As we reentered the familiar room, Raissa looked around in wonder.

“I meant to say this before, but Deek has some amazing magic. It was no wonder I wasn’t able to figure out how you left Dirage.”

“You were looking into us?” I asked.

“Ah!” She blushed. “That’s… I was just… worried… you see… cause I fell unconscious, and then you left so much money. I yelled at those guards! By the way… extorting money out of you and even after you saved me and generously gave me this.”

She subconsciously touched her collar, and I realized that she must have had that necklace on. In fact, when I had seen her earlier, I seemed to recall she had something around her neck. So, she was wearing that magical item after all? It wasn’t visible with her usual garb, which covered her up to her neck, complete with a hood that even made it difficult to see her eyes.

“It’s fine,” I said, barely stopping myself from reaching out and patting her on the head.

The other girls seemed to notice the incomplete gesture, although Raissa didn’t. They were shooting me dagger-like glares. They would probably say that head pats are reserved for slaves as well. It was something like that.

Raissa’s eyes drifted to the kiosk and she gulped. “Sh-should I head down the 15th floor?”

The 15th floor was the lowest floor of the dungeon that Raissa had registered with. We could make half the distance in a single day. It was certainly a tempting idea. On the other hand, Raissa was shaking slightly, and I realized she had adopted a little bit of trauma after what happened before. She doesn’t want to head down to a saferoom alone. Who knows what might happen? Although the Knights are dead, that probably wouldn’t be enough to remove someone’s ingrained fear.

“No…” I shook my head, causing her to glance over at me in surprise. “We need to tackle this dungeon one step at a time. We already skipped from the 1st level to the 5th. I’d rather play it safe. I don’t know what kind of mobs to expect or anything in this dungeon. We’ll fight our way down manually and gain an understanding of the place as we go.”

I had already come to that decision before we even got this far. Every 5 levels, the monsters got substantially more difficult, and it’s been a while since we systematically worked our way down a dungeon. As for me, I was a bit worried about this so-called dungeon of temptations. I didn’t want to get caught in something that challenged one of my vices. After all, I had poor impulse control.

Raissa was looking at me with teary eyes. She must have misunderstood things. While it was true, I was considering her feelings, my ultimate decision had nothing to do with her. The other girls should stop giving me looks like I’m being a playboy too. This was a completely cold-hearted decision I had made.

With that kind of atmosphere, we quickly found the stairway to the 6th floor and continued heading down the dungeon.