 'I see'?"
"For now," Hogni replied quietly, and began walking again.
He had come down here tonight as a vanguard. A set of eyes for his Mistress. A safety net for a boy she valued as a curiosity.
He was going home carrying a permanent teleportation anchor in his pocket, the memory of a Goliath erased into silence, and the weight of more trust than he felt he had earned pressed against his ribs like something he did not yet know how to carry.
Underneath the endless cataloguing, the tactical assessments, and the quiet guilt of his own social anxieties, something new had taken root. Something that had nothing to do with Freya's reports, the Familia's metrics, or Hedin's pointed, condescending remarks in the training yard. Something that had no professional justification, and required none.
He wanted to reach Level 6 faster.
Not to prove a point to Hedin. Not to be recognized by the Guild. Not to stand taller in the hierarchy he had spent years ruthlessly climbing.
He wanted to get stronger just to be here — in this dungeon, on this floor, three steps behind this particular boy — when he decided to go deeper. To be someone truly worth standing beside when the dungeon stopped coordinating and started trying. To be the kind of friend the Zeus Familia had once been to a younger, less certain version of himself, without expecting anything in return.
Because the boy walking ahead of him was already behaving like one, without even knowing it.
--> Devil in a Dungeon <--
AN:
Coming to this chapter, I would say this is my best chapter in terms of building a strong bond. I hope those of you who were waiting for Hogni's reaction were happy with how the chapter turned out to be.
The chapter covered many things and everything will be elaborated as we continue and about Leon, I didn't find anything about his official Level up to 7, so for the story, he is assumed to be Level 7 already.
In the next chapter, we will go around to see what's up with Alise a bit and finally come back to the end of this dive and Max will set up his business after his falna update, obviously. ;)
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Next update will be on Tuesday.
Ben, Out.
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