Chapter 381 |
Heading Down
Also, the poison was terrifying.
When you think of ants, formic acid comes to mind, but given that I—with my [Strong Acid] skill—felt nothing and couldn’t resist at all, it was probably closer to the venom carried by bees rather than formic acid.
(Hmm… It was excruciating… Oh, right. Just to be safe, I should drink a bit more of that giant aphid’s bodily fluids.)
Given the sheer size of the Great Ant, even a single sting injected a ridiculous amount of venom. Honestly, if its stinger had just pierced straight through my stomach, I might’ve still been able to fight.
As I was thinking that, I was about to drink the giant aphid’s bodily fluids I’d just stored in my newly created spatial vault when the pixies, catching the sweet scent, swarmed around me all at once, begging with their pleading cries.
"Pii! Pii! Piiii!"
"Whoa—! Hey!? You guys…!"
"Hehe, they worked hard, so they must be hungry~"
Nina-san and Serai-san were watching carefree like that, but being mobbed—hair pulled, stomach poked—was anything but tolerable.
"Alright, alright! I’ll give you some now, so calm down a little!"
"Pii! Pii! Piiii!"
So, to let all the pixies drink together, I created a large ceremonial cup (the kind used in weddings or sumo rituals) out of rock salt and filled it to the brim with the giant aphid’s bodily fluids.
(Nice, nice… It’s still there, good.)
In dungeons, monsters vanish into smoke when they die.
But apparently, if you store a part of their body in a spatial vault, the connection is severed, and they don’t disappear. Since even bloodstains vanish, I figured it was worth a shot—and it seems to have worked.
"Hey, Egetsu-san, is that…?"
Serai-san, standing nearby, looked at the pale yellowish-green liquid filling the large cup with a "No way…" expression.
"Yeah. This is the bodily fluids of the giant aphid I just killed. Thanks to this, I think I managed to recover from the poison."
But when I explained it like that, they just nodded along—since me using monster parts as ingredients was nothing new.
"Huh… So, what’s that in your hand?"
"Oh, this?"
What Serai-san was more curious about was the basketball-sized crystal I was holding.
"I ripped this out when finishing off that aphid. It was glowing when I was inside it, so it seemed like a weak point."
When I tore it out, it was covered in a biological membrane, but now that was gone too. It was orange, and the faceting made it look like a hundred-sided die. If this was a magic stone, it was a seriously big deal.
And since it didn’t disappear, it was probably a drop item.
"Heeeh… Aah!?"
"Huh? What? What’s wrong!?"
Serai-san suddenly let out a shocked cry, so I frantically checked our surroundings, thinking another enemy had appeared.
"I got a new skill! It’s [Sugar]!"
But it seemed my panic was unwarranted.
"Oh, you were checking your status? Don’t scare me like that… Wait, [Sugar]?"
"Yeah, the sweet kind of sugar. This has gotta be the skill that aphid had, right!?"
Then, Nina-san stepped closer and chimed in.
"I got a skill too. [Nectar], or something."
"What, not just Serai-san, but Nina-san too? You two are amazing!"
"Hey, hey. With this skill, maybe we can make that sweet juice the aphid used to heal the ants?"
"Probably. It’s called [Nectar], after all. Should work, yeah?"
Hmmm… [Sugar] and [Nectar], huh?
Different skills… No, just like how stats like Strength can vary in name from person to person, maybe the same thing happens with skills.
But just as the glow of life energy faded and the two were about to test their new skills, a "THUD!" echoed, and the stone stage began to descend.
"Eek! What…?"
Yet even though the boss was defeated, the sealed passages around the dome showed no signs of reopening. So maybe this large, circular stone stage itself was the path forward?
"Everyone, gather up! Just in case, let’s build a defensive barrier with rock salt and slime!"
Right. There was no guarantee this descending stage wouldn’t turn into some kind of deadly trap, like a giant blender. There was that hanging ceiling trap earlier that nearly crushed Serai-san with falling boulders, after all.
Better to be safe and fortify our defenses.
I’d been left weak and wobbly from the ant’s poison. But now, fully recovered and freshly charged with life energy, the rock salt barricades I conjured surged forth with wild, crackling momentum.
And so, the stone stage, now encased in blue rock walls, continued its descent. But where, exactly, did this path lead…?