“You sure about this? It’s very dangerous in the dungeon.”
“Unless I go, I can’t earn this dp, right?” Faeyna asked. “Then… Master will leave me behind, and I will no longer be the cook he needs!”
“I’m sure there is a Master Cook or something like that, so getting a second and third job would be necessary.”
“Plus, Master said there are cooking based DP in the store, right?”
“I guess that’s true.”
In the end, I couldn’t talk her out of it. Faeyna would be a noncombatant. Instead, she promised to keep watch, manage supplies, and do all of the cooking. I told her I was happy to keep cooking for the group, but she became quite insistent. Well, it was probably fine if I let her complete this one dungeon. Once she has the second job from her DP, she’ll probably get off my back about it. Since we were already at the boss, it was probably fine.
We stepped through the Portal into the safe room. The door was still closed, thankfully. That meant there was a boss waiting down below for us. If I understood things correctly, when it came to the final floor, there was no door to the boss room. Rather, the door appeared earlier before the safe room. This allowed the combatants to retreat during a lengthy battle while keeping new combatants from entering the battle.
Anyone who had logged in with the kiosk could naturally join in on the final boss battle, so it was an event unlike any other. It stood to reason that the nature of dungeons was for many individual groups to strive toward the bottom. Eventually, when enough groups reached the final boss, they would all join together in a raid and attempt to fight the dungeon boss, who was many times stronger than the other bosses.
Unfortunately, this world had a major shortage of Dungeon Divers. Too many people feared death, and thus only the bravest and stupidest went into the dungeons and risked their lives in such a manner. While you might find Great Dungeons with many groups in them, they never made it near the end. As for small dungeons like the Widow’s Dungeon, it was rare to get more than 2-3 groups interested.
From what I recalled, the group that attempted to take Widow’s Dungeon consisted of fifteen men, all higher level than myself. That included the King, an S class individual who should be close to Alysia in ability. Yet, they were all defeated, and now we were all that was left.
It should be known that I had never officially defeated a dungeon boss. Every boss had been defeated through a different means, and we hadn’t had to go all out thanks to various conditions. Calypso’s tower is the only possible exception, but it didn’t count since I crushed the entire dungeon and dropped a Meteor on their head. I never even met the dungeon boss for that building.
So, I should have been terrified to enter and fight this boss. It was probably a bad way to look at things, but we had managed with every dungeon so far. I reckoned that we could manage with this one as well. We succeeded where others had failed. I couldn’t say if that was because we had some hidden power, or just because we were really lucky. Whatever it was, though, I was willing to bet our lives on it.
“Master…” Lydia’s voice spoke up. “Can you continue the story of Widow’s Dungeon?”
“Ah, a story!” Celeste added excitedly.
“Ah… that’s right…” I had almost forgotten about the murals.
If we wanted to beat this dungeon, our best bet still fell with the murals that told the story of how this curse came to exist.
“So… last time… oh… it seems I’ve forgotten.”
So many things had happened since we had last been in the dungeon, I no longer seemed to be able to remember the dungeon’s lore.