Behind her, Donadron and the others were still fighting their way through the cave mouth, goblin by goblin, while Fran ran deeper into the dungeon.
The sword told her to be careful and not to overwork herself the way she had before, and she agreed.
Right then an army of goblins filled the passage ahead of them.
The sword suggested a policy: take down only the ones carrying skills worth having, and leave the rest. Fran went forward, killed two of the strong ones and took their crystals. To keep anyone from noticing that crystals were going missing, Teacher stored them in the pocket dimension.
They pushed on like that, stepping around the weak ones, killing the valuable ones. After a while the sword praised her for how efficiently she was harvesting. More goblins ambushed them, and she stayed with the plan, taking only what was worth taking.
Then a very large group came at them at once. The sword used double chant with parallel thought and put a fire javelin into them, and the whole group went up in one attack. He noted with some satisfaction that his parallel thought had improved — the last time he tried it, it had overwhelmed Fran completely.
She went on, and found a passage that looked as though it led to the boss.
Fran set the sword down on the floor so he could use his detection skills. He mapped the dungeon out from there and found two goblins some distance off. They frightened them, and the pair bolted — and led them, without meaning to, straight toward the boss.
Standing above the entrance, Fran wondered whether the dungeon master was waiting below.
Behind them, Donadron and his team were still cutting goblins down, and remarking on how strong the girl was. Her swordsmanship was advanced beyond her years, Donadron said. What worried him was that she might run ahead and let her guard down at the wrong moment.
Below, Fran looked out over a goblin stampede packed tight around the king and the queen. The sword explained that goblins gathered around their king and queen when they sensed danger, and advised against going straight at them. Instead he would handle the crowd with magic while she got herself ready to strike.
He unleashed fire blast and javelin into the mass and wiped out everything around the pair. Fran leapt down to fight the king and the queen —
And found them already dead.
She was distinctly disappointed that Teacher had killed them first. She walked away while the surviving goblins scattered in every direction.
As they went, they found another door.
So the dungeon went further than this. Fran stepped through, convinced that the true dungeon master lay beyond it, and the door swung shut behind her, and the sword told her to stay alert.
Glowing eyes opened in the darkness. Giant ladybugs came at them out of the dark.
Appraisal told the sword they were not particularly dangerous, though they carried some useful classes. As they swarmed, he pinned them in place with telekinesis and Fran killed them quickly, and he absorbed their crystals as they fell.
Thirty minutes later the bugs were more numerous than when they had started.
He worked out that they were being summoned, and identified the one doing it — the kin summoner. He used tri-explosion to destroy the swarm, and Fran killed the summoner and took its crystal.
By the end of that long fight Fran had reached level seventeen, and the sword had gained a good deal more besides.
Ahead of them was another door, and behind it something with a mana presence stronger than the slime king's.
Fran was perfectly confident. The sword was not, and he layered her with everything he had — resistance, recovery, sensory and physical buffs — and then promised to make her curry if she came out alive, which motivated her considerably more than the buffs did.
She opened the door, and a voice welcomed her in, and above her something was hovering in the air.
Outside, Nell asked the guild leader whether Fran and Donadron could handle the dungeon between them. He reassured her that they could, unless something entirely unexpected happened.
Back in the dungeon, Donadron had reached the inner door and could not open it. They had found the king and queen dead already, and assumed the dungeon master was on the other side.
Inside, the sword used appraisal and was appalled by what came back.
A greater demon. B rank. Stats high enough to destroy a city.
The demon talked down to them at length, until a second creature told him to hurry up and finish it. The sword looked at that one and identified it as the true dungeon master: a goblin, and the demon was under its control. The goblin confronted Fran about killing its king and queen, and started talking about rebuilding what she had ruined, and the demon told it to be quiet in a tone that carried a warning in it.
Then the demon drew his sword, and Teacher felt the power in it.
Fran channelled five hundred mana into her weapon and went in.
The demon struck and she blocked it, confident in the blade in her hands — but the sword understood immediately that the enemy's weapon had far better mana conductivity than his own, which made it a far more dangerous thing. Without the extra mana she had poured into him, that first impact would have broken him.
They traded blows again and again. Fran knocked the demon's sword out of his hand with an aura blade and rushed in to finish it, and the sword sensed the danger and tried to stop her — too late. The demon recalled his weapon to his hand and countered, and sent her crashing down.
He had made that opening on purpose, Teacher realised. He had left it there to draw her in.
The demon praised her skill. Then he vanished.
He reappeared behind her and cut off both her hands, and the sword fell out of her grip.
As the demon moved in to finish her, Teacher used parallel thought and blocked the blow himself. He threw up a wall of fire to drive the demon back, and used recovery magic to restore Fran's arms — which visibly surprised the enemy.
The demon acknowledged how fast she had answered, and went on attacking from angles she could not see. Somehow, Fran blocked every strike. The sword watched carefully through all of it and worked out what was happening: the demon was not using any conventional skill to disappear. He was hiding in the shadows themselves, using the darkness.
Once he understood it, he told Fran to watch the shadows.
The next time the demon came, she leapt and struck him with demonic poisonous fang and wounded him.
The demon answered with a darkness blast that filled the cave with explosions. When the dust cleared he was getting up again, and he had barely been hurt.
The sword understood that their attacks were not working, and suggested a retreat. Fran refused to back down, and kept fighting.
They exchanged more blows. She landed several — and none of them mattered.
The demon admitted, in the end, that her skills surpassed his own. And so he had decided to take them.
He began to build the magic for it, and the sword shouted a warning. A claw stretched toward her, and something felt deeply wrong. Then the demon revealed the ability he had been saving: he could steal the skills of others, and he used it to take Fran's sword skills and strip her of any way to fight him.