RMGCFW — Chapter 111 - Frieren

"Lord Adventurer, thank you for saving us..."

"Not even a monster?" Banxia ignored them, looking instead at the beast lying in two halves on the ground. He paused. No system notification had come through.

Only then did he turn to the five-person rookie party in front of him. "This weak, and you still came out to the deep forest?"

"..." Faced with words that blunt, all five rookies hung their heads.

"We heard a new unconquered labyrinth appeared nearby. We thought maybe we could scavenge something valuable on the first floor..."

"A labyrinth?"

"Yes, that's right..."

It didn't take Banxia long to piece together the full picture.

Not long ago, an adventurer had stumbled across a downward passage. After heading inside to investigate, they confirmed it was a new, unconquered labyrinth, and returned to town to report to the Continental Adventurers Guild and collect the reward.

Once word spread, adventurers flooded toward the labyrinth in droves, ready to clear it.

A newly discovered labyrinth meant no one had ever set foot inside. First-in spoils were the richest.

Obtaining a divine artifact wasn't out of the question.

The odds were smaller than most people imagined, but that didn't matter.

It was enough to draw most of the powerful adventurer parties in the area, and they would tear through it at top speed.

That left behind everything they didn't bother picking up, a prime scavenging opportunity for rookies.

"Another new labyrinth?" Banxia frowned slightly.

He had just conquered a labyrinth from the mythological era, and now here was another one, freshly emerged on the Central Continent.

In the past, decades would pass between events like this.

Two in rapid succession wasn't impossible — but the probability was negligible enough to ignore.

Rather than chalk it up to freak coincidence, Banxia was more inclined to read it as an omen. In this world's history, every major upheaval had been preceded by exactly these kinds of rarely-seen anomalies clustering together.

An age of great strife. Maybe it was coming.

...

"Looks like this is it." Following the rookie party's directions, Banxia arrived before the newly unearthed labyrinth. "No wonder the adventurer who found it didn't dare go in alone."

He took it in with quiet interest.

Unlike the Lova Labyrinth buried deep underground, this one stood directly on the surface.

It rose in a spiral, as tall as a small mountain, standing at the base, you couldn't even see the top.

One look told him this was not a place for low-rank adventurers to wander into.

The adventurer who first found it had made the right call.

"Hopefully there are plenty of high-tier monsters." Banxia stepped inside with anticipation.

He'd spent days staking out the forest for the white-haired elf and come up empty. The frustration had nowhere to go, and he hadn't found any beastfolk girls to take the edge off either. The monsters in this labyrinth were going to have a rough time.

He stepped through the entrance and stopped short.

Not because of any powerful monster. It was something else entirely.

"There are way too many people..."

Spread out before him were countless rookie parties, all wearing the same scavenge-hunting look as the group he'd just met.

With a crowd like this, there was no chance a single monster had been left for him on the first floor.

"Whatever. I'll go straight to the next floor." He sighed and picked up his pace.

Just as he expected, the second floor was noticeably thinner. A few daring rookies still prowled around hunting for leftovers the vanguard teams had overlooked, but nothing like the chaos below.

And his luck held. Before long, he found a monster.

A bloated skeleton gripping a massive bone-handled blade. Whatever race it had belonged to in life, its remains were enormous, and carved across its frame were runes that bolstered magic resistance.

"Sever."

An ordinary adventurer party running into a skeleton of this caliber would have had a lot to think about.

But it ran into Banxia. He gave a casual flick of his hand, and a single slash ended it.

"..."

Banxia blinked. He sent out a few more slashes and shattered the giant skeleton completely.

Bad start today. Two monsters killed, and neither one was actually a monster.

The first had been a beast on the verge of evolving. The second was a pure magical construct.

He sighed softly and kept moving.

Then a sound drifted from a wall further down the corridor.

"It's so dark... it's so scary... ahhh... it's so dark..."

He walked toward it and knocked on the wall.

A hidden chamber. The trigger mechanism was nowhere obvious.

And those cries sounded oddly familiar.

Without overthinking it, Banxia swung his hand like a blade and carved open a brand-new entrance.

He looked into the room and paused.

"A mimic... and a white-haired elf getting chewed on..."

There she was, the Great Mage, being solo-killed by a mimic, the weakest monster in existence.

Her entire upper body had been swallowed into its chest cavity. Only her rear end and both legs remained outside, kicking and flailing in a frantic attempt to break free.

The mimic clamped down and wouldn't let go.

"Hmm..." Banxia crouched down for a look.

Apparently things had happened fast, the white-haired elf exploring the labyrinth was dressed in nothing but simple cloth wrappings, and her shoes had vanished entirely.

The sight of a Great Mage getting solo-killed by a tiny mimic was objectively funny. Still, Banxia took a slow breath before pressing down on the white-haired elf's pale calf.

"Frieren, hold still. I'm the Hero..."

"?"

The white-haired elf, hearing someone call out her name with perfect accuracy, immediately fell into thought.

She stopped thrashing. Banxia reached into his robes for the Sure-Kill Blade he'd confiscated from the assassin.

He frowned, though. Something was off. Using spatial arts here was consuming far more mana than it should.

Not that it mattered — not with two thousand years' worth of mana behind him.

The emerald-green Sure-Kill Blade came free in his hand.

Word was it carried a sure-death curse. He wasn't sure whether that would do anything to a mimic with no vital signs, but it was worth a try.

He pressed the emerald-green dagger to the chest's exterior and drew a clean cut.

A few seconds passed,

[Ding. Mimic slain. Total lifespan: 15 years. Remaining lifespan: 5 years. Absorbed.]

[Current monster time held: 4,700 years (combinable)]

Five years. Not much, not nothing.

He'd been killing monsters at roughly this tier all week out in the forest.

Still... Great Demons were something else entirely. One of them was worth hundreds, maybe thousands, of small fry like this.

"Saved..." (=ω=)

Free from the trap, Frieren knelt on the ground with none of the dignity you'd expect from a Great Mage. Her long white hair was matted with damp fluid, her whole expression that of someone who had just narrowly survived.

Banxia put the dagger away.

"Thank you for saving me." Frieren closed her eyes and shook her head, flinging off most of the fluid.

"Even without my help, Ms. Frieren could have handled it easily with magic." Banxia had no intention of taking credit.

"...That wasn't possible."

"Hmm?"

Seeing his confusion, the white-haired elf pointed to a cluster of blue crystals nearby.

"This trap room has Magic-Sealing Ore. Magic doesn't work in here.

If you hadn't come, I would've just had to wait it out — until the mimic got sick of me and spat me out."

"..."

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