Eguchi Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill: Volume 12

1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-7183-4322-1
Verlag: J-Novel Club
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, Band 12, 250 Seiten

Reihe: Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill

Another day, another dungeon! Or rather, another day, the same dungeon, because even though Mukohda would much rather make the most of his mid-dungeon break by lingering on the surface and enjoying a breath or two of outside air, a certain trio of battle-happy gluttons have dragged him right back into the depths again! Fel, Sui, and Dora won't be satisfied until they conquer every last floor that the Brixt dungeon has to offer, and the most Mukohda can do is grit his teeth and tag along for the ride.

But hey, it's not that bad-after all, if the first forty floors were simple enough for Team Familiar to steamroll through, then surely the next who-knows-how-many won't pose any dangers or inconveniences either, right? And it's not like there are any horrible primeval monsters lurking somewhere down there that everyone-except for Mukohda-has forgotten the gods specifically warned them about, right?!

Autoren/Hrsg.

Eguchi, Ren

Weitere Mitwirkende

Masa

K. Hill, Tristan

Leseproben

Chapter 1: Mukohda’s Party Braves the Wasteland

Once again, we set off into the depths of the Brixt Dungeon. My teleportation stone brought us to the start of the fortieth floor, and it took two days to make our way through the forest from there. In other words, we made much faster progress than we had the first time we tackled the floor, though we still somehow ended up obtaining an excess of items in the process. I could only shake my head in resignation.

And so I found myself once again staring down a zlatorog. No sooner had we sighted the creature than Dora-chan, who hadn’t gotten to fight one the previous time we cleared the floor, shot out ahead of us, kicking things off with a burst of Ice magic. He must’ve been itching to take his turn ever since the last one we found.

The zlatorog let out a screeching shriek of pain and fury as Dora’s attack slammed into it. Lightning immediately began to crackle around the pair of golden antlers on its head. The zlatorog set its sights on Dora-chan, carefully aiming its head at the tiny dragon as it prepared to atomize him with its Lightning magic. Unfortunately for it, Dora-chan was an order of magnitude faster and more nimble, and the time it took to line up an attack gave him a massive opening to launch a strike of his own.

Considering how huge the thing was, I had to imagine it made for a pretty easy target in Dora-chan’s eyes. The pixie dragon wreathed himself in a veil of Fire magic and charged at the zlatorog, slamming into and its body, then turning around to open a second hole, and a third. In the end, the zlatorog fell without getting the chance to launch a single attack of its own. It vanished a moment later, leaving behind...

«A pelt, a hoof, and a magic stone, eh? Peh—coulda had the decency to drop some meat, at least,» Dora-chan grumbled as he surveyed the zlatorog’s drops. For all his complaining, I knew for a fact that the pelt was quite literally an item fit for a king. We’d somehow ended up with of the things at that point, but it was still a luxury item among luxury items, so I made sure to snatch it up along with the rest of the zlatorog’s stuff.

«Masteeer, let’s go pick some more of those tasty purple fruits!» said Sui as it looked out over the nearby field of shrubs. Each bush was once again packed with ripe and juicy-looking purple fruit.

We’d picked the entire field clean of violetberries just a few days earlier, but the whole crop seemed to have regrown in the intervening period.

“Violetberries, huh? Yeah, why not? We’ve had a lot of them lately, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re great. Nothing wrong with stocking up either,” I said to myself. “Let’s do it! You guys help out too, Fel, Dora-chan!”

«Hmph. Nuisance though it may be, I must admit the sauce we had with our meat recently was of quality. I will assist, though only under protest,» Fel grumbled.

«Yeah, that stuff real tasty. So was the sauce you put on that jiggly jelly stuff! I’ll help too, why not?» chimed in Dora-chan.

We ended up going with the same arrangement as last time: Fel stood guard, and the rest of us got down to business picking as many violetberries as we could. This was our second time harvesting the fruits, so thankfully we managed to work a bit faster and finish before another zlatorog could spawn to ruin our day. In the end we picked the field clean again, leaving me with another five sacks’ worth of berries.

With that chore out of the way, it was finally time for us to head down to the forty-first floor! We proceeded through the cave, descended a staircase, and emerged on the next floor to find...

“First a forest, now ?” I moaned.

«Ha ha ha! Man, these dungeons never get old, do they?» chortled Dora-chan.

«Indeed,» Fel agreed. «That sense of the unknown is why I will never tire of them.»

«Oh, wow! It’s so , Master!» said Sui.

A seemingly endless expanse of barren wasteland right out of a western spread out before us, stretching from one horizon to the other.

? ? ? ? ?

A full day later, we were still traversing the wasteland that was the forty-first floor. We’d spent the first day forging ahead, eventually stopped to bed down for the night, then got right back to it the next morning.

«This place really is -empty, huh? Not even a single monster,» Dora-chan griped telepathically. He was flying along beside Fel, who was charging across the wastes in an all-out sprint. I was on Fel’s back, as always, and Sui was in its usual place in my satchel, taking a nap.

«What are you talking about? There was a monster just yesterday!» I beamed back to Dora-chan as I glanced upward.

Yesterday, right after we’d arrived on the new floor, we’d been attacked by a flying monster called a poison vulture. It looked pretty similar to the vultures I knew, except for the fact that it was huge, with a wingspan of something like three meters. Its feathers were also dark purple, and when it got close to us, it started emitting some sort of purplish haze from its whole body that I could tell at a glance would be really bad news.

According to Fel, it was a poisonous mist that the vultures surrounded themselves with when they went hunting. And they hunt—they were just as carnivorous as normal vultures, but these ones would proactively kill their prey by way of poison, carry the bodies off somewhere safe, and wait for them to get nice and putrid before digging in.

«Didn’t count!» said Dora-chan. «Those aren’t even a fight! You just shoot ’em down with magic, and that’s the end of it. We’ve barely seen any of ’em anyway.»

«Okay, I admit, you have a point there.» I didn’t know if the population on the floor was just small or what, but whatever the reason, only a few of them had actually tried to attack us. «Just because there aren’t many of them doesn’t mean they can’t catch us off guard when we’re not paying attention, though! Keep an eye out!» That was one of the nastier aspects of the poison vulture’s hunting style.

«Sheesh, I know, already! Not like they drop anything other than magic stones when we beat ’em, though,» Dora-chan grumbled. «Hey, Fel, are those really the monsters on this floor?»

«Indeed,» replied Fel, «at least within the range I can sense. Several more of them are present in the vicinity, but nothing else.»

«‘Within the range you can sense’?» I parroted. «Does that mean that this floor’s so big that you can’t sense the whole thing?»

«It is most definitely larger than the forest above. That, I can say with certainty.»

«Ugh! I was already fed up with two floors of endless forest, and now we have something even than those were?» I scowled as I looked out across the utterly featureless wasteland from atop Fel’s back.

«It seems this may well be one of floors,» Fel said cryptically as he glared at the wastes before us as well.

«One of what floors?» I asked.

«Consider this: I take great pride in my speed, yet even I will need no small amount of time to reach the next floor. How would a group of ordinary adventurers fare in our place?»

«Oh, right... It could take them a solid two or three months to make it across. Maybe more.»

«Quite. Note too that there are no sources of food or water to be found.»

I hadn’t considered that until Fel brought it up, but he was right. I’d noticed a few of what looked like springs on the thirty-ninth and fortieth floors, and while they were few and far between, there were monsters around that dropped meat as well. In a worst-case scenario it wouldn’t have been to find enough provisions to get by up there, but this floor was a whole different can of worms. After all, the only monsters around were poisonous, and only dropped magic stones to begin with—no meat to be seen.

«I guess when you put it that way, you wouldn’t be able to make it through this floor at all without enough provisions,» I said. «You’d just keep walking farther and farther as your food stores get lower and lower, with no sign of the path to the next floor to be seen... Not to mention how cold it gets here at night! This floor’s kinda hellish, huh?»

I could easily see less strong-willed individuals breaking down long before they got anywhere near the end of the floor. The endless journey would have your spirit dangling by a fraying shoestring, and then the freezing-cold nights would set in the moment the sun went down to snap that last remaining thread. Speaking of the sun, I had no clue how it worked, but the larger, more open floors light up in the daytime and get dark at night.

It only took me one night on this floor to realize how miserably cold the nights here were going to be. It wasn’t so bad during the daytime, but when night came I could tell from feeling alone that it was...