Chapter 106: Minimum Requirements

"You know, you’ve really made a big difference ever since you’ve started working with us. On paper, this party is pretty unbalanced, but you’re so effective at the front line that you more than make up for it," Remarked Lector, as I stared out the window."Well, for what it’s worth, you guys are great at what you do. Your accuracy with your arrows is amazing, I’m nowhere near as accurate as you are," I pointed out with a wry smile.

"To be fair, I possess the High Marksmanship Affinity Skill, so I have a bit of an advantage on that front," He responded sheepishly.

"I mean, you still have to work at it to actually make use of it, don’t you?" I replied, before adding as I glanced at Elicia, "You’re great at backing me up with your Lightning Spells too, your timing is always spot-on."

"Heh, thanks. But you make my job super easy," She grinned as she flashed me a thumbs up.

"Well, he is basically an Ace at this point, so it’s no wonder we’ve been breezing through these Mid Level raids so easily," Chimed in Ferna.

"Yeah, that’s true. It’s going to be tough to readjust back to normal once he stops hiding his abilities and joins a Guild," Mused Will thoughtfully.

Today’s the 20th of April, 2169, it’s been five days since my breakthrough with Enrage...also, it’s 4/20, nice.

Anyway, I was currently heading out on another raid with the same party, a Mid Level Dungeon once again.

I really want more of a challenge, but the Union doesn’t have any High Level Dungeon Quests at the moment.

And even if they did, it’d be hard to get me on one.

Depending on the Threat Level, Dungeons have minimum requirements for the parties that take them on. With Low Level Dungeons, you need a minimum of four Hunters, with at least two of them being Q-Ranked.

Mid Level Dungeons need a minimum of five Hunters, including at least two K-Ranks. This party just barely meets that requirement, Lector and Ferna are the only K-Ranks, while Elicia and Will are Q-Ranks, and of course, I’m registered as a J-Rank.

As for High Level Dungeons, the minimum requirement is a party of seven Hunters, with at least one Ace. Also, J-Ranks aren’t allowed to go on High Level raids, since they’re almost certain to die, and even if they don’t, they’ll only get in the way of the rest of their party.

Then there’s Critical Level raids, those require at least eight Hunters, with a minimum of three Aces, with the rest being ranked no lower than K-Rank.

And finally, with the extremely rare Calamity Level Dungeons, you need a minimum of ten Hunters, with at least five Aces, and at least two of which should be X-Aces.

Normally, Guilds and the Union branches only deploy their own Hunters to tackle Dungeons in their jurisdictions, but if a Calamity Level Dungeon appears near a Sanctuary that doesn’t have an X-Ace, an X-Ace from a different Sanctuary will be deployed.

Only four of the eight Sanctuaries have X-Aces, but Calamity Level Dungeons are extremely rare, so yeah.

To get back to the point, at my current rank, Mid Level raids are the highest Threat Level I’m allowed to take.

I mean, Charlotte could probably pull some strings to sneak me into a High Level one, but if anyone finds out, it’d cause problems for the Union.

Well, considering that the Union doesn’t have any High Level raids available at present, I guess it’s a moot point.

With my current stats and Power Level, I’m on par with the strongest K-Ranked Hunters, and around the level of lower-mid Aces when I use Enrage.

And my sparring sessions against Rex all but confirmed that I’m now capable of holding my own against Aces...with all that in mind, maybe it’s about time I stop hiding my true power.

I can’t get stronger at a faster pace if I can’t go on higher level raids, unless I start taking on Mid Level raids more often.

But that would mean forcing these four to increase their own workload too, and that wouldn’t be fair to them.

Maybe once I’m done with this raid, I’ll go discuss it with Charlotte and see what she thinks.

"Oh, looks like we’re almost there, that must be the Dungeon," Remarked Elicia, as a tall structure came into sight up ahead.

"Huh, that looks a bit taller than the ones we took on before," I noticed as I got a look at the Dungeon.

"Yeah, this one has fifty floors, the highest number a Mid Level Dungeon can have. Of course, assuming it sticks to standard patterns, the kind of Monsters we encounter shouldn’t be too different to our previous raids, in terms of how strong they are," Lector informed me.

Right, the standard patterns for a Mid Level Dungeon would be one of two possibilities.

The first would be an increasing number of Low Level Monsters across the floors in the first half of the Dungeon, and then an increasing number of Mid Level Monsters in the second half, and a High Level Monster for the Dungeon Boss.

And the second would be entirely Mid Level Monsters throughout all the floors except for the Boss Room, and a High Level Boss.

With this second pattern, there’s generally a smaller number of Monsters in the Dungeon than with the first pattern, so the overall difficulty level is more or less the same with both patterns.

All the raids I’ve been on since graduation have more or less adhered to one of these two patterns.

Though, while they have been easy, raids are pretty tiring. Even with Desecrator’s ability to restore my stamina, I’m always at least mentally worn out.

Also, it generally takes anywhere between ten to thirty minutes to clear one floor of a Dungeon, depending on the number of Monsters, so a Mid Level Dungeon generally takes somewhere around ten hours to conquer.

Although, I’d imagine it’d take longer to conquer the floors in higher-ranked Dungeons, since the Monsters are stronger.

Each floor of a Dungeon is about five hundred meters long, which takes around seven or eight minutes to walk through, and combat can range anywhere between ten to twenty or so minutes.

On every floor, all the Monsters tend to stick together in one group, which helps us take them all out in one go before moving on to the next floor.

In the first pattern I mentioned, we speed through the early floors since we only encounter around five Low Level Monsters on average in each floor, it only takes a handful of seconds to deal with them.

Alright, looks like we’re here, time to focus up...