Author’s Corner: As I edited into the author’s corner from the last chapter(before the edit chapter button vanished with the update), I am looking for someone to help me write some song lyrics for later in this arc. For details, send me a PM, no spoilers here! Naturally whoever writes the lyrics will be credited with them.

After resting up and recovering the two scales that I had spent during the boss battle, we moved on towards the next floor. Naturally, just in case we ran into more greed demons, both the axe and the mountains of coins were stored inside either mine or Sharon’s groves. But it was also from this point that we’d be gathering new data.

“John, go ahead and pull out one of the sensors.” Celeste looked to me and nodded. Since we had to keep them out of inventories for the greed floor, the sensors that we’d be placing had to be stored in the grove until we were ready for them.

Nodding my head, I pulled out one of several dozen devices I had stored in my grove, which appeared to be a long metallic spike with a camera on the end. As we left the boss room and moved on to the next floor, I through the spike into the wall to embed it in. We had to put one of those in every room and corridor, in order to make sure that we got all of the spawns from the floor.

In the first floor, we saw the demons that we would be fighting on this level. I wasn’t sure whether to be glad that we had a counter for them already… or disgusted because of what they were. “This must be the Gluttony floor…”

I could hear Sharon gagging next to me as she looked into the room, were dozens of baseball-sized flies with the faces of human babies on them. On this floor, the demons had one property, and only one. They consumed, everything. Whether it was a magical attack or a physical one, they would immediately begin eating it to replenish their health. There were only two ways to kill the fly demons… Either hit them with something they couldn’t eat, or hit them hard enough to kill them before they could heal.

We went with the first option. Thanks to having Yin here, we could literally crush dozens of fly demons at once. Like regular flies, these demons were both fast, and incredibly fragile. It took hardly any effort for Yin to crush them with her telekinesis. Though, we made sure to take a break if she started building up a headache, so that she could recover.

The worst part was when the gluttony demons came out in groups of over a hundred, and Yin couldn’t get them in time. Some of them would latch onto Yo’s body and began drinking her slime, while others tried to attach themselves to the rest of us. But, thankfully there weren’t any lesser devils on this floor, and the only thing we had to take care of were the fly demons.

At least, until we hit the boss room. I was expecting many things from the boss of the gluttony floor, but a slime wasn’t one of them. Well… it was sort of a slime. It was giant, at least twenty meters tall, and very slime-like. However, along its edges were wide openings full of teeth, from which long tentacles came out to try and grab us.

“Sharon… please tell me your divination can help us here…” I said after raising a stone wall, using every bit of energy to say nope to that fight. I was just fine standing outside that room, thank you.

“Uhm… give me a bit, and I’ll let you know?” She said awkwardly, before sitting down beside the wall and focusing. I could feel the fluctuation of mana around her, so no doubt she was working some magic to try to get information about this boss.

“Ugh.. well…” She started speaking again after being quiet for a few moments. “From what my spell said… it’s called a devourer… And… that’s pretty much it. It eats things… Everything.”

Yin furrowed her brows as she listened. “Too big…”

“Right, it’s too big for Yin to blast it with her telekinesis…. And it will probably eat our attacks faster than we can use them… So… Other options?” Celeste looked around to us as she asked.

It was at this point that the answer came from the most unlikely source. “Why don’t we just avoid it..?” Yo asked, tilting her head slightly to the side. Her body was a bit shorter than it had been before, as she hadn’t been able to reproduce enough slime yet to finish rebuilding her body.

Suddenly, everyone started looking at me, and I couldn’t help but sigh. Using my Earth Manipulation, I tapped into the stone around the boss room and began making a tunnel to circumvent the room altogether. “This feels like cheating…”

It is cheating! Good job.

When we got to the next floor… what kind of sin is this supposed to represent? For some reason, there were little snakes slithering around all over the place. However, shortly after we entered the room, the snakes let out a hiss, and we all prepared for a fight. All at once, the snakes in the room jumped into a pile, squirming together to form one mass, which slowly shaped itself until it looked like… Sharon. By the time it was done, its appearance was almost completely indistinguishable from my girlfriend.

“Burn…” The real Sharon glared at her fake, causing a pillar of fire to rise up around it. Pained shrieks rose from within, but then the fake jumped out, sending a punch directly at Sharon. Although its skin was burnt, it was still able to pull out the same strength that Sharon used.

“Ah… this must be the Envy floor, then…” I said, shaking my head as Sharon suddenly transformed, her skin sprouting white fur. In a flash, the fake Sharon was cut to pieces as soon as her transformation into a rabbit girl was completed.

“This floor is going to be a problem…” Celeste spoke while furrowing her brows, looking at the spot where the fake Sharon was dissolving, various snake bodies falling from the corpse. “If groups of these snakes can become us, and we continue to encounter greater numbers… this will be an uphill battle soon.”

I nodded, understanding that as well. If we were to fight a group of ten, with two of each of us, we’d be doomed. At least if it is a one on one battle, or us against only one or two of them, then we are okay. But… “Is there a chance that the copies can’t use magic?” I noticed that Sharon’s fake didn’t seem to use any magic before she was taken out, so there was a chance that they were only physical clones. If that was the case, then we could do this.

“Maybe… we’ll have to keep going and see.” Celeste seemed to agree with my thinking. If they couldn’t use magic, then we could take out even twenty of them at once, though it’d be hard.

In the next room, there were twice as many snakes, as well as one unusual one. While the normal snakes were blue, this one was red. But, once again they joined into two masses. This time, they copied myself and Yin. The red snake joined into the mass that had formed my clone, and gave me a rather bad feeling.

No, to be more precise, what gave me a bad feeling was when my clone sent a fireball flying at me. I could tell that it was weaker than my own abilities, because I could stop the fire in midair with my Fire Manipulation, and send it right back, but then it changed to throwing water at me. Once again, that was easily countered, but while I was busy throwing the water back at it, it had begun charging at me. Rather than using more magic, it resorted to throwing a straight punch at me.

Unfortunately for it, the punch was useless, because Celeste blasted it with her arm cannon. “Sorry, was helping Yin take care of hers.” She pointed towards the other side of the room, where Yin had been smashed against a wall, and there were several snakes falling off of another nearby body. “Useful information here, though.” She added a grin to that last part.

“Well, seeing as how I was preoccupied, mind sharing?” I grumbled under my breath. Although it had been a quick fight, it was annoying trying to blast myself with magic.

“Ah, right. Well, the blue snakes represent basic form. Speed, strength, and so on. Red snakes represent magic ability. Your clone seemed much weaker than you magically, likely because it only had one red snake in it. Also… the clones always seem to go right after the person they copy. Yin’s… used telekinesis on Yin as soon as it finished forming. So psychic powers are covered under physical transformations, since it is part of the brain.”

I waited for her to finish the explanation, but did not really like any of it. What would happen if they copied Yo? Was she considered a magical entity or a physical one? I wasn’t entirely sure, but I knew I’d find out soon enough.

In the next room, there were three clones. Myself, Sharon, and Celeste. Thankfully, the clone of Celeste did not include a red snake, so she was unable to use her pets, and the snakes weren’t able to copy equipment effects. This made the fight fairly easy, but they were gradually becoming more difficult as we went on.

In the fifth room of the Envy floor, we saw our first item after defeating a full team of copies. This item was a large shield with a reflective surface. When Sharon identified it, it was listed as the Shield of Envy, and had a rather powerful effect. When the user activated the shield and aimed it at someone so that they saw their own reflection, the user would then be able to take on the appearance and physical abilities of the target. Of course, this only applied to targets with similar body types, so you couldn’t become a boss monster with it.

This shield… I stored it in my grove, so that we could do something with it later. Although it is difficult to store magical items, with my increased stats I am more than capable of it. Plus, I still wasn’t sure that we wouldn’t encounter a greed demon again.

I want to say that we kept going through the rooms, until we fought an epic battle against the Envy boss… But that would be a lie. We did make it to the boss room, after fighting a room with fifteen copies. Thankfully, there weren’t very many red snakes in the dungeon, so we were able to clear the floor pretty easily. No, the lie would be the epic battle.

When we arrived at the entrance to the boss room, there were already sounds of battle within, a few screams being heard. I couldn’t help but turn to Celeste and ask. “Are you sure that nobody came down here right before us? We should be the first to even make it to this floor…”

Celeste nodded her head. “Right… nobody else has ever been to the gluttony floor before us, let alone the envy one… Maybe there is an internal dispute?”

We could only shrug, and walk into the room. Inside, we were surprised to find twenty of the red skinned lesser devils fighting a single lesser devil that was double their height. The giant devil let out an evil laugh as it swept a sword covered with black flames across its attackers.

With every swing of the sword, at least one or two lesser devils fell, but more and more were slicing at it with their own weapons. This scene inevitably confused us, and I looked towards Celeste for answers.

“I got nothing… could be that they turned on him for food?” Celeste shrugged her shoulders. “But, we can take advantage of this to use an attack that will wipe them all out together.”

Sharon smirked slightly. “I might have something. Yin, can you help me with a bit of lightning when it’s ready?” When the other girl nodded, Sharon closed her eyes and began transforming again. This transformation was one I hadn’t seen yet, and was quite surprising. Thick shell-like pauldrons formed on her shoulders, followed by a wide shell covering her back. At the top of the shell, two plates opened up to reveal cannons made of bone.

After completing her transformation, she took a deep breath and kneeled down on the ground, so that the two cannons were facing forward. Then, I could feel as she began building up a large quantity of water mana within the shell on her back. “Get ready…” Sharon spoke while focusing, before she apparently reached her limit.

Sharon, use Hydro Pump!

I was momentarily confused by the window, before two highly pressurized streams of water shot out of the cannons on Sharon’s back. Though, shortly after they left her back cannons, they began freezing over, and breaking off into a rain of dense ice shards. “Your turn, Yin!” She called out just as the rain of ice began stabbing into the demons.

Yin nodded, surrounding herself in lightning as she returned to her stormbird form, and opened her mouth. Streaks of lightning shot out from her mouth and mixed in with the blasts that Sharon was launching, increasing the damage being dealt to the horde. One by one, the demons fell down from either the pressurized blast, the lightning, or the combination of the two. Even the boss, the giant lesser devil, fell down to one knee as it sustained a large amount of damage.

“Well… that was…. Yeah…” I looked to Sharon, and then the one remaining enemy in the room. Well… since she already weakened it. Might as well finish the job, right? However, before I could even charge in to take out the boss, it exploded in a cloud of blue and red snakes. Yeah no, not letting them form back up.

In order to take care of the snakes all at once before they could recover, I did one very simple thing. I breathed lasers on all of them. All hail the invisible laser breath of death!

Not as good as Hydro Pump.