Unearthing All the Hidden Things
Good thing she accepted.
I felt genuine relief. The goddess Eru had given me a pair of excellent gifts. One was a holy relic—a bow—and the other was a quiver.
My original goal had been the sacred bow, but right now every scrap of my attention was locked on that quiver. The reason was simple.
Free arrows. As many as I want.
Arrows themselves were expensive. And I was poor. If I poured the meager weekly allowance into arrows, I was confident I would be a beggar before long. The academy supplied training weapons, true, but the number of free arrows they handed out was pitiful. In short, anyone who actually wanted to train properly at this academy had to dig into their own pocket and buy more.
In this place the saying “your weapon is part of your skill” really does hold true…
So I intended to wring every possible drop of value out of this quiver.
The material decides the arrow’s strength and killing power.
As a test I had tossed in scraps of paper and loose pebbles, and the results had been instructive. Paper arrows stung a little if they hit you, but they had zero lethal force. They were denser and tougher than ordinary crumpled paper, yet they never escaped the fundamental limits of the material.
Worst of all, the slightest breeze sent them fluttering away.
They had simply inherited paper’s weaknesses. And stone?
Stone arrows were incomparably heavier than paper ones.
Not only the head but the entire shaft came out solid rock. Range was severely limited, and the flight speed was painfully slow. The impact was decent, yet pure killing power still favored ordinary arrows by a wide margin.
I tried a few more experiments after that—dropping a lit match into the quiver because I wanted a fire arrow, pouring water in, even catching a cockroach and stuffing it inside.
All of them were trash.
The fire arrow was impossible to hold; the moment a breeze rose the flames spat in every direction and one of them landed on my arm. Pure agony. The water arrow collapsed the instant I tried to grip it. The cockroach simply refused to become an arrow at all.
Living things can’t be turned into arrows, then?
I killed one and tried again. Still nothing. Apparently creatures of any kind were off-limits. After all the experiments I reached a firm conclusion: the best materials were ores like stone or iron.
Factoring in weight, mithril is ideal.
The original protagonist obtained this quiver later than I had, so he routinely used ores even better than mithril. I couldn’t reach those yet, which made mithril the practical ceiling.
Mithril is harder than iron and lighter at the same time.
I had no intention of fighting apostles anyway, so mithril would more than suffice. And the easiest place to obtain it was this very dungeon.
C-rank dungeon: the Dwarven Mine.
Exactly as the name suggested, dwarves appeared inside. In most novels dwarves were allies. Here they were simply monsters.
C-rank dungeons are completely off-limits to freshmen.
On top of that, any dungeon that produced mithril required serious connections just to enter. That was why I had decided to use Anin.
With Anin along, walking into a C-rank dungeon is trivial.
Even better, under the pretext of a lesson I could legally pocket every scrap of mithril we found. So I had asked Anin to take us into the mining dungeon, and she had agreed.
Anin was a teacher. That meant she was obligated to put student safety first. But I knew her well. Right now she was treating the entire trip as a special training exercise.
Which meant:
She won’t lift a finger to help.
My prediction proved perfect. Anin simply trailed after us, doing absolutely nothing.
Doesn’t matter.
I had only needed her to get us inside. I also had the brooch. If my life ever truly hung by a thread, the brooch would activate on its own and eject me from the dungeon—though every bit of mithril I had mined would vanish with me.
All right. Time to dig.
I raised the pickaxe I had brought and began slamming it into the mine wall, hunting for mithril.
Crack!
After several heavy swings I finally pried free a single chunk.
This should make about twenty arrows.
While thinking that, I glanced over at Ceryll. She was swinging her own pickaxe with equal fervor…
CRASH! CRASH!
“Argh! Where on earth is the mithril?”
Ceryll was pulverizing nothing but worthless rock.
Can’t blame her.
This mine was a mixture of real mithril and worthless stones that looked almost identical. Without mineral knowledge or a special talent for spotting it, telling them apart was nearly impossible.
There is a method even for the talentless…
Unlike ordinary stone, mithril refused to shatter under a pickaxe. Smash everything else to dust and the mithril would remain. The efficiency was abysmal, of course, and two people alone could never clear the place that way.
“Ceryll. Not that side—hit right here.”
I pointed downward with one finger.
“Here?”
She obeyed without question.
Crack!
Three solid blows later a clean piece of mithril popped free.
“Huh? It’s mithril! Reina, look—mithril!”
Ceryll’s eyes sparkled as she held the chunk out to me.
“Yeah. You’ll find more if you dig there… and over there.”
I pointed out several other veins. Explaining by voice alone felt awkward, so I simply marked the spots.
“Wow! Every place Reina shows me has mithril just waiting! You’re amazing! How do you even know?”
Ceryll’s excited shout rang off the walls.
How do I know?
I can see it. Reina’s setting came with exceptional eyesight—not merely sharp vision, but a natural gift for spotting and distinguishing things others missed.
In the original story the protagonist even brought Reina along whenever he went ore-hunting.
She was a walking disaster most of the time, yet in this one area she was genuinely useful. Maybe that was part of why he never kicked her out of the party.
“There’s mithril over here too. And here… hmm?”
While scanning for more veins I suddenly froze.
“This doesn’t look like mithril.”
I swung the pickaxe at the odd patch where something seemed concealed.
Clang! Clang! Clang!
It was harder than expected, but repeated blows finally freed it. Nestled inside was a black box smaller than my palm. The single character Evil was carved across its lid.
This is one of the supply crates the Apostles of Evil receive.
Why is it here?
If goddesses like Eru existed, then so did the beings called Evil Gods. They found their amusement not in peace but in ruin and destruction. And there were those who served them. People called such servants Apostles of Evil.
This woman was one of them.
If I want to draw even a little closer to Lord Satan, I need more acquired talents.
Acquired talent—postnatal talent. Talent was supposed to be something you were born with, yet that was only half true. Once you became an apostle, a god could grant you new gifts. The method, however, differed between the two sides. Ordinary gods simply bestowed them. Evil Gods preferred to hide them and tell you to go dig them up yourself.
“The mine. They said it’s in the mine.”
At least they told her the general location, so finding it would not be impossible.
“Though… the royal brats pour in and out of that place all the time…”
The woman frowned. Hidden in such an ambiguous spot, it would be hard to locate without exact coordinates. But if someone did manage to find it…
“Ah, come on. There’s no way an apostle is wandering around a mine right now.”
Anything granted by a god could only be seen by an apostle—whether recognized by an Evil God or a proper one. Anyone else would never notice it.
More importantly:
“Even if someone did find it, the box is sealed with a cipher. How would they open it?”
Security magic protected every crate that held acquired talent. Force the lid and it exploded. The woman therefore assumed she had nothing to worry about.
She never imagined that an apostle—half-recognized by a goddess, even if the formal contract was still pending—might enter that mine at this exact moment.
And she never imagined that apostle would open the box.
“Oh. It opened.”
I let out a hollow laugh as the lid lifted. A password had locked the box; one wrong attempt and it would have detonated on the spot.
I read the entire novel. You think I wouldn’t know the Evil Gods’ ciphers?
The author had helpfully described every single one of them. Back then I had cursed the padding; now I was grateful.
No upside to letting the Evil Gods’ side grow stronger…
Whether I claimed the contents or destroyed them, nothing bad would come of it. So I had decided to open the box. And the moment I saw what lay inside, I could only stare in shock.
“This is…!”