“Uhh, should we go get lunch, then?”
“Yeah, let’s go!”
Today was the couple’s very first date. They’d first decided at the end of last summer that they would go out. They’d had a fight in spring, and it had taken a long time for them to make up. They were each able to confirm that they felt something special for one another, but hadn’t quite been able to define that feeling until Chris, of all people, prompted them. That the words had come from him had been a surprise to everyone, but this was what he’d told them:
“If you both feel strongly for one another, you should make those feelings clear. Otherwise, it’ll take more than twenty years for you to start going out, like it did with us.”
Allen and Sara had to admit the words were convincing coming from Chris, but Sara had a hard time obeying his advice.
Her feelings were complicated due to her memories of her life in Japan, but when she’d been upfront with Allen about this, he’d said in response, “Would you not go out with anyone unless they’re Liam’s age, then? Or Chris’s? Josef’s?”
Sara had gotten a far-off look in her eyes for a moment when she realized how few men there were around her that could serve as hypotheticals. When she considered who’d be a good fit for her at her age in her last life, though, Chris was a little too old and Liam was actually younger than her. Josef was out of the question. Actually, she’d heard Liam had gotten married the year before, which was a great relief to her, and Josef was a married man himself, as hard as that was to believe. But even if they had all been single, they wouldn’t be a good fit for her since she was a teenager now. However, Allen had no compunctions about Sara’s mental age and couldn’t understand why she did.
“Forget all that complicated stuff and please just go out with me, with marriage in mind.”
When he said that to her face, she realized she had no reason to say no.
“I would be glad to.”
And so they’d officially become a couple. That said, they’d pretty much always been together even before that, so nothing really changed about their relationship. Sara had no complaints about this, but Allen was starting to get antsy by the time they got back to Hydrangea from the capital that fall. And so, he had finally asked her out on a real date.
“Want to go on a date in the dungeon? I think the climate’s perfect right about now on the bottom floor. We can take lunches and make it a picnic.”
“In the dungeon...?”
It was just like Allen to make a not-at-all romantic suggestion, Sara thought with some chagrin, but she ultimately agreed since the bottom floor in Hydrangea’s dungeon was similar to the Dark Mountain, and so she liked being down there.
“I bet it’d be lovely to relax on those hills to the right of the entrance,” Sara commented.
“We’ve both been working pretty hard every day. I think it’d be nice to relax every once in a while.”
They’d invited Kuntz, but he’d declined with a, “I’m not going along on your date,” and so the two of them set off on their own.
As they walked, Sara kept a small barrier around herself while Allen punched away any horned rabbits and hellhounds that came flying at them. It was the sort of stroll only the two of them could have, and Sara found it pretty fun.
Maybe it was because they’d already spent six years together, but they never ran out of things to talk about—dungeons, places she’d been, the difficulties she’d faced, the things that she’d enjoyed—and as they walked down to the bottom of the dungeon with smiles plastered on their faces, the Hunters from Hydrangea who they passed shot them exasperated looks, those who had only arrived there recently doing double takes. The humor of this only amused Sara all the more, and between everything, it felt like they arrived at the bottom of the dungeon—the sixteenth floor—in no time at all.
“Oh wow! No matter how many times I see it, I can’t help but be struck by how much this place really is like the Dark Mountain.”
Wyverns flew in the sky, and a herd of elk moved in the distance. Straight ahead of them, mountain wolves loitered, pondering whether there was any way they could get a bite out of Sara and Allen.
“Okay, let’s use our physical strengthening to race to the hill on the right and see who gets there first!”
“That’s not fair!”
“Ha ha ha!”
“Wait!”
Allen must have gone easy on her, because they reached the hill at the same time. The pair flopped down on the grass, breathing hard, and looked up at the sky together.
“The sky’s so blue.”
“It’s probably just the ceiling of the dungeon, though.”
“Such a realist! Oh, a wyvern.”
Sara hurriedly expanded her barrier.
“Gyeee!”
Wham! The wyvern crashed into her barrier and slid to the ground.
“Mmm, I still would really prefer not to kill them... I wonder if there’s some way I could stop wyverns from attacking me altogether,” Sara grumbled as she put the wyvern away in her storage bag before the mountain wolves could get to it.
“All I can think is that we’re lucky to be alive. And if it hadn’t hit your barrier, I’d probably have had to kill it anyway.”
“We’re in a dungeon, so I know I can’t just cry like I did when I was a kid, but still...”
Sara had no interest in killing living things, but her barrier reflected monsters’ attacks back at them, so they ended up dead when they collided with it. But dungeons were where monsters lived, which Sara knew when she entered them, so she had to accept the fact that doing so would mean causing them harm.
“Worrying about that is just what you do, Sara. It’s who you are, so I don’t think you need to change that. But if it really does bother you, maybe you could come up with some kind of solution. You could color it like Kuntz’s shield or something.”
“Color it, eh? Brown, like a wooden shield, or... No, wait...” Sara gasped, coming to a realization. “I feel like fish are silver on the bottom so that they look like the surface of the water when seen from below, and dark on the top so that they look like the water from the sky. So...”
Sara spun around, observing her surroundings. “I just need to make my barrier look like grass from the sky, right?”
“I’ll go look from the top of that tree! Try it out, Sara!”
“Yeah! Err, it couldn’t be that easy, though, could it?”
Tigers had stripes so that they didn’t stand out in the forest, and military camouflage was the same. The barrier couldn’t just be a uniform green—she’d have to make it a complicated pattern.
“Sara! I’m ready!” Allen called out from the top of a nearby tree. When had he even gotten up there?
“All right, I’ll just try a flat color for now. Grass green! Go!” Sara turned the top half of her barrier to the same green of the grass in front of her. “How’s it look?”
“I can’t see you anymore! But it doesn’t look all that natural. It looks like someone left a green cloth lying out. Sara! Watch out!”
Sara froze when Allen called out to her tensely.
“Gyeee!”
She could hear a wyvern, but it sounded far away. It was all green above Sara, so she couldn’t see it, but it was probably getting closer.
Sara stayed still so her barrier wouldn’t move and glanced over to the tree Allen had climbed. She’d be fine since she had her barrier, but she was worried about the wyvern noticing Allen there. But it looked like he was hiding skillfully enough in the branches that he couldn’t be seen from above.
“Gyeee!”
They waited for a time, and then finally the wyvern went off somewhere else.
“I guess that worked?”
Allen slid down the tree and came over to Sara with a big smile on his face. “Sara! It worked!”
“Oh, thank goodness...” Sara sat down, relieved.
“It definitely saw where you were, but then it turned around and left, so I think it couldn’t find you,” Allen said, having been observing the wyvern carefully from his position in the tree.
“If it saw where I was, then I guess it must have looked unnatural.”
“Maybe it saw us before and came over to check, but couldn’t find its prey, so it left.”
Sara did feel like this was a likely explanation.
“Maybe it won’t look as unnatural if I don’t make it as big. But there’s rocks and exposed dirt and stuff in the dungeon too, so I’ll have to figure out what to do while I’m on the move.”
“What you need is a barrier that adjusts to what you’re walking on, but that doesn’t sound like an easy function to add.”
He was right. The barrier could only do what Sara could picture it doing. It wasn’t all-powerful.
Then, they heard heavy footsteps echoing in the distance.
“Uh-oh. There’s a herd of elk coming this way. The wyvern must have spooked them. Go hide on the other side of that tree!”
“Got it!”
Allen told her to hide behind a tree, but Sara gave it some thought and climbed up one like he had before. She was thrilled to have a body capable of climbing up a tree whenever she wanted to.
With her barrier, there was really no need for Sara to hide simply for the sake of remaining unharmed, but she climbed up the tree in order to avoid injuring the elk. Plus, up here, she could easily see Allen on the ground.