I was certain that the wound was sapping Touya’s stamina, and if we didn’t move fast, new foes might appear. I racked my brain for anything in our magic bags that might be of use, but maybe because the stress was wearing on my nerves, I couldn’t come up with anything.
While the rest of us were frozen, Metea sprang into action. “Overthinking is bad! Let’s just stick this in for now!”
She took out the iron baton—really just a plain iron rod—that Touya had once used as a weapon. Making skillful use of the lever principle, she thrust it between the rope and the cliff.
“Now the rope won’t rub on the rock, so come on, let’s go!”
“Great thinking, Metea!” I exclaimed. “All right. Let’s do this!”
We all had the Enhanced Muscles skill, so Touya’s weight was manageable as long as we kept our feet firmly planted. All of us worked together, and soon, he appeared over the edge of the cliff.
Touya breathed a sigh of relief the moment his feet were back on solid ground. “Thanks for saving me.” With an irritated look, he reached for the flying fish, still embedded in his shoulder. “This damn fish!”
But Haruka stopped him before he could pull it out. “Wait, Touya! I’ll take care of it for you. Please just sit down.”
“...Right. Sorry.”
Touya obeyed, and Haruka circled around behind him. She took out some cloth and pressed it against the wound before pulling the wriggling fish out in one swift motion.
“Argh...”
As Touya writhed in pain, Haruka pressed down on his shoulder, then cast magic over it. “Cure. Purification.”
Touya’s whole body relaxed, and he placed his hands behind him, then took a deep breath. “Shit, I feel a lot better now. Thanks. I really thought I was a goner.”
Yuki came over and removed Touya’s shoulder armor. As she inspected it, she suddenly yelled in surprise.
“Dang, this is scary! I can’t believe that fish just went all the way through the leather.” She beckoned at me. “Come take a look, Nao!”
I walked over to join her. There were huge holes in both the shoulder armor and the acton underneath. The chain mail was undamaged, but the tip of the fish’s snout must have passed between the links.
Chain mail was intrinsically somewhat weak to piercing attacks, but Gantz-san had made our mail with masterful precision, so only the tip of an ordinary spear could pierce it. We had been confident that it would be adequate as long as we weren’t attacked by a weapon as sharp and slender as a needle. It was unfortunate that these foes had a natural advantage against mail. The most important sections of our chain mail were reinforced with lava boar leather and partial plate, but the flying fish’s snout had bypassed all of that. As Yuki had said, it was scary to think about.
Touya sighed as he examined the giant hole in his shoulder armor. “This is expensive, high-quality leather. I honestly can’t believe it ended up like this. Man, I’m glad my shoulder didn’t get completely destroyed.”
I pointed with my chin at the cliff below us. “Yeah, the flying fish even got stuck in the rock. They’re tough, no doubt about it.”
They seemed unable to extricate themselves from the wall, so the way they were wriggling around helplessly, they looked pretty pathetic, but now that I knew what happened when they hit a human being, I would never underestimate or laugh at them. Even the wriggling motion served to enlarge wounds and exacerbate blood loss.
Natsuki was examining the flying fish that Haruka had pulled out of Touya’s shoulder. She held it up, handling it carefully, and pointed. “Its snout is barbed.”
“Let’s see,” I said. Metea and I went to join Natsuki, and I immediately saw what she meant. “Yikes. Yeah, you’re right.”
“It looks like it hurts a whole awful lot,” said Metea.
From a distance, the snout resembled a needle, but it had jagged barbs all over it—presumably the reason it could work its body back and forth and dig itself deeper into the wound without falling out.
“I guess that’s why it stayed stuck in you even wriggling around like that,” I said.
“Yeah. It was really painful.”
To treat a wound like that, you had to pull the fish out forcefully, enlarging the hole. It hadn’t been an issue for our party because we had access to healing magic, but it would have taken a lot of time for a wound like that to heal naturally, and it would almost certainly have left a nasty scar.
“Let’s see. The actual name of this thing is ‘flying needlefish,’” said Touya. “It comes flying out of the water and stabs targets with its snout. If you get stabbed by one, the wound keeps getting worse and larger, and if you don’t have a way to staunch the bleeding, it can lead to a massive hemorrhage.”
Having experienced that himself, Touya grimaced as he read the results of his Appraisal to us. In fact, had healing magic not been available, Touya would probably have lost the use of his right arm for a while. It would have been a severe blow to our fighting strength as a party.
“Third Eye says it has two skills called Flight and Pierce,” I said, “which do exactly what you’d expect.”
It was possible that the shoal of flying needlefish was just a type of terrain effect restricted to this part of the dungeon, but it had attacked us at a very inconvenient time.
“By the way, they’re apparently edible,” said Yuki. “You can sell the snout part too.”
Natsuki paused as if unsure how to react to that statement, then said, “Let’s gut it before we decide what to do next.”
In spite of her apparent uncertainty, she quickly chopped off the needlefish’s head and began to drain its blood. Decapitated, it just looked like a somewhat elongated flying fish. But does it actually taste good?
Metea looked up at me and cocked her head. “Does it taste good?”
Though she and I were obviously thinking along the same lines, none of us had an answer for her.
“We can try it out and see after we return home, Metea-chan,” said Natsuki. “We may be able to make some good broth with it.”
“Broth? Uh, I dunno about that, but I’m looking forward to it!”
Metea had been on high alert just a little while ago, but now she laughed in excitement. Clearly she’d succeeded in calming herself.
Her sister also seemed to be looking forward to trying it; Mary murmured the words “A new fish!” to herself.
Oh yeah, flying fish are supposed to be good for broth, right? Seeing the sisters excited is making me excited too.
“So the body is edible,” said Haruka, “but I suspect the snout would serve well as the tip of a javelin.”
She split the snout from the head that Natsuki had discarded, cleansed it of Touya’s blood with the Purification spell, and then flicked it with her finger. She frowned—it seemed to be very hard—and passed it over to Yuki.
“Yeah, that would probably be a good use for this,” said Yuki. “We could use it in other weapons too, like arrows.”
“Arrows...” Haruka mused. “It might be worth a try.”
Yuki took the snout back from Haruka and tapped it with a kodachi. “It wouldn’t cost us anything to experiment,” she said, sounding a little exasperated. “It’s really hard—hard enough to pierce rock, and that’s without us even modifying it!”
It took a lot of work to drive even pitons and spikes into the dungeon walls, whereas the flying fish had easily lodged themselves in the rock. That meant that they weren’t just sharp but insanely sturdy.
“If they can furnish us with food and the raw materials for weapons, flying needlefish may be extremely useful,” said Haruka. “That being the case, let’s retrieve the remaining ones as well.”
She pointed at the needlefish that were still stuck in the walls. They were squirming around but had yet to free themselves.
“Like sitting ducks, except they’re fish!” Yuki laughed. “I wonder if they’re suicidal monsters—like, they try to take their targets down with them.”
“Yeah, even if they’d succeeded in killing us, they would still have ended up like this,” I said.