Volume 4 Chapter 4.3

Volume 4 Chapter 4.3

「I really am grateful for your hard work.」

Igreos bowed to Hiroshi once after he said that. Finding it a little baffling that a god would do something like that, Hiroshi just returned to his work and then got to finishing the outer wall maintenance as pledged before looking inside…

「Whoa……」

「Mm, it appears to be still thrashing around.」

In the center of all the junk that used to be the treasury, there was an evil god fragment attempting to crush the barrier that Igreos had erected.

「Before repairin’ this or anything, don’t we gotta do somethin’ bout that？」

「Aye」

「Even I feel like I’d lose my sanity if I weren’t next to Igreos-sama right now, so I bet regular priests/faculty wouldn’t be able to take it.」

Looking at the wriggling evil god fragment, Hiroshi, Igreos, and Nazaria continued their conversation while grimacing. Honestly, you would have to possess a sharp mental game like Hiroshi or Igreos’ direction protection like Nazaria in order to keep your sanity. Of the members from the Japanese team, Mio could probably handle it somehow, but the other three, probably not, unless they had a preventive measure.

「Well, since we obviously gotta erect a barrier to prevent anything leakin’ outside, Igreos-sama, do ya gotta holy elemental offensive strengthening field or somethin’ you can make?」

「Aye, as I am a god. That is the most basic of basics.」

「Then followin’ past procedures, how ‘bout we play Haruna-san’s sutra gospel on repeat.」

By this point, Haruna’s song was essentially being treated like a talisman or like the salt in pickles. Nazaria inwardly expressed her deepest sympathy.

「Now I’ll just fill in the crevices that stick out ‘n then coat the surface with a sheet, I guess.」

「Aye. Please do.」

Since Igreos gave his stamp of approval, Hiroshi moved the work along speedily. Igreos’s barrier (which outclassed Aearis’s holy offensive strengthening barrier) forced the evil god fragment to pour all of its remaining energy into maintaining its life force, now unable to interfere with the outside at all.

Rewinding a bit to the time Hiroshi was relaxing with some tea on break.

「We should be at the first poison gas region soon.」

「About how far do we have?」

「According to the map, that tunnel over there makes a turn, and it’s right at the end there. The spacious room ahead is completely filled with it.」

The dungeon crawl with Haruna’s group was going pretty smoothly. Already at the entrance there were just monsters that even amateurs could deal with, and even going a little further in only yielded capybara-sized mice. Big rats were certainly a handful to beginning adventurers/warriors or amateur excavators, but to adventurers who were accustomed to taking on quests, all they amounted to were sitting ducks.

Approaching the poison gas region, there were monsters like giant centipedes coming out, which were a nuisance, but even these were no enemies of Haruna’s group. The moment they showed up, Makoto sliced them in half, Haruna cut them up, Mio sewed them onto the wall, and Tatsuya froze them in ice.

Also, the reason Tatsuya didn’t use Oxide Circle was because despite the monsters in this dungeon being of the biological variety, depriving them of oxygen did not work.

「Dungeons are weird places though.」

「Pretty sure when they’re isolated they’re beyond weird, yeah, but specifically what do you mean？」

「Cuz the monsters we defeat disappear if we leave them too long, but the ingredients we retrieve from them, like meat, don’t disappear right？」

「Oh, that’s what you meant……」

Tatsuya commented on Haruna’s rather late observation. Normally you’d think after watching the tower sprout back up after being pulverized, this would be nothing new to see, but apparently Haruna just liked to pay attention to small, pointless details from time to time.

「Also, the monsters disappear, but why not human corpses？」

「Ah～、I see what you’re getting at」

「Come to think of it, the search parties that all got destroyed apparently were one day past expiration when they were found.」

Understanding what Haruna found so peculiar, Tatsuya and Makoto found themselves agreeing.

「Y’know, listening to your observation, Haruna, I thought something……」

「What？」

「It seems like some of the corpses from the search parties had all their flesh eaten. I think the dungeon monsters spawned suddenly out of thin air. So byt hat logic……」

「You’re wondering if they excrete their food？」

「Yeah. Rather, they shouldn’t even be organisms, so it’s weird they’d even require food.」

「Ahー」

The elders of the group let out impressed voices at Mio’s oddly sharp question. Upon hearing it, Haruna tilted her head a bit as she came up with her own new problem.

「I also found that odd. In fact, are they even eating for preservation？」

「What do you mean？」

「What if the monsters in the dungeon grow from experience too…?」

「That’s one freaky theory……」

「Well, a lot changes, like if it’s from individual experience or if the dungeon grows at a uniform rate, etc」

「And so we go back to the initial question……」

Of course, being a talented woman who got third place on the national mock examination, Haruna sometimes had unfathomably sharp intellect when she wasn’t twitterpated. Had she began her first question with the premise she just offered, no one would be questioning why she cared. Instead they would have known it was an important element to consider.

「Honestly, the only dungeons we’ve really been through were Ortem’s and the one over here, so I get the feeling we don’t have sufficient information about the dungeons in this world.」

「Ah～、that’s very true」

「With the Ortem one, we were split into different groups, and with Sensei being together with Artiem, none of us could keep all that calm, so we didn’t even end up properly researching the layout.」

「In that sense, this is almost the first time we’re going through a dungeon, huh」

It seemed like this topic, emerging from Haruna’s misgivings, was more crucial than they gave it credit for, especially when it came to figuring out whether the monsters in dungeons grow or not, and if so then was it on an individual basis or a group thing? They couldn’t ignore that.

「The real problem is how we figure that out.」

「Right…Guess I should have tried asking that when we were at the Sweltering Tower.」

「Well, we didn’t have the leisure to do that, plus we only recently started caring about the dungeon specs.」

Tatsuya recalled an incident in which they could have learned something, clicking his tongue, while Haruna scolded him. But before this whole issue of not knowing enough about the dungeon layout, the team hadn’t even entered the Sweltering Tower to begin with.

「When you think along these lines, there’s a heck of a lot of things we didn’t care about initially that we probably should have pointed out.」

「Such as？」

「Especially with the Sweltering Tower, but just in general, how are these isolated dimensions staying activated？」

「Yeah, I’ve been wondering that for a while. Aranwen-sama and Igreos-sama aren’t experts on that, I don’t think, so I didn’t ask them at the last explanation meeting. If we’re going to ask anyone, it’d be better to try Alfemina-sama or the god of knowledge, Darjan-sama for that…」

「Yeah, Alfemina-sama’s pretty busy usually……」

The group nodded in a serious manner as Tatsuya commented on one of the five gods they had yet to meet directly through Aearis. Darjan didn’t seem to be staying in one specific area like Aranwen or Igreos, and he didn’t visit the priestess more than one or two times a month.