The Dark Ratman was fundamentally different from the Wraith Queen or the Orc Lord. The Orc Lord had nothing but brute strength and the Wraith Queen had a clear weakness. However, the Dark Ratman was fierce with a strong attack power and a powerful skill. His minions were also nothing to scoff at.

I led a party of ten to challenge the Dark Ratman. Although we succeeded, three of the party members had died.

“Thank you! Thanks to Crown Prince-nim, we can finally challenge the 16th floor!”

“As expected of the One Who Leads the Path!”

“Crown Prince! Crown Prince!”

Similar to how the explorers from the 10th floor acted, the six surviving members bowed and either thanked me, or chanted my name. At their level of enthusiasm, they might even decide to pick me up and toss me in the air. I knew it wasn’t my place to lecture them, but if they continued climbing up by relying on others and not on their own strength, they would eventually be brought to their knees.

After saying farewell to them, I left the boss room. Then I fell on my butt and murmured, “Whew, strong. Too strong.”

 Currently, the Dark Ratman was the Floor Master of the 15th floor, and I was level 20. At lower levels, a small change in stats made a big difference on the outcome. Now, it seemed a difference of 5 levels was merely a difference of numbers. Even though my stats were abnormally high from all the Compressing Elixirs and Soul Tempering Pills I had consumed, it was still not enough to make a decisive difference.

Since I couldn’t rely on my high stats to overwhelm it, I could only use battle experience instead. In order to do so, I needed to read all the ratmen minions’ movements and prevent the Dark Ratman from attacking me while I took care of them. I also needed the ability to escape from the Dark Ratman’s fearsome skill without failure.

Of course, the goal was to let all the party members avoid it, not just me. From my previous experience, it was a rather simple process as long as all of the ratmen minions were taken care of.

“Now! Get back!”

“Gwak Gwak Gwak! It’s a festival of lightning!”

That bastard never changed the way it talked! After hearing my warning, the party members backed off, and the Dark Ratman’s lightning only crackled through empty air. I disregarded the burntand charged towards the boss. With aradiant white light, my Heroic Strike penetrated his abdomen. Now that it had become a skill, it had a wonderfully short charging time.

[Critical Hit!]

“Gwak Gwak Gwak Gwak!”

As Dark Ratman cried out in its death throes, I let out a sigh of relief and looked around to check on the party members. One, two, three… eight, nine. Perfect. Everyone was alive.

“Oh, Crown Prince!”

“All hail Crown Prince!”

“To defeat the Dark Ratman without any casualties!”

“This is the first time I’ve heard of such a thing happening. To think I’d become the witness of history. Crown Prince…”

It took me three days of fighting the Dark Ratman in order to get to the point where I could win with all of my party members still alive. In other words, it had taken me 9 boss fights. Since I had taken the top contribution for all of those fights, I had gotten the Thunder Crystal eight times and I had chosen the Dark Ratman’s Leather the one time the crystal didn’t drop.

I was starting to get the hang of it now. When I thought about slowly lowering the number of party members and completely destroying the Dark Ratman by myself, I could not help but get excited like a child. As I was immersed in my thoughts, the party members suddenly pounced toward me.

“Crown Prince, Crown Prince!”

“Hey, prepare to pick him up!”

“Whooooo!”

Stop! Just go up to the next floor already!

Then one day, just as I finished eating breakfast and prepared to go to the dungeon, my mother stopped me.

She gave me a look. “Shin, school starts today, right?”

“…Yes?”

“It’s September 2nd, the first day of school.”

“Ah.”

I sometimes wondered if my intelligence stat was really at 20. Perhaps the dungeon was lying to me. Today was another one of those days.

When I asked Loretta about it, she said, “How can someone born with the intelligence stat of 20 be the same as someone who raised their intelligence stat to 20?” I didn’t quite know what to say after that explanation

Apparently, this applied to not just intelligence, but also strength, dexterity, constitution, magic, and other stats. When I thought about it, it made sense. I had always been strong and found it easy to move my body around, but when I saw other explorers, I always wondered why they couldn’t move as well. Loretta’s words had solved this mystery.

 Basically, raising one’s stats did not immediately make one stronger. After each change, there needed to be some time for the person to adjust. Loretta jokingly called this ‘updating’.

But how could I forget the first day of school!? It had been years since I raised my intelligence stat, so how could it still be updating? Was it because I didn’t use my brain enough?

With my mother giving me the ‘don’t tell me you forgot’ face, I smiled bashfully.

“I’ve been busy with the dungeon lately.”

“Dungeon this, dungeon that. Your father’s been saying the thing. Do you have gold hidden in there?”

“Doesn’t Father bring you some every day?”

“What about you?”

“Eh? Well, I…”

I turned away from her eyes. Sorry mother, with all the gold I’m spending to meet a friend, I don’t have any to bring home. But if I told her this, I had a sneaking suspicion that she would throw me out and disown me. That would be troublesome as it meant I would not be Yua’s brother anymore.

I made an excuse. “How can I be the same as Father? I don’t make as much. In fact, I spend more than I make.”

“Well, that’s what I thought. Your father, though. Why isn’t he registering as an ability user?”

Currently, my father was frantically breaking through a dungeon floor. From my estimate, he should be on the 14th floor. As the self-proclaimed Strongest on Earth, he didn’t shame his own name and swept through a considerable number of floors in just a few months.

I knew exactly what my father was thinking.

“He’s a bit too weak right now.”

When I told her that he was raising his level and his new ability, Shockwave’s, skill level, she tilted her head. It seemed there were some things that even my mother did not know.

I had no idea how ability users on Earth developed their abilities. From my best guess, I could only suspect that they grew with frequent use. It was also possible that abilities could not grow. After all, if it was so easily doable, there wouldn’t be so many F-rank ability users complaining on internet forums.

On the other hand, it was simple for an awakened dungeon explorer to develop his or her skills. All they had to do was repeatedly use their skills in the dungeon and then raise the skill levels. As a bonus, the explorer could also raise their mana stat with the level up stats points, making it even easier for skills to develop. All in all, being a dungeon explorer and then awakening as an ability user should be considered a giant bug in the system.

When ability users awakened, they usually visited the government owned Ability Appraisal Center to determine a few things: what category their ability fell into, the amount of mana they held, and their rank. Since my father had no plans of registering any time soon, he could only guess where he would rank based on what he had seen on TV.  His final estimate was D-rank.

F and E-rank ability users were not deployed to fight against monsters. If they were, it was only to support the higher-ranked ability users. Only people at D-rank and above have the power to fight against monsters. Of course, with my father’s spearmanship and strength as a dungeon explorer, his real strength was well over D-rank. However, if he relied on his ability alone, it’d be D-rank.

My father was a man who thought that he was the strongest person on Earth. When he discovered that his ability was considered D-rank, he became antsy and rushed into the dungeon to level up. 

After leveling up Shockwave’s skill level along with his own base level, he now had the strength of an upper C-rank ability user. As time passed and he climbed higher, he would only get stronger. Yup, I was jealous.

However, to do this, my father gave up on things like Compressing Elixirs, Soul Tempering Pills, the Orc Lord Set, and titles. He focused solely on climbing higher and raising his skill levels.

Although it was a decision he made to quickly increase his strength and earn more money, I did not think it was wise. Other than conquering the entire dungeon, I believed that the path that I was taking led to sustainable and much greater growth in the long run. 

“So…Shouldn’t you go to school?”

“Yes, I will, Mom.”

As I walked up the annoying hill to the school, I felt myself regretting scheduling my first class to be at 9 A.M. in the morning. However, when I saw the ginkgo trees lined up along the path, I smiled.

“In a while, they’ll be extremely beautiful,” I said happily.

Ginkgo nuts fell and exploded, their pungent odor spreading out into the air.

[Let’s do our best so more will grow next year!]

[Ehew, I’m annoyed by all these old women picking up the nuts. We have to give them to the Queen.]

Fall had always been a season that was scented with the smell of ginkgos, and it was now coming to an end. There were fewer than two weeks before winter began. When the cold came, I vowed to take the shuttle bus, instead of treading uphill in the wintry weather.

The lectures I had signed up for were all on the 2nd floor of the business management building. My first class had over 100 people. As I stood outside the classroom, I watched as many of the students in the room chatted like they’d known each other for years. They had somehow gotten to know each other before class had started versus me, who felt like I had been dumped into a foreign country. As I stood there like a deer in headlights, I had the feeling that the university campus life I dreamed of would not be happening.

It was then that I felt a hand pulling on my sleeve. I turned around.

“Oh, hoodie girl.”

“Su Ye-Eun!” she said sharply.

“Right, Su Ye-Eun. It’s nice seeing you again.”

As I made a 180 degree turn and began to head towards a corner seat, Su Ye-Eun grabbed onto my sleeve again.

“You…”

“I still don’t know your name yet,” she said plaintively.

Once again, Su Ye-Eun was wearing an oversized hoodie that covered up most of her head. Even so, at a close distance, her face was in full view: round eyes, aquiline nose, and full pink lips. She had all the qualities of a beauty. However, I didn’t care if  she was so beautiful that she could topple Cleopatra off her throne, I still wanted nothing to do with her!