〖 Ailsa: Don't use magic! They already know your 【 Throw Rock 】 spell is mastered, and have seen you use it before. Just use melee techniques! 〗

Kira sighed in the midst of using 【 Earthshape 】 to pull a chunk of rock away from the tunnel wall, reluctantly patting it into place like a glob of loose mud that instantly hardened after she pulled her hand away. She'd made her way down the hall toward the first Dungeon room, stopping in the entry to arm herself upon seeing two goblins chattering to each other while holding shards of rock vaguely resembling swords, only to be stopped by her mentor's sudden message. She typed out a concise question, keeping an eye on the chattering goblins while awaiting Ailsa's response.

〖 Kira: For Boss too? 〗

〖 Ailsa: Yes, unless you feel it's necessary. Your melee combat is not currently as efficient as the spell, but that's what'll make it effective as a demonstration. 〗

〖 Kira: You guys can see me now? 〗

〖 Ailsa: Yup, got my spirits watching you, and the girls have their eyes glued to the video display screen. They're still pretty nervous, just go ahead and show them what you've got! 〗

〖 Kira: Ok 〗

'If I'm gonna be doing this alone with no magic, then I need a cool good BGM to go with it,' Kira thought to herself, turning on her System headphones and adjusting the volume settings so it wouldn't drown environmental noise. 'Which playlist should I... Ah! My nerdy metal list! Yeah, that'll do. Let's start with that nice Holy Diver cover.'

She waited a few beats, just until the admittedly obscure lyrics started, before approaching the goblins.

They didn't react until she was right next to them, but by then it was too late. Two quick jabs of her fists were enough to take each monster out, splattering their blood and brains against the stone wall behind them. Kira's stomach churned in disgust, but she quashed the desire to vomit and simply shook the gore free from her hands. The wrappings were faintly stained pink, but at least no chunks lingered as evidence of her violence.

'It's easier this time,' Kira thought to herself as she randomly picked one of the tunnels leading out of the room. 'It's still gross, I don't like it. But... It's easier than before. I didn't notice the second time here, since it was Brigit doing all the work, but this time it's all me again, and I... Ah...'

A lone goblin interrupted her train of thought, nearly colliding with her as she rounded a bend in the tunnel. It gibbered frantically in the brief moments before Kira smashed its face into the stone floor, her knee against its back to pin the creature down. Her face was devoid of emotion as she struggled to grasp the strange feeling churning in her belly.

After twisting its neck to stop its futile struggling Kira stared at her hands, the wrappings stained pink with blood, and let out a heavy sigh. 'I should be careful about that. I don't want to get too used to killing anything, not even monsters. This is a Training Dungeon so the monsters aren't... They're not really real, I know that, but still... They feel real enough to me. The blood is warm. Their bones crack. But I guess that's the idea, isn't it? To get people used to fighting? Since the world is so dangerous...'

Kira dusted off her knees as she stood and continued down the tunnel to the next room. Three goblins awaited in a room only slightly wider than the tunnel hallways, their attention captivated by multiple failed attempts to start a campfire with wet moss and mushroom stalks, the plucked caps resting in a nearby basket.

She killed one goblin with a single punch after walking right up to it, which apparently counted as Sneak damage because they didn't detect her, regardless of whether she was actually attempting to be stealthy. The attack alarmed the other two, who immediately leaped into action. One dived for a club leaning against a nearby wall, while the other rushed her with its fists clenched and sharp yellow teeth bared.

Kira slammed her knee into the face of the lunging goblin, following up with a quick snap kick to the side of its head as it reeled back from the impact. It slammed into the wall, and Kira punched its face with all her might to ensure the thing was dead and not just stunned.

The third goblin made its presence known by smacking its stone club with a surprising amount of force against Kira's back. She grunted in a mixture of surprise and pain as a notification alerted her to the loss of 8 HP, spinning on her heel to grab the weapon and smash her fist into the goblin's face.

Its grip on the club was so tight it didn't fly back like she expected, instead digging its heels into the ground and tightening its grip on the club to avoid falling down. Kira released her grip on the stone weapon, took a half-step back, and aimed a punch at the goblin's temple before it could recover enough wits to try attacking again.

As the creature's body fell to the ground, a tooltip window popped up.

-----

【 Skill Learned: Melee Strikes 】

Lv.1 / 10

Passive Effect

Training and practice are leading you down the admirable path of martial arts. Though you so far lack the specific training methods of a special school or style, your hard work and experience in building a good foundation will pay off regardless.

Increased damage when striking enemies in melee while unarmed or using fist weapons. Increased comprehension speed of martial arts techniques.

Skill Synergy Effect: When using Scan on a target, there's a low chance of revealing a weak point on their body. The chance is increased with skill level, and familiarity of target species.

Skill Evolution available when Skill levels are maxed.

-----

'Ah, so there's proper skill synergies, huh... Weak points when Scanning targets?...Oops. I've been forgetting to Scan things. Brigit said I should make it a habit to do that...'

Kira paused to Scan everything in the room - the mushroom caps, the basket holding them, the failed campfire, the rough stone club, even the goblin's corpses in the moments before their bodies dissolved into particles to be absorbed back into the Dungeon. Nothing too special, aside from the word "Imitation" in parenthesis next to the name of anything that wasn't a corpse, and a sentence about how matter created inside of a Training Dungeon couldn't be put into an Inventory or carried out of said Dungeon, unless it came from a reward chest.

Every enemy she ran into were all 8-F or 9-F. Her first time in the Dungeon, they were usually closer to 5-F or 6-F. Kira couldn't help wondering as she cleared room after room, about whether or not some mysterious Dungeon God was watching everyone who went through every Dungeon in the world, and adjusting things appropriately for them.

'Spooky thought,' Kira shuddered. 'Always being under surveillance by some unseen entity judging your every move... Well, I guess religions have always kinda thought that was happening, but now it's more... Legit? Ailsa said a god's her literal boss. So are they just, always watching everyone all the time? Or only watching their own areas of interest? Or maybe it's more of a subconscious thing running in the background... It might be neat to ask a god how it all works for them. If they're not like, smite-happy I guess... I wouldn't wanna get snapped out of existence just for having too many questions...'

Distracted by thoughts weaving a list of potentially acceptable questions to ask in a hypothetical divine conference, Kira barely noticed how quickly she cleared the entire Floor of goblins. Without a Variant to set off her alarms, she ended up in front of the Boss door again in less than two hours.

According to Ailsa and Brigit, even the smallest Training Dungeons had Floors that would take at least half an hour to fully traverse, assuming no enemies or traps delayed progress. All the other Dungeons were even bigger - even the smallest Natural-type Dungeon would be many times larger than the biggest Training Dungeon.

Dungeon Floors increased in scope proportionately to the Dungeon itself. The more Floors a Dungeon had in total, the bigger each Floor could potentially be, and the more complicated their layouts. Reaching a Boss door in under two hours, even in the first Floor of a Training Dungeon, was something only over-leveled Teams and Parties could manage.

'And I just did it solo, even though I zoned out again...' Kira thought with a heavy sigh, taking a moment to retrieve a bottle of water from her Inventory to rinse off her aching hands. 'But at least this time I remember doing the... The mass murder. I didn't black out and do another rampage, so that's an improvement. I'd hate for that weird berserk auto-pilot to become a recurring thing... There should be a limit on how monstrous I can be. People are scared of me enough as is...'

Ailsa made it a point to drill Dungeon etiquette into Kira's brain during their training sessions, so rather than push open the doors and immediately fight the Boss, Kira took a moment to rest. She set out a blanket, did some quick stretches before sitting on it, then had a snack and some juice. Brigit packed a lunch for everyone but they were meant for the second Floor, so Kira made do with dried veggie chips, teriyaki jerky, and a snack cake from the System.

While she was chewing, she used 【 Earthshape 】 to mold the ground by her blanket, creating flowers and awkward animal figurines from the stone and dirt.

After a few minutes, she paused, then sent a message to Ailsa. 〖 Kira: Hey, quick question? What are specialists who use air and fire called? 〗

〖 Ailsa: Aeromancers and Pyromancers, why? 〗

〖 Kira: That's weird... Can you do me a favor and send me a voice clip? I want to hear you say Geomancer, Aquamancer, Aeromancer, Pyromancer, and 【 Earthshape 】. There's something I want to test. 〗

Then Kira removed the gold ear cuff Karl personally enchanted with a translation spell, and listened to the voice clip Ailsa soon sent her way. Though the cadence was a bit odd, the words were definitely the same pronunciation. They weren't being translated into the common tongue's equivalent, they were using old human terminology! But then...

Kira put the ear cuff back on and sighed, shoving half a snack cake into her mouth so her cheek bulged until she looked like a greedy hamster. 'Why is Aquamancer odd man out for root words? Geo, Aero, and Pyro are all Greek, but Aqua is Latin! And then why is it 【 Earthshape 】 and not something like Geomold or Geoshape? Where's the consistency?!'

She sent a quick thanks to Ailsa, added those questions to the list of things she'd ask a deity if given the chance, then finished her snacks quickly and packed everything up.

It was time to fight the Boss!

Since she didn't run into any Variants, the Boss waiting for her beyond the huge double doors was just a regular 10-F Cave Goblin Boss. Bigger and meaner than the other goblins, sure, but nowhere near as scary as that Variant Moglin had been.

'Should I be concerned that my sense of danger seems to be a little broken?' Kira muttered as the Boss doors closed behind her, glowing blue symbols on its surface working to seal the room against intrusion. Brigit, Ailsa, and Ribbon could no longer enter to help out if she got in trouble once those doors shut.

Yet she couldn't bring herself to be worried. Instead, Kira felt oddly refreshed and relaxed, surrounded by the smell of stone and earth waiting to lend her its power.

The Boss sat in the back of the room, on a boulder roughly carved to look like a throne. In its hands it held two small rocks, and seemed to be using the pointed one to chip away at the other. It was intensely focused on its work, and Kira stood awkwardly by the door waiting for it to notice her.

Tk... Tk... Tk...

One minute.

Tk... Tk... Ksha! Tk...

Two minutes.

Tk... Tk... Tk...

Aside from the low thrum of music playing through her System headphones, only the sound of chipping stone against stone filled the air. Kira shifted her weight from one foot to the other, then sighed. It wasn't going to notice her on its own, but a sneak attack when it was working felt...

Rude.

So she stomped forward to the middle of the room, intentionally making some noise with each footstep, and took a deep breath to shout: "Hey!"

The Boss looked up in alarm, dropping the small rocks in its hands to grab a roughly sword-shaped stone club leaning against the side of its chair. Kira firmly planted her feet and raised her fists, tucking in her elbows to protect her sides. She hadn't been learning from Ailsa long, but the Dwarf was an effective teacher. Their training sessions were enough for her to grasp the basics of a defensive stance, and her posture when punching or kicking had improved tremendously.

Of course, all she really knew how to do were basic attacks like the front kick, jab, hook, elbow and knee strikes, but it was better than nothing.

'I wonder if Ailsa will teach me a proper fighting style,' Kira wondered, then shook her head to clear stray thoughts from her mind. No matter how confident she felt regarding the outcome of their fight, a Boss was still a Boss. 'Right, think of that stuff later. I shouldn't get cocky and drop my guard, I could get hurt!'

Getting hurt was something she'd rather avoid. Above all else, the scolding she'd get from Ailsa and Brigit if she got injured would be the absolute worst!

"This... This is... She really..." Brigit stammered, mouth agape.

"S-so that's what you meant!" Ribbon said, excitedly clutching her paws into fists as she stared at the screen displaying Kira's Boss fight.

"Aye. Now ye see fer yerselves I ain't exaggeratin'. She ain't got the foundation laid yet so I ain't plannin' on findin' her a style anytime soon... But that's what the kiddo can do with just the basics under her belt."

"Talented..." Brigit muttered, her golden eyes sparkling. "Like I thought, she has talent!"

"How'd ye get ta be thinkin' that?" Ailsa turned to the Drakke with raised eyebrows, and Brigit blushed and straightened her posture under the other woman's curious stare. "Mind sharin' yer thoughts?"

"Yes ma'am! W-well... I mean, when we did our Dungeon run before, she... I saw she was always aiming for the weak points of monsters. She showed me her status page before, I know she doesn't have a skill or spell specifically for that, so it has to have been intuition and deduction. Even against the Variant we fought, her timing was really good. She noticed the blind spots right away, and stayed hidden until it was time to attack. And she always struck right when it lowered its guard, before it recovered from either giving or receiving an attack. Especially in the middle of a fight, that's not really something a few days of coaching can teach you to do."

"Yer right." Ailsa grinned, nodding her head. "She be a quick learner, and has natural instincts ta boot. That's why I be wantin' ye all ta train fierce, like, and try out the Arena. She ain't the type ta be wantin' the attention none, but I can tell she's got an interest in fightin' itself. Not just the knack, but the spark, and the determination ta get stronger. And havin' good friends alongside, ones she can trust, will go a long way fer fightin' off anxiety and nerves. Of course, that's only if yer interested in it yerselves. I ain't gonna force ye, none."

"I w-wanna do it!" Ribbon said quickly before Brigit could even finish formulating a response, her tail wagging so fast it was a fluffy little blur. "If, if you're okay with me accompanying her! I also w-want to get stronger together!"

Brigit sighed helplessly, then smiled and nodded. "Yes, I also would like to give it a try. If Kira wants to get stronger, I'd be glad to do whatever it takes to help her achieve that goal."

"Glad ta hear it," Ailsa said with a grin, jerking her thumb towards the screens. Kira stood triumphant over the body of the Cave Goblin Boss, and was waiting for the reward chest to finish materializing. "Cuz she's gonna be a real pain ta keep up with if ye ain't determined yerselves."