Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?, Vol. 12

by Fujino Omori

  “Leave it to us, Mr. Bell. Whatever Mr. Bell cannot do himself, Lilly and her companions will help him with!” she says.

  “Like Bell said—let’s talk constructively about this. If we put our brains together, we can probably find a way out,” Welf says.

  “Yeah, time is running short,” Ouka adds. Daphne and the others nod.

  “…I’m turning into a mere decoration over here!” Aisha murmurs out of the side of her mouth. She looks like she’s disappointed that her starring role has been stolen. But an instant later, she’s smiling and poking me in the back with her elbow.

  “Hey, you managed to speak up! You’re really growing up,” she says. I smile wryly as I stumble forward and turn my attention to my own thoughts.

  The deities have told me so many times that I’ve “grown.” I’m certain that the root of this growth is determination. My resolve is becoming stronger. My resolve to be a hypocrite.

  Or maybe it’s my acceptance that I might end up losing my arms or legs, like Luvis here right in front of my eyes.

  I think I may not have had enough of this “resolve” before. I’m not discounting the promise I made to my grandfather to try to pick up girls in the Dungeon. Still, I was caught up in the first volume of a colorful hero’s tale. I wanted to become a character in one of those flashy stories.

  But that’s not what it’s about. Heroes—like everyone else—have moments when they tumble to the depths of darkness. They lose people’s trust, they lose their fame, they lose all hope.

  Even at this very moment, I’m sure lots of people are suffering setbacks. Healers like Cassandra, and warriors who protect their companions, and sorcerers who weave songs for others.

  Vows are broken again and again. I’m sure there’s not a vow in the world that hasn’t been broken.

  But some people are bad at giving up, and those people bring their vows back to life time and again.

  These people who resolve to do something, and who move forward even as they wipe their tears—they’re called “adventurers.”

  Because a desire, I’m sure, becomes far stronger and far more impudent when it is reborn.

  Just like me.

  With my resolve etched in my heart, I’m moving forward, even if only a few steps.

  I shift my focus back to the external world. Lilly and the others are swiftly reviewing our options.

  “I think our only real choices right now are the ones Cassandra mentioned.”

  “So, either take the wounded back to the surface or kill the monster.”

  “Lilly thinks the first option, to take them back to the surface, is best.”

  The brains of our operation is at the center of the conversation.

  “Lady Lilly, why do you feel that way?” Mikoto asks, still keeping an eye on her guard duties.

  “Ten to one, that monster is an enhanced species. Most likely, it’s consumed a considerable number of magic stones. Judging by its fight with Mr. Bell, it’s definitely at least a Level Four. Not the type of thing you’d expect to encounter on the twenty-fifth floor. We have no idea how many techniques it has on top of those seed bullets…Trying to conquer it is just too dangerous,” Lilly answers without hesitation.

  An enhanced species. That’s the name for monsters that kill their own kind and consume the magic stones of their prey in order to boost their own abilities. Roughly speaking, Lido and the other Xenos fall into that category as well. Monsters that have nurtured their potential on the principle that the strong consume the weak are viewed as Irregulars, and when extraordinarily strong individuals appear, the Guild places bounties on them and issues subjugation orders. I’ve heard quite a bit of damage occurs each time those orders are carried out.

  “By the way…what type of enhanced species could that plant monster possibly be?” Welf asks. I mentally flip through the pages of the pictorial guide to the Dungeon.

  “I think it might be a moss huge. They live in the middle levels, not the lower levels…” I say.

  The moss huge is a type of rare monster that appears on the twenty-fourth floor. Their bodies are made of moss, which means they are plants in the shape of humans. Normally they don’t have the wooden armor we saw, and they can’t break Dungeon walls with superhuman force. That’s why I didn’t recognize it at first.

  The main distinguishing feature of a moss huge is its ability to produce replicas of itself that lack magic stones when they are cut. Apparently, a lot of adventurers have talked about how they thought they killed one, only to find it was a replica and the real monster had escaped. They’re not so much bellicose monsters as highly intelligent ones that make ample use of mimicry, ambushes, and getaways…Most likely, by repeatedly consuming magic stones, this individual transformed both its physical and mental state.

  By doing so, it gained the ability to descend to the lower levels and seek out higher-quality magic stones.

  “A low-level monster that enhanced itself by descending to lower floors…So that type of Irregular exists, huh?” Daphne says, drawing her eyebrows together.

  It’s the exact opposite of a typical Irregular, which becomes a threat by ascending from a lower floor to a higher one, like the minotaur that attacked me in the upper levels.

  “Getting back to the subject at hand, as I said, fighting an enhanced species is risky,” Lilly says. “But our biggest problem is that, since the twenty-fifth floor is so much larger than the floors in the middle levels, there’s no guarantee we’ll find it again. To the contrary, finding it will be a real challenge. And if that’s the case, Lilly would prefer the more certain option.”

  Her first priority is the safety of the party, and she is not budging on her position. What she says makes sense. But as I’m listening to her, Luvis—who’s still lying prone on the ground—opens his eyes into thin slits.

  “No…that monster will definitely…show itself again,” he says haltingly.

  “Mr. Luvis! You’re awake!”

  “So it’s the Little Rookie…or is it Rabbit Foot now? I never thought you’d be saving me…!”

  He looks up at me, and his sweat-drenched face breaks into a wry smile. Then he glances at his missing arm, and the elf’s refined face is distorted by despair and sadness. He looks in disgust at the vines crawling over his other arm, shoulders, and right leg, before finally returning his gaze to me.

  “My party has been left behind on this floor…I beg you…save my brethren and destroy that detestable monster.”

  As our party digests this surprising entreaty, Aisha raises her eyebrows in astonishment.

  “Elf, you’re telling me you left your companions in the lurch and ran away?”

  “Don’t be an idiot! Do I look like someone who would abandon my brethren…?! No, I was the decoy…”

  Maybe it’s pride in his species that makes Luvis explode with anger even as he is gasping for breath.

  “Please don’t strain yourself!” Cassandra says in a tizzy as she tries to calm him. Lilly brings her head down next to Luvis’s.

  “What do you mean by ‘decoy’? And a minute ago, when you said it would show itself again…”

  Luvis squints at the prum, who is trying to make sense of the situation as quickly as possible. Then, his long golden hair plastered to his neck, he draws a fist-size bag from his pocket with Cassandra’s help.

  “That thing is hunting down adventurers…because it wants this.”

  Let us call that monster “he.”

  When he was spawned, he was weak.

  Even if he raged as his monster’s instinct told him to, the humans who barged through the Dungeon trounced him handily. They pierced him with swords, burned his skin with flames, and sent him flying with hammers. It was almost a miracle that he hadn’t died in those early battles.

  There was no question about it; he was the one being robbed.

  But he did have just the tiniest bit more intelligence than his brethren. Time and again, he would use them as decoys or gather all his abilities to
escape the surface dwellers in some other way. His fate was a fiercely burning anger that drove him to continue attacking people without becoming discouraged and, somehow, to survive.

  His turning point arrived unexpectedly.

  One day, he got into a fight not with a human but with one of his brethren. Somehow—maybe by unintentionally tearing off a piece of his opponent’s body—he invoked its wrath. Death-hating creature that he was, he resisted fiercely, and ended up ripping his opponent’s windpipe to shreds with his jaws. He kept going and bit his opponent’s body all over until it was destroyed.

  And then, chest and all, he devoured the core of his brethren’s being.

  He shivered when he bit into the purple crystal. A flash of light ran across his field of vision. It was the breaking of a taboo, the ultimate forbidden act.

  Power burst from his entire body. Stimulation flooded his every nerve. He felt as if his body had expanded. For the first time, this weak being felt omnipotent. He had attained power.

  At first, he was drunk on the sense of omnipotence. He sank deeper and deeper into the pleasant feeling, searching desperately for more of it, devouring it. In other words, he became a murderer of his own kind. He would surprise them from behind, dragging them one after another into tree hollows. He came to understand with great clarity that the more he devoured, the more his body was remade from the inside out.

  Eventually, he began to think about the most efficient way to devour his brethren. The Dungeon that had spawned him looked silently on as he built a mountain of ash and crouched beside it, wolfing down countless purple crystals. Greedily, persistently, without thought of anything else.

  He realized that now he was the one doing the robbing.

  It was a very pleasant feeling to so easily destroy his brethren with the fists he swung with all his might. How could he express the ecstasy of skewering a person with a part of his own body?

  Again, he became drunk on violence and destruction.

  Nothing could stop the power that grew day by day.

  Then that moment arrived.

  He had mostly lost interest in people in his mad rush to devour his monster brethren, but they had not forgotten about him. The gangs of people that pursued and attacked him were extremely irritating and even stronger than his brethren. There was no harm in avoiding conflict with them. Normally, he tried to hide from them as much as possible, but the people who came on that day were very persistent. As a result, for the first time in quite a while, he gave himself over to instinct and fought back.

  After he had massacred every last one, he realized that some of the lumps of flesh that had been people were carrying those.

  In huge quantities, to boot.

  Finally—and this was very unfortunate for the humans—he realized they were just like him.

  Just like him, they extracted those things from his brethren and collected them.

  That was why the humans had so many of them—so many magic stones.

  “The monster is after the magic stones that adventurers collect?!” says Lilly, who had turned pale as she listened to Luvis’s explanation. “I’ve never heard of such a thing!”

  “But it’s true…When that beast attacked our party, it went straight for the supporters in the rear and snatched their pouches packed with magic stones. It ate them right before our eyes…Even magic didn’t work on it. All we could do was flee…”

  That’s when the seed had been implanted in him, Luvis explains. According to him, his party was made up of four members, all Level 3, and all apparently used to exploring the lower levels. That’s how strong the adventurers who got trounced by this monster were.

  “The reason we came to the Water Capital in the first place was because we were asked to do a quest…We were supposed to be searching for missing people, or else for their corpses. Aside from us in Modi Familia, that dwarf Dormul’s familia, Magni Familia, received the same request. We were quarreling the whole way…”

  “So Dormul is down here, too?”

  “Yeah.” Luvis nods. Apparently, they went their separate ways after arriving at the lower levels.

  “That thing bore down on us. But almost everyone in the party was covered in wounds, and they had to recover somehow. We didn’t have a choice…”

  “So you took the remaining magic stones and acted as a decoy for the sake of your companions?” Aisha snorts.

  “Yes, that’s right…” Luvis replies, nodding deeply. Then he readjusts his expression and appeals to us once again.

  “That monster is a bad one. It’s discovered efficiency, and that’s probably why it’s so much stronger than any of the enhanced species I’ve met before…even stronger than The Bloodstained Troll.”

  Ouka and the others change colors as they listen to Luvis’s urgent appeal, but Cassandra lifts her face.

  “The Bloodstained Troll, I’ve heard of that…”

  “…Yeah, it’s the enhanced monster that was wreaking total havoc for the past ten years. By the time the Guild confirmed its existence, scads of upper-class adventurers had already been killed. Even the elite group of second-tier and higher adventurers dispatched to conquer it were instead attacked themselves. I heard that more than fifty people died…” Aisha says.

  “F-fifty…A-and what happened in the end?”

  “The Guild went crying to Freya Familia and they took it down. I heard from them that it was at least the equivalent of a Level Five…”

  Haruhime is struck dumb by Aisha’s explanation. It’s not just her, either. Daphne and Ouka are also gasping at the gruesome tale of the enhanced species.

  And Luvis says this mossy giant is even more dangerous than The Bloodstained Troll?

  …It does seem possible.

  Compared to hunting down its own kind in the vast Dungeon, targeting adventurers who have already collected large quantities of magic stones would be far more efficient, with an exponentially larger return. And adventurers who come to the lower levels probably have way more magic stones of way better quality. What’s more, other monsters wouldn’t target an enhanced species unless it picked a fight itself.

  The worst part of it all is that this enhanced species is in the process of learning the best tricks for attacking adventurers.

  The way it retreated after planting the seeds is proof enough.

  An enhanced species that excels at hunting adventurers…There’s no two ways about it. It’s both different and a threat.

  “If you do nothing…I think this will turn into an unprecedented catastrophe.”

  The room falls silent for a few seconds in response to Luvis’s broken words. Everyone looks tense.

  “Shit. I chose a hell of a time to go on an expedition,” Aisha spits out, flicking her long hair violently off her neck. Once all eyes are on her, she continues.

  “Putting aside the question of whether it’s us who take it down or a group dispatched by the Guild once they catch wind of this, it definitely can’t be allowed to run loose.”

  “That is true, but clearly the more time we give it, the harder it will be to kill. Many adventurers could lose their lives as a result. And most importantly, we cannot abandon Sir Luvis’s companions…” Mikoto says with a tense expression on her face.

  Ouka and Welf pile on in support of her argument.

  “Plus, it’ll take a day to get back to the surface. There’s no guarantee Chigusa will last that long. Not to mention the fact that we have no idea whether the healers up there will even…be able to get rid of these parasitic plants.”

  “And as long as we have tons of magic stones, we can be sure it will approach us, right? It’s obvious which strategy will take less time.”

  “But is there any guarantee that we’ll be able to remove the parasites once the monster has been killed?” Lilly asks the two young men.

  “I think there’s a good chance we will,” Daphne answers in their place. “If this individual has split off from the moss huge line, then when we kill the main body and des
troy all the stones inside, it should turn to ash, right? I think the same thing will happen to these vines.”

  Lilly looks into Daphne’s eyes like she wants to say something in response, but Daphne shrugs and says, “I don’t really want to fight it myself. But based on everything I’ve heard…I don’t think it will let us get away.”

  I’m pretty sure all us upper-class adventurers have that same premonition. Call it a hunch. The moment we turn our backs on that enhanced species, it will bare its teeth.

  “…Lilly has said all she has to say. So…”

  She looks at me, and so does Aisha.

  “You heard what she said, Bell Cranell. What are you gonna do?”

  I reflect on all the opinions that the group has expressed, and I make my decision.

  “Let’s hunt down that monster.”

  “Yeah!” says Welf, pounding his fist onto the palm of his other hand.

  “I’m on it,” Ouka adds enthusiastically, swinging his battle-ax onto his shoulder. Lilly and the supporters nod at one another and start preparing to set off right away.

  The aim of our Dungeon expedition has taken an unexpected turn. In the face of an irregular situation that no one predicted, our allied party is setting out to conquer an enhanced species.

  The first thing he did after learning that people carried large quantities of magic stones was watch them in order to learn.

  Early on, he realized that the ones who went along at the back of the group singing songs were a real pain. Those songs were atrocious things that burned his body and often nearly killed him. Therefore, it was necessary to kill the ones in the back first.

  Those at the front of the group were very strong and killed heaps of his brethren as he watched with bated breath. Quite often they were outstanding members of the surface dwellers. Still, if they were alone, he could beat them. Therefore, he focused on ways to reduce the size of the groups or prevent them from forming gangs.

  He also learned that the stronger ones protected the ones who carried the magic stones. He devised all sorts of weapons to outwit humans and take their crystals. The seeds were one of those weapons.