Gacha Kingdom Building

From the 33 tickets I received today, 3 were spent on spellbooks for Bea, and 10 were spent on potions.

In case the boss battle turned out a little too dangerous, we could resort to those, and even if we managed to defeat it without too much trouble, this would help us out by allowing us to explore a little more of the seventh floor before heading back home.

Using the remaining tickets, I got the following skills: [Stamina Increase] x3, [Focused Breathing] x3, [Spear Throw] x2, [Wicked Attack] x2, [Pursuit Of Knowledge] x2, [Movement speed up] x2, [Mana control] x2. [Ice Veil] x1, [Greater Might] x1, [Enhanced Drop Chance] x1, [Faster tree climbing] x1.

While a few of these skills aren't that useful, the skill that increases my stamina is a lifeline both inside and outside the dungeon, and considering the overall value of everything I obtained in this roll, I can't say I'm dissatisfied at all.

After sharing the skills that increase status with the girls, I also shared with them the strengthened [Enhanced Drop Chance]. I also gave everyone two levels of [Stamina Increase], even though I think this will spell trouble for me later on.

I also noticed that Claire's been increasing her [Mana Control] by quite a lot, so I got that too since it's otherwise hard to control the [Fire Magic] I currently have.

It's also good to see that she's being cautious in order to not focus too much on power alone. Even though Licia and Bea already have good natural control over their magic, this skill would still help them out even more. This made me realize once again how much Claire's Gift is compatible with mine.

Given that we weren't having too much trouble on the sixth floor, I thought the boss battle wouldn't be too hard either, but it seems I underestimated it quite a bit.

Inside a dark room, four giant eyeballs, all of them [Lords] were watching us. Around them, magic of all types began to materialize.

For this type of monster, magic is their preferred method of attack. They'll sometimes use their huge body to do a charge attack, but that's a bit rare.

Either way, due to their number and variety of magic, we had to worry about how to block each one.

For the fire magic coming our way, it was obvious who we should depend on, but as for the water and earth, we left it to Licia and Mia. Beatrice took charge of the wind magic, allowing Anna and me to step forward.

Due to our opponents being capable of flight, it was hard to keep a good stance, it also didn't help that these guys were quite fast too, allowing them to dodge somewhat easily while still maintaining their magic barrage.

We ended up having to separate them, and together with Claire, we focused on taking down one at a time.

This strategy was a bit costly for us, but we ended up managing to defeat them all thanks to it.

The only problem was with the last one, when it was defeated, its body exploded into a hundred small eyeballs.

Each of these was faster than the giant eyeballs we were facing, not to mention, with each of them being equivalent to a mini mage, an onslaught of magic found its way toward us.

The only good thing about all of this was that they weren't as sturdy as the giant eyeballs, but hitting them with physical attacks was still difficult.

We had to use a lot of mana to defend ourselves and relied on Claire's magic to diminish their numbers as much as possible.

But even her attacks weren't having too much of an effect since the sheer amount of magic they were using was capable of dissipating most of Claire's.

As such, we took an adapted trench warfare approach and focused on maintaining the barrier while sniping them whenever possible.

Together with Ellie, we managed to get about 20 of them like this, but as their numbers went down, finding easy targets became harder as they started to use their shared senses to their advantage, and covered for each other.

Thanks to that though, we had managed to effectively cut in half the amount of magic attacks coming our way since a few of them were killed and a large quantity had to cover for the others.

This allowed Licia and Beatrice to be able to maintain the barrier by themselves, giving Mia the chance to get behind them.

The idea was to use her speed to give them another target, confuse their senses now that they were making proper use of their abilities, and also allow Claire to finally be able to deal with large quantities at a time.

Focusing on three tasks at once proved to be too much for them, while Ellie and I slowed down, Claire picked up for us, and in less than 10 minutes, the whole bunch was finally killed.

They tried to enter a circular formation, shooting in every direction at once, but that desperate effort didn't do them any good in the end.

Having dealt with all of that was half the battle though...

The door in front of this room opened, but instead of reaching the seventh floor, we found ourselves in front of the boss.

Both a [King] and a [Superior] the last giant eyeball was bigger than the others and his entire body was covered by smaller eyeballs.

This allowed the monster to shoot a large quantity of magic and also provided it with quite a lot of defense since once a mini eyeball was hit, it would leave the body and attack anyone in its way.

Thanks to that, using Claire's magic here was impossible, as it would only free the mini eyeballs, leading us to a similar situation to what we had before, honestly speaking, if we had to face that along with the giant eyeball, odds wouldn't be in our favor, even more so considering how much mana we had already spent.

To properly fight this battle we needed a lot of coordination, especially with the backline.

We surrounded the monster and relied on mostly physical attacks, but we refrained from staying in combat for too long, we would give it a single hit, making a single eyeball leave and giving Ellie and Bea the chance to kill it.

The person being targeted would either dodge or tank it in the case of Anna who could block almost all of the damage done to her.

For us who had to dodge and couldn't attack as much as we liked, this battle was tiring both physically and mentally.

Still, thanks to the flexibility of our party, we had 5 different targets facing the boss at the same time, so if one of us ended up being the target for too long, the others would come in and start dealing as much damage to the main body as possible to catch its attention.

If we ended up freeing more eyeballs than intended, Licia and Claire could help out with Bea and Ellie's tasks.

Tiresome as it was, we eventually managed to get almost all of the eyeballs out and seeing that their numbers weren't going to be too much of a threat, we started once again fighting without holding back.

Mia and I took it upon ourselves to deal with any eyeball that was freed and couldn't be dealt by Beatrice, thanks to our speed, we could deal with them before they shot any magic, thus enabling Anna, Claire, and Licia to deal a lot of damage at once thanks to Ellie's debuffs.

It hurt Mia's pride a bit that she had to take a more supporting role instead of hurting the boss directly, but making use of Ellie's Gift was favorable to having another attacker mixed in, even if that attacker was Mia.

It would also be hard to delegate this task to any of the other girls, so while it's a bit of a waste, it was the best we could do.

When all the mini eyeballs attached to the boss were finally killed, I could see a tremendous smile on Mia's face as that meant she could finally start attacking the boss too.

Even with all of us focusing on it, this thing was still incredibly resistant, and his magic attacks would be able to put any of us aside from Anna and perhaps Mia down had they hit.

Thanks to Bea that wasn't the case, so the only problem came when this thing decided to charge at us.

Each charge was as fast as me at top speed, and when it did more than one continuously, the monster managed to avoid all of us at the frontline and targeted Bea and Ellie.

Had it done a third charge in a row, it might've spelled trouble for them, but it instead chose to use a pressured water beam to attack them, leading Bea to meet it with one of her own paired with earth spikes coming from the floor and two flamethrowers coming from each side.

While using three different types of magic, each of a different element, at the same time was a pretty impressive display, we knew that doing this meant she must've used almost all of her magic.

It was necessary though, that seemed to be by far the strongest attack it had, and it might've taken both Bea and Ellie down.

Perhaps this thing didn't expect its attack to be blocked by the supporting backline, but its confusion gave us the opportunity to finish the fight once and for all.

Licia didn't waste any time before copying Bea and using ice spikes to attack the monster, while Mia used her ice magic to boost the power of her punches.

At the same time, Anna pierced through its body with her sword, while Claire copied the monster itself and used a concentrated beam of fire against it, piercing and burning it from within.

She also temporarily enchanted my daggers with her [Fire Magic], allowing me to give the boss the final blow.

I should also mention that Apollo attacked the boss with its wind blades too. It might not have done anything, but it was a valiant effort.

Having finally defeated the boss, we were allowed to leave the floor.

Surprisingly, even with our enhanced drop chance, the boss didn't leave anything behind.

As for the seventh floor itself, the monsters inhabiting it are less of a pain to the eye. It's actually a pretty-looking cave system full of crystals, and the monsters occupying it are different types of golems made of these very same crystals, stone, or dirt.

Since we used some potions before leaving the boss room, we managed to venture quite a bit into this floor and even checked a few settlements.

In the end, not only did we manage to kill the floor boss, but we actually got a level up and $761 in cash thanks to the loot we managed to acquire when making our way to the sixth floor's boss room, and also the few drops we got on the seventh floor.