Chapter 95: Speed Run, Farming
"You forgot to square the root," Kir said as he looked over Stella’s shoulder. "After that, you can simplify the equation better."
"It just ends up as the same number! Why do I have to put it all under the same thing?" Stella whined as she slashed a correction into the sand. They were, counter to Kir’s expectations, safely standing on a beach, with only the waves to watch out for as they took a few hours to rest.
"This kind of math is more complicated, but it’s what you need before you can calculate physics," Kir said as he looked over the claw he’d pulled off a crab-like grotesque.
Concluding it was probably not safe to try eating, especially because inside it looked like it was just cartilage and blue ichor, he tossed it onto the pile of grotesque corpses he’d gathered after spending the last few hours fighting.
Stella had helped, even her very basic fire magic was more powerful in the dungeon, which is what had inspired Kir to consider cooking.
But nothing here was appetizing.
As near as he could tell without a consistent marker, they’d experienced about ten days’ worth of time since their first grotesque encounter, and that was with largely flying over and avoiding encounters with the denizens of the dungeon.
The biggest reason Kir had chosen for them to stop at the beach was that it was relatively calm and small. Having learned how to tell when they were getting near dungeon walls, Kir guessed this floor was only about a kilometer around. The portal out was obvious since it was a crack of red sky horizontal to the beach, almost directly opposite the dark portal leading back down.
At the edges of the water, the waves seemed oddly "sliced" at times. As if the water within the floor was separated by a wavy layer of glass. It was more obvious with the water going out, as incoming water would lap over it. The beach itself was white-sanded, its inner portion covered with bleached wood and dark chunks of volcanic stone. Nothing here had lived, at least nothing visible, except for the crab things that Kir had smashed by their dozens.
His war form had made short work of them, and the fact they were cannibalistic opportunists had only helped the fight, as those on the edges of the fight had started eating their dead over engaging him.
Unlike the last few floors, there were no corpses or artifacts from people. Whether that was because they’d been thoroughly eaten or had simply passed through quickly, Kir could only guess. He wasn’t about to go dissecting more crabs to find out.