Frostfire Legacy

Chapter 80: Level 5 and an Anomaly

Aster noticed that the girls were done with their task and waved at them, calling them closer. "Come here! Finish off the spiders with me!"

From his experience with using his Legacy Level Magic Carved Seal, he noticed that when he killed enemies with it, the experience wouldn't go to him or anyone else. He was curious as to where it went, though, but he had no time or drive to figure it out.

As such, he started to have the idea of limiting enemies' movements with his ice before finishing them off one by one manually! It was a surefire method, with little to no risk other than the time he was casting!

As he called to them, he didn't delay and pulled his sword, swinging it down on the closest spider while making sure he was staying out of its attack range. After all, some of them still had one or two legs free, able to scratch or wave around.

After he killed the 10th monster, a Small Cave Spider, he started to wonder where the girls were. Turning back, he saw the three still standing a distance away, not budging an inch.

"What? You're not going to help?" Aster asked. "Then I'll monopolize the experience from them!"

"..."

The girls still didn't move. It was as if they agreed to let Aster get all the experience from the spiders without any qualms. The spiders were only around Level 2, so he would need at least 400 of them to level up. Given the number present before him and the estimated amount of experience he still has left, he should be able to push himself to Level 5 in one go!

Kali and Cassy turned to each other, nodding, before moving to either side of the frozen field. They weren't going there to snatch Aster's catch, of course, but rather to prevent other monsters from disturbing him.

Celestinya stayed behind, so there was no worry of monsters attacking him from the wide forest, either!

Aster thought that they were just being generous, but more than that, they just felt bad trying to snatch monsters that he hunted for himself.

The two were hunting actively, after all, unlike Aster, who just sat down and extracted slime cores. In terms of opportunities to gain experience, the three girls have it better than him. To be more accurate, Cassy and Kali were already nearing Level 5 themselves. Given one or two days of hunting, they should more or less level up!

With the number of frozen spiders, Aster took over 15 minutes to clear them all. That's like killing one Level 2 spider every 3 seconds! As if to match his pace, as soon as he killed the last spider, his body got covered in a bright light.

The light this time, however, was brighter than usual and lasted for a few seconds more before vanishing.

Aster was shocked for a brief moment before recalling how he needed to add his free points. When he checked, however, he was surprised to see two available stat points!

"Oh, was level 5 a special level or something?" He guessed immediately before dumping both stats into his CON stat.

"With this, I have 7 CON!" He cheered.

Soon he would finally reach the average for a normal human, a CON value of 8!

"Are you done with the cleanup?" Kali approached and asked as soon as she detected that Aster had leveled up. "Then, let's go back for now."

"Huh? But why?!"

Aster just leveled up from hunting hundreds of Small Cave Spiders. He would feel bad if they left without the others having earned a bit of experience too, at least.

Kali frowned before pointing her thumb at the literal pile of spider corpses lying around. "This. Do you think having this many monsters around the forest is normal?"

"That..."

Aster began to think.

If other adventurers encountered such a large swarm of spiders, then unless they had a wide AOE skill like Aster did, they'd be in danger of annihilation. "Does this mean this swarm of spiders is an anomaly?"

"Most likely." Kali nodded. "As such, we should report this to the guild first. They should be putting up a notice as a warning from tomorrow on for those on the second floor."

"What are you talking about?" Cassy, who just arrived, only heard the last bit and was curious.

Kali sighed, as if slightly annoyed that she needed to repeat herself... but decided not to. Instead, she simply said one more sentence, which explained everything to Cassy and Celestinya at once.

"What I'm saying is that the Rogue Boss: Cave Spider Mother has spawned."

"...!"

The two gasped. Even Aster was shocked. After all, he did know about the Cave Spider Mother. It was a special Elite, or boss-class monster, that could endlessly spawn Small Cave Spiders. Yes, "Endlessly."

"This is bad!" Cassy muttered with a pale face. "There's already hundreds of them right here. That means...!"

"Yes. The Cave Spider Mother is already mature and has probably spawned more than ten times this number."

"Thousands of spiders...!"

The three finally understood the gravity of the situation. It wasn't something that they could handle all by themselves!

Although Aster could, technically, attempt it, death was the only thing waiting for him if he failed. They had no way of fighting against and surviving an attack from thousands of spiders at once!

"Exactly. That's why we need to report this as soon as possible."

Of course, Rogue Boss appears randomly on floors. Whenever such an event happens, the guild will call on all adventurers on that floor and issue a special quest to hunt it down. They were incentivized for the materials, weapons, or armor lost during this period, making some parties willingly participate and take advantage of this system.

Of course, the guild would be incurring a loss, but it wasn't much compared to the lives of adventurers if they died from the Rogue Boss. And the loss wasn't anything they couldn't recover from, anyway.

After that, the four of them decided to return.

From the time Aster was hunting the spiders and the entire way back, Celestinya kept her mouth shut. He was starting to worry that she was feeling left out or something, but something in the way she looked at him caused him to get goosebumps.

He, for some reason, was feeling danger targeted at him!