The next day, while I was waiting on B1 of Plumbum, a gate opened nearby. Eve stepped out and stood in front of me.
“Sorry for the wait,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“Show your gratitude with carrots.”
“I’ll make a whole mountain of ’em for you soon.”
“Mm.” She nodded in satisfaction, took my hand, and guided me through the gate. I was enveloped in dazzling light, and then, I was in the mansion’s warp room.
The gate she’d opened would now allow me to go anywhere I wanted in Plumbum.
“Goodbye.” Eve turned and tried to leave.
“Oh, hey, do you wanna come? I might as well introduce the two of you.”
“I’m not interested in that dungeon.”
“Really?”
“I was excited at first, but it didn’t have rabbit’s milk.” After saying what she had to say, she promptly walked away.
“Hmm?”
Rabbit’s milk? As in, milk from a rabbit?
There’s no way it would have… Wait.
“Right… Rabbits are mammals, huh?” I recalled when I’d looked after bunnies back in the animal-rearing committee in elementary school.
They do produce milk, and they do breastfeed their young…
“Sure would be weird if that dropped, though.” I felt a little bad for Eve since she’d apparently wanted it, but as for me, I was glad.
I refocused myself and went into the warp gate.
I designated Plumbum’s chamber as my destination. After confirming that the usual swirl of light had appeared, I went inside. In an instant, I’d gone a distance that would normally take more than a day to travel.
“Morning,” I greeted the spirit.
“You really came…”
“I promised, didn’t I?”
“…You did.” She smiled happily. A smile really did suit her best. “S-Say…”
“Yes?”
“Could you…tell me more about yourself?”
“About me?”
“Yes… F-For example, say, how you withstood my assault when I tried to crush you.”
“Oh, that.” I took out the Absolute Rock pebble, which I always carried around for helping me clear dungeons. “I used this. It came from a monster called an Absolute Rock, and when I use it, I go into invincible mode… Uh, my defenses go up a lot.”
“And that’s how you didn’t get crushed by the turtles?”
“Yep.”
“Incredible… They should have exerted incredible pressure upon you…”
“They were doubling over and over, yeah,” I agreed.
“You fired something, did you not?”
That “did you not?” at the end of her sentence was like music to my ears. It was kind of captivating. I could listen to her talking like some kind of old-fashioned aristocrat forever.
She asked more questions, and I answered each one. Plumbum was awfully interested in me. The barrage went on for a good while.
Each time I answered, she would look straight at me and nod interestedly. “Hrmm. That I did not know.”
Occasionally, she was overtly surprised. She reacted so much that it was fun to talk to her.
“Well, I’d better hit the road soon,” I said, tired from the Q&A session.
“A-Already?”
“I’ll be back tomorrow. Don’t worry.”
“I-I am not worried…” Plumbum blushed and averted her eyes, but before long, she gazed at me again. “I-I know that you are not the sort of man to break a promise.”
“Thanks. See you tomorrow, then.”
“Indeed. Tomorrow.”
After we’d said our goodbyes, I took a strand of her hair and left the dungeon.
☆
The next day, I took that strand of hair to Orton, the custom magic cart manufacturer. There, I asked him to put it into a weapon.
He was a skilled hand at processing monsters and their parts into tools.
First, I asked him to make a prototype weapon. When I’d told him the details, Orton tried combining the hair into one of my normal bullets as a test.
After that, I went back to the mansion and warped to B1 of Plumbum in order to go out to Tetramine.
The Plumbum weapons, our solution to the monster splitting, would need to be distributed or sold to adventurers. My plan was to look for a merchant willing to take on that task.
But as soon as I exited the dungeon, someone shouted in a panic, “Aaah! Mr. Ryota!”
“Hmm?”
When I turned to look, I saw Dale, Tetramine’s Dungeon Association chief. He ran over to me, sweaty and desperate.
“What’s the matter?” I asked him.
“It’s here! The dungeon master!”
“What?!”
“It’s rampaging in the dungeon. Everyone is too scared to touch it because it might split.”
“Got it. I’ll deal with it.” I turned around and went right back into Plumbum.
I hadn’t noticed before, but I could now feel the aura that came with a dungeon master’s presence. There weren’t any other monsters around, either.
This couldn’t go on. I ran as fast as I could through the dungeon─down floor after floor, until I encountered it on the fifteenth.
“…Huh?” I gasped dumbly. If there was a mirror in front of me, I’d see an incredibly stupid-looking man’s face.
For the dungeon master before me was humanoid resembling an adult man wearing protectors and a jacket, wielding two guns.
He’s just like me.
“Except I’m not sparkly or covered in roses…” I muttered, exasperated.
It was like the Ryochin version of me that Alice summoned, except in an entirely different way.
Ryochin was a chibified, marketable plushie version of me. That made him cutesy, rather than uncanny.
Can’t say the same for this dungeon master, though.
In a word, it was like…a shoujo manga protagonist. The kind of all-powerful, super-hot guy that the main character might fall for.
He was sparkly. There were roses in the background. In this world’s art style, for lack of a better word, he was totally out of place.
But I didn’t have much time to wonder why; he raised his gun and fired a bullet. It flew straight at me─a simple, true-to-form bullet.
When I deflected it, he charged in for close-quarters combat.
I was a little relieved. If he was as strong as me, like Ryochin, he’d be big trouble when combined with the whole splitting thing. But his speed and power were no big deal; I’d put his stats at A across the board.
This was doable.
I restrained him without using enough force to count as an attack and fired the one Plumbum-enhanced bullet I’d had made right into his skull.
“Eww.”
It wasn’t very fun to watch a more handsome, shoujo-styled version of me get shot in the head and die, but, well, he was dead.
The dungeon master dropped a rusty key, which I picked up and put into my pocket for now.
With the death of the dungeon master, normal monsters returned to the dungeon. I left and reported my success to Dale, who was waiting at the entrance.
“Good now?”
“Ooh! Incredibly done, Mr. Ryota. Thank you for defeating the dungeon master with such speed!”
“Don’t mention it. There’s something more important I want to discuss.” I told him about the weapons, and how we could defeat monsters without them splitting.
“Goodness! Do such weapons exist?!”
“I’ll bring the first prototype tomorrow.” I’d used my Plumbum bullet already, but the true prototype to see whether other adventurers could benefit would be ready tomorrow. “By the way, I’ll need someone who can manage distribution of the weapons. Can you do that?”
For some reason, Dale seemed oddly moved by this. “Leave it to me, sir! I will take full responsibility!”
“You mean it?”
“Yes! You’ve given me your trust, and I swear, I will not let you down.”
“Got it. Thanks.”
That’s dealt with. Guess I’ll go see Plumbum now.
I went into B1, used the warp gate to go back to the mansion, and then warped to her chamber.
“Good morning. I’m back,” I called out. There was no response.
On closer inspection, she was hard at work drawing something.
Wonder what she’s drawing.
I tried looking over her shoulder.
“Woargh!” I made a very odd noise.
She was drawing me. Or more precisely, a shoujo-manga hottie version of me. Indeed, it was the dungeon master from before.
After she’d finished drawing him, she said, “No… The real one is much more attractive.”
“Not really!” I couldn’t help but shout, startling her.
“Hyah?!”
But let me be clear: no, I am not.
It seemed that her extremely beautified image of me had become the new dungeon master.