It’s morning again and the group was awakened by the pleasant sounds of growls and shrills of different plant-type monsters gathered outside of their barrier, surrounding them and ready to attack. Allan woke up first and dealt with a large swarm of them, around 100 or so with a massive incineration spell, then the others woke up. Marcel, after waking up, prepared a light breakfast for them: some bread, vegetables, and a bit of yesterday’s soup. After they ate, they set off for the second circle.  

Silva and Valeria led the way as they had come to see Marcel and the rest from the third floor, so they knew which monster near the barrier was the strongest apart from the one they defeated. They continued to lead the group to the barrier separating the first and second circles when they encountered another Vine Grabber.  

Marcel, after sensing the monster’s presence, pulled out Sigurd from his spatial space, ready to fight it. Silva looked a bit out of it when she saw Sigurd and asked him, 

“If I may inquire, judging from the energy emanating from the sword you’re holding, is that sword a super-grade weapon?” She asked, surprise written on her inquiring face. 

Marcel swung Sigurd several times before asking the ever-so-convenient Allan what she was talking about. 

“Oh, she, sort of, said, ‘...is that sword an S-grade weapon?’ Super-grade is an acronym of S-grade. You know, S stands for Super. Get it now?” Allan whispered to Marcel who finally understood what Silva meant. He thought for a while, then thought of something to say to her. 

“Incorrect. This sword isn’t a super grade weapon. It’s a super-super grade weapon.” He answered, a smile on his face. 

“Huuuuhh?!?!” Silva and Valeria exclaimed, surprised and shocked by the fact that Marcel, a D-class adventurer hero, was just swinging about an extraordinary and holy treasure that brought most people to tears at the sight of its awe. 

“Silva, I think what he meant to say is that it’s a super sacred weapon. An SS-grade artifact.” Valeria said to Silva who pulled no punches when she spoke. 

“Of course, I knew that. I’m not dumb, you know. I just didn’t see the point of trying to correct him since calling it super-super is sort of correct...” Silva said to her friend, then she looked over to Marcel and continued, 

“Dave, if it isn’t too much--- oh, forget it! Let me phrase this directly. Why is a weakling like you carrying around a priceless treasure like an SS-grade weapon so casually?! Do you want to die?!!” She asked, worked up, to Marcel who couldn’t fully understand what she meant by those words.   

Silva then took the opportunity to reiterate all that she’d said before and then some: 

“Do you know how priceless the treasure in your hand is?! You know, SS-grade artifacts are so rare and almost impossible to manufacture that any artisan who manages to make an S-grade artifact is then given the title of genius among geniuses. These types of weapons are made from metals incredibly hard to acquire and refine. Even skilled artisans fail multiple times and some, even dedicate their entire lifetime to studying S-grade artifacts and gathering large amounts of knowledge before being able to succeed in refining a small portion of the materials needed to create these sacred artifacts. 

There are only a few artisans who have managed to create SS-grade artifacts and according to one artisan that I know who made one such artifact, they needed um- almost five priests and an extraordinary priestess to constantly bless him throughout the process, or else it might have been impossible to finish just the refining process. And let’s not talk about the combining process which is rumored to be even harder than the refining as they must make sure to save all the immense power acquired from the refining of the materials when combining and then creating the sacred relics. Who the heck in their right mind would give such a treasure to a novice like you?” She asked, a bit skeptical as she didn’t expect an answer, but Marcel replied anyway. 

“Oh...um, I got it from a special someone. Now I get why someone I know was so shocked when he found out about it.” Marcel said, smiling awkwardly. 

Silva then straightforwardly asked again, “Huh? Did you get it from your fiancé or something?” She said jokingly, not expecting an answer, but then Marcel looked a bit startled when she mentioned it and stayed quiet for a while, “...” then he nodded. 

Silva was stunned, then after she shouted, asking him how that was possible when he just came to the demon realms. He explained that things happened and then before he knew it, he was engaged. Valeria and Silva found him a bit suspicious as everything he said made him sounded more and more similar to the Demon Lord’s aforementioned wife but that was alas, they dropped their suspicions as they found it impossible. After all, the Demon Lord’s wife is known and confirmed by many to be a blond-haired, blue-eyed, slightly muscular, cute-looking boy while this person who stood in front of them now was a silver-haired, red-eyed (since the Demon Lord gave him special contacts as a gift a few days before they left to cover up his fuchsia-colored eye) and muscular beauty. Hahaha! They couldn’t possibly be the same person, not by a long shot, they thought. 

After having dismissed the chance that Dave, the silver-haired beauty a.k.a. Marcel might be Marcel, the blond-haired beauty, they stopped talking about the subject since things began to get awkward. They also had an enemy, the Vine Grabber, to fight at the moment, so they were willing to forget about Marcel and his current identity, Dave for now.  

Valeria opted to take care of the enemy all on her own after it began approaching. Marcel, however, was worried but Silva reassured him, 

“... although Valeria isn’t serious most of the time, she tends to when it comes to fights. The thing about her not being a good assassin that you heard last night was a lie. Just watch calmly and you’ll understand.” Silva was brimming with confidence towards her friend. The other two decided to trust her words and watched from the sidelines as Valeria headed in to fight.  

The three watched as Valeria approached the Vine Grabber and enhanced herself, then her speed skyrocketed. She drew out a dagger made of a Hellbunny’s horn, then she cut the Vine Grabber at so fast a speed that it couldn’t regenerate its vines as fast as they were leaving its body, then Valeria came back.  

Allan and Marcel asked her why she had come back when the monster was clearly still alive.  

She answered, “It’s already been taken care of, just look at it.” 

The Vine Grabber looked the same as it did earlier and Allan who was worried about whether Valeria had failed without realizing it, began to cast a spell, but Silva lightly tapped his shoulder, saying,  

“Don’t! It’ll be a waste of your magic power if you cast that spell. Trust me!” She said with confidence. Just like Valeria had mentioned, the monster had already been taken care of, or at least, it was about to be. 

The Vine Grabber, after Silva’s words, went up in flames and began burning. 

“Told ya!” Valeria smiled. 

“Oh... you’re getting better by the day. You didn’t even have to use your ‘blades’ to take care of it. Impressive!” Silva happily praised her friend. It was quite the difference from yesterday’s ridicule of her assassination and cooking skills. 

“Oh, stop it. If I dealt with that weakling with my blades, then wouldn’t that mean that I’m weak.” Valeria said smiled, oozing off smugness from having Silva praise her. Silva let her have the moment. She'd earned it. 

Marcel, who didn’t understand what had just happened, asked Valeria,  

“How did you defeat the monster? I only saw you groom it a little and then you left. How did you end the fight with just that?” He asked and also very confused about the blades she mentioned, but now wasn’t the time for that question. 

“Simple, really. It’s because of this...” She responded, taking out a red dagger. This was the dagger she used while fighting the Vine Grabber out and showed it to Marcel. 

“...This is a special blade I got as a present from one of my siblings. It’s was made with the horn of a Hellbunny, a B-class dungeon beast living in a domain-type fire dungeon. The Hellbunnies are as strong as they are because of their horns. They use their horns as their main weapons and they use them quite well. They produce flame elements that ignite and burn their targets a short period of time after they’re cut by the horns atop their heads, meaning that if they get enough strikes in then their enemies are as good as dead; bound to death by blazing fire that erupts from their very bodies. This dagger was made from the same horn and every strike on the enemy produces a certain amount of fire elements to be ignited. Increase the number of strikes to a high enough number and just like how the Hellbunnies do it, even a high-level monster will be easily defeated, well, unless if they have fire resistance, of course.” She answered as she rubbed the dagger with a smile, staying careful as not to cut herself.  

Marcel wondered if Sigurd worked in the same way as the Hellbunny horn dagger and decided to try it on the next dungeon beast he met. Even in the dungeon where his luck was down to twenty percent, the world was still on his side as a monster appeared moments after he had that thought. He then tested his theory on the monster, only to be left disappointed as one strike was all it took to finish it off. He wondered if he was just too strong or that Sigurd was the one too strong. The girls really wanted to tell him to put away Sigurd but they didn’t want to come off as rude, even though its chill slowly spread into their surroundings when Marcel used it. 

He thought, “What am I going to do if people start coming after me because of Sigurd?” but alas, the Demon Lord already had him covered, making his future life less dangerous than it should have been, or at least, to some extent. 

When the Demon Lord made Sigurd, he added a variety of other abilities to it and one of them happens to be an ability that stores the sword’s aura with a barrier that most people can’t even feel. After all, he had to make sure that his wife stayed safe in a world where aura perception was everyone’s most preferred method of inquiry. If he hadn’t, then everyone would also know that Marcel was his wife from the moment he drew out the sword, which was something he couldn’t afford at the moment as it’d put his pure and naïve but also ‘blind to aura and clueless because of it’ wife in danger. 

Marcel, after having being disappointed by the first monster, decided to try it out on the next monster that came after that and before he knew it, he had ‘one-hit killed’ all the monsters that came his way and was currently facing the monster on the edge of the barrier separating the second circle from the third. It was a Vine Grabber, although a bit taller and thicker in width than the other Vine Grabbers that Marcel had seen so far. It was a slightly evolved Vine Grabber. 

They began fighting and then Valeria discovered that the Vine Grabber had resistance to fire since her fire dagger wasn’t doing much damage to it. Marcel, with Sigurd, let out many icy strikes at the Vine Grabber while Allan conjured up some wind blades and shredded up the vines it generated one after another. Silva, however, took out her weapon for the first time, a crystal magic staff, another B-class artifact enchanted to increase a spell’s effect by thirty percent. After she summoned her weapon, she took to the skies with a wind spell.  

Up in the sky, about 10 meters above the others, she was. She looked down at the others, hinting to them that it was finally her time to shine. As the others fought the Vine Grabber from below, she cast and launched the most beautiful composite magic spell that Marcel had ever seen. It was a spell fusing the water and earth elements perfectly that Silva dubbed the [Raining Jasmine Flowers], a spell that combined the flexibility of water and the durability of earth to create jasmine-shaped projectiles as fast as rapidly falling drops of rain with enough strength to shred the thick body of the Vine Grabber until there was nothing but a few vines spread around on the ground.  

Allan and Marcel could see why they made it all the way to almost the fourth circle with just the two of them. He wondered how hard he’d have to work to be able to casually cast a spell of that proportion with ease as she had just done. She looked like she didn’t even break a sweat.  

She smiled to the others and then they casually headed into the third circle. Marcel had a cold, spine-shivering feeling that told him to not offend the little overpowered miss who at this point, had proven herself capable of not only destroying him with her sharp tongue that never missed its mark and but also quite literally as well. 

The group made it to the third circle before afternoon, so, they had a quick lunch that Marcel set up that morning. He made a generous number of sandwiches and after they’d had them, they continued their journey and further entered the third circle, no longer fearing anything as they were strong enough to take care of any monsters they approached on that floor. This line of thought was what was going to get them in danger a few minutes after.