“Don’t push yourself, Sara.”
“I know. I’m okay, Nelly.”
By the time she’d gotten used to her nickname, Sara wasn’t too bothered anymore by the idea of using Nelly’s name, and the cottage had gotten a lot tidier. The goddess had told her that her purpose here was to absorb the world’s excess mana, but Sara couldn’t tell whether or not she was actually doing that, so she had no sense that she was accomplishing anything. As a former working adult, it didn’t sit right with her to be eating without doing any work, so she’d asked Nelly for some things to do. Those things? Tidying the cottage and preparing their food.
“Whatever you can do is fine.”
At first, Nelly had been hesitant to accept Sara’s help, but just as Sara suspected, housework wasn’t really her strong suit. In fact, Sara would say the woman was hopelessly bad at it. She only cleaned her home enough to have a place to sit and sleep. All she ate was bread, dried meat, and fruit. That first day, there hadn’t even been anywhere for Sara to sleep.
“There should be a spare room or two...”
“‘Should be’? Isn’t this where you live?”
“Well, I don’t use any of the rooms I don’t need.”
Eventually, they found two guest rooms to the left, between the front door and the kitchen area. “First time I’ve seen these,” had been Nelly’s commentary as she gave them a curious look-over.
“Just how little interest do you have in your own life?” Sara had asked her, astounded.
Fortunately, the beds and furniture in the rooms had been covered, so she was able to use them without worrying about dust on her first day there.
When Sara woke up the next day, Nelly had already gone hunting. Sara was nervous at first, but she quickly decided to get cleaning, since it would be for her benefit too.
“It’s so nice to not get tired...”
Sara wasn’t particularly adept at housework, but she enjoyed tidying and cooking. Since she got tired so quickly, however, she’d never done it to her heart’s content before, so now she could really appreciate having a body that didn’t get worn out at the drop of a hat.
However, she wasn’t sure how long she’d be able to stay healthy on a diet of nothing but bread, dried meat, and fruit. She wasn’t going to demand miso and soy sauce and rice (and when she mentioned such things to Nelly, the Hunter just tilted her head in response, so maybe they didn’t even have them in this world), but on that first day, she’d stepped on some kind of bone. That meant that there were at least bones with meat on them in this world. And vegetables. Vegetables were a necessity.
There appeared to be some sort of magic stove, and the cottage was equipped with cooking implements, so she could at least do some amount of cooking here. A short lecture from Sara on food and the importance of nutrition was enough for Nelly to bring back some meat, vegetables, and spices on her next shopping trip.
Nelly spent her days subjugating monsters near the cottage on the Dark Mountain and went down to the town at the base of the mountain every ten days or so to sell the materials she obtained from the monsters and restock on necessities. It took a full day for her to get to the town and a full day to get back. Since she spent a day there in the middle, that meant that she was gone from the cottage for three days every time she went shopping, which made Sara a little nervous at first. But she had lived alone on Earth, and it was safe in the cottage, surrounded by the protection field, so she quickly got used to it.
Every so often, there was a loud thud as something crashed into the protection field, but it couldn’t get inside, so it was safe... She hadn’t yet worked up the courage to ask what was making those sounds.
“I don’t want to go into town this frequently, honestly, but there’s a limit to how much can fit in one storage bag.”
Apparently, they weren’t like the bags with infinite capacity you might see in a fairy tale. Her bag filled up in ten days, so that was when she went to town to sell her materials.
Still, Sara’s eyes had lit up when she’d first seen the storage bag, so Nelly had politely explained, “You see ’em sometimes, right, Sara? Stealth slimes. You need stealth slime cores to make the magic stones used for storage bags, but even the biggest core can only make a bag that holds twenty wyverns or so.”
There were wyverns like the one she’d seen on her first day flying around all over the place, but they rarely came down to the ground, so apparently Nelly didn’t get many opportunities to take them down. She’d smiled about that day and said, “Made some good money off of that.”
But even if Sara had seen the creatures Nelly described, she had no knowledge at all about the monsters here. She went out to the deck at the front door every day and gazed at the area around the cottage, but all she saw were the same things she’d seen on that first day: wyverns, moose, mountain wolves. As for the slimes Nelly had just told her about...
“Are stealth slimes those things I see out of the corner of my eye sometimes that disappear as soon as I look?”
“Yeah. They’re all over the place, really, but they’re so quick, it’s hard to catch them. A swordsman basically has no chance and even casters have a hard time aiming at them, so they usually just torch the whole area around them. Or you find ’em in treasure chests in underground dungeons sometimes.”
For that reason, storage bags were very valuable; even small ones cost a lot.
There was another unfamiliar term, though. Underground dungeons? If there were underground dungeons, did that mean there were aboveground dungeons too? Sara wondered vaguely, but she had her hands full just inputting information about stealth slimes right now.
“Well, you can’t do much without one, so any Hunter worth their salt has one. As for me, I’m a good Hunter, so I’ve got the biggest kind you can get.”
Nelly was obviously fishing for a compliment, so Sara chuckled and told her how impressed she was. The unsociable impression Nelly had given off at first had faded as they’d gotten to know each other and Sara came to understand that she was just an awkward person. She was actually rather friendly, and even though she lived alone and didn’t chat much, Sara could tell that she enjoyed talking to her and being with her. If such an awkward person was bragging about herself, even humbly, of course Sara would answer her with as much praise as she could muster. That was how much she’d grown to care for Nelly.