Hinamizawa had leveled up to 80+ in the meantime and had some free time so we went wandering around the lower parts of payon dungeon, where we hunted a bunch of Sohees:
We went a level lower (Payon 5 I think?) where we unfortunately got mobbed by one too many ninetails:
I didn't even notice in the middle of the chaos that my sage had died, whoops.
Next we decided to see what these "Gramps" quests were all about. There are two gramps quests you can get (per level range) and you want to accept them both from the board on the very left, then Grandpa will warp you to the hunting grounds where you need to kill 400 (yes, 400) of each of those enemies. Fortunately you have the whole rest of the month to do it...
The two monsters on deck for this time were Magmarings and Banaspatys, both fire element, so my Sage was mainly just casting and autocasting cold bolts here, while Hinamizawa was busy using bash as well as grand cross.
I managed to figure out how to imbue their weapon with cold element, which probably helps as it does an additional 50 (or 75?) percent damage. Still, it doesn't go super fast, especially because there are other mob types on this map as well and we're still only really mostly doing single-target dps.
As an experiment we tried having my soul linker herd a bunch of enemies and then seeing if Hinamizawa could grand cross them all to death. This was the result:
I mean, it =sorta= worked....a bit. The Banaspatys went down super fast, but the other enemy types, especially the Anatolians, were a problem.
Around this time we also took a detour down to the basement of the main office in prontera. Here you can join one of 4 "clans", which basically give you a free permanent stat buff which gives +1 to two stats as well as some extra max HP and SP. Nothing special, but hey, free stats, who can argue with that?
At the end of the night we had taken down 50+ Banaspatys, so like 1/8th of the way there, not bad. The Magmarings are a little slower to progress, but yeah, it's slow but steady.
