Chapter 4.1

Chapter 4 Part 1

「Eesh…」

Haruna muttered inadvertently as she faced the very unpleasant situation in front of her.

「Azuma-kun…? This is a little too…」

「It’s all right. Despite their looks, they ain’t that aggressive. They won’t make a move unless we trip their web.」

「Okay, that’s not the problem though…」

With a futile interjection, Haruna looked up once more with disgust.

「Eek…」

「Oh, Toudou-san. You keep goin’ that way, you’ll trip the web.」

「What? For real? Where?」

「Right there.」

「That was too close…」

Startled by the web a step away, Haruna scurried away. She reevaluated her situation, and ended up speechless.

「Err…」

「What’s wrong?」

Picking up on the difference in her tone from her disgusted groans earlier, Hiroshi asked.

「I made eye contact…」

「No problem. These types don’t pick their targets from visual cues.」

「It doesn’t matter if it’s going to attack me or not. It’s already ridiculously disgusting…」

「You say that…」

「I didn’t know spiders could be so repulsive when they’re big…」

Masterfully ignoring Haruna’s comment, Hiroshi gripped his weapon-slash-excavation-tool hand axe. His expression made it clear that his current state of mind consisted entirely of how to efficiently collect materials, and how to efficiently remove what’s standing in the way for him to do that. Frankly put, he couldn’t give a rat’s rear end about how Haruna felt.

At the very moment, they were witnessing a giant hornet caught in the spider’s web being encapsulated into a feeding cocoon. They had wandered into a cluster of Giant Spiders, each as large as a grown man. It was a half-day’s journey, with the traversing speed of adventurers, through the woodlands from where they encountered the Berserker Bear on the first day.

「…How did we get here…?」

In the absurdly jarring situation of confusion, Haruna couldn’t help but avert her eyes from reality and into a flashback.

***

It all happened two nights ago, when Haruna said:

「I kind of want another outfit…」

「An outfit, huh…」

「Mm-hm. One of them’s stained with curry and oil… And it won’t come out.」

「All right. You wanna get one for workin’ at the shop?」

「I could, but looking at our sales, it seems a little frivolous.」

A month had passed since the Venomous Wolf fiasco. Hiroshi and Haruna had established a rather reliable livelihood. The biggest change in their lives was that they had rented a room, at the lowest pit of the market in Wulls (so small that they didn’t understand how it could be legally described as a two bedroom flat).

Staying at the inn for an extended period of time would have just been too expensive. Besides, developing seasonings in an inn seemed rather futile. It wasn’t too encouraging when they had no opportunity to use the seasonings they had created. Even if they wanted the inn to use them, they couldn’t make enough for the entire kitchen. So, with a rather side-tracked motivation to contribute, they decided to rent a small room as soon as they could.

In other news, for additional income, they opened a food stand to run in down times in between taking on requests. Their best sellers were curry bread and corn dogs. This doubled as recycling the curry powder they made too much of, and sharing their new seasonings.

Occasionally, they had been selling some bison (or other wild animal) meat they had hunted during one of their quests, fried on a skewer. The steak sauce and ketchup they had brewed were coming in handy. They sold the curry bread at 35 Tirol a piece, which seemed close to a rip-off, but it had recently been selling hot as their signature dish. Sometimes, they nearly forgot if their real occupations were adventurers not food stand owners.

「Right. The best day we had on the stand was 100 Chrones when we worked the entire day.」

「Taking out the cost of the ingredients and the registration fee for the stand, our profit was 50 Chrones, tops.」

Still, as a side hustle, these adventurers were doing quite well with their food stand. Normally, even after a full day, a food stand in the city would only sell about 70 Chrones. They were coming to terms with how lucky they were to make 20,000 Chrones in their first two days in the city.

One of the reasons why their food stand was booming was their implementation of a never-before-seen cooking method of coating food and frying them in oil. While the concept of frying food wasn’t unheard of, consumable oil that remained in liquid form for a sustainable time was a rare commodity, and it was only in the past few years, that enough liquid cooking oil to dip entire pieces of food in had become readily accessible in the market. This was true for the entirety of this world, even outside of Farland, and in any country, “cooking with oil” meant cooking with animal fat or butter. While there was a form of lard-like fat, not much of it was produced until recently, which didn’t encourage the development of fried food, either.

Of course, there were many cooks and food stand owners who tried to copy-cat them, but fried food had rarely been seen before, even on a noble’s dinner table. Therefore, there were barely any cookware that had been developed for frying food (like the wok, for example). While it seemed that it would be popularized one day as word of mouth spread, it looked like fried food wouldn’t hit the table of an average family for a long time. That being said, the desire for delicious food transcends time periods and dimensions. Fried food may become a staple of anyone’s diet in, say, a half a year.

On another note, the concept of steaming food itself was not a thing in Farlane. At this time, the Iron Nation of Forrey had barely been introduced to it, and they had just started steaming bread buns with nothing inside them. Even in Forrey, no one had a steamer that could be used at a food stand. Once Hiroshi and Haruna discovered this, they had began discussing selling steamed meat buns at the food stand once it was a little colder.

「So, Azuma-kun. You can make clothes, can’t you?」

「Well, sure. That’s easy.」

「Can you make them more resistant to stains?」

「No problem. I just gotta enchant the clothes with a stain-resistin’ spell.」

「It’s that easy, huh…」

Haruna was sincerely impressed by Hiroshi laying out such a convenient option with ease.

「I mean, it’s a little awkward castin’ it on a finished product… Besides, it wasn’t a popular enchantment in the game, either.」

「Well, it does eat up one of the precious Enchantment slots. I can’t blame them.」

「It’s like, three slots tops when you get a NPC to do it, ain’t it?」

「Just about. It didn’t seem to take up a slot if it was already enchanted, so those equipment were very popular. Is it any different when a player enchants something?」

「It’s just a matter of success rate, but if I wanted to, I could slap on ‘bout five of the convoluted ones. I don’t think there’s a max to how many I could put on at once.」

「Cool.」

「I mean, it spikes up the difficulty and the chance of damagin’ the equipment for no reason, so I’d only put up to 3 Advance Enchantments… Novice Enchantments are a different story, and I could put 5 or 6 with a realistic success rate if I really wanted to.」

Haruna listened, interested in asked what caught her mind:

「Can you make anything pre-enchanted, like a drop item?」

「Can I? Your rapier’s exactly that, Toudou-san.」

「Huh?」

「It’s actually real easy. I just had to enchant the materials and while I was processin’ ‘em. When I made that, as a high-level refinement, I used magic to improve its quality as I enchanted the materials with automatic-restoration. Then, when I took it out of the furnace, I added a Durability buff. And while I shaped it, I threw on Elemental Attack (ALL) and +75% Parry.」

「Elemental Attack (ALL) and +75% Parry!? Those Enchantments are ridiculously expensive!」

「I thought you’d want ‘em anyway, since it’s a rapier, after all. ‘Cause of the quality of the materials, I couldn’t really throw in more enchantments in the craftin’ process, so there ain’t no base Attack or other stat bonuses.」

That’s more than enough! Haruna nearly shouted. The base specs of the swords had already surpassed that of Starlight, a rare equipment. Anyone would have interjected that four pre-set enchantments on top of those specs would make this piece of weapon broken.

「Okay, I’d been meaning to ask you…」

「Yeah?」

「Why don’t the enchantments you put on during crafting not affect the enchantment process later?」

「Accrodin’ to the NPC who taught me the Advanced stuff, now I don’t get all the mumbo jumbo, but when you process an enchanted material, the bonus becomes a characteristic of the material, instead of an enchantment. So, technically speakin’, your sword only has unique abilities. Not enchantments.」

In other words, since characteristic can’t normally be erased, melting these weapons for purposes of reusing them were difficult, although not impossible. That being said, Hiroshi had almost never performed it.

「Any who, goin’ back to the stain-resistin’ enchantment…」

「Uh-huh.」

「It would be easier to put on the fabric or rather ‘an the outfit. Same goes for Auto-Repair and Improved Durability.」

「Which means?」

「It’ll be a ton cheaper if we just gather the ingredients for string to begin with.」

Not again… Haruna nearly thought, before admitting to herself that this was a very attractive offer. While it wasn’t impossible that this would end up as her only outfit for a while, she couldn’t carry around many different pairs of outfits, anyway. So, she had decided that the vest course of action would be to carry as much durable, long-lasting, and relatively stain-resistant clothes as possible. One of the reasons why they couldn’t take on too many quests at the moment was because they were unable to gather ingredients for an armor due to their damaged clothes.

And, no offense to Hiroshi, but an artisan of any trade is useless without ingredients. In Hiroshi’s case, his completed products were too powerful, so Haruna couldn’t have him making them willy-nilly, even when he had the ingredients. To boot, while Hiroshi had ridiculously high stats in the adventure department, his skills were completely useless in the field, making him a wall at best. In-game, in fact, his stats as an adventurer was below average. Even at the food stand, while his cooking skills were on par with a three-Michelin-star chef, they were noticeably worse than Haruna’s. His debilitating fear of women prevents him from doing even an acceptable job at the cashier. Come to think of it, he seemed more and more useless.

Although, all the equipment in the food stand and its kitchen were created by him, and considering that they were easier to use than the cookware in their real world, let alone the average of this world, Haruna had to recognize the strength of his Extra Skill in Tool Building. It helped a lot that he used all sorts of scrap materials they scrambled around for, keeping the cost at a minimum. If Haruna were to start a food stand without Hiroshi, she would have spent more money for cookware that were harder to use.

A man who comes in handy backstage, but useless in action. That’s who Hiroshi Azuma was at the moment. Of course, Haruna would never have such a cruel impression of him, but that was the objective truth.

「Speaking of, what kinds of enchantments can you put on it?」

「Lessee… Temperature Control, Auto-Repair, Stain Resistance, Rash Control, Heatproof, Acidproff, and Improve Armor, I think. Also, clothes get a bit of Defense modifier for each enchantment, so if I put a bunch of enchantments on good materials, it could end up with a higher Defense stat then most pieces of armor, even without any Improve Defense enchantments.」

Something in the list of enchantments ignited a spark within Haruna. She didn’t seem to hear the rest of his sentence.