Chapter 457 - 457 - You Can Dodge It Today, Not Tomorrow

Jeanne, with her sharp senses, snapped her eyes open and pushed herself up on one arm. She frowned slightly, her pale purple eyes sweeping the surroundings, wariness and confusion passing through them.

Beside her, the veteran Rose and Persephone kept a thread of attention on their surroundings even while resting. That habit was burned into the instincts of any senior Adventurer.

So almost the moment Jeanne's expression shifted, they both noticed.

The easy smile faded from Rose's face. She leaned in close to Jeanne and lowered her voice near her ear.

"What is it, Jeanne?"

Jeanne shook her head, uncertain.

"I don't know. Revelation isn't reacting, but... something feels off to me."

Persephone stood up and brushed the sand off her robe. A hot wind blew past and lifted her long golden waves behind her.

"If your instincts say something's off, then something happened."

"But Revelation didn't warn you, which means... something has happened, and it isn't a direct threat yet."

Rose agreed with the analysis.

"Looks like this Dungeon can't spare us even a minute of peace."

The movement among the three of them drew Kureha's attention. She swept her silver bangs back, her hand already settling on the hilt of the sword beside her.

"Leon, Leon, wake up."

She gave the man next to her a light push and called to him in a low voice.

"Mm... huh? Wh, what is it?"

Leon was groggy, his head a fog, not yet registering what had happened.

Days of fighting back to back, holding the line and controlling the field, cleaning up after the battles, and taking on most of the camp chores and the cooking besides, plus the constant mental pressure the Dungeon ground into you, and even a Lv.5 body was starting to feel it.

Of course, "feeling it" only counted against a fully rested state. He was nowhere near running on empty.

"Jeanne noticed something abnormal."

"...?"

Leon blanked for half a second, then his eyes cleared and he came around.

"Huh? Something's going on? Didn't we sweep all the ambush zones around here? We wrecked the terrain too, so by rights nothing should respawn nearby for a while..."

Jeanne, Rose and Persephone had come over by then.

"Leon, we're counting on you."

"Right."

Leon undid his shirt cuffs and rolled up his sleeves, baring solid forearms.

He pulled the Twisted Staff out of the sand where it stood at an angle, unwrapped the oilcloth around its head and exposed the Magic Crystal set there. As his eyes and the crystal lit up, a huge magic circle spread across the sand at his feet, and several clones like ice sculptures condensed into shape.

"Ice clones!"

The five clones appeared and shot off in different directions as Leon shut his eyes and focused, steering them.

Using clones for scouting was the most classic application of this spell.

Behind Leon's closed eyelids, the five clones fed their fields of vision back to him in real time, all in first person.

Without special training, just taking in five constantly shaking views at once would be enough to make anyone dizzy, let alone splitting your mind five ways to control them. When he first started practicing, the sensory overload used to leave him nauseous.

But with Scholar's Heart backing him, he adapted fast and picked it up quickly, able to handle it skillfully within a month. After several months of real combat, he could run five clones at once and keep their movements smooth and fluid.

In low-intensity exchanges it was even hard to tell the clones from the real thing, but the moment the fighting got serious they'd be smashed apart at once.

A drawback, if a middling one.

The clones ran on, setting off a chain of hidden ambush zones along the way. Monsters burst up out of the sand one after another, roaring as they chased the racing figures.

Leon had no attention to spare for them, pouring everything into spreading the clones out to search. But a quarter hour passed and he still hadn't found anything like what Jeanne described.

"Nothing abnormal?"

The instant he pulled his mind back, the five ice clones were torn to shreds one after another by the monsters that had caught up.

He didn't care. They were only clones.

The monsters ended up with mouthfuls of ice chips, dumbfounded, and stood there frozen in place with nothing but confusion in their red eyes. They circled around a few times, sniffed along the ground, shook their heads about, and once they'd confirmed the prey really had vanished without a trace they settled down and sank back into the ambush zones, unsatisfied.

...

"Leon, how does it look?"

Jeanne and the others had been watching him closely, and stepped up to ask the moment he opened his eyes.

Leon shook his head.

"Nothing but the monsters that came spilling out of the ambush zones. No Irregular at all."

Jeanne frowned.

"Nothing...?"

Rose patted her shoulder to reassure her.

"It shouldn't be your imagination. You're a Lv.4 Adventurer with a perception skill. Your instincts don't fire for no reason."

"And if Leon scouted the whole area and found nothing, then there's only one possibility left."

"What?"

Rose's mouth curved, and there was weight in her voice.

"To use Miss Persephone's words: something has happened, and it isn't a direct threat yet. So is it possible... that the abnormality isn't on this floor, but below it?"

"Floor 36?"

That was the last floor of Sand Land.

Below it, Floor 37 was another world entirely, territory only the very top handful of Orario's mid-tier Familia and the few great Familia standing at the city's summit were qualified to set foot in.

The Deep Floors.

Hearing that something might have happened on Floor 36, everyone relaxed first, then tensed right back up.

Relaxed, because the abnormality wasn't next to them.

Tense, because tomorrow they were heading to Floor 36.

As the saying goes, you can dodge it today, but not tomorrow. Not running into it now didn't mean they wouldn't run into it on Floor 36 tomorrow.

"Tch, looks like we need to plan ahead."

...

...

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