Chapter 432 - 432 - So You're Into "Combat Highs"?

As Leon threw himself back into the fight at full power, the temperature across the whole battlefield plunged again.

Everyone's breath fogged white the moment it left them, and they pulled the cloaks embroidered with Demeter's emblem tighter around themselves.

"Good thing Rose thought ahead and prepared these cloaks with spirit-weave cloth worked into them... otherwise Leon's Blizzard would freeze us solid before it got to anything else."

The Dungeon is buried deep underground. The environment changes, but apart from special floors like deserts and ice fields, the temperature usually holds within a fairly stable range.

And because of that, the vast majority of monsters that live here long-term have almost no defense against extreme cold.

Not that it was absolute, but going by the data Jeanne and the others had learned and every monster they had run into, not one species possessed any effective means of resisting extreme cold.

The freezing wind swept through again with a long howl.

The monsters' movements went stiff and sluggish at a pace you could watch with the naked eye, frost racing across their bodies and sealing them into pale statues. Leon's main body looked out over the slowly solidifying battlefield, and the corner of his mouth curled up again, a grin that bordered on mad.

"Lv.3, Lv.4, big form, small form... all the same. In front of my magic, all of it is meaningless!"

"Muda muda muda muda muda muda muda muda muda!"

"Kehahahahahahahaha!"

...

...

Later, on the 27th floor, the Water City.

The huge waterfall roared as it fell into the deep pool, water vapor drifting everywhere. On one side of the embankment at the pool's edge, in front of a cave set against the cliff face, several figures were busy. They gathered dead branches that had fallen from the massive roots hanging down from the ceiling while they clattered together the frame of a temporary camp.

"Huh?"

"What did you say?"

Jeanne looked at Leon with something like pity, pressed her lips together, and turned her gaze aside as if she couldn't quite bear to watch.

Leon didn't answer. He swayed on his feet, and then he dropped straight to his knees at the edge of the pool with a thud, face tilted up, eyes blank, staring at the roaring waterfall on the far side. The man was completely out of it.

Beside him, Jeanne silently opened the notebook she carried and held one page out clearly in front of his eyes. The record in black and white, along with the line of notes she had deliberately marked with emphasis dots, was the last straw for Leon's sanity.

Record: Water City Monster Rex, Two-Headed Dragon Amphisbaena, respawn time three months.

He counted it out on his fingers. It had only been two months since they killed the Two-Headed Dragon last time.

So the result was obvious.

"It... it didn't respawn?"

"You've got to be kidding me!!!" (cue the Kiritsugu Emiya reaction face)

Leon's anguished howl from where he knelt drew every pair of eyes around him.

"Rose, what's he...?"

Rose reached over out of habit and stroked Laurier's head, a sly smile rising at the corner of her mouth.

"Our Lord Leon forgot the Monster Rex's respawn timer, so all that anticipation came to nothing, and now he's going through a little bit of a breakdown."

She finished with the gentlest, kindest smile imaginable.

Laurier, Aura, and Iri all shivered in unison when they saw it.

Rose is terrifying!

She's absolutely doing it on purpose...!

Such a sweet-faced schemer!

Rose, as if she'd sensed something, winked at Iri.

"Hmm? Iri, were you just thinking something rude?"

Caught out, Iri shook her head furiously.

"N-no! Absolutely not!"

Rose looked away with a meaningful smile and said lightly, "Mm. Good girl."

Not far off, Persephone was keeping watch on the outer edge of the camp.

She slowly pulled her eyes away from the Iguazu flocks and Harpies circling lazily through the air around the waterfall, then followed the noise to the sight of Leon kneeling at the lakeside pounding the ground like a lunatic, and her mouth twitched.

She took off her glasses and wiped the mist from the lenses with the cloth she carried, half amused.

"Is it really that serious? Other adventurer parties are thrilled when they don't run into a Monster Rex, and you... not only aren't you happy, you're having a breakdown over it."

"Weirdo."

But then it occurred to her. Every time Leon hunted a Monster Rex, the odds of a Drop Treasure Chest seemed unusually high, didn't they?

So that was why he was so fixated on it?

Persephone caught on and understood at once.

"I knew it. With that can't-be-bothered personality of his, why would he be hoping for a Monster Rex respawn for no reason?" She looked at Leon's back, shaking her head with a quiet laugh. "So it wasn't that he wanted a fight. He had his eye on what they leave behind."

The crushed Leon hammered the ground until it cracked.

Once he had thoroughly vented the disappointment in his chest, he finally went quiet with the look of a man with nothing left to live for.

Jeanne stood beside him, writing and sketching in her notes with no expression, apparently recording this Expedition. Noticing that Leon's mood at her feet was cooling off, she asked without looking up, "Over it yet?"

Leon got up and brushed the dust off himself, then let out a long sigh.

"Yeah."

"Such a waste... one treasure chest, gone."

"Damn it, my heart is bleeding here!"

Jeanne rolled her eyes.

"Enough. If you're fine now, go get to work, and stop bothering me while I'm working."

"Fine."

...

Night.

When it came around to Leon's turn on watch, he fed dry branches into the campfire now and then while he gazed out at the vast, glittering lake, his eyes gradually going unfocused.

The rumble of the Great Fall echoed in his ears without pause.

An ordinary person might have found it noisy, but Leon wasn't annoyed at all. On the contrary, he liked this kind of atmosphere quite a lot.

"Real sound, live and in person. Way better than cyber white noise."

Leon stood up from the log, stretched hard, took a deep breath, and a smile of anticipation appeared on his face.

"System, open panel!"

Having delivered the command with proper ceremony, Leon moved a finger and manually opened the Falna panel.

Ignoring all the various information on it, he dragged the Falna panel straight down to the bottom, eyes bright as he looked at the "wallet" and the "Excelia bar."

...

Assets: Reserve funds: 4.13 million | Cash: 611.82 million (fixed monthly income: 10,236)

Excelia: 2444.4 (points)

...