“………Okay,” I begrudgingly agreed, chagrined at what seemed to be a measure taken for my sake. Arrows leading to the spot in question appeared on my glasses.
“These are real helpful, aren’t they, Yaya?” my sister noted, fumbling with her glasses. “But they’re almost too helpful. I feel like my other senses are gonna get duller.” That made sense. But without this extra support, I’d be useless as an adventurer.
The two of us carefully made our way through the dungeon to meet up with our party.
“Good work, my love.”
“No, I, uh……” I stammered in reply to my wife, awkward as a fish flopping about on water. Her gaze fell. A weird tension hung between us.
“Let’s move. Souya, Princess Éa, get behind Shuna.”
“Okaaay.”
“Understood.”
Following the expert adventurer’s orders, our group resumed its trek. Freyja rambled about something to Lana, trying to strike up a conversation, but was flat out ignored.
“For you, dude.”
“Oh, thanks.”
Gaslark handed me some sort of fruit. Without thinking, I popped it in my mouth.
Sour! It’s super freakin’ sour!
The thing tasted about a hundred times more acidic than a lemon. Too much for me to handle, I guzzled the rest of the water in my bottle to wash it down.
“Ooh, I want one,” Éa chimed in.
“Sure thing.”
“Eeek! So sour!” my sister squealed. It’d hit her the same way.
Wait, I feel a little less exhausted. Is this a lump of citric acid? Like a pickled plum?
“Got any more?” asked Éa.
“Nah, man.” Guess she liked it. I’d have to ask Gaslark to teach me how to make them later.
The watering hole marked on the map veered away slightly from the shortest route through the floor. By that point, we’d spent four hours traversing the dungeon and, in those mere four hours, covered two and a half levels. If we kept it up at this rate, we could take a few more breaks and finish by evening. A day-trip dungeon exploration—a venture only the most exceptional adventurers armed with detailed maps could do. Everything was going so smoothly, I started to get nervous about our next expedition—if there ever was one, that is.
“Hmm, odd to see them here,” Pops wondered aloud, then signaled for everyone to stop.
Moss covered the stone walls and floors around us in the damp tunnel. Farther down, the path opened up into a brightly lit chamber with a fountain and an ancient garden. Clear water wound in shallow rivets across the thickly carpeted ground, which was dense with vegetation. Sconces lit by emiluminite crystals hung from the walls, and gnarled vines snaked over upturned chairs and tables. This almost-rococo scene felt markedly out of sync with everything else around it, as if it existed in another civilization or space entirely. The source of the water posed another mystery, an exercise in futility to ponder at all.
“Damn, that’s not good,” I muttered, too.
A frog-head sat right next to the fountain. Dungeon monsters generally detested all kinds of light, but both of this one’s eyes had been gouged out. The bigger problem lay in the murder of chochos hanging from its hand. Though I still didn’t fully understand the ecology of these avian beasts, I did know they settled down easily enough in dark rooms but would waste away, violent and haggard, if exposed to light. Most likely, this correlation was what drove them to attack adventurers carrying light sources. Every one of the chochos dangling from the frog-head’s fingers had atrophied into vicious madness, snapping their fangs loudly.
“What should we do, Pops?” All I could suggest was to avoid them.
“They’ll mob other adventurers if we let them linger. We’re taking them down.” Just like an experienced adventurer to have that sense of responsibility.
“Right, how exactly?”
“If they eat me, use that momentary distraction to flee to the next level. Don’t look back.” So basically, he was going to go it alone. All right, let’s see what you’ve got, what it means to be an adventurer a cut above the rest.
Pops stepped out in front, alone. His longsword in its scabbard, he took his round shield in hand as if holding a Frisbee. Most frog-heads detected enemies by sight, but since this one couldn’t see, it had probably highly developed auditory senses to use instead. Pops threw a random rock to test the theory out. It bounced off the fountain; immediately, the frog-head’s tongue shot out to catch it, several times faster than the ones we’d seen up to that point. I didn’t manage to see anything but the afterimage of the motion.
And yet, Pops was even faster. He flung his shield at the monster. My eyes didn’t even catch its afterimage. I heard the sound of metal slicing into flesh and saw an almost arterial spray of blood. The shield had cleaved through half of the frog’s mouth and lodged itself into the rest of it, sealing its jaw shut. Furious chochos scattered from the frog-head’s hands, then flew at their perch’s killer in a rage.
“Here’s a lesson for you to take home: Find chochos grouped up like this, and there will always be one who acts as the ‘brains’ of the flock,” the knowledgeable fighter explained. He then withdrew a knife and, with a flash of silver, plunged it into one of the chochos, and the rest crashed down to the floor as one. “Take that one out, and the rest will be temporarily paralyzed.”
The hardened adventurer pulled out his longsword and began swinging it back and forth like he was casually hacking through tall grasses, easily slicing through all the emaciated avian monsters. The frog-head whipped its long arm at our fearless guide, who severed it in two with a single slash of his sword. Pops then calmly walked up to the bleeding beast and buried his blade deep in the creature’s head, ending its life in one strike just as he had with all the others we’d encountered so far.
The man retrieved his shield and knife, then announced, “It’s over.”
It looked so incredibly simple, but I knew I’d never be able to replicate it. My brain had taken several shortcuts when processing the phenomena it could not comprehend, driving home the fact that the father of adventurers was on a completely different level.
“Souya, dispose of the bodies. Get our meal ready, too. I’ll go set traps around the perimeter.”
“Oh, uh, sure.” After calling my party over and giving them the okay to rest, I asked my sister to take care of meal prep. Then I got to dragging and dumping all the beastly corpses into the corridor, doused the whole lot with oil, and set it ablaze. It actually smelled pretty tasty. I got the feeling the frog meat would make a nice—
“Don’t even think about it. Those frog-heads are poisonous, and the chochos are just skin and bones—there’s no meat to be had on ’em,” Pops warned upon returning from patrol.
“Where on their body is the venom stored?”
“In a pouch by their eyes.”
“It’s to ward off predators, right?” Otherwise, the poisonous glands would probably concentrate around its mouth or limbs.
“That’s right. I’ve never seen one use that poison to attack anyone.”
“In that case, shouldn’t its arms and legs be edible?”
“You………” He fumbled for words. “Sure, they’re still monsters, but you’d eat something that walked around on two legs?” the gruff adventurer asked incredulously. People had a cultural aversion to eating bipedal animals or monsters in this dimension. It was why even though chickens existed here, they didn’t often eat poultry. Though, I’d also heard it’s because they looked too similar to some deities among the Legion Gods. I’d been taken aback by how they viewed chicken eggs as somehow bizarre.
“What’ll it be, Souya? You having those frog legs for lunch?”
“Another day.” We didn’t have time to waste during this expedition, and I needed to rest up.
When we rejoined the others back in the chamber, we found them all seated on a large vinyl sheet spread out on the ground. Lined up in front of the picnic tarp were nine gray packs, all bulging and blowing out steam.
“What in the devil are those?” our fearless leader asked, having the same dubious consternation the others displayed. Éa, who’d obviously eaten the mystery packs before, boasted an expression dripping with pride.
These were defense–armed forces combat rations; you only had to add water to activate a chemical reaction that would then heat the packaged meals. We had precious few of these special emergency reserves—perfect for expeditions like this where time was of the essence.
Pops and I took our seats with the others. A wave of exhaustion hit me as soon as I sat down. The weird edge I’d been on with Pops had tired me out more than usual.
Beep, beep, the alarm rang. Éa turned off the timer on the wristwatch I’d lent her, then, looking extremely pleased with herself, addressed the group. “Heh-heh-heh, I’ll bet you don’t know, but these are amazing. All you do is add water, and you can have a nice warm meal. Less than a hundred remain in the whole world, so you better be grateful.” Whatever was mine was my sister’s, apparently. “Just watch what I do and follow after me.”
The slender elf opened the pouch, dumped out the water, then gingerly removed its contents, her fingers dancing from the heat. In case you were wondering, each had two portions of rice, Hamburg-steak curry, and pork fried with ginger.
“Peel the lid off the rice, open the package, and pour this stew over it, then use a spoon to eat. That’s all!” she declared, then immediately dug into her own. The others followed suit.
“Wow, this really is nice and warm. The pork is so wonderfully tender,” raved Freyja. “……Could we not re-create this somehow with magic?”
“Milady, we absolutely must. We’d make a fortune.”
The Champion of Light and her maid ate their meals, their faces darkly conspiratorial. Gaslark turned his back to the group to have his.
“I’d be good with this every time.”
“………”
“………”
Shuna happily munched away, while Lana and Lis ate their meals in silence.
“Hmmm, this is really good, but it would be better with a little more oomph and spice.” Éa reviewed the curry.
“You’re basically an elite curry expert now, aren’t you?” I noted. My sister had an incredible capacity to pick up anything that piqued her curiosity. I, for one, would be grateful if her culinary studies broadened our dietary repertoire.