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I couldn’t see it that well, but… it looked like one of these bird-head monsters, but with two heads instead. The color of its skin was also different. Unlike the ones we encountered before, this one didn’t stimulate my appetite much.

“Rir, do you know this kind of-… woah!?”

The magic beast wasn’t kind enough to wait for me.
Fair enough. Probably let my mind wander a bit too much.

It attacked us with an Ice Cannon spell. I cancelled it out with a Ball.

“I don’t know it, but we can discuss this after we’ve killed it…”
“It’s already dead…”
“Huh!?”

You could create more than one Ball at once. Far from just two or three at the same time, it was possible to create dozens upon dozens of them… apparently. That said, I had shot off five of them at once, but this seemed to have been sufficient to bring down our foe.

“Was that it for the first room?” I wondered.
“Maybe there’s more.”
“About the corpse of that magic beast just now…”

It lay in front of me. Holes had opened in its body due to my spells and six C-Rank magic cores emerged from its remains. I other words, this thing had been a subspecies.

“Rir, for now, let’s put away that monster.”
“Yeah, let’s.”

After storing away the strange magic beast, we left the room. The purple glow at the room’s entrance had disappeared, and instead there was now a light shining on the large gate.

“I see… So, each time we clear a room, it unlocks one of the keys to the gate… is that how the mechanism works? This is rather curious.”

Looks like Rir also noticed how it works.

Only… this was way too easy. I thought dungeons would be more difficult, but…

“Master, which room should we enter next?”

She had lost most of the nervousness she showed when entering the first room.
That’s ’cause I cleared that room way too easily, ain’t it?

To answer her question… going clockwise for now should work.

“Let’s go clockwise, Rir.”
“Understood, Master!”

This time, Rir and I entered the room to the right of the one with the purple-glowing entrance. Again, there was a magic beast in the center of the room, but Rir reacted completely differently from how she had to the one before.

“Ma… Master! That’s a… Myrmecoleon¹… an A-Rank magic beast… can you defeat this?”

An A-Rank, huh…? This is the first time we encounter one of those… but for some reason, I can’t see myself losin’.

“I think I can.”
“I… I believe in you, Master!”

The Myrmecoleon charged at us with the highest movement speed of all the magic beasts we had met so far. I quickly summoned my Blaze Sword and swiped at it, as if I was performing an Iai draw. With that single swing, I cleanly severed its neck. Disappointingly enough, it was dead already.

“Woof~!? Incredible, Master, you’re amazing!”

It put Rir in high spirits, as if I had just performed some miracle. Seven B-Rank magic cores then emerged from the Myrmecoleon, which should have been A-Rank.

“Rir, that thing… didn’t you say it’s A-Rank?”
“Huh…? Seven B-Rank magic cores…? Oh, this must be a deteriorated specimen.”
“A deteriorated specimen…?”

From what she told me, deteriorated specimens were, as the name implied, weaker versions of magic beasts. She said that their stats were lower than those of the original magic beasts, they couldn’t use as much magic, and they were also smaller. To that extent, they also dropped magic cores of the previous tier.

Still, you could obtain the same materials from them, so if that was all you wanted, they were quite useful… I guess?

“At any rate, should we take care of the remaining three rooms?”
“Yeah!”

Rir and I stored away the Myrmecoleon and left the room. On the large gate, there was a new, white light shining. Once we had confirmed that, we entered the room next to it. This time, we were faced with three foes… moreover, they were small dragons.

“Rir… do you know what those things are?”
“Those are… Child Dragons… I think? No… they seem a bit too burly for that…”
“Well, we’ll find out once we beat ’em…”

I brought down two of them normally with my Blaze Sword. Meanwhile, Rir faced off with the remaining dragon and defeated it easily. From their corpses, a total of 32 D-Rank magic cores emerged.

“Those definitely weren’t Child Dragons…
“Well… I can take a look once I’ve evolved my Appraisal² skill. Let’s move on to the next one, Rir.”

We left the room and checked the large gate. On it, a new, green light had appeared. Then, we immediately moved to the next room. In there, a giant bird awaited us. Different from the other rooms, this one had an overwhelmingly high ceiling, where said bird was flying around.

“It’s just… flyin’ up there, ain’t it?”
“You’re right. Can you reach it?”
“Probably.”

I shot off several Fireballs with normal power and highly increased size. They hit the bird without any issues, causing it to crash down while giving off a burnt smell.

The monster greatly resembled the Screw Hawks Rir had hunted high up in the valley. It netted us seven C-Rank magic cores.

“Since this thing looks like those Screw Hawks, it probably had beautiful feathers…”
“They’re all burnt up.”
“Couldn’t be helped, y’know.”

We quickly left the room.
On the large gate, there was a new, yellow-green light, and there was only one spot left, which hadn’t been lit.

TL notes:
It looks like the dungeon works as Shuu guessed in the last chapter. From what we’ve seen, this one seems to have more of a bird motif, or it might be based on variants of normal monsters you’d find in the area.

1. The original is ミルメコレオ (mirmekoreo). It is likely a combination of myrmecology (study of ants) and leo (lion). The name may or may not come from a mistranslation of the original book of Job. They showed up aaall the way back in chapter 60 and were also called 蟻獅子 (Ant Lion) there. Real antlions are insects that dig holes to prey on ants. They are a popular enemy in games (for example the Final Fantasy series), so I assume the Anazumu version is closer to the one we see in such games.
2. I wonder what the basic version of appraisal woks on? We know it can identify plants, but it apparently cannot appraise magic cores and magic beast corpses.