Slave Harem in the Labyrinth of the Other World (LN)

One part of my current training was to focus on being attacked by Minos on purpose so that I could get a hang of how strong their attacks were exactly. Their attacks are indeed painful, but not to an extent that could not be endured as long as I clenched my teeth to power through it. Worst case scenario, I m going to have a few bruises or cuts left from the Minoss horns, but any injury that looks like its a more serious one can be quickly recovered thanks to my HP-regenerating abilities from Durandal and my Monk Job.

When three of them appear in a single group, things are naturally getting a bit more hectic in comparison to fighting with only one or two Minos at once, but its all down to getting the timing of my dodges down perfectly. And speaking of avoiding

As usual, Roxanne does not have a problem with avoiding incoming attacks even when she is facing all three Minos at once, even though having to face off against three massive opponents at once required significantly more movement and manueverability than the battles against smaller opponents. I guess this is one of the downsides to our current exploration strategy: even though Roxanne can locate groups of enemies thanks to her keen sense of smell, it cannot tell her exactly how many enemies there will be and what they are. Running away from the encounters that seem to be too much for us to handle is always an option, but I dont want to issue an order to retreat from the battle because it might create a situation where we will flee from the enemies and they will simply chase after us, possibly creating a situation where we will be unable to properly respond to any case of emergency that we might end up getting ourselves into if one or two groups of monsters will combine into a bigger one to get us.

Rather than allow that to happen, what we need is an aggressive approach. I realize that fighting every battle regardless of how disadvantageous our positions might be is a risky thing to do, but its actually a high risk, high reward thing: basically, you can earn much more items and EXP by defeating as many enemies as you can.

However, even if a group of three Minos was best for us EXP-wise, then naturally we were not encountering them all the time. This is a dungeon in a game after all, so just as one would expect, the enemies we were encountering were most likely generated randomly, and I think we all know that whenever a player wants something particular, RNGezus will make sure that they will not get it. And so, we fought against quite a few groups of only two Minos, or two Minos and a Kobold. Kobolds were always first to die, and after a while, I think I even stopped noticing them when I was using Fire Storm as my opening attack. There was also a combination of a Mino and a Green Caterpillar, but Roxanne does not have any problems dealing with them at once. In the end, neither Minos nor Green Caterpillars attacks scratched her even once. She dodged them all gracefully and lightly like a sheet of paper dancing in the wind. I know that this metaphor is a pretty strange one to be using to describe a persons ability to dodge incoming attacks, but at the current moment it is the only one that comes to my mind as the one to most accurately describe what is now happening before my eyes.

You know what Roxanne? At this point your movements are so amazing that even though you are my model for when it comes to learning how to dodge, but on the flipside they are so incredible that I kinda gave up on trying to understand how exactly do they work since I cannot imitate them for the life of me.

If were talking about just this degree of movement, then I think that this is something that even master could master with just a bit of patient practice.

(No no no, no way in hell. Thats absolutely impossible.)

I know that Roxanne didnt mean to mock me with her words, but that does not change the fact that her advice was less than helpful here.

The next three groups of enemies that crossed our path were also made out of three enemies, but they were not all Minos. They were two Minos and a Green Caterpillar. In order to gain as much advantage over them as possible, I released three consecutive Fireballs, one after the other as soon as the cooldown period was finished.

Roxanne, go!

Right, master!

Almost immediately after I finished casting the third Fire Storm and send Roxanne out to the front, the Minos broke through the clouds of raging fire and attacked us. Roxanne bought the attention of the first one by slashing at it with her Scimitar while evading its charge attack and the subsequent attempts to slash and pierce her with its horns. Not wanting to be left behind, I pulled out my own sword and attacked the other Mino while dodging it as Roxanne briefly slashed it with a horizontal slash when it was rushing just past her. I also did my best to block the body blow from the Green Caterpillar that must have survived being hit with one of the Fireballs and was now coming towards me from the left. When I was trying to think of the best possible move to make next after stopping the Green Caterpillar in its tracks, an orange magic circle suddenly appeared under it.

Web Spit attack incoming, master!

Roxanne shouted her warning out to me. Thats right, the orange magic circle under the Green Caterpillars body means that its going to launch its special Skill, Web Spit to try and bind me in place. If I allow it to do so, that is!

Earlier I might have been scared shitless when I saw that magic circle, but right now I do not care about it!

(Fire Storm!!!)

I shot a fourth spell at it. The Green Caterpillar wont be able to use its Skill if it will be dead before it can cast it! And if it manages to cast it anyway, the thread itself is most likely going to disappear. Probably. I never managed to actually kill a Green Caterpillar mid-Skill casting so I do not know for sure.

At nearly the same time as the Green Caterpillar began releasing the threads from its mouth, Roxanne jumped away from the place where she was still battling against the Minos. Second after she jumped to the safe place, the area where she just stood has been covered by the sparks of the Fire Storm that erupted into a series of explosions.

As the sparks exploded one after the other, the white sticky threads spread and stretch widely before getting evaporated and covering the ground with its remains, a few of which ended up getting on my arm. Damn, I hope cleaning it up wont be too much of a pain in the ass.

When the Fire Storm ran its course and disappeared, so did the three monsters. They disappeared in puffs of green smoke, and the remains of the Green Caterpillars threads melted into the air.

Phew Im glad that this battles over. I never would have expected that Green Caterpillars would still be so problematic, even though it was kind of a given now that we are on the higher floors.

I exhaled a heavy sigh and lowered the Wand which I was still holding up just in case another monster would try to get a jump on us now that our guards were lowered after just finishing a battle.

Thats certainly true. While we are on the subject, allow me to apologize, master. I was careless when I was dodging Minoss attacks, and as a result of that I ended up putting you in the place where you were vulnerable to Green Caterpillars Skill attack.

When she warned me that the Web Spit attack was coming my way, she immediately jumped back to get back to me, and as a result, we ended up right next to each other when the threads and my Fire Storm collided with one another, but it seems that none of the thread remains got stuck onto her, unlike me. I wonder if she also dodged them, or was she completely out of their splash zone and I was the only one unfortunate enough to get that sticky, white stuff all over my hand?

Dont worry about it, Roxanne. These guys can be defeated with magic alone, so its not like they will be posing any real threat to us now. We were just unlucky that they appeared with those two Minos that absorbed our focus, thats all.