Feeling the attention of what was close to three hundred adventurers turning towards her due to the commotion she inevitably ended up causing charging through the group of adventurers about to reach the place she had been hiding, Scaly didn't dare slow down for even a second as she continued charging forward using wind magic to increase her own speed in the process. Understanding that the second she slowed down, those adventurers still in a state of confusion, not understanding what was happening, would recover and team up to attack her.
Before any of that could happen, she wanted to get through the entrance leading down to the fourth floor of the dungeon. A goal that she ultimately accomplished with little to no effort, as the few stronger adventurers who would originally have blocked her path had found themselves in a discussion about descending to the fourth floor with the leaders of the other three adventurer groups away from the passage itself. Allowing her to slip through by essentially pushing aside a few B Rank Adventurers who had been blocking her path.
"Wha- Dragon!? It's here!?"
"Stop it! Fast!"
"Too late… It has already made it through and should be on its way to the fourth floor. Damnit… Looks like we won't be able to avoid going to the fourth floor…"
In the end, the only thing Scaly heard as she slipped through the adventurers and began her descend down the familiar looking spiral staircase a short distance away from the carved stone entrance was the complaints of the adventurers who realized that they would have to go to the fourth floor if they wanted to chase after her.
Of course, though she had made it through the most dangerous part of the passage to the fourth floor, she didn't dare lower her guard nor slow down, as those adventurers would soon enough come chasing after her.
For her to ensure her own safety and avoid any future problems from the adventurers chasing after her, she would have to reach the fifth floor of the Swirling Sands Dungeon, as only that floor provided enough of a deterrence that even S Rank Adventurers wouldn't dare to chase after her.
Problem was, though she knew the fifth floor could provide her with a certain level of protection against the adventurers chasing after her, she also understood that there should be a reason why even S Rank Adventurers feared the place and she herself might not entirely be safe on the fifth floor of the dungeon.
At the very least, compared to the fourth floor of the dungeon that seemed relatively simple to handle with her current strength, the monsters on the fifth floor should be strong enough that even she would have a difficult time dealing with them.
Bad as this might seem on the surface, she wasn't exactly feeling scared about reaching the fifth floor of the dungeon and was more so feeling excited about getting to the fifth floor of the dungeon. After all, for the fifth floor to be dangerous even to her meant that the strength of the different monsters found throughout the fifth floor of the dungeon were almost definitely at the S Rank with countless other slightly weaker monsters around.
In other words, a perfect place for her to rapidly increase her strength. Not much different from the chaotic battlefield she had encountered in the dreamscape- Well… Maybe not at the same level as that, but at least it should be a place where she would be able to increase her own level by more than one a day.
That aside, she first had to get through the fourth floor of the Swirling Sands Dungeon and find a passage to the fifth floor of the dungeon before she could start focusing her attention back on increasing her own level and strength, something that should be somewhat difficult to accomplish according to the information she had managed to gather on the fourth floor of the dungeon from listening to the adventurers talking about it amongst themselves.
From that information, outside of getting a general picture of what the fourth floor of the dungeon looked like, she also came to understand that finding a passage leading down to the fifth floor of the dungeon was incredibly difficult. Not because the passages were located in dangerous places where powerful monsters resided, but instead because the passages themselves shifted around the fourth floor and didn't stay in one set location.
In a way, one of the things that had deterred further expansion into the Swirling Sands Dungeon according to what these adventurers had talked about. Leaving it in a state far less developed compared to the far smaller scale dungeon that was the Howling Caverns Dungeon she had been born inside of, was the unique shifting passages on the fourth floor of the dungeon.
Still, this alone wouldn't have been enough to stop expansion on the third floor and later down into the fourth floor itself, as passages connecting the fourth and third floor were fixed.
Instead, what deterred this kind of expansion was not just the sandstorm found on the third floor of the dungeon that deterred most adventurers from spending their time hunting down the unique monsters found on the third floor of the dungeon due to the difficulty of traversing the third floor, but also the fact that the third floor itself didn't have anything of value beyond the uniquely venomous scorpions and hunting them came with a level of danger even for S Rank Adventurers. Deterring most weaker adventurers from exploring the third floor of the dungeon and instead sticking to the second floor of the dungeon where one could easily earn a living with the help of sand vision powder.
All this put together, the development of the Swirling Sands Dungeon had essentially stopped on the second floor, with only a few outposts on the third floor and not a single one on the fourth floor, a fact that caused most weaker adventurers to not want to descend to the fourth floor, as the path of retreat meant one would be required to climb all the way back to the third floor before seeking out one of the few outposts there.
The danger alone spoke to why adventurers below the A Rank rarely ever stepped beyond the second floor of the Swirling Sands Dungeon.
With all of this in mind, Scaly felt certain that the adventurers chasing after her would give up after she got to the fifth floor of the dungeon, as it was not just dangerous, but also far away from any outpost where these adventurers could safely rest without worrying about attacks from surrounding monsters.
And as she thought about her plan of action regarding how to get rid of the adventurers chasing after her, she officially broke through the darkness that had engulfed her as she began descending the spiral staircase and finally saw the fourth floor of the dungeon in person for the first time.
Starting from the spiral staircase itself that was thousands of meters above the ground from where she had emerged, she saw a large desert just below, but different from the endless desert on the first floor or the sea of sand on the second floor only broken up by a few islands in the shape of oasis and the third floor that was a copy paste of the first floor with a permanent sandstorm around to increase the difficulty of travelling through the desert, the desert on the fourth floor didn't stretch on forever.
Instead, the desert came to a stop as a towering mountain range appeared in the distance, around which several smaller valleys filled with life and what would undoubtedly be powerful monsters could be seen.
Far from keeping the desert theme that dominated the three other floors of the dungeon, the fourth floor of the dungeon seemed to be partly covered by a desert that was broken up by several smaller mountain ranges with valleys of life hidden away inside of them where monsters would undoubtedly be far more abundant compared to the desert that surrounded them.
But when it came to finding a passage leading to the fifth floor of the dungeon, she was helpless, as from what little she had learnt about these shifting passages from the adventurers, they didn't linger around the same place for more than a few minutes and came in all kinds of shapes and forms.
One might manifest in the shape of a sand whirlpool in the middle of the desert, while another was a normal looking cave leading to staircase that took one down to the fifth floor of the dungeon, while another emerged as a hole below a lake in the middle of a hidden valley.
No matter what form the passage to the fifth floor took, one thing that was certain, was the simple fact that none of them lingered around for more than an hour, with most not even staying around for five minutes…