I wrapped my stole around a tree branch and jumped upward. The matango funginoids couldn’t fly, so I decided to head straight for the Aluloona from above.
“Understood, Master. Allow me to provide support.”
Nanami was adept at every element of magic, including fire magic. While there were a fair number of the matango funginoids, they moved slowly, making it easy to target their weakness.
One of Nanami’s arrows made the matango funginoid in front of her go up in flames. From there, Ludie and Claris took charge of the funginoids that were trying to chase after me.
Once my momentum carried me right to the Aluloona, I used my Third Hand to smash apart its flower shield. Then I released the mana I had accumulated in my sheath and slashed the monster with my katana.
In RPGs, if two opponents posed a problem as a unit, all you had to do was take care of one of them first. At that point, your foe’s fighting strength would drop significantly.
With the Aluloona finally gone, Yukine was able to focus, and it wasn’t long before she had located the Matango.
While I figured the Matango had been making us hallucinate, it was powerless in the face of Yukine’s Mind’s Eye. She went up to a moss-covered rock and swung her naginata. When she did, the rock released white smoke as it began to change shape.
The smoke cleared, revealing a mushroom sliced clean in two.
“Takioooto, looks like it dropped something!”
Yuika approached me from behind. If I had to guess, she had probably stayed behind me in case I wasn’t able to fully defeat the Aluloona.
“What do you think this vial is for…? Bleraugh!”
Apparently, the Aluloona had left an item behind. Yuika had picked it up, only to immediately drop it and let out a cry unbefitting of an upstanding young lady like herself.
“A-are you okay?”
She picked up the item—a vial filled with a mysterious liquid—like she was handling sludge. Then she pinched her nose with one hand while handing it to me with the other.
“This reeeeeeeks!”
This was the fault of the smell the Aluloona gave off. To men, it was a nice fragrance, if not somewhat overly sweet. To women, it smelled completely different—utterly repulsive. This was completely in line with the game’s worldbuilding. Conversely, the Aluloon smelled nice for women and awful for men.
Actually, now that I thought about it, Yuika wasn’t trying to pawn off this smelly crap on me here, was she? Though it smelled good to me, so I didn’t especially mind.
“Please, Miss Yuika, calm yourself. At times like this, I recommend recalling a different smell. I know, why not imagine the scent of Master’s socks instead?”
“That’d be just as stinky! And I’ve never even smelled them before!”
“Why are you so sure they’re stinky when you’ve never actually sniffed them before, hmm?”
I was just asking the simple questions here. Smelly feet, huh…? I thought back to the events at Amaterasu Girls’ Academy.
“It’s fine, Takioto’s socks aren’t smelly.”
“Kousuke, Yuika, Nanami. And you, too, Yuika. Enough with the comedy routine; let’s be on our way.”
Urged on by Ludie, we tightened up and continued forward.
This wasn’t necessarily important or anything, but why had Yukine frozen up for a moment when the topic of my socks was brought up?
From there, we continued through the forest, battling several times along the way. After what must have been a few hours, we arrived at our destination.
“This time, it’s…ruins?”
We had come before a colossal tree growing atop some ruins. Or maybe it was the other way around, and we had stopped before some ruins that had been constructed around the base of a tree. Not that it really mattered.
“We basically just followed the road the whole way. Are we sure this is the right place?”
No need to worry, this was the right area. Though to be honest, there was one other place I wanted to go, too. If we had used a specific, more systematic progression route, we would’ve been able to find rare items and weapons.
Nevertheless, we didn’t have any time to spare on detours.
“This is probably fine. I’m not super well informed about the Sanctuary forest or anything, but I’ve heard there’s an entrance to some ruins wrapped up in giant tree roots.”
“Master, there’s traces of a campsite around here.”
At Nanami’s words, the mood instantly changed.
We went over to the spot she had pointed out and saw the remnants of a campfire and some scattered trash. I wanted to chew these people out for not picking up after themselves, but it wasn’t like the Church of the Malevolent Lord were the types to take littering seriously.
“It doesn’t appear much time has passed,” Nanami said, looking around the extinguished fire.
Judging by the footprints leading away from the fire, the followers had gone inside the ruins.
I took a moment to think. We hadn’t slept since we had gone out for ramen. We were definitely in a hurry, sure, but moving around nonstop was a ticket to mental and physical exhaustion.
“…Why don’t we talk about how we’re going to proceed first and use it as a bit of a break?”
Everyone nodded.
“Huh, it looks like any other dungeon inside,” Yuika remarked.
As one could imagine from looking at the entrance of a structure built around a massive tree, countless branches had penetrated the brick-lined walls of the ruins.
There were fewer obstacles in the dungeon as there had been in the forest, so it would probably be easier to fight here.
“Different monsters are gonna show up here, that’s why. Be careful.”
In the Sanctuary forest, the monsters tended to have a weakness to fire. Once you went into the ruins, however, there was a dramatic change in monster type.
“What’s that thing? A big squirrel?”
“Looks like it has a gemstone on its forehead, doesn’t it? I’ve seen one of those before. It’s a carbuncle, I believe.”
Claris was right; it was a carbuncle.
A monster with a red gemstone on its forehead. However, the color of the gemstone and the monster’s typing changed depending on the location. Visually, they looked downright adorable, but they were surprisingly strong, so underestimating them would get you knocked off your feet.
However, since one of their rare item drops was absolutely fantastic, they were also a monster worth farming, even over making progress with other events.
This time, for better or for worse, there was only one of them.
When the carbuncle noticed us, it retreated backward while summoning a magic circle. The moment the red gemstone on its forehead shined brightly and red particles enveloped its body, it released its magic.
“—!”
A flame shaped like a human hand. Perhaps because of the intense heat, the air around the hand seemed to shimmer.
As the spell hurtled toward us, Ludie met it with an Air Hammer.
A loud roar echoed across the area—the sound of the hand stopping her Air Hammer. Actually, it didn’t just stop it. The hand crushed the Air Hammer in its grip and even tossed it aside.
At the same time, a hot gust of wind blew right past my body.
“I don’t believe it…”
Ludie had been left dumbfounded by her spell being dismantled.
“Its attacks aren’t cute at all, are they? Takioto, what are we supposed to do about that thing?” Yuika asked.
“It does have a weakness to water.”
I could enchant my stole with the water element and punch it to a pulp, but before I could do so…
“I’ll go after it, then.”
…Yukine stepped out in front.
Water elemental magic was Yukine’s specialty, so she was the perfect for the job. She ran toward the flame hand, with Claris following after her.
Meanwhile…
“We should go over there. Yuika, let’s move in a pincer formation. Nanami, back us up.”
We sprang into action.
Nanami fired at the creature with her bow to prevent it from moving any further, while Yuika and I pressed in from the right and left.
I glanced over at Yukine and saw her swinging her naginata at the flame hand.
“Cascade.”
This certainly wasn’t a slashing technique of any sort. Her move slammed the opponent with sheer volume and terrifying force, like a colossal waterfall pelting the earth.
The attack, so unlike the usual slashes of her blade, struck the flame hand, constricting and crushing it with overwhelming power and presence. Her target vanished with an explosive sound.
“Even during our training sessions, I hope to never get hit with that,” Yuika murmured.
“Yuika, forget that, watch the carbuncle!”
I turned Yuika’s focus back toward the monster.
While carbuncle weren’t very skilled at melee combat, they were shrewd, nimble, and great with magic. Their natural temperament was to fire off spells from long range while retreating, making them a headache to fight, and there were some occasions when they would fire off a single attack before fleeing from battle altogether. Their escape chance wasn’t especially high, and compared to some other egregious examples like the Liquid Metal Sl**e, they basically never fled at all. Though boy was it irritating when they did.
Regardless, their regular tactic was to keep their distance while firing off long-range magic, so there was a chance slow characters who were weak to magic would get trounced before they could do their thing. That meant the characters who had a hard time with them had a really hard time with them.
“Takioto, it’s heading your way!”
The pincer attack seemed to be the right call, as our foe was charging at me without anywhere left to run. Jumping up high in front of me, it wreathed its tail in flames and swung it down with a vertical spin.
I blocked the blow with my water-empowered Third Hand and punched the carbuncle with my Fourth Hand. Then the monster disappeared, as though there had been nothing there in the first place.
“Takioto, watch out!” Yuika yelled.
She didn’t need to worry, though. I wasn’t sure if it was thanks to all my experience up until now or my Mind’s Eye skill, but I had known from the very beginning where it had gone. If anything, I had been waiting for my enemy to make its move.
The carbuncle swung down its flaming tail at me, and I launched my katana from its sheath.
No items dropped from the carbuncle as it dissolved into magic particles. If we had been in the game, the current event wouldn’t have progressed any further from this point, so I could’ve farmed them as much as I wanted, but I didn’t have much of a choice this time.
“Let’s keep going.”
To be honest, I would’ve liked to collect one of the items in this dungeon, too, but I’d have to save that for later. I could always give up on it if obtaining it truly proved impossible. If push came to shove, there was another item elsewhere that could act as a substitute.
More importantly, we needed to pursue the Church of the Malevolent Lord.