I left my base and made my way to the stairs heading down to the nineteenth floor. There was a steady stream of adventurers coming and going through the opening, some with smiles some without. The oddest of the bunch I saw consisted of an elf, a dwarf and a human which was weird as elves typically disdain both the other races while dwarves butt heads with elves. To be fair though it was more a cultural thing then a racial thing so it also wasn't unheard of for elves to befriend members of these other races.-
No one really spared me any attention beyond glances as I descended the stairs and entered the nineteenth floor properly. When I got there I saw something that I could only shake my head at as it was a foolish thing to do. A large flagpole with a banner style flag was stabbed into the ground and there was a impossible to miss sign next to it that read.
"The northwestern area of this floor is officially being hunted by the Mammon familia! All trespassers will be attacked on sight!"
Claiming an area in the dungeon while not illegal or anything is HIGHLY frowned upon as it cuts into the possible profits of the other adventurers on the floor. There were some resources that spawned only in certain areas after all and if that area was claimed there was a very good chance of familias clashing. There was however a sort of unspoken rule in regards to claiming an area that everyone followed, you can't block the stairs between floors. Doing so is little different from cutting off the people heading deeper and no one will tolerate that.-
'Mammon? God of greed if I recall correctly, figures he'd jump on the wagon to grab as much profit as possible.' I thought before leaving to find some monsters.
With the amount of people on this floor that proved harder than I liked as I spent a good hour walking around before finally stumbling onto a bloody hive. For anyone else this would be a bad thing but for me it was just what I needed as deadly hornet stingers just so happened to be on my shopping list. I casually picked up a rock from the ground and with a nice "Swish! Thwack!" threw it straight into the side of the hive.-
Immediately a droning buzz filled the air as the hive began spitting out one person sized hornet after the other. At first they just buzzed around the hive but once one of them saw me they all shot through the air at me at speeds most level threes would struggle the follow if they had stats bellow C rank. For me though it was easy to keep track of them as I matched a new level four in all regards. I casually unsheathed my weapon and held it's axe side at the ready with a hair thin edge of erasure on it's blade as the hornets approached.-
"Swish! Swish! Swish! Swish!" I swung my weapon lazily through the air moments before the hornets would have ran me through with their stingers and each of them split in half cleanly avoiding me. This didn't kill them but removed all danger to me from them as they were quite harmless without their stingers. Sure they buzzed about angrily but it was little more than an annoyance that I simply ignored as more and more of the hornets being spawned by the hive were bisected.-
Once it was clear the hive wasn't going to give me anymore hornets after the thirtieth one I tossed a ball of hell fire at it and started refining the stingers on the cut off half of the angry swarm around me. With that done I raised my palm and a serpent made of flames sprung forth and began to feast on the swarm. Admittedly this was more me showing off but it was awesome so I won't apologize. As all of the swarming monsters burst into smoke that poured into my tattoos and their stingers dropped to the ground I began to casually claim my prize.-
I of course made sure to claim the magic stones of the hornets as they were level three in nature and highly useful for my crafting once converted to cursed stones. Once that was done I drew back the flames still burning around me and snuffed them out between my palms. I then walked up to the charred hive and sank my hand into it's exterior that crumbled into dust and scooped away the hard casing until i got to it's center that held the only thing of value it had, the core.-
Bloody hives were in fact almost entirely empty but held a core at the center that spawned the hornets and was an excellent magical catalyst with an innate poison affinity. The were also extremely rare as most adventurers refused to mess with a hive or flat out destroyed it as quick as possible which also destroyed the core. I honestly had no real use for the core at the moment but if we ever got an archer or rogue in the familia I could use it to create a piece of gear with poisonous effects for them.-
The stingers from the hornets could also be used for this purpose but were also good for normal blades if you discarded the poisonous aspect of them. I checked my metal finder compass and after getting a few weak directions chose to follow these leads since I needed to stock up some metals since I doubted I'd have much luck focusing on finding monsters. Sure it would be nice if I found some but with the amount of people running about this floor I didn't have much hope. The hive was honestly left alone simply because it was too troublesome to deal with to be worth the effort for everyone else.-
Not that I could blame them all as most adventurers on this level of the dungeon were level two or three and a hive sent out dozens of level three hornets to murder anyone nearby if it detects somebody. Considering the stingers on those hornets can punch through a level fours gear AND had poison on them and the danger to payout rate was far too skewed for most to consider taking it on.