Chapter Two Hundred and Eighty-Eight: Their Respective Jobs
“Kyaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”
“Shaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”
Karen was screaming.
She sensed monsters approaching from outside her field of vision, but more than that, she was screaming because she felt like she was about to be thrown off the riding dragon.
“Little Lumi! No no no no! Master Licht! I’m about to fall!”
“I won’t let you fall even if you do, so relax. That said, I’m busy dealing with the frost harpies chasing us right now, so if you fall, I’ll grab you roughly, so I recommend holding on.”
They rushed through the adamantite deposit cave on the sixth floor without encountering what seemed to be ghosts, and while she was screaming with her eyes closed, the inside of her eyelids brightened, and when she opened her eyes, they were on the seventh floor.
The seventh floor was a pale blue ice cliff. In such places, there were usually flying monsters, and sure enough, the moment they arrived on the seventh floor, they were swarmed by frost harpies.
Harpies that used ice-based magic.
A flock of them was apparently flying from behind. But Karen had no room to look back.
“Little Lumi! Sorry! I might dig in my nails!”
“Normal human nails won’t pierce a riding dragon’s hide, so you’ll be fine if you bite down and hold on. Well, if I pour magical power in, I can stab them at my level—ngh!”
Shocks ran through the riding dragon while the frost harpies shrieked in piercing voices sharp enough to tear silk.
Licht apparently swept away the harpies with his sword, as the sound of wingbeats receded, and immediately after, Karen, who had been slipping down, was pulled back up by Licht, who had finished the battle.
“See, the battle’s over, so you can fall onto me now if you want?”
“That’s somehow… unpleasant…”
“I don’t want it either. Julius wouldn’t like it either.”
Karen couldn’t even speak without keenly feeling the danger of falling after steeling herself, yet Licht was talking normally on the riding dragon.
Straddling the almost bipedally running smooth slide-like riding dragon, Licht squeezed the riding dragon’s torso with his thigh strength and held on in a posture with his upper body raised using his whole body’s muscle strength.
Meanwhile, the riding dragon continued racing at terrifying speed along the narrow protruding path, clinging to it perfectly. Karen desperately clung to the steep slope with Licht serving as a stopper behind her. If she relaxed here, rather than riding the riding dragon, she would almost be sitting on Licht.
“Could you not waste energy here, Karen? Is that your fastest?”
“Ghk…! How humiliating…”
Struck at a sore spot, Karen fell back onto Licht—and was horrified by how little vibration she felt.
“Are you making micro-adjustments to your posture matching the riding dragon’s running vibrations…?”
“Well, yeah. At our level, we can do that much.”
Even being able to talk normally, Karen swallowed her scream.
Though she had been on the verge of motion sickness just before, now it felt like riding in an abnormally fast wagon cutting through the wind.
Fearsome physical ability.
Karen understood instinctively that Licht truly was a strong person who matched Julius.
“…Thank you for your consideration.”
“You just need to do your job. We didn’t bring much food, so I’m seriously counting on you, you know?”
Karen’s luggage was just the alchemy cauldron, ladle, and the rucksack held in front, sandwiching the alchemy cauldron. Licht’s equipment wasn’t much different either. They had brought as many herb hardtacks as they could carry, but if an unexpected situation occurred in the unknown dungeon, they would be immediately done for.
“It’ll be fine… probably. At the very least, I should be able to find food.”
“You sound confident? I haven’t heard you’re knowledgeable about dungeons.”
“What I’m knowledgeable about isn’t dungeons, but the seasons of ingredients.”
“Seasons?”
In this world—or rather inside dungeons—what you sought could eventually be found if you looked.
Though things were said to be easier to find in the deeper layers of dungeons, they weren’t impossible to find in shallow layers either.
In Karen’s hypothesis, they spawned based on probability.
Monsters too.
Monsters were born from eggs or viviparously, but fundamentally, dungeons generated them. This was the common understanding of people in this world. After all, monsters were positioned in roughly the same places every time people entered a dungeon.
Of course, they moved within the floor, but they were concentrated enough that adventurers had their own hunting grounds. Even dungeon bosses on every tenth floor, once defeated, wouldn’t appear for a while, but then the same type of monster with the same strength would reign as boss again.
It was natural to think dungeons generated them. And Karen’s idea was that the various plants and animals found inside dungeons were also spawning in the same way.
But this wasn’t a common understanding among people in this world, probably because, unlike monsters, the way they appeared seemed random. If the probability were constant, it wouldn’t be strange for some people to notice the pattern. But most likely, the appearance probability also differed by person. The probabilities were surely affected by factors such as the goddess’s favor, one’s rank, magical power, personal understanding, and various other influences.
And if Karen’s theory was correct, she could increase those spawn probabilities. If she looked for things that seemed likely to be in the dungeon, wouldn’t they be easier to find?
For example, things likely to be in a rich forest were easier to find in a rich forest environment dungeon, and things likely to be in a winter forest were easier to find in a winter forest environment dungeon. Things likely to be in the sea were, of course, found in the sea, and things likely to be in rivers were found in rivers.
To Karen, this felt perfectly natural. But most people in this world spent their entire lives in towns, and there were people who didn’t know forests or seas outside of dungeons.
Naturally, nobody tried searching for fish in a forest, but some people searched in ways not far removed from that. Most people didn’t understand that summer fruits couldn’t be found in winter forests.
But in the winter forest inside a dungeon, even summer fruits could occasionally appear, making people even more confused about the relationship between seasons and vegetation.
If there were forests or rivers within a dungeon’s sphere of influence, natural activities could be observed there. But places easily accessible to people were valuable territory. They were quickly cleared and became areas where people lived.
Outside dungeons’ spheres of influence, the environment became almost the same as inside dungeons.
“Deepening ‘understanding’ is difficult, so it’s no wonder you don’t understand, Master Licht.”
“Are you making fun of me?”
“Not at all. This is the view of a B-rank alchemist.”
Licht’s eyes widened slightly.
How on earth could people in this world know that daikon radishes were in season in winter and cucumbers in summer? Even the ordinary knowledge from her previous life was surely helping Karen understand ingredients better. Thanks to this knowledge, Karen could surely reach Julius.
Looking down at Karen, who gazed into the distance unfazed by the freezing wind striking her cheeks, Licht too narrowed his eyes, gazing at what lay ahead on the road.
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