Yona's No Baby Anymore
The grotesque moan slipped from my lips. “Gweeeehhh…” At the same time, my knees buckled and my body collapsed. It was only natural. To make full use of the agility that outstripped even the Thornbush King, I’d been sprinting nonstop while swinging my dagger. On top of that, I’d burned through every last drop of mana I’d recovered with potions, pushing myself all the way to mana exhaustion. Simple math: exhaustion plus mana exhaustion equals “waaah, I’m gonna die.”
Just as that formula floated through my mind and my forehead was about to smack the ground—
Poof.
“…Good work.”
Elly, who had somehow already rushed over, wrapped me in her one remaining arm. The softness unique to a woman’s body pressed against me, but beneath that plushness were dense, resilient muscles that gave an oddly reassuring sense of stability. A beat later, Elly’s scent flooded in—her natural skin smell, the warm, fuzzy scent from her ears and tail, and the familiar aroma of tobacco mixed in. Only then did the tension finally drain from my body. At the same time, all the fatigue I’d been holding back came crashing down at once.
“Ah. We’re in big trouble, Elly.”
“What’s wrong? Don’t tell me something else is about to pop out or anything like that?”
“It’s not that, but… I’m so wiped out I can’t even twitch a single finger.”
“What? Well, can’t be helped. You got ridiculously strong, but that thing was still too much for you right now, Yona.”
“At this rate, even if you did all sorts of things to me, I wouldn’t be able to put up the slightest resistance…!”
“Huh?”
“Aaaah~ This is terrible. To think I’ve been thrown defenseless in front of a wolf like you, Elly. At this rate, I’m definitely going to get eaten alive!”
“No, I’m not going to eat you, okay?”
“Wolfie, Wolfie. If you’re going to eat me, please do it in one quick bite so it doesn’t hurt.”
“……”
At the sight of Elly rendered speechless, I barely managed to tug the corners of my sluggish mouth upward and let out a soft chuckle. Only then did Elly snort and sigh.
“Yona, you… Even in a situation like this, you still want to mess around?”
“But you were making such a scary face! It was like you thought I got hurt because of you.”
“That’s…”
Elly’s eyes drooped in a sad slant. Her perked ears folded down, and her tail lost all strength, hanging limply toward the ground.
“There, there. That’s exactly why I told you not to make that face. Anyway, we didn’t just stop the plans of Those Who Swallow the Twilight—we even caught one of their executives. And I grew strong enough to fight a Floor Guardian one-on-one and win. It’s a day to celebrate, isn’t it? You should be smiling!”
“…Yeah. You’re right. Just like you said, Yona, it’s a happy day.”
With a faint smile, Elly skillfully hoisted me up with one arm and settled me onto her back. Thanks to the full-body suit clinging tightly to my skin, I could feel every bit of Elly’s warmth. I buried my face in the defenseless nape of her neck and secretly sniffed. Elly adjusted her grip on me and spoke.
“I’ll head straight to the surface like this. Just rest.”
“Is that okay? We caught someone from Those Who Swallow the Twilight, and this was the first time anyone summoned a Floor Guardian on the first floor. The guild’s probably going to want a ton of testimony…”
“They will. But the guild isn’t crazy enough to detain an injured person and force them to testify. Besides, with me standing right behind you glaring with both eyes wide open, how could they?”
“Ah, right. Now that I think about it… just who exactly are you, Elly? I knew you were a retired high-ranking adventurer, but you’re way too strong for that to be the whole story.”
When I was outlining the story, I had only sketched out the key charm points and personality traits that defined Elly. I hadn’t bothered thinking about exactly how strong she was or what kind of feats she’d accomplished in her prime. That made sense—any setting that wasn’t directly tied to the plot but existed purely for flavor would eventually strangle the author the longer the serialization went on. Sure, piling on more setting could deepen a character, but the downside was that it limited the episodes you could actually use. For that reason, I tended to keep settings as loose as possible. Anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary, I basically left blank. Elly’s active days fell into that category, and the same went for Eve’s time as queen. In the end, the important parts were that Elly was a retired adventurer who had never even held hands with a man, and that Eve was a virgin of historical proportions. Everything else was just extra. …For some reason, it was starting to feel like pulling a unicorn horn in gacha hadn’t been a coincidence. Had the Goddess of Love been aiming for this all along?
While I was seriously pondering the black curtain theory of the Goddess of Love, Rydia, who had approached while Elly hesitated, spoke up in her place.
“The Brave Elly. That was a famous name until about five years ago.”
“The… Brave?”
At my flustered reaction to the grander-than-expected title, Rydia nodded expressionlessly and continued.
“You know that high-ranking adventurers pretty much have to learn either aura or magic, right?”
“Of course. Both are versatile and effective.”
Both aura and magic could be learned by ‘anyone.’ Of course, the speed and the wall you hit depended on talent, but it was still possible. Normally, at that point, it would be treated as a privilege granted only to a chosen few… but for adventurers, that wasn’t entirely the case. As long as you could somehow survive and return, the labyrinth would forcibly raise your growth and elevate your rank according to your achievements. Couldn’t stack any more aura because you lacked the talent? No problem. The labyrinth would just pump you full of aura! Mana sensitivity too low to handle high-level magic? Doesn’t matter. If you spam magic like crazy in the labyrinth, eventually it’ll reward you by raising your sensitivity! The labyrinth’s rewards were miracles in their own right. Even I, who hadn’t suddenly grown a ton of muscle, had become far stronger than before. So if you wanted to climb higher as an adventurer, you had to learn both aura and magic. Going around without a weapon everyone else carried was just too inefficient.
“But Senior Elly managed to do it without either.”
“Huh?”
“Senior Elly was… beyond talentless. It was at a hopeless level.”
“???”
I tilted my head, wondering if that could even make sense, but Rydia’s next words made me understand completely.
“She said she could sense aura and mana, but it was impossible for her to accumulate either in her body.”
“Huh…”
“And she was so unlucky that she never once received aura or mana as a labyrinth reward. Even though she was active for quite a long time.”
“……”
So that’s how it was. Elly had completely bombed both the talent gacha and the labyrinth reward gacha…. Feeling a pang of sympathy, I rubbed my face against the nape of her neck. Her skin slowly grew warmer. It seemed she liked it.
“But even without aura or magic, Senior Elly was amazing. Without any special powers at all, she faced powerful enemies with nothing but courage and won. That’s why she earned the title The Brave.”
“Uh… wait a second. No special powers at all… does that mean she didn’t even have an Authority?”
“Yeah. She reached her current level with nothing but the pure physical body of a beastman.”
“……”
If I’d known, I would have just thrown on some light seasoning and let Elly take the last hit. At least then she could have taken the World Tree’s Authority. Feeling guilty, I nibbled and sucked at the nape of her neck like I was tickling her with my teeth while picturing her fighting. The ground flipping over with a single stomp. Trees shattering from the mere shockwave of her fist. Even lightning and crystal spears strengthened by Authorities bounced off her bare body. The most basic reward—enhancement of physical ability. She had piled up only that and reached a height higher than anyone else. Muscles holding the strength of a giant. Durability harder than most metals. And on top of that, the keen senses unique to beastmen. At this point, Elly’s body itself was practically an Authority.
When my thoughts reached that point, a sudden question came to mind. I lifted my mouth from her saliva-drenched neck and asked.
“Uh, wait. Then how on earth did you lose your arm, Elly?”
Elly herself was already so strong. What kind of being could possibly blow off her arm? Elly, her face flushed bright red, vigorously wiped the drool off her shoulder with the sleeve of her suit and answered.
“Well… even for me, if I get hit by a dragon’s breath, my arm’s gotta fly off.”
“Dragon breath?!”
“The Floor Guardian of the sixth floor is a dragon that went mad. And it was even rampaging because of Those Who Swallow the Twilight.”
“……”
A dragon that had already gone insane and was rampaging on top of that. Yeah, that couldn’t be helped. I hadn’t put any specific dragon settings in, but since I’d based it on a generic fantasy world, having one wasn’t strange. The sixth floor was the layer where the Beast God slept, right? I hadn’t decided what monster or Floor Guardian would appear, but… if you viewed a dragon as the apex of beasts, it was a pretty convincing lineup. At the point it became a monster, going mad was obviously a given. I nodded inwardly for a moment. But the fatigue that had been creeping in was finally closing my eyes. I was about to fall asleep while watching Karen, along with Lemon and Apple, collecting evidence a short distance away when—
“Ah.”
Come to think of it, I still had that. I pulled the goddess statue out of my subspace ring, unfolded the mini sanctuary for a moment, then immediately put it back. No matter how shameless I was, showing off the soft, squishy, defenseless, warm mini Goddess of Love in front of other people was a bit embarrassing. Vitality surged back in quickly. I was still exhausted so I couldn’t feel it much, but my physical abilities had definitely improved too. I’d been caught up in the mood and hadn’t thought of it right away since I’d only just obtained it, so I couldn’t use it during the fight with the Thornbush King… but since I remembered it now, that was good enough, right?
With my mind wide awake again, I nibbled and sucked at the nape of Elly’s neck when I suddenly felt everyone’s eyes on me.
⊳ Rydia’s Assessment: A match made in heaven.
Rydia clapped her hands with a satisfied tone.