With a roar, the settlement was engulfed in flames.
Using fire in a forest on the Dungeon's second floor was tantamount to suicide.
However, unlike the surrounding forest, the trees in that area had been thoroughly felled, leaving the ground bare.
Simple hut-like structures stood in rows, built from wood that had presumably once grown there.
Just how many Goblins had been in that settlement when it suddenly caught fire?
Most likely, the vast majority died in the flames without ever realizing what had happened.
The fortunate ones — or rather, the unfortunate ones, having seen their own settlement burning with their own eyes and understanding there was no escaping the fate of being burned alive — several Goblins ran frantically through the settlement, half-deranged.
But every hut was ablaze, and there was nowhere to flee.
The Goblins that somehow tried to escape the settlement found themselves unable to move, pinned down by arrows and stones flying from out of nowhere, and were eventually burned to death.
Staring blankly at the burning settlement, Reliu turned his gaze toward the boy next to him — Rei.
Reliu was also an Alias Holder and an A-Rank adventurer, but his true strength lay as a warrior.
He could use skills, but even so, for someone like Reliu, Flame Magic powerful enough to burn an entire settlement to the ground — small as it was — was not something one saw very often.
After spotting a Goblin trying to flee the settlement and killing it with a thrown stone, Reliu turned to Rei once more.
"Hey, seriously. This is really safe, right? If the fire spreads to the surrounding trees and we end up getting burned to death too, that's no joke."
"Is that so? If this fire actually spread, the second floor would clear right up, making it a lot easier to find the stairs to the third. Though, ah, it would be a shame to lose those trees bearing all kinds of fruit."
"Hey, come on. Are you... are you really sure it's safe?"
Meeting Reliu's suspicious gaze, Rei nodded calmly, pulling a spear from his Misty Ring — not the Twilight Spear, but a chipped, disposable piece of scrap iron — and hurling it forward.
"Calm down. Marina's Spirit Magic is carefully keeping the fire contained. There's no chance of it spreading, so stop worrying."
So saying, Rei turned his gaze toward the Goblin settlement.
Looking closely, a thin membrane of water was spread over the settlement like a sheet.
The membrane was extremely thin — stones, spears, and arrows launched by Rei and his party would pierce right through it.
But even water of that degree was enough to prevent the fire consuming the Goblin settlement from spreading.
Normally, water that thin would evaporate in an instant.
But what covered the settlement was no ordinary water — it was water created by Marina's Spirit Magic.
If everything burning the settlement had been flames born of Rei's Magic, that would have been one thing. But while the fire had started from his Magic, what was now spreading was ordinary flame.
This was the result of Rei's adjustments when casting — likely thanks to his intuitive grasp of magical composition.
Rei's reputation — the ability to create a Flame Tornado and reduce an entire army to ash — was, of course, known to Reliu as well.
As an Alias Holder, it was only natural to gather information on newly emerged Alias Holders operating from the same base.
Even so, not having expected that fine control was possible beyond large-scale destruction, Reliu cast another admiring glance at Rei.
Yet even while doing so, he kept spotting Goblins desperately trying to flee the burning settlement and continued killing them with thrown stones.
Noticing Reliu's gaze, Rei looked up at the sky.
There, Set was flapping his wings, soaring through the air as if to declare himself its undisputed ruler.
This forest was home to many bird-type monsters like Yellow Birds and Grinbos, but so far nothing had dared to challenge Set in the air.
Whether that was because they understood his strength or simply coincidence was unclear.
Regardless, Set rained down a variety of skills from above — Wind Arrow, Ice Arrow, Earth Arrow — targeting the ground below.
Those who suffered most were, naturally, the Goblins caught in the barrage.
The handful of Goblins still alive in the settlement were taking heavy damage from the arrows pouring down from the sky.
"Not having to rescue any captives sure makes things easy," Rei muttered, hurling another spear.
Reliu agreed from the bottom of his heart.
If this Goblin settlement had been outside the Dungeon — or if adventurers were free to enter the Dungeon at will — there might have been captured women inside.
But this was inside a Dungeon.
And Rei and his party were supposedly the first to enter it.
There might have been someone who ventured in before them, but Rei was certain that anyone capable of doing so would never end up captured by Goblins.
More importantly, since Set had found no trace of humans, there was no need to worry on that front.
For those reasons, so long as the goal was simply annihilation, this Goblin settlement was not particularly difficult to deal with.
The tradeoff, however, was that burning the entire settlement made recovering Goblin subjugation proof parts and magic stones considerably harder.
Not that Goblin magic stones were something Rei and his party particularly wanted. The effort of extracting them outweighed their value, so it was no real loss.
However, for Rei — who occasionally helped with research on making Goblin meat edible — being able to obtain a large quantity of it was a reasonably tempting opportunity.
Then again, if he just wanted to collect Goblin meat, he could simply put out a request to some adventurer in Gilm. There was no need to go out of his way to carry it himself.
Watching the Goblin settlement as the fire began to die down, Rei hurled another spear at a Goblin that came scrambling out of the flames.
The spear flew with a speed that made it impossible to believe it had been thrown casually, shattering the Goblin's skull — then punching clean through the torso of a second Goblin behind it, a club still in its grip, before embedding diagonally into the ground and pinning the creature in place.
Not that the second Goblin had still been alive when its torso was pierced.
Time passed. After a few dozen minutes, judging the Goblins completely wiped out, Marina extinguished the remaining flames with her Spirit Magic.
"I wonder how many more Goblin settlements there are. Cobolt ones too... though if it were an Orc settlement, I'd welcome that," Rei muttered as he stepped into the scorched remains.
Orc meat was a daily staple for Rei.
Consumption was high, and his honest desire was to stock up on as much of it as possible.
Cobolts, he figured, could be dealt with the same way as Goblins.
Then again, if there were Rare Species or High-ranking Species... hmm, would there be? Hard to say. If there were, it would certainly save us some trouble.
Even Goblin magic stones, if they came from a Rare Species or High-ranking Species, had a high chance of granting skills.
That being the case, having such monsters around would be incredibly welcome — both for Rei and for Set.
Though, High-ranking Species aside, it was precisely because they were not easily born that they were called "Rare" Species in the first place.
"Orcs, huh... If we burned an Orc settlement like this, the smell would probably make everyone hungry," Rei said.
"Would it? Maybe at first, but I have a feeling it'd end up smelling like burnt char before long," Reliu replied.
As they walked and talked, the others who had been scattered around soon gathered back together.
"Rei, what do we do now?" Marina asked.
"What do you mean? If there are more settlements like this one, we wipe them out. There's no way we'll finish exploring this floor in a single day. Which means I want to avoid bumping into Goblins and the like as much as possible. ...Though even if we killed every last one, the dungeon core would probably just summon them back."
Goblins were weak in a fight, but they were undeniably troublesome monsters.
Perhaps understanding this, the dungeon core made them one of the most frequently appearing monsters.
They were, in a sense, the perfect monsters for overwhelming an enemy through sheer numbers.
...Though the moment they sensed a stronger opponent, they would bolt immediately.
"It's not like the dungeon core can just instantly summon a huge wave of Goblins, right? As long as they don't come pouring out before we finish exploring this floor and find the stairs to the third, we're fine," Reliu said.
Rei nodded. Reliu was right.
There was no need for Rei and his party to fully conquer this floor — to visit every corner, obtain every rare material, and defeat every last monster.
As far as Rei was concerned, as long as there was a chance of obtaining magic stones from unknown monsters, he wanted to wipe out every creature in this forest. He wouldn't go that far, exactly, but he did want to defeat every type of monster at least once.
The problem was that since he hadn't told Reliu or Byune about Beast Magic, he couldn't exactly say so outright.
However...
"That said, if possible, I'd like to collect magic stones from any unknown monsters we find."
He never forgot to mention that.
Even if Beast Magic was a secret, the fact that Rei had a hobby of collecting magic stones was fairly well known.
Thinking that Reliu, who made a point of gathering information on Rei, would naturally know this as well, Rei had murmured it almost reflexively.
"If it's not full annihilation, one or two here and there shouldn't be a problem."
Sure enough, Reliu said exactly that, signaling that Rei fighting monsters was not an issue.
What caught Rei's attention, though, was the word "two."
To acquire new skills, Death Scythe and Set each needed one magic stone — two in total.
That was why, when Rei told people about his magic stone collecting hobby, he usually explained that he kept two — one for display and one for storage. But judging from Reliu's choice of words just now, it seemed possible he even knew that.
Though the far more likely explanation was that Rei was simply overthinking it.
While mulling this over and watching Reliu, Set suddenly dove from the sky toward the ground.
Ielo was alongside him, but unable to keep up with Set's speed, the little creature was left stranded in midair.
"Grrrrrgh!"
Set's cry carried a warning — an enemy was approaching.
The instant they heard it, Rei and his party snapped into combat formation.
And what emerged from the nearby bushes was...
"Buhi!"
A pig.
...No, to be more precise, it was best described as something between a boar and a pig.
Though, of course, neither boars nor pigs normally had wings like a bird's sprouting from their backs.
What was more, the monster that appeared was barely knee-high to Rei.
No matter how you looked at it, it seemed like a monster's child.
"What, just a kid?"
Reliu lowered the tip of his longsword... then immediately sensed something was wrong.
Because he was the only one who had dropped his guard.
"Hey?" he asked, dubious.
But Rei and the others, well aware of Set's acute Danger Detection Ability, had no intention of letting their guard down — child or not.
"Puh... puhi."
The monster gazed up at them with glistening eyes.
At a glance, its appearance could honestly be called adorable. Reliu glanced back at Rei and the others once more.
"Hey, what in the—!?"
The moment he took his eyes off the monster, Reliu swung his longsword on pure reflex.
His instantaneous reaction to the killing intent he felt was everything one would expect from an Alias Holder and A-Rank adventurer.
But the longsword Reliu brought down... was caught squarely by the fangs of the monster, which had in that brief instant swollen to the same size as Set.