"He is the Crown Prince, Mister Roost. Whatever the reason, hurting him was a grave offense. If the worst comes to pass, the Empire might start targeting you. Do you hear me, Mister Roost? If this escalates, we'll be troubling Professor Golmind and the Academy again! Even your family and the restaurant will also get involved..."
Theo scratched his cheek while walking, the water around them still rippling from the duel.
"I know, I know... Sorry, but don't worry. He will not report it to the Empire."
Tizmilly pursed her lips, water-light flickering across her worried face.
"Why are you so confident when it was the first time you talked with him!?"
Of course Theo was confident with him, since he knew Agraviel's personality well after playing the game for so long. The Crown Prince had too much pride to admit he lost to a commoner. He'd rather swallow the humiliation than let the court hear he was beaten in a fair fight. However, of course, Theo couldn't just reply to her words like that, since she wouldn't believe him.
"You didn't understand, Theo, how shameless that gu—I mean, Lord Agraviel was. He will do anything to win once you made him lose!"
And she continued on and on. Theo didn't know whether it was his imagination, but the air felt colder when she was staring at him. Her usual grace was gone, replaced by something fiercer.
_I never expected Tizmilly, the Villainess, to become like this when she was agitated..._ It was oddly endearing. And terrifying.
When they were like that, the pinkhead, Raffassa, suddenly approached them, her eyes still wide with disbelief.
"W-wait, how could you defeat Lord Agraviel!? He was the 3rd most talented student in the Academy, you know! It doesn't even make any sense! You must be cheating, aren't you!?" She yelled at them, her face telling Theo that he had greatly shocked her by beating their crown prince.
Following after her, Tizmilly's ex-big-brother, Lideon, also came to them, his expression dark.
"Tizmilly, who is that guy? I had never heard of a student that was stronger than Lord Agraviel except you and that kid named Huggbuch!"
They started to accuse him of cheating while leaving Reffion alone to take care of the Crown Prince. Huh, what should Theo do now?
He exchanged glances with Tizmilly. She shook her head, gesturing for him to stop provoking them even more than this. Her eyes pleaded: _Please, not more trouble._
However, no way Theo could forgive them that easily. Especially this supposed big brother of their Miss Villainess. It was tolerable for Agraviel to be seduced by Raffassa since he had an inferiority complex, but him? What was him? Why did he even get attracted to a petite girl like her? And because of that, he convinced his family to erase Tizmilly's name from their family lineage? The hypocrisy burned.
"Oh, what's wrong, Senior Lideon? I just used pure physical strength there. I used no magic there, even though I was born with magic, because I thought it was only fair for the Crown Prince that way, and you said that I WAS CHEATING?"
The two shut their mouths after they heard his words. Even you yourself knew it, that he was fighting fairly, right? So why did you even accuse him of cheating? These guys really were a pain in the ass...
Theo couldn't help but recall how much trouble he had when playing Ahlia before, whenever Ahlia had to be together with these Love Interests. I mean, was there really no better guy somewhere other than these useless guys? They were all talk, no spine.
The more he looked at them, the more irritated he became. How could these whippersnappers be chosen as people who were accompanying Ahlia to prevent the end of the world? Fate had a twisted sense of humor.
"Or what? You wanted me to use my magic, so it could be a FAIR FIGHT?" Theo asked them while taking steps forward, his voice dropping an octave.
Thanks to his superior height, he could look down at them. Even Lideon, who was 3 years older than him, couldn't compare to his height. His Dungeon diving days had trained his body well, so he grew faster than most kids his age. Muscle built from real combat, not academy sparring.
Raffassa gritted her teeth, clearly frustrated. However, she couldn't say a thing after Theo checkmated them. Her little victim act wouldn't work now.
Tizmilly sighed seeing that, her fingers pulled Theo's sleeve. "That's enough, Theo. Let's go," said Tizmilly with a tired smile.
Dealing with idiots really was draining. Theo nodded at her and turned around. After this, they still had to kill some more monsters to descend to the next floor. They better preserve their precious energy rather than waste it on these brats.
However, maybe because Theo hadn't beaten her, that pinkhead just couldn't shut her lips.
"Don't you know that that girl, Tizmilly, is a bully!? Are you fine with her, knowing how she was a woman with that filthy personality!? You are destroying yourself befriending her!"
_Should I give her a punch before we go?_ Theo cupped his fist and began to think about turning back to them, but Tizmilly stopped him, her hand firm on his arm, so he ignored them and continued to kill monsters with Tizmilly.
They kept yelling at them, their voices muffled by the water, but Theo focused more on killing monsters. Maybe even used these poor monsters as his sandbags. Each strike was harder than it needed to be.
Ten minutes later, they finally fulfilled their kill quotas. They immediately descended to the next floor, fearing that those brats would come to them if they lingered around too long at that floor.
...
The 15th floor of The Bank of Water was different from the previous floors.
The terrain was not a basic underwater ground, but underwater ruins. The architecture looked kind of similar to ancient Egypt's buildings, but more alien and with a magical touch on it. Massive stone blocks, impossibly smooth, stacked into half-collapsed temples.
The collapsed walls, pillars, statues, and etc. All were engraved with shimmering unknown symbols that pulsed faintly like breathing.
"They always said that the 15th floor of The Bank of Water was special, so this was the reason..." Tizmilly muttered while admiring the sight of the underwater ruins, her earlier frustration melting away.
To be honest, Theo was also surprised. He never expected the floor to be multiple times more impressive than what he saw on the monitor. The scale was wrong. The detail was too real.
They admired the sight for a while to forget about those brats, before Theo led Tizmilly to the east side of the floor. We navigated through the ruins carefully this time. They couldn't be as easy-going as before here, since the monsters here were already way stronger. The water felt heavier, charged.
They had also grown a lot smarter than before, now capable of using the cover of the ruins to hide themselves and ambush us. Shadows moved where they shouldn't.
They passed a collapsed gate while carefully looking around. But then a tentacle ambushed them from above. Tizmilly reacted immediately and slashed the tentacle, before she pierced the body of the monster, which looked like a squid, to end it.
"They are getting more annoying now!" muttered Tizmilly with disgust while looking at her slime-covered sword.
The slime would also disappear once the monster's body dissolved into mana particles and dropped behind an Elemental Gem, but having her sword covered by slime every time she killed a monster must be uncomfortable for a girl like Tizmilly. She wrinkled her nose.
"But the squid monster number was indeed increased on this floor, huh?" Theo said while picking the elemental gem up and storing it into his waist bag.
Tizmilly's motivation wavered after he mentioned it.
"Ugh... It would be better if they would stop ambushing us, however," she mumbled displeasedly, flicking her blade.
"If you disliked them that much, then I'll handle them."
Tizmilly immediately looked at him like he was her life-saver, eyes shining with gratitude.
_Slimy monsters sure are hated by girls, huh?_ Theo thought inwardly as they continued onward.
They kept encountering monster after monster attacks on the way. And every time squid monsters appeared, Theo killed them before they could approach Tizmilly. He made it look easy, but he was watching her mana levels.
After ten minutes of walking, finally, they arrived in front of a building that looked like a shrine ruin. Moss and vegetation had crawled all over the place, speaking volumes about how long this ruin had been abandoned here... If they ever abandoned it. The silence was ancient.
It was never explained in the game, but now Theo wondered why ruins existed inside a Dungeon. Not just in this Dungeon, but others as well. Who built them? Or did the Dungeons?
"So this is the place where we can get an Aqua Rune?" Tizmilly asked, interrupting his thought.
Theo looked at the ruin once more, and after confirming that it looked the same as what he saw in the game, he nodded.
"That's right," he replied, gesturing her to follow him into the shrine ruin. "There was supposed to be a Magic Circle here..."
The shrine ruin interior was not dark, it was bright with constant light from the symbols that were engraved on the walls and everything. However, there was a circle of symbols that was different from other symbols when they reached the center. It was dormant, waiting.
Theo grinned as his eyes landed on that magic circle.
"We can get our Aqua Rune from there."
Tizmilly blinked. She looked at him and the magic circle.
"How?"
Theo leaned his spear on his shoulder.
"Of course, by bringing one hundred monsters into this shrine and killing them while the monsters were inside."
"O-One hundred...?"
With that, they started the ritual. For a whole hour, they were alternately bringing monsters into the shrine while the other was killing it. Baited, and kill, and repeat. The floor became a slaughterhouse.
When Tizmilly's mana was running low, they took a rest, then continued the ritual after her mana was recovered. Elemental gems piled on the ground, left uncollected since they were too busy fighting monsters. Mana particles had also polluted the place and made it look like a shimmering sauna, thick and heavy.
They only stopped once the magic circle started producing light like the other symbols. It hummed, a low, resonant sound.
Tizmilly immediately collapsed on her knees once she saw the light. "Finally... We finished it," she muttered with a tired face, sweat plastering her hair to her forehead.
Theo could only laugh seeing how tired she was. Her stamina and mana were still too low at the moment. She needed a lot more dives before she could reach his level.
"That's right—"
At that time, he paused.
He suddenly felt like he was forgetting about something important. And when he racked his brain to find what was forgotten, he found a horrible truth for the tired Tizmilly.
Tizmilly noticed his strange face, so she looked at him with a stiff face.
"Mister Roost?"
Theo looked at her, before he bowed at her, deeply apologetic.
"Sorry, but the fight was not over yet!"
He just remembered.
That they had to kill an Irregular Monster called Underwater King before they could get the Aqua Rune after they activated the magic circle. A Floor 15 boss-tie spawn.
Tizmilly's face slowly lost its color, going from flushed to pale in seconds.
"... Eh?" Her voice was barely a whisper.