In the following days, Rui dedicated only half the time he normally did to dungeon raiding and clearing.
Given that they already knew the location of the twentieth floor, they didn't need to waste time exploring for a day or so.
"So this is the twentieth floor, eh?" Kane murmured. "I guess you weren't lying out of your ass when you said that you discovered a ton of floors."
Rui tutted. "I wouldn't lie about such a thing, you know."
"I know, but it was just so hard to believe, that I had to put on my suspicious face, you know," He shrugged
The two of them bickered a bit before entering the dungeon.
"Is that…?" Kane's eyes widened.
"Spider webs," Rui nodded, confirming. "Looks like we have just happened upon the lair of a spider."
"I fucking hate spiders," Kane muttered, growing more wary.
The floor was a bit of a novelty due to the fact that the entire floor had been transformed into nothing more than the nest for nearly endless spider webs crisscrossing across the entire floor.
"Where the hell even are the esoteric ore deposits?" Kane frowned.
"They're in a nest at the bottom of the Shionel Dungeon," Rui replied. "And coincidentally, it also happens to be where the spider currently is at the moment."
"What about all these webs?" Kane gestured at the many layers of webbing between them and their objective.
SHING
A swift swing of his sword severed the webbing with ease.
"The webbing possesses quantities of the esoteric substances that make my sword as effective as it is," Rui replied.
It was rather convenient as they made their way to the bottom of the floor clearing out a path for themselves as they headed downwards, until, of course, the spider responsible for creating all the webbing noticed that something was wrong.
TRTRTRTRTRTR
It produced a strange clicking sound as it came rushing up toward the areas where the webbing was destroyed. What shocked Rui and Kane was the speed at which it waded through its own webbing. Like normal spiders, the spider seemed almost entirely immune to the stickiness of its own webbing, it didn't get hindered like all other creatures normally would.
It also possessed powerful limbs that allowed it swiftly shoot through its webbings, as it climbed across them faster than Rui could cut across them.
Thankfully, the Void Step technique was active thus neither Rui nor Kane was directly detected by the spider, but that wasn't entirely comforting. Rui was worried that the spider would be able to detect them indirectly.
He deeply inhaled launched a powerful Might Roar Flash Blast projectile, and followed up with three more, aimed toward the spider.
The four projectiles were each faster than the previous, eventually merging into a single projectile as it struck the spider.
The spider staggered at the sudden unexpected attack, yet the attack did no damage despite whatsoever catching the creature off-guard. Considering that tier four Transverse Resonance contained four times the attack power of a grade six Martial Squire's distant attacks, Rui could see that this creature was far tougher than he had given it credit.
He could tell that it was searching its surroundings for the source of the attack, confused at being unable to detect anything.
"Let's go back," Rui told him. "We need to approach this a little differently."
The two of the returned back to the tunnels that they had come from, while the spider quickly fixed all the webbing that Rui had severed.
"What's the issue?" Kane frowned, turning to Rui. "Your long-range attack was perfect. Everything was going well."
"I think we should avoid entering the dungeon so long as the webbing is intact," Rui replied to him calmly. "It takes away our greatest advantage."
Kane furrowed his eyebrows. "You mean my technique…?"
"Yeah,"
"But how though? It never sensed us,"
"It never sensed us directly, it cannot," Rui told him. "But it can locate us indirectly. You recall what I told you about how my senses can detect you despite being in the Shionel Dungeon?"
"Yeah," Kane looked up as he recalled Rui's words. "Something about detecting me through where my footprints led you, rather than detecting me directly."
A look of realization dawned on his face as he understood what Rui meant. "So this is what you meant. The severed webbing."
"That's right," Rui nodded. "The path of the severed webbing is the footprints in this case. By following the path of the severed webbing, it can arrive at our position at any given time. Obviously, this is not nearly that simple, but it reveals too much and is far too risky. Tarantulas have potent venom and I'm willing to bet that that monster is worse. We don't want to get anywhere near it. We definitely do not want to give it an inkling of our position because of how fast it can navigate the web. We, on the other hand, are forced to move slower than normal because of the webs."
It definitely made a lot of sense to Kane.
"But at that point, we can't even enter the dungeon floor, we're just going to have to brave that risk, honestly," Kane frowned.
"Not if we have a better way," Rui disagreed. "We don't need to get close to kill the monster. We have me, after all."
"Oh right," Kane slapped his forehead. "Man, I forgot that we can attack the monster from extremely far away. That's perfect. We normally don't go for that route because sniping down every individual monster is absolutely an inefficient way of going about it when we have my Void Step."
"Yeah," Rui nodded. "The problem is that it's going to take a while alright."
He walked over to the edge of the tunnel before he peered down. "The good news is that the ODA System solves the problem of range for us. The bad news is that this monster is tough as hell and killing it is going to require me to stack a ton of attacks.
