Volume 2 Chapter 9.1

Chapter 9.1

Just as dread had almost completely taken over their minds, their bodies were whisked up into the air by some unknown force.

「Eh?」

「Whisked.」

「Away.」

Haruna’s bewilderment was dispelled by the octo-gals’ ever so endearing disorganized speech pattern.

「Catcher.」

「UFO.」

「Abducted.」

「Earthling.」

「Akita Neru.」

「If you’re going to be dropping obscure references would you at least have the courtesy of doing them justice?」

Haruna’s comment seemingly fell on deaf ears as the octo-gals kept prattling on as though nothing ever happened. Upon further inspection, the remaining three party members could similarly be seen wafting in the air, enveloped in their loving embrace.

「Catcher.」

「Cleaned it out.」

「Claw’s wobbly.」

「Three thousand yen per successful attempt.」

「Each prize’s worthless.」

「First of all, stop taking the piss, second of all I should either get my ears checked or that thing just mentioned japanese currency.」

The octo-gals’ treasure trove of meta knowledge could be reasonably explained by Alan Wein’s mischievous nature, which just further reinforced the idea in the back of their head, originally kick started by Alfemina’s antics, that the deities of this universe weren’t deity-like in any conventional sense.

「Easy money.」

「Customer traffic down.」

「Filing for bankruptcy.」

「Disposed of.」

「That last bit doesn’t even make sense in context, stop trying to hamfist it into everything!」

Makoto couldn’t stop herself from speaking up, despite knowing all too well just how hollow her efforts really were. The octo-gals’, naturally, made sure to do the exact opposite of what they were told.

「Targets secured.」

「Take to incinerator.」

「Char the bodies.」

「Snap the limbs clean off.」

「Disposed of.」

「You could’ve just reduced us to ash while you were at it, you know. Would’ve spared you the few extra steps.」

The disconnect between their squeakish voices and the actual things being said had finally broken Tatsuya’s resolve. The body count just kept increasing.

「Boobies.」

「Creep!」

「Every melon seed ripens with time.」

「Big or small, you are all equal in the eyes of god.」

「Titties.」

「It’s not your babylons, it’s you.」

The octo-gals’, in an attempt to stave off their boredom, set their sights on Haruna, who had no way of fighting back against their surprisingly soft touch. She hung in there like a true champ, all while continuously reassuring herself that the blatant act of sexual harassment could be chalked up to a hitch in inter-racial communication.

But it didn’t just stop there.

「Stripper tits.」

「Plastic breasts.」

「Silicone? More like sillycone.」

「Falsie abuser.」

「Enough already!」

Their relentless wave of hurtful words struck Makoto right where it hurt. The real kicker here was that she was forced into cramming a bunch of falsies up there, to create the illusion of C cup, against her will. Needless to say she found the critique undeserved.

Makoto had been self-conscious about her breast size for as long as she could remember. To put matters into perspective – she’d lull herself to sleep by reminding herself that at least they weren’t growing inwards. She took pride in being who she was, the good and the bad. Her authenticity was her very identity.

Being perceived as inauthentic was plenty a reason for chagrin. Expressing said emotion would only serve to fuel the fire so she, begrudgingly, chose the path of least resistance – keeping her mouth shut. A heartbreaking tale to say the least.

As fate would have it, she wasn’t alone in her toll as everyone, with the exception of Tatsuya, were in a relatively similar position. Haruna had already given up the idea of making demands, meanwhile Mio was just meekly putting up with mostly anything they threw at her, asides from when they got a bit too rough for comfort. Granted due to her vocal rebelliousness Makoto’s treatment was a tad more unhinged than the rest.

「What’s the matter? You want none a this?」

「Guys are gross.」

「It’s weird.」

「No fun.」

「Girls tender.」

「I see…」

Tatsuya could intuitively grasp their talking points without much further elaboration. The only real point of attack on a guy would have to be his crotch, there’s also the rear but most of them are going to be characterized by a particular scrawniness. Whether or not they would be satisfying to grope was up for debate but if there’s one thing that was for certain is that Tatsuya could breathe easy knowing that his manly pride would be kept out of harm’s way for yet another day.

「Do you think they’re still going at it?」

「Can hear them clashing, barely.」

「Signal’s up.」

Haruna and Mio’s languid response was perfectly understandable, given the circumstances. Granted their treatment wasn’t as bad as, say, Makoto’s, it wasn’t exactly a far cry from it.

「I’m gonna assume you all ain’t picking up the pace for good reason, right?」

「We have limitations.」

「About as fast as we go.」

「Figured.」

Say what you want about their unladen airspeed velocity but at least it served its purpose, seeing as they had this whole artful dodger vibe going for them, although their reading ability and erratic movement patterns undoubtedly had a part in forming said vibe.

Thing is though, they were laden, quite laden at that, what with being burdened with multiple decked out human bodies and whatnot. To be completely fair none of them even came close to the obesity line or anything of the sort, unarmored that is, armored, however, it was a completely different ballpark. Makoto, who was about as average across the board as it got in all the relevant measurements, averaged out weight wise with the cloth geared Tatsuya thanks to to the greatsword. In Hiroshi’s case this would’ve been all the more apparent, seeing as he was carrying around a pole axe and a great maul with him which would’ve easily put him over the hundred kilo threshold. Even Mio, who was the lightest of the group, totaled fifty kilos, equipment and all. It was a miracle that they were even moving at all.

「What about blinking? Oh wait, we might just blink into our doom by accident.」

「Concentrated fire.」

「Swiss cheese.」

「Disposed of.」

「It’s not as funny when it goes beyond the field of implausibility.」

Their single minded dedication to creating as many hypothethical scenarios where ‘disposed of’ made sense in context was not received well by Haruna, who believed the joke to be in poor taste.

「Better not set them off, unless you’re willing to take the plunge, that is.」

「Not anytime soon, no…」

「Who’d want to subject themselves to *that*」

Mio exclaimed with a defeatist tone in her voice, pointing towards the torrential flow of liquid poison running right beneath them. Her assertion remained uncontested.

「Whoosh.」

「What a lovely peach.」

「Clammbon.」

「Laughed.」

On the flip side the octo-gals were more interested in dropping shallow references to peach boy, only to inexplicably transition from that to referencing a certain work from a certain prolific Meiji/early Showa poet’s collection. Through repeated exposure this bizarre nature of theirs had registered as matter of fact, as far as the party was concerned. The sense of moral obligation to call out wackiness for the sake of wackiness had died out, leaving them wholly apathetic to the octo-gals hijinks. This lead to them calling off the incessant assault against the female rosters more sensitive parts as its sole purpose – getting a rise out of the vocal protests, had lost all meaning.

「Could I ask you something?」

「Absolutely anything, lay it on us, sis.」

「We’ll always be there for you.」

Haruna’s off-hand mutter was met with an overwhelming surge of positive reinforcement from the octo-gals. Their apparent lack of social tact might’ve given some people the wrong impression but it was never their intention to discomfort the party, they just wanted to brighten the mood in their own awkwardly cute way.

「I recall you mentioning that the final boss was a corrupted end, if I’m not mistaken?」

「You’re not.」

「We most certainly did.」

Judging from the name I’m going to assume it’s an Ent that’s been encroached by miasma?

「That is… correct!」

「You have just won a million dollars!」

The excitement was palpable as the octo-gals could be seen zipping around in the air in celebration. The freshly crowned winner, on the other hand, just wanted to get to the point already.

「It’s immobile, correct?」

「Right on the money.」

「I guess you could say it’s rooted in its ways.」

「And long range dependent too.」

「As far as I’m aware regular Ent’s are capable of movement, what makes the corrupted version different?」

Ent’s were broadly classified as any tree that, through thousands upon thousands of years of sapping dregs of magical energy from the environment, had a soul manifest within them. Functionally they were on par with humans- Their roots were restructured in a way that allowed for fluent bipedal movement and their branches were capable of performing precision-heavy tasks inaccessible to most. Due to the heavily conditional nature of a tree ever coming to life, and the amount of time to get there in the first place, the total Ent population was so meager, that they weren’t even recognized as a mainstay race. A triviality to some but it was important to note that Trent’s were a completely different beast altogether and, as such, shouldn’t be lumped together into one category.

Thus one would naturally think that an Ent would retain its mobility following corruption but it seemed to not have been the case, at least in this one isolated instance.

「Corruption, transformation.」

「Link to the underworld.」

「Dungeon spawn.」

「Assimilation.」

「One with the dungeon.」

「And by that you mean that it lost its ability to move upon merging with the dungeon?」

Haruna’s attempt at connecting loose ends was met with thunderous cheers from the octo-gal crowd, who would go on to seamlessly transition from this happy-go-lucky vibe they had going for a moment into that of a cynical middle-aged man who’d only ever talk about how the media perpetuates fake news and how men’d be happier if they learned to take responsibility for their actions and what have you not. In a rare showing of camaraderie between fantasy and reality, these generalized statements fell flat on their face, failing to catch the attention of the audience, which was much more interested in sorting out the data presented to them.

The most relevant piece of information that could be extrapolated from it was that the Corrupted Ent’s presence was the only thing holding the dungeon together. Unlike a mainstay dungeon, such as Phantasm Spire, it had nothing to fall back on in the event of losing its one and only major repository of miasma. It’d take, at the very least, another five hundred or so years for the dungeon’s innate existence to bleed through into the intrinsic order of the universe.

Whether or not downing the Corrupted Ent would be enough to sewer the link between it and the underworld was murky, by all accounts. In game the writers’d go through leaps and hoops to logically justify that being the case but this was foreign territory where any wild card can and should be expected.

Regardless one thing was for sure – its resource deposit should, in theory, be infinite. That being the case, baiting the thing into blowing all of its resources through repeated usage of high-damaging abilities hardly seemed like a viable strategy and yet, in Hiroshi’s case, it was the only real option.

「Just to be perfectly clear, if we were to fell the Corrupted Ent the dungeon would follow suite?」

「It’s link to the underworld would be severed too.」

「It’s still in the process of gathering miasma.」

「Without the Corrupted Ent to keep it locked down it’ll scatter all over the place.」

All of Haruna’s suppositions had just been reinforced. She would’ve liked nothing less than to be by Hiroshi’s side as soon as possible but the aforementioned flow of liquid poison showed no signs of dying down any time soon.

「I sure hope they’re okay.」

「I can still track them.」

「I know what you’re trying to do, and I appreciate it, it’s just that… Sorry, I can’t really put it into words.」

There was plenty of room for concern: For one the Corrupted Ent was immobile, forcing Hiroshi, who had no movement items on hand, to go on the offensive. At a glance one’d think an immobile target would have to be a bow user’s wet dream but Artiem’s bow wasn’t designed with punching through tree bark in mind. Depending on the trash mobs’ positioning she might just find her hands full with fending them off and never get the opportunity to go on the offensive in the first place. All of these aspects are bad enough on their own but they’re nothing compared to the worst possible hypothetical scenario – one where the number of trash mobs keeps growing indefinitely as the fight goes on and their attack range gets artificially extended via spatial contortion.

「Are we there yet?」

「Arriving in ten minutes.」

「In case of unexpected interference.」

「Remain calm and collected.」

They didn’t muddy the waters when it came to answering exactly what they were being asked about in a direct manner and, although the awfully vague wording could use some work, they’d thrown in some extra bits of relevant information to boot.

「Warning, warning.」

「Imminent danger.」

「Brace yourselves.」

A mere five minutes later, the octo-gal banter took a concerning turn. An onslaught of branches shot out of the surrounding walls before anyone was able to say something about it.