As they made their way through the dungeon floor, Terry made what was, in retrospect, a very obvious discovery. The minotaurs were warm-blooded creatures, so blasting them with ice was a great way to slow them down. What was a more interesting realization was that the frozen soil beneath him made for a half-decent stand-in for rocks. After a couple more encounters, Terry had adopted a new normal strategy. Rather than engaging the things up close and personal, he did his best to freeze them at a distance. Then, he froze the ground around him. Finally, he would sink his hands into the ground, jerk out orange-sized clumps of frozen soil, and hurl those at the monsters. Rinse and repeat.

It wasn't a foolproof auto-win in every encounter. He usually wound up having to kill one or two minotaurs with his swords, but that was a more manageable problem from a purely logistical perspective. After all, there was only one him, and he could only wield two swords at a time. Winnowing down the numbers was crucial if he also wanted to keep Kelima alive. Earlier in the floor, she'd insisted on trying to fight one of the minotaurs. She'd said something about "helping" that Terry hadn't bothered to listen to. He thought it was a bad idea, but she'd had one of those determined looks that people sometimes got when they were about to make terrible choices.

Okay, he didn't know if that last part applied to everyone, but she definitely got that determined look just before bad choices. Since he hadn't wanted to spend precious hours arguing with her about it, he'd given in. He'd spared one minotaur and let her try to fight it. That had been a brief encounter. She'd done better than he'd expected by not getting hideously injured in the first five seconds. It was still obvious that she was out of her depth when her first attack also turned out to be her last attack. After that, it was all defense. He'd let it go on until she couldn't just pretend it had been bad luck, or that the sun got in her third eye, or some equally ridiculous excuse. Then, he'd stepped in and killed it.

Even then, she'd seemed put out, which baffled Terry. She was stronger now than most of the adventurers he'd met so far. Definitely in the rank three range. Maybe even closing in on that hazy threshold that separated rank three from rank two. He'd never gotten a good explanation of how the Guild decided that stuff, so he wasn't sure. He'd kind of been expecting to get a magical colonoscopy to determine his rank when he joined the guild. There hadn't been anything like that. Did they just give those ranks based on whatever the adventurers managed to kill? Seemed like a great way to lose recruits to him, but whatever.

As for Kelima's annoyance that she couldn't kill the minotaurs… So what if she couldn't fight these specific dungeon monsters toe-to-toe? Terry doubted that there were more than a handful of adventurers who could solo these things. Once again, he thought that a properly balanced team could probably do it, but even that might be stretching things. They'd have the same problem he did, in that they'd have to control the numbers that got close enough to use melee weapons. They'd definitely need a powerful ranged fighter for that.

"What are you doing?" asked Kelima.

"Hmmm. What?" asked Terry, shaking himself free of his thoughts.

"I asked what you're doing. You've been standing there and staring off into space. All while that thing dripped blood on your boots for like three straight minutes."

Terry looked down at the minotaur head he was holding by one horn. It had been the last one in the most recent wave, and he'd beheaded it. He looked a little farther down and, yes, the toes of his boots were now covered in bright red minotaur blood. Terry heaved a little sigh and tossed the head onto the ground. There was nothing to do now but wait around for the bodies to disappear and leave source stones behind. Terry had made that Kelima's job. It wasn't exactly an equal distribution of labor since she didn't do any of the actual fighting, but at least she was contributing somehow.

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"How much longer do you think?" asked the girl as she nudged a minotaur corpse with her toe.

"A couple more minutes?" guessed Terry. "These ones break down slower than the monsters from the earlier floors."

"No," said Kelima with a hint of laughter, "I meant to finish this floor. I'd really like to get back outside where we can at least eat the stuff we kill."

"Do my ears deceive me?" asked Terry, perking up. "Are you yearning for some delicious, grilled murder-bird?"

"Of course, you remember that."

"You say that like I don't remember other things."

"Are you saying that you do?"

"Of course, I do."

"Okay," said a smug Kelima. "What's my mother's name?"

"Uh," said Terry, drawing a blank.

"Okay, here's an easier one. What's my surname?"

Terry stared at Kelima's triumphant face for a few seconds before he said, "So, about that murder-bird."

"I knew it!" she shrieked, pointing a finger at him. "You don't remember!"

"I remember the important things," said a defensive Terry.

"We've been traveling together for weeks. I almost got killed by demons, who you then invited to go back with us, and now we've faced death together in a dungeon."

"Yeah," said Terry suspiciously.

"And you don't think it's important to remember my whole name?"

"Did you ever tell me your whole name?" asked Terry after a burst of inspiration.

While he was quite certain that he'd heard her last name, she was a noble. That meant that she probably had, at minimum, one middle name. If her parents were particularly pretentious, she might have four or five. And he was certain she'd never told him those. Based on the startled look Kelima wore, it seemed that she had just realized that as well.

"That's not the—" she started to say.

"Oh look, they've disintegrated," said Terry, gesturing at where the bodies had been. "Get to collecting."

Kelima shot him a look and said, "We're not done discussing this."

Terry gave her a great, beaming smile and said, "Of course, we are. What possible motive could I have for indulging that topic again?"

"You're such an ass," muttered Kelima as she started searching the area for the source stones.

"Oh," said Terry a few minutes later. "I just realized."

"Did you finally remember my name?"

"Naturally not," said Terry with a dismissive wave of the hand. "I never answered your original question. Not that much longer. These things have been getting stronger and coming in bigger groups. I have to imagine that we're getting close to whatever cave or pasture they live in."

"Don't you mean houses?"

Terry stared at her blankly and shrugged.

"Sure. Why not? We're getting closer to their houses," he said while throwing up some finger quotes.

"I wasn't being facetious. They have clothes and weapons. There's probably a village of them nearby."

"That would be awkward," said Terry.

"Why?" asked Kelima.

Terry had been thinking about his earlier belief that there were no minotaur wives and kids. Even if they were just dungeon constructs with no real existences of their own, he didn't like the idea of killing minotaurs in front of their families. He damn sure didn't want to find out that he had to exterminate the entire village to beat this floor. That would be some next-level fucked up. Then again, this was the same dungeon that had thrown a cockroach queen and spider-goats at them. Mood soured, he started walking in the direction the last wave had come from.

"No reason," answered Terry. "Let's get moving. I'm ready to be done with this dungeon crap."

They trudged in silence for most of an hour. Kelima had finally realized that when he got into one of those kinds of moods, talking was not what Terry wanted. The closer they got to what Terry thought was going to be the final battle of this floor and dungeon, the more unhappy he got. He kept imagining little minotaurs looking up at him with sad little cow eyes, and then trying to stab him in the junk because he'd murdered their dads. So, when they reached their destination, Terry let out an explosive breath and shouted in happiness.

"Oh, thank Christ!"

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