“Waaaaaaah!”
Crying and yelling at me? Girls, pick one and stick with it… Anyhoo, I hadn’t expected myself to vanish on them like that. I hadn’t planned on getting caught in the crossfire to begin with. Accidents happen, y’know? Who didn’t mistakenly vanish out of existence every so often? We’ve all been there. Right? There’s no need to make a fuss out of your garden-variety extinction mishap. Does it still count as a garden-variety mishap if the garden vanishes too?
The one stroke of luck was that the spellstone hadn’t vanished as well. Good! I wasn’t risking my life for free here. And all was well that ended well, i.e., I’d done nothing wrong. And wasn’t it Dancer Girl who reminded me of the Severing Staff in the first place? Yeah, hadn’t I used it when we’d first met? Wha—don’t whistle innocently at me!
“That’s a good thing! It’s good that I remembered I had it! Yes, your attempts at dodging the blame are very cute, but there’s no blame to dodge. That staff saved my life! Hmm…there’s no convincing you, huh? You’re that mad? Mm-hmm. Uh-huh. From your perspective, it looked like I made direct eye contact with you and dissolved in the mist, huh? Yeah, I could see that being a disturbing visual. But don’t blame me. That’s the Sacred Severing Staff’s fault!”
While Dancer Girl was otherwise occupied being mad at me, I pulled off my crown to doublecheck the two flowers in the Talisman Flower Crown. That’s when I realized all the fake flower charms were gone. Forcefield and Reflection must have been consumed when I’d slipped into the pocket dimension. A good half of the Slayer of Elderly Humans of the Male Variety: Never Met an Old Man Worth Keeping! was gone too. And I’d put mithril in that sword! A tiny amount, but it still counted. If mithril equipment was going ghost on me, I shuddered to imagine what would’ve happened with ordinary equipment.
Once the dungeon emperors got all the lecturing out of their systems, I popped into the hidden room. Ah ha. You’re the one responsible.
“Magi Draining Bottle: Intelligence Amplification (mega). MP Conversion Rate Amplification (mega). Alchemy Boost (mega). Magi Absorption Storage. Magi Transmogrification. Magi Adaptation.’ No wonder this dungeon has so little raw magic—magi—in it.”
This dungeon was smack-dab in the middle of no-man’s land. There wasn’t a village or town in kilometers. That, and the fact that the dungeon emitted very little magi, explained how it had evaded detection for years.
“A cool new ring, huh? Oh wait! This is a Klein bottle! An intricate Mobius-strip-looking thing… Aghhh! I can’t stand it! Hrrrrghhhh!”
I was writhing in pain because of the blatant and wretched mistranslation. Klein bottles were theoretical “tubes” first described by the German mathematician Felix Klein, two-dimensional curved surfaces whose “faces” had no meaningful boundary or distinction. They weren’t, in other words, literal bottles.
“See, in German it’s a ‘Kleinsche fläche’ or ‘Klein surface.’ Some English translator confused ‘fläche’ with ‘flasche,’ and it became Klein ‘bottle’ in English. Then that got ported to Japanese, and now we’re stuck with the wrong word.”
I slotted the Mobius-strip-esque ring into its slot and just about died when my MP skyrocketed to an explosive degree. Fantasy world equipment could be scary! Fortunately, I resurrected. Unfortunately, so did the anger. And the lectures. Sorry?
“And I already have high-efficiency mana batteries and a mana converter! If not for that, my optimized, transmogrified body would’ve exploded!”
Yeah, in a single instant, everything from my cells to my blood had turned red-hot! The Klein bottle had sucked up magi from the outside world, converted it into human-usable MP, given it an element type, and released it as a magic spell. In too potent a form, this had manifested as a magical blight, which cropped up in the frontier sometimes. It was also the illness Elf Girl had suffered from.
“And mushrooms are the only cure, huh? That’s because mushrooms grow from magi themselves. They’re nature’s perfect magic converters. There’s all kinds of mushrooms—HP, MP, physical recovery. They break down the basic magi in the world around us and turn it into the kind of magic we can use—MP.”
That explained why people in this world rarely lived in monster forests or areas thick with dungeons! Look at me, solving yet another of the world’s mysteries. Next mystery to solve: When will these lectures ever end? Lemme just…cook some dinner while you’re yelling at me. Yes, yes, I knew I shouldn’t have almost died twice in quick succession. But how was I to know that I wasn’t allowed more than one close brush with death per day? Who made that a rule?
“The first one was an unpredictable accident, and the second was an unforeseen snafu. Life is full of things we can’t predict, right? I agree that it’s foolish to repeat the same mistakes—that’s worth a scolding—but I pride myself on the sheer variety of mistakes I get up to! Surely there’s no need to break me of this entirely innocent and accident-prone habit? Or, to put it simply, I did nothing wrong?”
Blame the universe, not me!
Eventually, I gathered that the disappearing horror show of the first mistake and the gushing blood of the second accident had done little to endear me to the dungeon emperors. I thus made myself very busy stuffing snacks into angry faces and patting tearful heads. Even Slimey was mad!
Wiggle wiggle!
“Look, I’m just saying. The first mistake was me screwing up a spell, and the second accident was me screwing up an equipping. I’m not repeating my mistakes! It’s not even my fault! Blame the world! This wouldn’t have happened if the universe wasn’t so incredibly illogical. I’m perfectly innocent. I blame the world for it all!”
Angry glares crossed with angry munching!
I flirted with the idea of slotting the Magi Draining Bottle into my equipment, but I sensed that this would only incense the dungeon emperors further. But hey—all that Reviving had drained me of MP!
“It’s just cruel, having zero MP when there’s an infinite MP ring right in front of me… It’s like dying of starvation at a banquet… Eek! Don’t glare at me like that!”
The dungeon emperors hoisted me onto a stretcher, trotted up fifty flights of stairs, and deposited me in a carriage—even though I was perfectly fine, physically! They stripped me of my equipment, confiscated my lovely magic-filled ring, and slid into the crisp cheerleading uniforms I still had on me: fetching red for Miss Armor Rep, creamy white for Dancer Girl, and gallant yellow stripes on black for Sleeping Beauty.
“Uh… Something tells me you’re not about to start cheering…”
These cheerleaders were ready for the kill! Carnal carnage-causing cheerleaders hiding behind the excuse of sexual healing! Oh, this carriage was full to bursting of bustling, buxom bosoms and bouncing behinds—fine, fine legs tangling and curling with mine.
“Oh no! I let my guard down, and now I’m caught in a three-way pincer attack!”
There was leg flesh everywhere I looked—pale white slipping and sliding around husky amber brown, a contrast that was as pleasing to the eyes as was being squeezed under their thighs.
Smooch!
Saaaaa-mack!
“Waaaagh!”
Red flirted with white; white cavorted with black; leg rolled over leg. The carriage rocked in the world’s most localized earthquake. The vehicle may have been heading for the frontier, but its inhabitants were on a one-way trip to pleasure town.
“And still the world turns… And still Haruka turns! And shakes! And bounces! And bumps! Aaaaaaagh! Ghrhrhrblllll!!!”
Indistinct lovemaking noises <3