by Hiro Ainana
Tama and Pochi looked around in disappointment.
They didn’t seem to know what to do.
“Don’t worry. There will be more once we go in a little farther.”
The pair perked up at that, so we continued our exploration.
Area 1 seemed to be picked clean by explorers—there were hardly any monsters.
Groups of monsters did use a few passageways to get around at times, but they weren’t connected to any of the paths the explorers were on. Thanks to that, they never encountered one another.
After I observed the map for a while, I saw a tunnel open up between two such paths in the distance, and a battle began. That must be how the monsters appeared.
“It is hard to see even with the light, I report.”
Various columns and stone statues lined the walls of the corridor, along with occasional sets of stone steps that didn’t seem to lead anywhere.
There were occasional curtain-like objects hanging from the ceiling, too, most likely dusty spiderwebs.
We also passed occasional hollows in the walls and ceilings that looked like small passages.
The ventilation-like holes near the ceiling seemed to be traversed by small monsters; occasionally, moth- or hornworm-like monsters would poke their heads out and consume some of the fluffy spirit eaters.
Both varieties were very low-level, so we left them for other explorers.
“Something’s theeere?”
“I hear fighting up ahead, sir.”
Tama and Pochi seemed to have picked up on a battle farther down the path.
About two hundred feet down, five explorers were fighting three demi-goblins.
Since there was constant noise coming from the ventilation holes near the ceiling in the labyrinth, it was somewhat difficult to detect faraway noises.
Even Tama and Pochi took longer to notice than usual.
According to the information on my radar, the battle wasn’t taking place in the great hall we were exploring but a path that branched off up ahead. It wasn’t too far from where we were.
When we passed nearby, one of the explorers called out a warning to us.
“These goblins are ours. Keep moving.”
“All right.”
I gave a brief response so as not to distract them too much.
It seemed to be a pretty intense brawl: Even though the demi-goblins were only levels 1 and 2, all the explorers were wounded.
The explorers seemed to be relative beginners, all around level 3. They were wearing hemp-woven vests and armor made of strung-together bones. They were fighting with short spears and light pickaxes that were pretty obviously homemade.
They were all brawlers, but since only a small percentage of explorers had any magic skills, that wasn’t too unusual.
While I was contemplating all that, Nana whirled around from the front of the group.
“Master, I have located a suspicious group of larvae, I report.”
“What do you mean?”
In an area where part of the great hall turned into a cliff, some children were peering down from above.
The eldest boy seemed to be an explorer, while the other five children were all bag carriers.
The kids were carrying what looked like a stretcher woven from grass.
“Big Brother Boma, behind you!”
One of the kids called out a warning, and the explorer boy and the others all spun around alertly and readied their weapons, which were really just clubs that looked more like sticks.
We must have startled them.
“Hello there.”
I moved my hand away from my sword and called out to them, but their postures didn’t waver.
I had the rest of the group wait while I walked over to the cliff.
Looking down, I saw that a group of young explorers was engaged in a life-and-death battle against some demi-goblins.
“Damn this stupid, fat goblin!”
The “fat goblin” in question was a actually slightly stronger type called a “demi-goblin grappler.”
“Guess I gotta use my trump card!”
The ax user who appeared to be the group’s leader swallowed some kind of pill.
Then his movements suddenly became faster, and he went from a losing battle against the grappler to gaining a decent advantage.
According to my AR, the medicine he’d just taken was a pill form of Demonic Potion.
Considering how effective it was, it was no wonder that people would use it even if it was a dangerous illegal drug.
Although, since it was illegal, there had to be some kind of nasty side effect.
The battle was over soon after that, and the explorers began disassembling the defeated demi-goblins and taking the cores.
Finally, the group finished collecting the cores and left the demi-goblin corpses behind, moving on to find their next prey.
One of them seemed to notice the children and muttered a disgusted “tch, corpse pillagers” as they left.
Indeed, Corpse Pillager was among the boy’s titles.
“Let’s go! Grab ’em before any other monsters eat ’em!”
As soon as the explorers below the cliff were gone, the boy led the children down the stone steps with the woven stretcher in tow.
I was curious, so I called out to the boy.
“What do you use the goblin corpses for?”
“W-we sell ’em to a butcher.”
For real?
So they even eat demi-goblin meat in Labyrinth City…
It was all well and good that people were more willing to try monster meat than before, but I didn’t have the courage to eat anything so humanoid.
“I-it’s not like that! We don’t steal ’em! We only take what gets left behind!”
Misunderstanding my silence, the boy started defending himself.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I wasn’t doubting that.”
“J-just so you know, we don’t eat ’em, all right? That’d make you so sick, your body’d go nasty and rotten.”
Realizing what I was thinking, the boy corrected me.
He explained that although demi-goblin meat wouldn’t kill you, it had a high chance of making you sick if consumed, so it was forbidden to take it outside the labyrinth.
“Is that what causes Goblin Disease?”
“I dunno. I don’t think so, though?”
The boy tilted his head and shrugged.
“So what does the butcher use it for, then?”
“They have a slime eat it and turn it into oil and bones.”
Oh?
I asked the boy where the butcher was so I could check it out on the map.
In a small room within the labyrinth, there was a lizardfolk monster tamer with the titles Butcher and Slime User. He was accompanied by four trained monsters called “oil slimes.”
It was fairly far away from here, which was probably why the explorers didn’t bother taking the corpses there themselves.
“So even goblins have a use in everyday life… Humans are amazing, hmm?”
“’Sright. They might make fun and call us ‘corpse pillagers,’ but without us, they wouldn’t be able to get bones for their armor or goblin oil for their lanterns.”
The boy exploded into a little rant. He must have a lot of built-up frustration about the subject.
“Besides, if we left those corpses lying around in the labyrinth, it’d be crawling with coreless and cursed monsters.”
“What are those?”
I’d never heard those terms before. I pressed for more information.
“‘Coreless’ are walking corpses without a monster core. ‘Cursed’ corpses don’t move, but if you get too close, they can grab your legs and curse you.”
So we shouldn’t carelessly get too close to corpses, either. Labyrinths really were dangerous.
“The fat ones are so heavyyy.”
“Help us out, Big Bro!”
“Wait a sec—I’ll be right there!”
The carrier kids were g
rumbling from the bottom of the cliff, so the boy turned to help them.
Before he left, I gave him enough copper coins for the group as thanks for all the information.
“Wow! You sure, mister?”
“Of course. Thanks for answering all my questions.”
“Heh-heh, anytime!”
I watched the boy descend the cliff in high spirits, then went back to where my group was waiting.
“The monster pickings certainly are slim in area 1.”
As we continued along the great hall, we saw many beginner explorers fighting hard against monsters and competing for kills.
“Master, the sign stones have begun displaying a new number, I report.”
“Fooour?”
“It says 1-4, sir.”
The trio walking up ahead had found a particularly large sign stone.
This seemed to be the crossroads between the path around the rest of area 1 and the branched-off path into area 4.
At the very edge of my radar’s range, I saw red dots.
“Maybe we’ll start seeing more monsters soon?”
“I’d say so…”
I nodded at Arisa as I checked my map.
The red dots were mainly maze ants. And tons of them, at that.
There were almost three hundred in total, broken up into groups of anywhere from ten to fifty.
There were also three parties of explorers and carriers fleeing from the ants, heading in our direction.
This must be the “monster chain rampage” the soldiers right outside the labyrinth told us about.
These monsters weren’t much of a threat to us, but their numbers were somewhat impressive.
To the other explorers in here, it might be a pretty major problem.
“…It looks like there’ll be plenty of fighting to go around pretty soon.”
“Let me investigate.”
Arisa seemed to detect that my response carried a bit of meaning.
“Me next.”
“Oh right, it’s your turn this time.”
We’d been alternating between Arisa’s Space Magic and Mia’s Spirit Magic for detection, so this time it must have been Mia’s turn.
“ Cowardice Sylph Okubyou na Kaze.”
Mia used an enemy-detecting Spirit Magic spell.
A yellow-green wind raced through the labyrinth, bringing information back to Mia.
“Satou, lots of enemies.”
Please don’t make it sound like I have a ton of people who hate me.
“People comiiing?”
“Sounds like bugs, too, sir.”
Listening with their ears to the ground, Tama and Pochi seemed to have picked up on the approaching explorers and monsters from far away.
“How many are coming?”
Arisa looked to me seriously, but I couldn’t help responding a little mischievously.
“You mean people or enemies?”
“Enemies, of course,” she snapped immediately.
“Three hundred.”
“Th-three hundred?”
“Master, we should retreat, I propose.”
“I agree with Nana, master.”
“Mm.”
Lulu clung to my arm anxiously. They were all pretty quick to make a prudent decision.
I supposed any meatheads who would want to fight a three-digit number of enemies wouldn’t do well in a labyrinth, where you have to conserve your energy.
“Don’t worryyyy?”
“We can do it, sir. As long as our master’s with us, it’ll be easy, sir!”
Oh right. I guess our own party has a couple of meatheads.
Tama and Pochi struck some rather strange poses.
I patted their heads. “What would you do if I wasn’t with you?”
“Run away, of course, sir.”
“Get outta heeeere?”
Hmm?
So they weren’t total meatheads—they just trusted me that much.
“Good answer. If I’m not with you, you should never try to take on such a large group of enemies, even if they’re not very strong.”
Our group had fought large numbers of undead and pirates on the sugar route, but I’d been with them, and it was never more than between three and five enemies per person.
Of course, the Skeleton King and Sea Lord we had fought in the Lalakie incident were far more dangerous.
“What if we have no choice but to fight?” Arisa asked.
“What do you think?” I responded.
“Hmm… Get to an advantageous position?”
“That’s right. Find a place where the enemy won’t be able to come at you all at once.”
“Yep, bottlenecking is a must when you’re hunting solo in online games.”
So that’s where she learned that…
In the MMORPGs I played, most people fought solo only against weak monsters that could be defeated in one hit, but I guess every game is different.
Now, we weren’t obligated to save explorers we didn’t know, but since we’d finally encountered monsters, I figured it was a good chance to get my group some experience.
“There are people running away from the monsters this time, so let’s help them by fighting, shall we?”
Giving an arbitrary reason, I suggested that we do battle, and everyone promptly agreed.
“Of course, if I wasn’t with you, you’d prioritize your own safety and run away, all right?” I added, just to be safe.
We went back down the corridor a bit to prepare for battle in an area with lots of rubble and raised ground that would make it easy to fight large amounts of enemies.
If the great hall were a river, it would be like we set up camp on a sandbank about ten feet high.
The part of the ground that would be on the bottom of the river was rife with rubble, making it difficult to run. On top of that, the only way to get up to us would be to climb a nearly vertical wall or go to a slope in the opposite direction of where the maze ants were coming from.
The only problems were that it was difficult to see farther than a hundred and fifty feet or so into the distance because of the bends in the great hall, and since there were fleeing explorers, we couldn’t set any traps on their path.
I thought about using Earth Magic to make a better battlefield, but the labyrinth floor seemed resistant to Earth Magic for some reason, so I decided not to push it.
“Oops, I almost forgot.”
I cast Enchant: Physical Protection on all my companions.
Weak enemies or no, it was always better to be safe.
“Comiiing?”
“They’re here, sir!”
A party of two rabbitfolk and a ratfolk came dashing from the other side of the great hall.
Though they weren’t visible yet, there was also a party of human males behind them and a party of human women bringing up the rear.
“Run for it!”
“Hey, there’s a swarm of maze ants coming this way!”
“If you don’t wanna get eaten, you better quit standing around and get outta here!”
The beastfolk party, Swift Arrow, shouted warnings as they raced past us. They were all warriors, ranging in level from 7 to 10.
“Master, the next group is here, I report.”
Next to arrive was the male human party: three explorers and two bag carriers.
The leader of the explorers was level 13, while the other two were level 10. The bag carriers had good constitutions, but they were only around level 4.
“Come on, slaves! Don’t drop those jars of ant nectar!”
The leader, who had bandages wrapped around his limbs and neck, looked over his shoulder to shout at the two bag carriers. I guess they were his slaves.
“If you drop any, I’ll cut off your arms and feed ’em to the ants!”
Without responding to their master’s cruel threat, the two slaves silently followed the man.
“Besso, the Lovely Wings are falling behind.”
“Hmph. I hate to lose
Jena, but as long as we make it out with two jars, we won’t be in the red.”
“Good point. Let’s make a break for it while they’re getting eaten.”
The pair ran past us as they held this nasty little conversation, barely sparing us a glance.
Unlike the beastfolk party, they didn’t give us a word of warning.
Finally, sometime after the first two groups, the female human party arrived. It was a group of four, with two explorers and two bag carriers.
The bag carriers were in ordinary clothing with carrying boxes on their backs, but the two explorers had woven vests with bone armor, wooden shields, and short spears with bronze spearheads.
Under the women’s vests were short shirts that exposed their midriffs, and their slender legs were clad in tight pants.
The glimpse of a tan line just above their ankles was sexy, too.
I didn’t know how they tanned when they worked in a dark labyrinth, but sexy is sexy.
By my standards, they were just wearing sporty outfits, but in the eyes of the Shiga Kingdom, I’d imagine they were practically half-naked.
“Master, the monsters!”
“They’re going to catch up to those ladies!”
Arisa and Lulu pointed at the maze ants closing in on the women.
One of the bag carriers seemed to have an injured leg, and the other one was helping her along, so they were just barely staying ahead of their pursuers.
“Oh no! At this distance they’d get caught up in my spell…”
“Mrrr.”
“I can’t get a clear shot with the Magic Gun, either.”
The rearguard girls bit their lips helplessly.
Behind the two bag carriers, one of the nearly human-size maze ants was about to catch up.
Because it looked like it might catch the women before my party could intervene, I used my Practical Magic spell Magic Hand to grab the closest ant’s leg and pull it to the ground.
Really, this spell was more like magical telekinesis.
At any rate, the fleeing party was safe for now.
“You there! Run away! The maze ants are on a chain rampage!” shouted one of the explorers from afar.
She was a slender woman in her early twenties, though she had a boyish voice. I wouldn’t quite call her beautiful, but her features definitely had a certain charm.
The other woman looked a little younger than the charming one and was a total beauty, with her black hair tied back in a neat ponytail.