Besides their weapons the three only had about three thousand valis between them and some potions. Nothing else was worth taking as even the weapons were made with level two materials and not that good a quality to begin with. Clearly the smith that made them hadn't put their heart into it and I found that sad. A smiths weapons could be considered their children in a weird way so not giving your all in making a weapon is little different than abandoning your child before it was even born.-
I erased the weapons and armor of these three as a result as I had no need for such things. Once all evidence of them was erased I looked at my compass again and headed towards the nearest metal ore deposit. On the way I ran into a battle boar and three hobgoblins that I ended without any real fanfare as they were too weak to prove a challenge. I took the teeth of the hobgoblins and the hide, tusk and meat of the battle boar before moving on. The metal ore wasn't anything impressive really, just a finger sized chunk of adamantite.-
After refining it I was left with a nugget barely the size of a penny. Obviously this wasn't enough to do much with but it wasn't supposed to be. Making something out of pure adamantite was the height of idiotic unless it was a magic item with a powerful but passive effect. For weapons and armor it was best to use drop materials mixed with adamantite into an alloy for the best effects. This reminded me of Bell's teammate Welf Crozzo who was a smith much like me but had the lineage magic to be able to forge magic swords but refused to do so.-
Even despite not being willing to do it himself he didn't mind sharing the creation process with me so long as I traded some of my own crafting tricks with him. The problem was that to make a magic sword you needed purity so you only used pure metal most of the time. The issue with this is that the pure metal can't withstand the sudden forceful power of the magic imbued in it and so magic swords shatter after a varying amount of uses. If you could stuff an additional property like [durandal] into them as well the problem would be solved but once again purity was the boon and bane here.-
In order to create a magic sword you could ONLY put the magic in it which meant no [durandal] and thus a limited use item. It was interesting as fuck that Welf could take inspiration from my unique crafting knowledge while I myself took some from his more traditional crafting knowledge. For him he found my use of geometric shapes holding the effects of my items better to be equally applicable with his style of crafting though not without it's own challenges to integrate.-
For me I found the more traditional approach of essence extraction and condensation to be greatly inspiring. To better explain a traditional smith like Welf would use fire and special magical powders to draw out the essence of things and condense it into a sort of false metallic substance they could forge like normal metal. This was how they were able to use things like nails, bones, horns, teeth, hides and more from monsters to create gear from. This was something you NEEDED the [smith] DS to pull off though as it was a sort of falna magic fuckery at play to allow it.-
I directly skipped this whole process thanks to my cursed technique but understanding it helped me gain some inspiration for how to further improve. Anyways I got off topic there for a minute but after dealing with the adamantite I checked the compass again and sighed when I saw it led to the Mammon familias claimed area. Cutting my losses I head for the stairs going further down into the dungeon. I get stopped AGAIN by people from the Mammon familia who are trying to rob me.-
"Give us everything ya got and me and my boys here will only hurt ya a little." the leader dude said with a cruel smile with his sword pointed at me along side the other three dudes with various weapons.
"Once or twice I can accept as a coincidence but I swear to hell that if I run into another group of you asshats trying to rob me I'm going to kneecap your captain." I say annoyed before unleashing a wave of hellfire on them without even bothering to see if they had anything good on them. They were consumed in mere moments and barely had time to scream when they realized I wasn't someone imitating me but the legit article.-
I found a couple firebirds and another battle boar before I left this floor for the twentieth floor and collected the feathers, beaks, talons and bones of the birds as well as the stuff from the boar before I headed down. The twentieth floor was far less crowded than the previous one thanks to it being too far from the safe floor for anyone gutsy but cautious to risk. This meant all the gutsy level twos from the previous floor didn't come here.-
Thanks to this the floor had a much greater selection of monsters for me to harvest drops from. To my great delight I found a mammoth fool soon after I left the stairs. It was easily six or seven meters tall and looked like a furry elephant with massive tusks and angry red eyes. While deceptively fast for all that bulk it was still only a mid level three monster so I was way beyond what it could handle. Moments after finding it my weapon was being ripped out of where it was imbedded in the beasts skull.-
These level three monsters weren't even slightly challenging for me to kill and even this one was no different. I refined the tusks, hide and fur of this monster before cleaving open it's chest cavity and ripping out the magic stone. As a larger and more powerful level three monster the smoke got from it was better in quality and quantity than what the hornets and lizardmen gave me. It wasn't too big a difference though so I could only shrug and collect my drops.