#020
To answer properly would require a long explanation, and since Carlisle didn’t seem to have actually asked out of interest, I answered roughly. If he had been interested, he would have looked inside while I was unconscious. Anyway, it wasn’t a wrong answer. Setting aside the Melbrain, I was in a position where I needed to deliver the medicinal herbs Eira requested to preserve my life.
Of course, escaping from here would come first.
“Wait! Come with me!”
Even though I hadn’t been dawdling, when I looked back, Carlisle had already set off ahead, so I hurriedly got up and chased after him.
“Walk apart from me.”
Walking among the corpses of giant monsters wasn’t very pleasant. When I stuck close behind him, feeling like they might come back to life and attack at any moment, he spoke coldly. I hesitated and changed my hurried steps to match his pace to something a bit slower. His solid back quickly grew distant.
‘How irritating.’
I grumbled inwardly. It was embarrassing, and honestly, I was even a bit hurt. Of course, there’s no reason to be hurt. What kind of relationship do he and I have?
‘Still, in the game he liked me quite a bit…’
Thinking that, I suddenly recalled that Carlisle’s favorability was in an inactive state. Come to think of it, that’s strange. In reality, I met Carlisle in the forest. Even before Eira, he was the very first NPC I encountered. But why wasn’t his favorability activated?
I called up the favorability window again. Below several activated NPCs, Carlisle was still grayed out in an inactive state.
‘What’s this? A bug?’
Carlisle’s back walking ahead looked cold and solid. Even without checking, Carlisle’s favorability index was obvious from how he treated me. Given our history, it’s not incomprehensible… but still, being openly hated like that can’t feel good. No matter how much he’s just an NPC, if it were someone like Muchi it would be one thing, but honestly, he was a character I liked.
It would be better for my mental health not to look at it. Feeling dejected, I decided to just lose interest and closed the window.
‘It’ll appear when it’s time to appear. It doesn’t matter if it never appears.’
Feeling dispirited, I kept my mouth tightly shut and began walking through the dim cave following behind him.
Only the sound of our two footsteps echoed loudly in the quiet, damp cave. The faint light emitted by unidentified plants and minerals illuminated the cave, so no separate lighting was needed. No more monsters appeared. At least the monsters on this floor had definitely been wiped out by Carlisle. No wonder there were so many corpses… It seemed like mobs had all flocked here, excited by the scent of humans entering after a long time.
Walking quietly like that for a while, it even felt somewhat peaceful. The problem was… we needed to find an escape route from here.
It wasn’t known even in the game how many total floors this mine dungeon consisted of. Anyway, the exit connected to the outside only existed on the lowest floor, so we absolutely had to go down to the lowest floor. Passages leading to lower floors could skip dozens or even hundreds of floors at once if you were lucky, but the problem was that these also opened randomly, so to find passages, you had to break all the surrounding rocks.
Because of this, this dungeon wouldn’t even open when your level was low, and even if you discovered it early, it was best not to attempt it unless you were properly prepared. You needed enhanced weapons and stamina, of course, but also had to prepare as many potions, bombs, and luck warps (lucky items that could randomly skip multiple floors at once) as possible, and in case of emergency, you absolutely had to carry an incredibly expensive item that could immediately escape to the surface.
I had none of these things, so normally I would be trapped here forever and die of starvation, exhaustion, or monster attacks, but fortunately, I now had Carlisle Lightinger with me.
KWAKWAKWAKWABOOM!
“……”
Carlisle was advancing by occasionally stopping and throwing small, coin-sized red stones ahead. Then that entire area – rocks, plants, everything – would be destroyed and become flat ground in the blink of an eye. If this were real, there would be no environmental destruction like this.
I didn’t know whether luck warp items or emergency escape items existed for NPCs too, but it seemed clear that Carlisle didn’t have them now. If he did, there’s no way he wouldn’t use them immediately. Instead, it seemed like he had many other items I didn’t know about. It would take some time, but we should be able to escape somehow. I had to believe that.
Fortunately, a passage was found not far ahead, and we moved to the next floor.
Carlisle went down first, then I followed. As soon as I arrived, what I saw were monsters being mercilessly slaughtered. As soon as Carlisle landed, he dealt with the monsters that had swarmed him indiscriminately, then moved forward and detonated explosive items again. Even amid all that chaos, his flowing movements were so smooth they felt like art.
The small fry (by this dungeon’s standards) died and collapsed just from the explosions, and even the strong monsters that survived had their life force drastically reduced. In Carlisle’s hands was suddenly a gorgeous, antique silver rifle (it looked antique but performed like the latest automatic rapid-fire), and with just a couple shots from that, even giant mobs collapsed.
Carlisle walked calmly forward through that pandemonium. Dust, monster fluids, and bone fragments swirled around, but thanks to the coat he wore or perhaps some special purification item, even when he seemed briefly contaminated, he quickly became fine again. If it were me, not only would my clothes and skin become tattered, but my stamina and life force would be randomly chipped away.
Wait a moment.
Following at a distance behind and watching all of this, I suddenly paused at a thought that occurred to me.
‘Could it be that he told me to walk apart for my sake?’
That couldn’t be. Someone with that kind of consideration wouldn’t have left me dying in the forest.
“Um, this probably isn’t the case, but just in case.”
Unable to contain my curiosity, I spoke up.
Of course, I wasn’t going to ask if he was being considerate of me. Even if I asked that, I didn’t think I’d get a proper answer. If he looked at me like I was talking nonsense, I’d have no choice but to dig a hole to hide my face. Even with a shovel, it would be impossible with my current stamina. This was even a rock cave.
My question was more fundamental and crucial.
“The cave isn’t going to collapse, is it?”
If this were the game, of course not, but since it had been reality-patched, who knew? I didn’t know how much the fantasy settings would work in this world either. But Carlisle answered indifferently without even looking.
“It’s a cave where everything automatically restores itself over time, so how could it collapse?”
His tone suggested I was talking nonsense, but regardless, I was relieved by those words. However, after a brief pause, Carlisle glanced at my face and added in a somewhat mischievous tone:
“Even if it collapsed, I can escape, so it doesn’t matter either way.”
It seemed he had an escape item! Then why wasn’t he using it and going through all this trouble now… wait. Because of me? It might be that the escape item was so rare he was saving it for truly critical situations and trying to find other methods as much as possible, but… in reality, it was probably just single-use. After all, the game I had played was single-player only.
If he had an escape item but wasn’t using it and was instead helping me find an escape route together, that would be incredibly grateful, but at the same time completely incomprehensible… (Right? He was the one who left me in the forest?) But aside from his actual words and expressions, it was also true that he had consistently been helping me except for our first meeting.
As my head became complicated, I asked, prepared for the cringe:
“But why are you helping me anyway? You left me in the forest.”
“Forest?”
Carlisle, who had just sliced through a giant mob blocking the path, glanced back at me. His expression seemed to wonder what I was talking about. But there were still mobs swarming in front of him. Taking advantage of the moment Carlisle turned his gaze, several attacked at once. I was horrified and frantically pointed.
“W-wait. Don’t look this way! Monster! Monster!”
With a briefly frowning face as he searched his memory, he scattered something like water droplets toward the mobs without even looking. The attacking mobs turned to black ash in mid-air and disappeared. My mouth fell open at that sight, but Carlisle seemed uninterested in either me or the mobs.
Carlisle, who had been tilting his head, seemed to remember something, but for some reason his expression became coldly dismissive as he turned his gaze forward again. Then he spoke in a tone tinged with some annoyance:
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
