It was a well-known issue that progress in the Labyrinth slows down drastically the higher you go. Tier zero Shards will take you up to floor five. You’ll want to have tier one Shards for floor five itself, and they’ll be sufficient up to floor ten. Tier two will take you up to floor eighteen, or even twenty if you’ve got a very good group. Tier three will be sufficient up to thirty-five, tier four will get you to forty-two, and tier five will get you up to floor fifty. So far, even tier six Shards have proven insufficient to win through floor fifty.

The problem, of course, was that Essence requirements rise faster than Essence gain. A day grinding floor fifty, assuming one can survive, will net a delver ten times as much Essence, on average, as a day grinding floor five. The tier six Shards they’ll be using, however, will require a hundred thousand times the Essence that tier one Shards needed.

What it all comes down to is the need to grind. And with House Bjørnson unwilling to act against Hermes, Ed and co. settled down to some serious grinding.

A large clanging sound reverberated through the forest as a thirty meter tall tree raised its large metallic-grey branch and crashed it into Ingrid’s raised shield. Strong as the Valkyrie was, the ironwood ent’s blow staggered her, and she grunted in pain. Bolts of fire and acid flew from behind her, piercing the iron-hard bark of the ent and forcing it back enough for Ingrid to recover. Fire covered arrows and daggers joined the volley of spells, forcing the tree-like monster further back. Bright blue light covered Ingrid briefly, healing injured arm, and she charged at the ent, dismissing her shield mid-charge and cutting at its bark with a flame-covered pole-axe. The incredibly dense wood of the monster prevented the axe from cutting too deeply, but a second later a large hammer slammed into the back of the axe, driving it into the wood and announcing that the phantasmal dvergr had joined the fray.

From the other side of the ent, a large Lesser Naga wielding a pair of short swords leaped forward to strike at the monster, scoring a pair of shallow hits and quickly drawing back before any kind of counterattack could be attempted.

The enraged ent flailed at its tormentors, but the only one in range was Ingrid, and she was too close for it to bring its full strength to bear, and her shield blocked its attacks easily. The heavily armored monster took a lot of time to fell, but eventually the concentrated fire based attacks wore it down, and the delvers scrambled back to escape the falling tree.

Ed went to the fallen ent and pulled a Stoneskin Shard from its bark, while Ingrid started hacking at it to get at its heartwood, which the House’s craftsmen would surely be able to use.

“That makes forty eight of them today,” Lucy noted. “This floor should be over soon.”

“Is good thing too,” Katya answered. “We are ready to move on to next floor, I think. Last two runs were too easy.”

“Don’t say that! The Labyrinth will hear you, and who knows what it’ll throw at us.”

“She has a point though,” Ed joined, placing the Shard in his backpack. “We’ve been on floor twelve for the past week, and we’re strong enough now to move higher.”

It’s been two weeks since the battle with Kevin in the eleventh floor. They’ve made a quick run through the eighth floor to level up the new phantasm, and as soon as they got it firmly into tier one, moved on to farming floor eleven, and later floor twelve.

“I’m not saying we aren’t,” Lucy shook her head. “I just don’t think we should say things like ‘this is too easy’ out loud.”

“You are being mood killer. What do Chinese say, ‘may you live in interesting times’, yes?”

“That’s a curse, Katya. Interesting times are not supposed to be a good thing.”

“Bah. What do Chinese know, anyway?”

“If you two are done playing,” Ingrid interjected, moving towards the party with a heart shaped piece of wood in her hand, “we should get going. We’re still not out of this floor, and we shouldn’t let our guards down.”

Katya blew a kiss at the Hobgoblin, and slinked away deeper into the forest, fading away for sight as she activated her Invisibility Shard.

“Let’s give the Cheshire kitty a couple of minutes head start, and then follow,” Ed leaned in to kiss Lucy’s cheek. “And I think we need to take the rest of the day and tomorrow off after we’re out of this floor. We’ve been going non-stop for two weeks, and I think it’s starting to wear on us.”

“Yeah, I think a rest day will do us good.”

The party turned to follow their cat-kin scout, and a few more minutes of walking brought them to what was obviously the boss for their current floor.

The huge redwood ent stood at least sixty meters tall, and stood in the middle of a large clearing. It hadn’t noticed the party yet, and Ed called everyone back far enough away to talk without the huge monsters hearing them.

“I don’t think I’ll be able to take a hit from that thing and remain standing,” Ingrid stated.

“And there’s no way our casters can get into bolt range,” Ed added. “Those branches will reach them easily.”

“Storms have enough range to keep us out of its reach.”

“Yeah, but we don’t know how fast it can move, and Ing can’t hold it away from you.”

“So what’s the plan?”

“We cheese it. Get Luce and the fox on the horses, and cast storm from above its range.”

Ed summoned two of the winged cloud horses, and Lucy and the phantasmal fox-kin were quickly mounted and took off, settling fifty meters above the tall ent’s treetop. The monster was easily big enough that the two phantasmal storms hit it without even a little overlap, and it bellowed in rage as it felt the fire damage from the chromatic spells.

It didn’t take long for the ent to locate its tiny tormentors, and it was only Lucy’s instinctive dive that saved her from the stream of pointed acorns that suddenly sprayed in her direction.