The next thing I did was ram my dagger deep into the eye attached to the side of its mouth. It felt like I’d stabbed a giant grape. Tree sap came gushing out, its color reminiscent of blood. It smelled sweet, though, almost like concentrated fruit juice.
On the other side of the trunk, Troach split through another eyeball. After abandoning the greatbat corpse, the treant tried to attack, but its hard branches were covered in firm, inflexible bark. The monster couldn’t injure anything that got too close. The treetop leaves smacking us in the back did as much as those white-birch sauna whisks you struck your body with in Scandinavian saunas.
The treant wriggled its thick roots in rage, but Troach and I clung to the bough and endured it until its movements faltered. The flow of sap waned as well. Troach and I backed off as its branches, once wildly flailing, all dropped limp and finally drooped to the ground.
After a moment’s pause, the room was filled with cheering.
“We did it…”
Troach fell backward into a sitting position. Mizuho ran up to us and asked, “Are you okay?!”
“Yeah.” I wiped the spray of sap off my face, then did the same for my dagger before sheathing it. The fluid flowing from the treant’s remains dyed the moss red and melted into the earth. It looked like all threats had been neutralized.
“Let’s see to the wounded,” I said. “Is anyone hurt?”
A check revealed that everyone had some scrapes and bruises, some larger than others, but most of them were from the bloodsucking kudzu vine thorns. Small punctures, a bit of shed blood, the congestion from having been squeezed. It was a stroke of luck that nobody had suffocated.
Troach was still the one who had taken the most damage. Her bruises and abrasions from the treant’s attack were severe.
“Could you maybe stop moving? I can’t help you like that.”
Troach writhed in displeasure as Mizuho tried to check her injuries. “Ow! That hurts! It’s nothing major! Anyway, I’m the Attendant here, so it’s supposed to be my job to fix everyone up!”
“Just be quiet and stay still.”
Still, the only medical supplies we had on hand were some pieces of cloth that had been sterilized in a pot. All we could do was wash the wounds in clean water and cover them up. I shuddered, belatedly realizing how dangerous a place we’d ventured into. There’d been little other choice, but things could have easily gone far worse for us.
I was worried about the puncture wounds from the bloodsucking kudzu vines, but Mizuho set me at ease a little, telling me she’d never heard of them being poisonous. It was a good thing we’d boiled water before setting out. The number one scariest thing in the wild was a bacterial infection. Simply not cleaning an injury caused the risk of disease to skyrocket.
I’d begun to learn firsthand how dangerous the labyrinth was. The threats we encountered here weren’t all of a size that humans could handle. We managed to fight our way through this one with some desperate maneuvers, but challenging a tree like that without any real weapons was insanity. This wasn’t Minecraft.
“I’m sorry—this is all I have.”
Mizuho took a salve from her own things and applied it to Troach’s bruise.
“Ow, ow… Are you sure? That stuff seems valuable.”
“It’s meant for the bruises and scrapes that kids get, so… It’s more just for ease of mind,” Mizuho admitted, wrapping the cloth over the balm and causing Troach to cry out again.
I had Mizuho show me the salve. It smelled of fragrant perfume. It wouldn’t seep into the skin when applied. Mizuho explained that she’d used it since she was young. I had no way of analyzing it, but it didn’t look harmful, at least.
After finishing our first aid, we took our meal so that we could rest. We split up what little preserved food we had, relishing the meat’s flavor, even though the stuff was as hard and dry as boot soles.
We’d brought some embers from the campfire in case we had to make camp while exploring. I’d wrapped a few glowing sparks in some small woodchips, covered that with a bag made of rough fabric, then put it into a metal container with a hole in it for ventilation. The air coming in through that aperture would keep it burning slowly, which allowed us to walk around with still-living embers. Having ready-to-use sparks on hand was convenient. Firemaking from scratch was a pain, to say the least.
I started a small campfire using dried kudzu ivy and dead sticks that had fallen to the treant’s roots. I stood some branches up as supports, then hung a small billycan over the flame. In my survival training in the Regiment, they’d first had us make our own billycans out of empty soda cans. They were handy tools, useful for both boiling water and cooking.
While heating the water, I came to a decision. I stood up and went over to the remains of the treant. I’d just remembered the fruits that had been growing on it. Cutting one of them off with my dagger, I found it to be softer and more rubbery than expected. It felt less like an apple and more like a single plucked grape or berry made much bigger. I cut it open and rubbed its juices on the inside of my wrist. It didn’t seem to cause itchiness or a rash.
“You’re not really gonna eat that, are you?” Troach asked dubiously. “That fruit was growing on a man-eating tree.”
“No—we can’t afford to eat it and be poisoned.”
“Right? Phew.”
“We’ll test it after getting back to our nation. If you have extra room, put it with the rest of your things.”
“……”
Starving and stranded people often made the mistake of risking it all on any animal or plant that looked edible. Unfortunately, the natural world was filled with things indigestible by humans. Many were also toxic.
However, we lacked much of any kind of food in our country. If we found anything that looked the least bit consumable, we needed to test its safety as much as possible. Perhaps that was something I would be better at than a native, being a visitor to Million Dungeon without any preconceptions.
The water had started to boil, so I took out a tree root that supposedly had a taste if you bit into it from our stash of preserved food. I set it in the billycan and boiled it for a few minutes. When the water became tinged with color, I took the makeshift pot off the heat, waited for it to cool, and gave it a sip.
“What are you doing over there, Taiga?”
“Trying to make tea.”
“Did it work?”
I let myself taste the liquid in my mouth for a moment before answering Mizuho’s question.
“…It has a taste.”
I passed around this tea, of which I could only say it had a taste, and we drank. When the billycan made it back to me, I took it and downed the remaining liquid. Then, throwing the tree-root grounds “with a taste” into my mouth, I stood up.
“Break time is over. Let’s get to work.”