VIP Chapter 115: The Heroine’s Suspicion
In the Green Wilderness Trace dungeon, teams like this always appear.
A blond swordsman, with pomade on his hair to the point it’s almost greasy, holding a small, branded rapier, wearing brand new, unscuffed gear, walks in front.
Behind him…
Follows a meticulously dressed mage, complete with lipstick.
A small priest, clutching her staff and shivering, her freckles hidden by powder.
These three cover all the roles—healer, ranged, melee—but they look like students playing dress-up from head to toe, wearing stereotypical outfits and completely unseasoned in every aspect.
It’s more like a noble young master paid two classmates to play with him.
But…
This kind of “team” isn’t enough.
They’re still missing someone very common in such a team…
“Whoa! The lion is so scary!”—The Priestess hesitates.
“Befitting a BOSS floor, the BOSS floor itself looks incredibly difficult to fight,”—The Mage’s eyes gleam with anticipation.
“Hmph, no worries, leave it to me!”—The Swordsman Young Master excitedly draws his sword.
“Yawn… You guys go ahead and fight. Just call me if you can’t handle it.”
The one they were missing was—
Trailing at the very end…
Wearing attire that screamed “experienced adventurer”…
Carrying a sharp and practical weapon…
With black hair tied into a single ponytail for convenience…
Shuna, who yawned, crossed her arms, and stood to the side, intending to watch the three of them perform first.
This team was clearly not a professional one. Oh, of course, they were here to pass the Adventurer’s Guild’s rookie exam, which was still a threshold away from being professional.
The Swordsman Young Master, with a reckless charge, failed to maintain a safe distance from the BOSS’s “morning anger,” and was sent flying by its aura as it rose.
“The current Adventurer’s Guild is truly completely different from three years ago.”
The Mage attempts to cast, her staff already charged, but she forgets her lines halfway through. After a few seconds of stuttering, the unformed fireball flies towards the ceiling.
“Adventuring used to be a truly ‘adventurous’ job. Now… well… with so many people, it seems more like they’re here for fun?”
The Priestess sees the Swordsman’s arm grazed by the Green Mane Lion and anxiously begins chanting with a trembling tongue, but she seems to have cast a spell to accelerate blood flow, making the Swordsman’s wound visibly worse with spurting blood.
“…This is truly worrying.”
This was Shuna’s “small job” recently.
It was mainly because she arrived in Nov a bit early and, after inquiring around, couldn’t find any information about W’s team—that guy was the Young Master of the Hysterm Family, and…
His skill level should be far superior to these nobodies, and he should be making a grand entrance here, so a casual inquiry would yield results.
Therefore, to wait for W and to keep her own wallet from being emptied, Shuna took on the most profitable, most popular, and most fitting current job for the region—
Acting as a proxy for newbie missions!
Newbie missions require all participants in a dungeon subjugation to be registered in a team.
However…
Once the adventuring team is successfully registered, the system doesn’t care if you leave the team.
Those who are confident in carrying multiple people can absolutely take on such jobs, clear the tenth floor of “Green Wilderness Trace,” and then leave the team after it’s formed.
For the past few days… she’d been doing just that.
Witnessing all sorts of bizarre newbie adventuring teams, her mentality had shifted from numb to calm.
She’d only been away from dungeons and this line of work for three years, yet it felt like everything had changed.
Are these people truly “here to clear dungeons” now?! Each and every one of them acts more like “this is trendy, I want to try it.”
Although she had heard that the Hysterm Family had made rapid progress in the past three years, rebuilding the Adventurer’s Guild and its system based on new reforms, she hadn’t expected it to change so much.
This made Shuna start to question if she should even re-enter this profession—though, in hindsight, the money earned from one proxy run was more than from three individual jobs when she was a freelance adventurer, making it a very promising career.
“Save me—”
The Swordsman Young Master ran all the way behind Shuna.
“Oh? Didn’t you want to try it yourselves?”
“Waaah… We’ve definitely encountered the legendary hidden difficulty!”
The Priestess was already starting to cry.
“Yes, that’s right. We heard before that this dungeon often has an insurmountable difficulty.”
The Mage wrapped her arms around herself, seemingly having given up.
“Hurry up and act, it hurts so much, I’m going to die—”
Shuna looked at the wound on the Young Master’s arm and sighed. It was actually just a very shallow scrape, something a Priest with even the slightest bit of skill could heal.
“Alright.”
Shuna stretched in place, then casually extended her right hand and cast an instant Heal spell.
The Swordsman’s wound healed instantly, and he stared with wide eyes, full of disbelief.
“It doesn’t seem that difficult to fight, there should be no problem…”
Shuna pulled her favorite dagger from the thigh strap on her leg, twirled it in her hand with a showy flourish.
The two girls behind her were too preoccupied to comfort the Young Master, who had just claimed to be “dying of pain,” and were instead staring at Shuna’s dashing back.
“Then, let’s end this—”
She took a deep breath.
She rushed out like a black lightning bolt.
While twirling the small knife in her hand, she continuously chanted, hurling magic with her right hand, a set of actions so fluid it was impossible to tell her profession.
Compared to the Green Mane Lion, she…
Was more like the BOSS.
“Done—”
A flash of light appeared before her, and petals fell.
She didn’t even give the Green Mane Lion a chance to enter its second phase.
“…”
“…?!”
“…!!!”
The three of them watched, dumbfounded.
“When we recruited her, what did she say she did before?”
“Logistics support…”
“You call this logistics support?!”
“Here, you should take this flower bud to turn in.”
Shuna ignored their stunned expressions, picked up the flower bud from the fallen Green Mane Lion, and threw it to the three of them.
She herself…
Walked step by step towards the body of the lion, which was gradually disappearing after it fell.
“Compared to the previous few times, the number of slashes this time increased by 30%. Its attack power was too low, I couldn’t feel any improvement in attack power, but I could definitely feel that it had more health points…”
“30%… 30% again?”
Shuna recalled hearing on the way that an adventuring team was trapped on the BOSS floor of a dungeon, and a rescue team was being organized to go in.
She followed them.
That BOSS was indeed more difficult than she had expected—the BOSS on that floor shouldn’t have had this level of strength.
So she carefully examined the corpse, hoping to find clues.
“As expected… it’s this ‘〆器〪爾鏾liXng泗IX妻厁si菱-梦’ again?”
Finally, she found…
A stone similar to the fragment in her hand. The one she picked up back then was more complete, but this one was too broken.
The stone was strange. It was green, and seemed to have some writing inside—but she couldn’t read it. Shuna later researched it, and it was not a script found in ancient magic or ancient texts.
However…
The strangeness didn’t lie there.
That dungeon was centered around the sea and water, and they fought a giant dolphin.
This dungeon was forest-themed, and this was a lion whose body was made of plants.
The types of the two dungeons were vastly different, completely unrelated, yet they dropped items that didn’t fit either dungeon’s style—something that had never happened before.
“This is too strange…”
“The previous fragment has already been sent to him…”
“I wonder if he has any new insights on this…”
