After agreeing to limit our strengths, we activate the inherited skill we got from Mother, the Extra Skill Limiter, to lower our Levels down to Level 100. With this diminished strength, we can now fight fairly with the Redcap.
Just after we lowered our Levels, the goblin suddenly crouched, and like a loose arrow, it launched at me with a speed my nerfed stats barely perceived. With its daggers pointed at me, I did a quick side step and managed to successfully avoid the swift blades.
"Whoa! I almost got hit! It's been a while since I was this sluggish. It feels like I turned back when I was just ten."
Even with the same Level of 100, the goblin's AGI stat is higher than mine. My stats were allocated more to magic and attack almost equally, so my speed was inferior compared to the roguish stats of the goblin.
My thinking speed was also affected by the lowered stats, which made it hard to catch up with the goblin's speed. That's why I activated Level 8 Space-Time Magic.
"Future Prediction. Now I can see its movement a second ahead."
Future Prediction is a time spell that allows the user to peek into the future for a short time. But it sucks my mana too much that I have to use it for only a minute.
"…"
The goblin charged at me again, then slashed its daggers rapidly and made a barrage of attacks. I use my katana to deflect the raging daggers. I used my ability to see the future to slash my blade in a fluid motion and deflected two of the attacks at once.
As I am repelling its daggers, Sister didn't waste the opportunity to slash her blade at the occupied goblin from behind.
"?!"
As if having an eye behind its head, the goblin rogue suddenly withdrew one of its daggers from attacking me and slashed it upwards, successfully deflecting Sister's slash.
Using a Dagger Art technique, the goblin skillfully maneuvered its daggers and parried our blades at once. Even though I can predict what move it will make, its movements are too fast for my limited body to react.
Me and my sister stepped back, then charged at the goblin and thrust our blades from both sides. Since I am the one who is slower, the goblin just avoided my sword by rotating its body and reacted only to Sister's blade by parrying it.
My future sight shows me a blade going straight to my neck and a front kick to my stomach. Due to its fatality, I decided to use my blade to block the incoming dagger and let my body be kicked.
Even though I have Blast Resistance, I was knocked back for several meters due to the power of the kick. I held my sword with both hands and struck it against the floor to stop myself from knocking any further.
With a knee on the floor, I watched the duel between my sister and the Redcap.
After exchanging blades, the goblin stepped back and crouching down. Like before, the goblin launched itself at my sister while crossing its arms.
The daggers glowed a pale light, an indicator of a technique. When the daggers reached their target, my sister's neck, the goblin swiftly swept both of its arms, forming a pair of pincers of daggers.
(Level 4 Scissors!)
Clank.
As I am screaming the name of the technique inwardly, a sharp clanking of metals echoes throughout the room. Sister raised her sword in time and barely blocked the trajectory of the pincer attack. If she hadn't stopped the daggers, her head would have sent flying.
The daggers glowed again, and the goblins furiously attacked Sister. Even though Sister was being attacked simultaneously, she just parried, blocked, or evaded all of it.
Even though she cannot use the same future-seeing spell as me, she has a technique that works the same as the Future Prediction. The Level 8 Martial Art: Foresight.
When I asked my sister for details, she said that even though it could not predict the future, she could see streaks of light, which were the trajectory of incoming attacks.
After recovering my stance, I charged at the goblin. Sensing my approach, the goblin slashed the left dagger horizontally. I dove to avoid the blade as it was forming a beautiful arc.
I stood up just after the blade pass, then did a roundhouse kick and hit the goblin's occiput with the intention of dragging its head to the floor. Sister should take advantage of that opportunity and swing her sword in a fluid motion.
With its head pushed downward, the goblin couldn't do anything to stop the sword from aiming straight for its neck. The blue blade met the goblin's green skin and buried through its flesh, cleanly decapitating the goblin like a heavy guillotine.
Being separated from its body, my foot kicked the decapitated head to the floor. It bounced sequentially, then rolled before being stopped by the wall.
"Skilled dagger users are hard to deal with."
"Yeah. Even though their range was limited, they had faster attack speed and could freely mobilize their bodies."
"Since daggers are lightweight, you can wield two at once. Not only that, you can even activate two dagger techniques at the same time."
The goblin gave us a hard time despite fighting two opponents of the same Level. But that was because we weren't using any sword techniques. If we did, the fight would have concluded in a matter of seconds.
"It seems like our rewards are here." I said as I kept the corpse and the blades in my Inventory.
After defeating the Redcap Goblin, this floor's Domain Guardian, a block of dark grey stone at the farthest top of the room, moved, creating a two by two meter square pit. Then sounds of moving rocks echoed through the room, and a wooden chest slowly ascended from the hole.
At the same time, an odd five-meter-high, five-meter-wide stone slab on the wall, right beside the chest, sunk into the floor. Upon sunk down to the floor level, a flight of stairs of stone revealed behind the wall.
"Dungeons were straight out of RPGs."
"RPGs?"
"Well, how do I explain it… In my previous world, we played games to entertain ourselves. RPG was one of them. RPG is a type of game where one or more players assume the roles of characters and interact inside a fictional world. There were dungeons inside those worlds."
"I see… I don't get it."
"It'll be easier if I just show it to you."
I conjured video footage of RPGs in the air using the Projection spell. I explained the concepts of it to my curious sister as I was playing the video. She couldn't understand most of it, and it took her many replays and several minutes to at least grasp the gist of it.
"So there were systems in your magic-less world?"
"There's not. It existed only in video games. But I've been wondering about this since I was born… How does an RPG-like system exist in this world in the first place?"
"Isn't it something from your world?"
"I don't know. Even if a Reincarnator wished for it, it might be impossible."
"Why is that?"
"That's because… RPGs only existed in my era. And there were evidences of the system dating back at least two thousand years. That was one of the mysteries that I've encountered in this world so far."
"What are the others?"
"…Just leave it in your imagination."
"Did you just stare at my chest?"
(Of course! One of those mysteries keeps that mystery raising!)
"Oh, look! Our rewards!"
"Hey! Don't ignore me!"
Ignoring her rants, I approached the wooden chest, which contains our rewards, and opened it. Since it's the reward for defeating the first Domain Guardian of this dungeon, the chest was rather small, about a meter in length.
"Sigh. Just like other dungeons, our reward was just two bars of iron ingot."
"What can we expect from the first reward?"
"Don't worry, Sis. We can get higher-grade rewards as we go further." I tried to console my sister as I threw the ingots into my subspace.
The reward that we got was a pair of iron ingots. Even though it's just iron ingots, they're already pure and void of impurities. That means they were of higher quality than the mined ones.
The quality and rarity of rewards are proportional to the difficulty of the Guardian. The deeper the floor, the better the rewards. Our parents' weapons were the rewards for defeating the Dungeon Guardian of a 70-floor dungeon.
By the way, the rewards that we got were common-grade, and there were many other items under this category, like low-grade monsters' raw materials. While our mothers' weapons are legendary-grade.
"Then we have to delve deeper. Let's go, Raphael. You'll be my transporter."
"At your service, my queen."
After talking about our rewards, we passed through the five-meter-wide spiral stairway and began our descent down the 11th Floor. From here on, going to the next will be a lot more difficult.
Unlike Floors One to Nine, which had floors with a unicursal labyrinth, the 11th to the 19th Floors had floors with a circular maze structure. These floors had twice the diameter of the first ones.
The paths are still ten meters wide, but the ceilings are now fifteen meters high. The walls that separate the paths had a thickness of a meter and were still made of the same dark gray stone as the Labyrinth Floors.
If a person explored the Maze Floors for the first time, it would take around a month to escape a floor. A day or more if memorized or guided by a map. The monsters lurking on these floors are around Levels 51 to 119.
However, my Omnidirectional Perception, Clairvoyance, and Warp helped us clear a floor in less than a minute. It takes a few seconds to draw a map of an entire floor. More seconds for me to solve the maze manually in my head. I had a maze solver app, but I want to solve it on my own.
In just a few minutes, we already passed the Maze Floors and reached the 20th Floor. Since it's almost time for our curfew, we decided to fight the 20th Floor Guardian the next time.
I tried to teleport outside, but it didn't work. But for some reason, teleportation between floors seems to be working. Since it works, we warped back to the 1st Floor's entrance, then exited the dungeon.