Volume 3 - Ch 4.08
No matter how it is going to turn out in the end, the current setting where the Cooks Item Box has to stay at a fixed size no matter what the level of the actual Job is felt like a natural one to me, and thinking about all of the factors that might or might not facilitate changes in it only made my head hurt when I tried to wrap it around them.
Finally, given the overall size of its Item Box, I think it is safe to assume that the requirements to unlocking the Job of a Cook is to have the Explorers Job at Lv.30 and cook something.
Since I got my hands on the Job with the Skill Rare Ingredients Drop Rate up, I decided to go to the Labyrinth of Veils fifth floor while having it as one of my active Jobs to see how was that going to work, but much to my disappointment none of the Cheap Sheep we encountered there seemed to have dropped anything that would be out of the ordinary. Not a single rare ingredient, just the regular ass ones. We even went down to the fourth floor to see if Minos would drop something else, but that was a bust as well. Tch, what a bunch of useless cows! Then again, maybe Cheap Sheep and Minos only have common drops and do not have anything that could be classified as rare on them?
Roxanne, just to make sure that we are both on the same page here. Therearemonsters that drop rare ingredients when they are killed,right?
Yes, they definitely are there.
So technically speaking, as long as we keep killing them, they should drop something different than their regular drops at some point, right?
Yes, that is what I believe.
Okay then, Im going to trust you on this one. On to the next group of enemies, please.
Since Roxanne has a much better sense of smell than I do, I guess we will eventually find an enemy that will drop something rare if we just continue to follow along her guidance.
Maybe we should try going to another floor?
I proposed after the next few battles where the result was the same as with all the other ones.
We might as well. I think that the higher we will go, the better chances we are going to have.
While we are still on the subject, I wonder if one type of enemies has only one type or rare ingredient that can drop from them or do they have multiple ones?
I think some of them do, but I never had any opportunity to verify if that is true for all of them, or just for a select few.
Okay, we gotta start somewhere. How about Minos?
With Minos that started appearing from this floor onward, I think they have multiple rare drops that are floor dependent. For example, the ones here on the fourth floor drop one type of beef, but on the higher floors they might drop things like boneless ribs or other kinds of meat that can normally only be bought at the butchers shop.
In other words, that is another incentive to keep climbing higher and higher inside of the Labyrinth: the higher the floor, the bigger the risk, but also better chances of obtaining items of higher quality.
Also, I think there are other kinds of cow-related enemies dwelling on the higher floors, and they would definitely drop other kinds of meat that Minos wont be able to provide.
Is that so?
Good to know that we might have an alternative way of obtaining meat.
And since you mentioned the butcher already, do you think we could sell the meat obtained from the enemies for some nice dough?
Dough? Why would a butcher pay us with that?
I meant money. Thats how we sometimes call money back where I came from.
I see. Unfortunately, I do not think that meat obtained from Minos is worth all that much even though it is a rare item.
So far I have only shopped at the butchers once and I only bought ham and some chopped pieces of meat without paying too much of an attention to the other types of products the shopkeeper had to offer there. On a side note, I wonder if all the shopkeepers who run their own shops in the cities used to be Explorers or Adventurers who decided to pursue the business route because they were unable to make enough money in the Labyrinths? It would certainly make sense, since you can get a lot of ingredients relatively easy, and once you place them in the Item Box they will not rot no matter how long you will hold them there.
Since we have been on the topic of meat how these past few minutes, would you like to buy some of it for the next dinner or two?
Yes, and once the herbs in our garden grow bigger, we will be able to make even better dishes by combining them.
Thats settled then.
Roxannes right. For the time being the herbs in our garden are too small to harvest them properly, and the only spices we have on us are the Kobold Salt from Kobold Kampfer and black pepper from Spy Spider, both of whom are Floor Bosses. Once the herbs grow ready to harvest, then we will be able to go to town on the bigger number of recipes, but that is another bridge that we will have to cross no sooner than when we will get to it, so theres no reason to think about it too much right now. When it happens, I will leave that to Roxanne.
Before we continued the exploration, I removed the Cooks Job and replaced it with Explorer. After that, we were able to quickly break through everything the fifth floor of the Veils Labyrinth tried to throw at us. Cheap Sheep were a given, but this time we even managed to cut the Floor Boss of the fifth floor, the Beep Sheep without getting hit and allowing it to use its Skill even once. I think it is safe to say that this combination of enemies no longer is any particular threat to us.
Once I made sure to always stay close to it and interrupt any of its attempts at trying to cast Skills, the victory was easily ours to claim, and it was even easier when Roxanne was taking the position in the front, leaving me in the back to do my thing with Durandal where I slashed the Beep Sheep in a rinse and repeat pattern. Even when it tried to kick me with its hind legs, I always tried to sneak an attack or two at them before it went to recover its posture without jumping back too far away from it. That was my countermeasure against its attempts to create a time-buying gap between us
The next morning, we took a map and run through the entirety of the 5th floor of Quratars Labyrinth straight to its Floor Boss. The boss of the fifth floor of the Labyrinth of Quratar gave us a little bit of trouble because it was a little tricky where the Collagen Coral had its front and backside, but other than that this battle was not a big deal for the two of us, and I managed to beat it simply by swinging Durandal at its general direction.
Here is the medicine you gave me master. There was no need for me to use it.