Stepping in and slashing her knife horizontally, Alex tried to strike at the goblin. However, the goblin simply took a short step back before moving forward to grab at Alex. 

Stepping in and kicking the goblin away, I turned to look at Alex as I reminded her:

“Remember what you were told about not using all of your strength, if you step in hard and miss, you’ll only be opening yourself up for an attack.”

 Looking at me seriously, Alex nodded her head as she mumbled:

“Yeah, got to be quick and fast in my strikes, can’t allow myself to get parried here…”

Not entirely understanding what it was that she got, I watched as Alex began circling the goblin again, this time however, she was stepping in and stabbing in the direction of the goblin, guiding the small critter with her strikes that did not allow it to counter her unless it wanted to walk into one of her stabs. Finally pushing the goblin up against a wall, Alex feinted a strike forward as the goblin decided to lunge itself sideways towards Alex.

However, unluckily for the goblin, Alex was prepared for it as she took a step to the side and circled around the goblin before stabbing it in the back and, in what was honestly an unnecessary manner, pushed the goblin to its knees before thrusting forward once more and leaving the goblin laying on the ground as she got up and began celebrating excitedly before pointing downwards at the spot the goblin was located at. Following this, she took out the monster core from the goblins body before handing it to me to hold onto.

Seeing the excitement on her face, I decided not to mind the performance she had just put on as I congratulated her.

Turning to face me, Alex put on a vibrant smile that I had not seen from her yet as she simply said ‘Yeah, thanks!’ in a manner that made my heart beat.

Following Alex’s defeat of her first monster, the five of us continued walking forward through the labyrinth. Along the way, Alice had her own chance to fight a goblin as she too was able to dispatch it, though quicker that Alex did. Thus, Alice and Alex led the way for us, clearing out goblins along the way, with the latter being a little overly flamboyant in her moves at times.

There were a few times during their fights were Alex and Alice would stop and lose focus as though they were looking at something only they could see, with the former having such episodes more often than the latter. However, they would quickly snap out of it and return fighting as if nothing had happened.

When I tried to inquire about it, the two simply said that it was due to their inexperience and that I was looking too deeply into the matter. Thus, deciding not to press the girls any further, I let the matter drop.

Once we came across a few large lizards deeper into the labyrinth, Alex and Alice found it troubling to pierce through their thick hide with the simple knives we had provided them. However, the two of them were still able to take out the three lizards in front of them by working with surprisingly capable teamwork. Despite their achievement, from that point on, the three of us began taking the front as we tried to leave behind a few monsters whenever we could for Alex and Alice to use for training. 

After a few hours of fighting, the monsters in the labyrinth began to decrease until we found ourselves with no new monsters appearing. As a result, we returned to our previous arrangement of having Brent and Roger flanking the two girls as I followed along from the back. After a bit of aimless conversation, Alex decided to ask:

“How far and how long do you guys expect to be in this labyrinth.”

Answering the question was Brent as he said:

“We plan to keep heading down and stay the night here. Once we wake up, we’ll head back up and kill some more monsters. With that, we should have enough monster cores to at least get us to Dene and be able to afford a cheap Inn for 3 days.”

Adding on was Roger as he said:

“Yeah, I’m afraid that’s all we can do for now. I would have liked to have gone even further down into the labyrinth and potentially clear it, but we just don’t have the resources at the moment chu know.”

With the two statements, Alex put her hand on her chin as she began pondering for a minute before muttering:

“Is that so…”

It was in this matter that we continued traversing the labyrinth until a few cave spiders began making their appearance. With them hanging on to the walls and ceilings, we were worried that Roger wouldn’t be able to take them out quick enough and that they could pose a serious threat to us. At least that was what we thought until Alex began throwing her fireballs at them, once again reminding us that she was quite a capable mage. Thus, with Alice lighting the way, Alex and Roger firing at the spiders in the walls and ceiling, and Brent and I clearing the way of lizards and goblins, we continued advancing as a well organized unit without much incident. Though Brent suffered a small slash wound from a lizards claws, Alice was able to heal him quickly with [Heal]. Allowing us to continue forward until it was finally time to rest.

Once it was time to rest, we looked around and found a medium sized cave inside the labyrinth with two rooms. Picking this cave as the place in which we would spend the night, we decided not to trouble Alex and Alice with guard duty, and simply split the guard time between the three of us as we would have done originally if we hadn't run into them. Thus, although Alex was a bit hesitant at first, after a bit of coaxing from Brent and Roger, she decided to acquiesce to the proposal as the three of us drew lots to choose in which order we would keep guard.

It was in this way that I was stuck with the first lot, Brent with the second, and Roger with the third. So, once we had finished setting up camp in which the three of us picked the larger room as Alex insisted on taking the smaller one, I began making my way towards the entrance of the cave and, using a sand hourglass, began waiting for the two hours of my watchtime to finish before I would be able to return back to our sleeping area and get some rest…