(Drake POV)
We descended through the stairs towards floor 2 as we were immediately greeted by a massive swarm of the same spiders we fought before. The moment we stepped into the second floor, we were greeted by another swarm of spiders right midway through the stairs, the annoying spiders crawled upwards, hissing, and roaring back at us, but we were mostly unfazed by their intimidation at this point.
We quickly began to massacre them as we had done before. It wasn't so hard, and I used my magic to swiftly freeze them to death, it was surprising to see that such monsters were so weak to ice. Despite living in a continent were more than half of it is covered in snow and icescapes.
This time we were even more merciless, swift, precise, and efficient, I unleashed a larger part of my Unique Skill: Winter Magic, showing off the might of it as everything around me that wasn't my allies froze, only for everyone else to quickly confirm the kills by slaying them with their weapons, fists, or claws… or even bodies.
In less than an hour, second floor was cleared as we quickly gathered the corpses in my Inventory and I even decided to gather the spiderweb I found, finding it was a very good silk that could be used for high quality magic-conducting fabric.
After that little looting, we move further into floor 3, where we were greeted with something interesting, mutations. There were mutated evolutions of the spiders now, some were bigger than others, although their bodies were different. Some had a lot of metallic spikes with venom on them, others had crab-like claws, some even had sharp scorpion stingers, and a few others even had wings, indeed, flying spiders, what a horror that I would only find in my deepest nightmares.
These mutations still were within the Rank 3 spectrum, and were not hard to kill either, but were mostly a spectacle to the eyes to see how they had advanced and mutated. If these horrors were to crawl outside the dungeon and then expand, many villages and sects would fall before their numbers and incredibly fast ability to reproduce, coupled with their bloodthirsty and cold demeanors, the ability to absorb mana (which we had been being constantly drained since we entered), and more…
These monsters were indeed quite deadly, if I had entered here while I was weaker, I might had truly died to them, but now, even as they drained my mana viciously, I was mostly fine, my mana regenerated faster than they could drain it all, and the more I killed, the less mana was drained, so it wasn't so bad.
The rest were a bit tired, however, so after turning the entire floor 3 into an icescape, we decided to take a break once more.
This time around, we decided to eat the giant black claws that the mutated spiders with claws had, these meaty claws were obviously going to be a threat, so I quickly put them to boil and then distributed them. They had turned completely red too.
"W-Wow! I didn't thought we would eat so soon…" said Yuki.
"Well all of you are exahsuted of mana, eating monsters is a good way to recover mana, especially these ones with so much mana infused into their bodies." I said.
It was a widespread information that eating monsters that were infused with a lot of mana and magic would help a person recover both vitality and mana rather quickly, so having a snack before continuing was a must.
I cracked open the large claw in my arms, as the tender white meat greeted my sight, it was such a massive amount of white meat inside, it felt as if I had discovered a treasure. I quickly broke apart the exoskeleton that had turned red and revealed a larger part of the meat. It was so tender and jiggly it was as if it were gelatin or a flan. I could easily use a spoon to take little bites out of it with ease.
However, I decided to give it a bit bite instead, as I tore apart a large, meaty, and warm piece of the white flesh, my mouth exploded with flavors as I couldn't help but groan a bit in pleasure.
Everyone else felt the same, these monsters were certainly different and were way too flavorful… perhaps, one of the reasons could be that they are good at absorbing mana and store it inside their bodies a lot, and as it is well known, monsters with a lot of mana on them always have a higher quality in flavor and well in the rest of their materials harvested from their corpses.
This is nice, so nice in fact I cannot barely believe it. I continued eating as I poured some salt, pepper, and butter, and devoured the entire claw, leaving the empty claw carcass.
Everyone had done the same and were already left happy with just one claw, but I decided to boil a second one for everyone before departing. The flavor and tastiness were way too much to go out with just one.
After that, we decided to move over to the next floors, Floor 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 were a breeze, although mutations kept emerging, with some special spiders being able to wield darkness and other elements such as fire and ice, they were still within Rank 3, and no Rank 4 to see, so we slain them and took periodical breaks one after another, it roughly took 4 hours to reach floor 10 at the end, more than I thought but not really that much when you put it on perspective.
After that, we were greeted by the door leading to room 10, we stepped forward while being fearless of any danger, the darkness of this floor was illuminated by my light bulb as a massive horror greeted our sight, a gigantic black spider of at least 50 meters of height…
This was most likely the "Queen".
