[Welcome to Floor 5.]

[You and your party are now an incipient adventuring team in the kingdom of Cradine.]

[This kingdom is an extremely isolated land, near-constantly beset by a wide variety of dangerous creatures.]

[In this place, one of the universe’s many human-like races long struggled to survive, but recent developments have given them enough peace to advance beyond the most primitive technology.]

[Cradine adventurers are tasked with hunting down the dangerous creatures wherever they may lurk, to expand humanity’s borders and continue to ensure prosperity.]

[But the relative peace the kingdom’s people enjoy may need a great deal more protection soon...]

[Your team’s Mission Difficulty: Extreme]

[Mission Selected]

[Ensure the calamity is sealed while keeping native deaths on the responding force under 20%.]

“The mission is as we expected,” said Bruzigan, “everyone be ready to hustle as soon as orientation is done.”

That orientation took quite some time. First, there was some speechifying about “the duties of an adventurer of the kingdom.” Following that, everyone in the room was issued a...well, for lack of a better word I called it a gem, though it wasn’t much bigger than a few grains of sand. It could have been some kind of magic glass for all I knew. When it was placed in my palm, it vanished, and much like the game screen in the Throskart storyline, a new tab appeared in my Tower menu.

This was the System that the Cradine kingdom had managed to create. For them, it was an invaluable tool for the adventurers, to keep track of their strength and enable communication over long distances. Unfortunately, it wasn’t much use to Tower challengers, mostly just being a way to keep track of their rise through the adventurer ranks. However, it did mean that the native’s understanding of certain things was greater than, say, those people who were still on Earth at this moment.

We were expected to remain there until everyone had been added to their System. When that finally happened, the adventurer’s guild leader spoke again. “By now, the system has evaluated your battle power and assigned your starting Adventurer Rank accordingly. The Ranks are arranged from H to SSS, but you won’t start lower than Rank F or higher than Rank B.”

That wasn’t quite 100% accurate. It was true as far as G and H Rank being for screwups, washout natives, or rich people who just wanted access to the system, and the fact that our team still wouldn’t be considered higher than B Rank at the start.

However, there was a Rank beyond SSS. Straight battle power alone didn’t determine an adventurer’s status in Cradine beyond B Rank, unless they were so strong that they were considered to have surpassed their understanding of human limits. Then they would be considered Legend Rank. In the 5th Floor’s scenario, one native of that Rank was known to exist. They were in charge of stopping the “calamity” that the kingdom was soon to unwittingly unleash.

Without assistance from Tower challengers, they’d pull it off, but only after a long time and with tremendous loss of life among his native support. This actually happened fairly often, since only challengers who took Very High or Extreme difficulty were assigned missions directly related to stopping the calamity.

Basic, Low, and Medium difficulty challengers mostly received missions related to making a certain amount of headway as an adventurer team, whether completing a certain number of missions or killing a certain number of total monsters. High difficulty challenger teams were assigned a certain area, a town or village in the kingdom, which they had to protect from destruction through the two-month duration of the Floor. The Very Hard and Extreme missions were the same for all such challengers, regardless of how many teams their were: Very Hard had to keep the casualties of the battle at the source below 50%, Extreme below 20%.

Unchecked by any challengers, casualties would be 80 or even 90%. We had our work cut out for us, and we weren’t the only ones. As soon as the guildmaster finally released us, there wasn’t a single challenger who didn’t move with an urgency of purpose.

There was a very good reason for this. This floor lasted for up to 60 days. If no challengers interfered, the kingdom would barely weather the crisis after 50 days. That crisis would start when a certain extremely powerful monster was accidentally unearthed, from mountains far west, a place that was not considered part of the Cradine kingdom, but rather the western border of its known world. This monster was a demonic behemoth that, for several different reasons, was known as a Monster Lord.

Just by it awaking, lesser monsters for hundreds of miles around would be driven berserk, power up, and even multiply more quickly. This would happen on the night of the 10th day. For those who had accepted the easiest missions, their best case scenario was if they could turn in their missions before the hard part even started. Those with higher requirements needed to prepare themselves the best they could as well as practice for when things would get harder.

We were no exception. Our first objective was to secure a promotion to S Rank Adventurers for the team. Unless and until we did that, the kingdom wouldn’t consider us trustworthy enough to be a part of the group tasked with containing and resealing the demonic monster. And reaching that status as quickly as possible would be helpful in more ways than just that. If we could pull it off before the Monster Lord was unleashed, or very early on into the crisis, we’d gain a seat at the table, eyes and ears on the kingdom’s planned response, a chance to influence that response into meeting it with maximum force quicker than would otherwise happen.

Our plan for this stage of the Floor was to split in 3 pairs, therefore completing Adventurer’s Guild quests 3 times more quickly. Any B Rank team which completed 20 B Rank quests would be eligible for promotion to A Rank. We could also complete a larger number of lesser quests, but that would take too long.

Mewi and I would form one pair, of course. Like heck we were going to have it any other way by now. It helped that we genuinely made a good duo team—with me attacking and Mewi defending, we’d successfully taken on three times our numbers of opponents with attributes equalized to ours in simulation. For the others, Anna would be going with Ri’legh, and Bruizgan and Arvallei would form the last pair, a more all-rounder mini group than the other two.

So, currently we were speeding away from the town we started in, each pair headed for a different town. We had already used the Adventurer System to find and accept requests in our respective areas, we just needed to go there and complete them. The goal was to complete two missions a day. Fortunately, the Floor started us off a few hours before noon, if the sun’s position was an indication.

It was still before noon when we arrived. “Finally, a little time to be alone together, eh Mewi?”