My Life In A Fantasy, Women-Dominated World-Chapter 43: Good Morning

"Good morning..."

I murmured back subconsciously, wincing and rubbing my eyes as I could feel small amounts of dirt in the corner.

My body felt a little sore all over, exhausted from last day’s never ending turn of events.

Lovemaking with Claire in the morning, then the labyrinth dive, then with Nancy, a lot had happened.

And then the call with Eva resurfaced, making me turn around and gaze at the owner of the sweet morning greeting.

Claire was lying on the bed, tilted towards me with a warm smile on her lips.

"You were that tired hmm?" she grinned as she gazed at me, curled up on the couch without any blanket over me.

Hell, I now realized that I was sleeping with my shoes still on.

I hadn’t realized how quickly sleep caught me, and ended up dozing off just like that.

"Yeah," I nodded casually.

"Mmhm," Claire chuckled, "I guess Eva’s sabotage was useful for once."

I was tempted to ask, ’does she do this often?’ but then realized that I should probably know that answer, so I held back.

Instead, I remembered about the news that Eva had told me to watch.

I planned to do it at night but then ended up falling asleep, but oh well. I could do it now.

"What are you doing?" Claire hummed sweetly when she saw me getting up from the couch.

"News." I yawned while stretching my sore and stiff body.

And from the corner of my eyes, I saw Claire frowned a little when I mentioned it.

Obviously connecting the dots that I knew some things about the labyrinth.

"Did you talk to Eva?" she guessed.

"Yep, after you slept I called her to ask about the sleep inducement, and learned a few things. But she didn’t clarify much and told me to ask you later."

Hiding some details for good measure, I smiled back at her while turning on the TV.

"Hmm what did you learn from her?"

"That our labyrinth’s not the one hit and that it could’ve been a job of some other race, and also your team was hired or something."

Claire frowned more, "What about hiring?"

She clearly wanted to be the one to tell me this.

"Hired by the government to assist nearby cities, she said I will understand when I see news. But I slept soon after and didn’t check the news."

Claire sighed deeply, and picked up a remote that was kept near her bed, "Catch." she said before tossing it to me.

After fumbling around the controls for a bit, the news finally played on the TV.

"The entire region of Winzervill is in a state of turmoil as many labyrinths were reported to be broken despite being Tamed!"

On the TV, a young looking handsome man was holding a microphone, looking panicked and anxious as he reported.

"Countless monsters have assaulted the cities, causing many casualties! I am so deeply regretful about the number of lives lost... My colleague will carry over from here."

The reporting man stifled as he struggled to hold back his tears, gesturing towards his right.

Beside him, a young female was sitting calmly with another mic in her slender hands.

Taking the cue, she raised the mic and breathed calmly.

"As every raider and civilians know, labyrinths are considered to be safe when they are in their tamed state, a state where they could only be accessed and there is no risk of monsters breaching the dimensions.

Our government, guilds, mercs and even the talented soloists, they all work hard to clear the labyrinths and conquer the labyrinth cores in order to achieve the tamed state."

She took a deep breath to level her voice as she continued:

"Yet. That rule was broken when throughout the Winzervill region, many tamed labyrinths were breached by monsters–" She glanced at her colleague, who was sitting with faint tears in his eyes, "As mentioned by my partner."

He nodded, pointing at a big LCD screen that was playing in their background.

"These are some footage of some cities, captured by our brave citizens."

Both the reporters moved a little away from the view, looking at the videos as well.

In the first video, the quality was very blurry and filled with loud screams.

It started with a crazy camera shake, before focusing onto the front as if the recorder was being pushed around while moving.

"M-Monsters are coming, run!" she screamed into her phone, zooming in the distance where the labyrinth’s staircase was dug.

And from the stairs, many kinds of monsters were crawling up.

There were fantasy monsters that I have heard of on Earth, such as goblins, kobolds, gnolls, and even the direwolves.

But if that wasn’t enough, the recording was cut short, jumping directly to the sight of huge chimeras and giant orcs walking up the stairs with their bodies swaying and weapons resting on their shoulders.

I gulped, turning to look at Claire for some clarifications.

Was this how a labyrinth break looked like?

And although no question was asked, she understood it. 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

"Haah... yes, Aaron. That’s a full fledged labyrinth breach." she said in a grim tone, "Not only that, it was a very famous labyrinth of Gammora city, of tier 2 difficulty. There are monsters that even I cannot defeat, with or without my team."

Or in other words, those monsters can squash me like a bug.

Though... tiers?

I didn’t hesitate to ask her about the tiers.

"You don’t even know that..." she grumbled, looking at me as if I was the dumbest man she has ever seen, "Can you remind me why I took you on the labyrinth dive again?"

I grinned in response, "Maybe because you were jealous that I went with another group?"

Claire blinked, closing her eyes as she took a deep breath before skipping over the subject like it never existed.

"Normally there are 3 tiers of labyrinths that we know of," she put up three fingers, "Obviously, one, two and three." She closed them one by one till only one finger was left open.

"Tier one can be said to be the hardest to tame, as they are up to 100 floors deep, and let me tell you, the difficulty ain’t linear, it’s exponential."

Now she raised one more finger.

"Tier two are also pretty hard, as they have 75 floors."

She raised one more finger.

"Tier three, well obviously, it’s like ours. 50 floors."

I nodded in understanding, "So... your team is hired to–" I glanced at the playing news, where different clips of monster outbreaks were being shown:

"To clear out these monsters?"