Exhausted Man's Cave (3)
We jolted awake to the sound of Gnome's obnoxiously loud alarm. She'd somehow shaped dirt into something like a drum and was pounding away at it. THUMP THUMP THUMP—Wake up~ THUMP THUMP THUMP—The sun's already high in the sky~ THUMP THUMP...
“Haa… Fucking hell… I’m up, I’m up. Quit the thumping already, Thumpy.”
-What? Thumpy? I don’t know what it means, but it really pisses me off.
“I said it because I wanted it to piss you off. Senior Dorothy. Wake up, please.”
“Hey!”
“Mmm… Is it morning already…”
I shook Dorothy, who had been sleeping peacefully in the middle of the tent like she didn’t have a care in the world. She cracked her eyes open blearily, saw me, and immediately went right back to sleep. What the hell was that?
“Senior. It’s time for your shift.”
“Mmm~ Five more minutes…”
“Sergeant Dorothy. Five minutes until shift.”
“Sergeant… what… mmm…”
Dorothy finally surrendered to my relentless pestering. She got up with messy hair and stared blankly out of the tent. While she was spacing out, I woke Kasa so we could heat up the leftover stew.
[Do spirits even sleep? Hurry up and wake up already.]
-Cain! Are we leaving now?!
[After we eat. Light a fire for me.]
Even first thing in the morning this kid was bursting with energy. She stuck her tongue out and scurried around the brazier before finally lighting the fire.
Even half-asleep her stomach must have been growling, because I heard rustling from inside the tent. Dorothy crawled out on all fours.
“Let’s eat breakfast. We need to get moving quickly.”
“Hmm… Neither of us stood watch, huh.”
“I already made arrangements so I wouldn’t have to. Don’t worry about it and just eat.”
After hastily finishing breakfast, we packed our gear and set off toward the cave again. Thankfully the jungle didn’t give us the bug infestations or sweltering tropical nights we’d feared. The only oddity was the bizarrely large number of slimes. On top of that, I had run into one problem.
“Hmm… Using my strength is fine, but it doesn’t feel like my skills are improving at all…”
“Of course not~”
Dorothy grasped the issue instantly. She waved her staff and drew a magic circle in the air, then pointed at it.
“Do you know what circle this is?”
“Yes. It’s the Third Circle wind spell, Wind Cutter.”
It was the spell I’d shouted to Silph when facing Preston. Back then I hadn’t realized how bold it was to casually call out a Third Circle spell. I really had been clueless.
Dorothy nodded, muttered “Your theory is solid,” erased the circle, and drew a new one. It built on the Wind Cutter formula with an added layer. From the number of rings, it was clearly Fourth Circle.
Once she finished, she asked me the same question again.
“Do you know what circle this is?”
“Um… It’s Fourth Circle wind magic, right? Since it looks derived from Wind Cutter… Hmm…”
“It gets harder from here, doesn’t it? This spell adds physical cutting force to Wind Cutter.”
“Huh? Oh… That kind of application…”
“Up to Third Circle is the realm of the ordinary. And extending what I told you yesterday… the reason the next two spells are called the realm of geniuses lies in the Fourth Circle.”
Dorothy erased the outer ring of the Fourth Circle array and inscribed a different formula—the fire attribute. Realizing what she’d done, I muttered in surprise.
“You added fire to Wind Cutter…”
“There’s no official name, but we can just call it Flame Cutter or something.”
Dorothy spoke indifferently, erased the formula, and looked at me.
“Now you understand why just those two spells earn someone the title of genius? That’s the territory starting at Fourth Circle. Even with a single attribute it can vary based on effort, but…”
It meant I’d have to work several times harder than everyone else. I nodded, understanding the unspoken end of her sentence.
“Uh… But what does that have to do with my skills not improving?”
“It feels like… your power is somehow disconnected from ‘your own growth.’”
“Disconnected from… my growth…”
I’d just picked up another assignment. The nature of growth, huh.
“Someday you might awaken a water attribute too, but if it’s at the same level as now… Fourth Circle would probably be your limit.”
“So even if I learn every attribute, I might still end up stuck at Fourth Circle?”
“That’s right. Well… at least your magic circle interpretation is good, so you’re not stupid~”
“Hmm…”
“We need to figure out how to grow that alien power…”
Dorothy suddenly swung her staff mid-sentence. Startled, I froze. Her eyes sharpened as they swept the area. Every tree around us had been sliced cleanly in half by her magic. Was this the power of a Sixth Circle mage? She could do this much without even chanting?
“It’s not a slime.”
“What? No way, that can’t be right.”
Silph and Gnome were supposed to be monitoring the surroundings thoroughly. Even with my weak body, I’d been confident in our scouting, yet this woman’s senses were terrifyingly sharp.
[Hey. You guys really didn’t see anything?]
-Hmm. At least around here. Nothing. I confirmed it myself.
-That woman is either insanely sensitive, or the opponent is skilled enough to hide from us completely.
[Hmm.]
Better safe than sorry. Besides, the dense trees put us at a disadvantage. I glanced at Dorothy and waited for her reaction. She seemed to cast mana detection, silently scanning the area before letting out a deep sigh and returning to her usual expression.
“There really isn’t any movement around here. Strange… My detection is never wrong.”
“Maybe it was just a big animal passing through? Or one that hasn’t been cleared out yet.”
“I’d rather it be that~ Someone with actual hostility toward us would be a real headache~”
She asked so casually if she should just blow up the entire area. If she wasn’t including me in that blast, she was talking about erasing the whole jungle.
“What if we get caught? Let’s proceed carefully. Even if they’re hostile, freezing up in fear and refusing to advance against someone who hasn’t attacked is just stupid.”
“A seventeen-year-old saying some pretty impressive things.”
“You’re eighteen, senior.”
Dorothy nodded like she accepted that and patted my head. Only now did I realize she was almost the same height as me. She probably had plenty of admirers, but her extreme my-pace attitude of refusing to get along with anyone was truly one of a kind.
It felt ironic that someone like her was now adventuring with me under the pretext of protection.
“Once we leave this jungle, it’s the cave, right~?”
“Yeah… Probably another half day after we get out…”
“Doesn’t Cain have classes or anything? The gate doesn’t even matter to you, does it?”
Her voice was icy. She was right—trying to wrap everything up over the weekend at this pace was pretty unreasonable.
“Uh… Then should we hurry? We can… fly if you want?”
“So you called me here just to use me as transportation~ I see~”
Dorothy’s staff shook roughly, like it was throwing a tantrum. I flinched, but she simply let out a long sigh and quickened her steps.
“Let’s fly once we’re out of the jungle. Actually, we probably should have flown from the start.”
“When else would we get to camp like this? You were looking forward to it too, weren’t you, senior?”
“Ahem…”
With a straight face she cleared her throat and fixed her eyes forward. I spent the next several hours teasing her nonstop.
After a few hours we finally reached the jungle’s exit and basked in the sunlight we hadn’t felt in what seemed like ages.
“Sunlight! Vitamin D! This is amazing!”
“It’s been so long since I’ve seen the sun~ It was getting stuffy.”
Saying there was no time to waste, Dorothy immediately waved her staff and lifted both me and our luggage into the air.
“Just tell me the direction. I’ll get us there in an instant.”
“Whoa… You make carrying all this look so easy.”
“I’m a Sixth Circle mage. If I left the academy, there would be countless magic towers begging to recruit me, you know?”
“Ah, yes.”
Of course there would be. I guided Dorothy in the direction I remembered. Man, we really should have flown from the beginning. All that effort chasing romance had been a waste.
Feeling the refreshing wind against my whole body, I spotted the cave at the base of a small hill rising in the distance.
“Senior. It’s right there.”
“There really is a cave. And no one’s guarding it. You were seriously planning to come here alone~?”
“Ahaha.”
I laughed it off awkwardly. They say you can’t spit on a smiling face, so even the student council probably wouldn’t hold it against me too much.
“This is the only time. Next time, excuses about the gate won’t work.”
“Yeees~ Thank you, Senior~”
“Seriously…”
The way her ears turned red this time was definitely from anger. I looked at her with my best ‘can’t tell shit from piss’ expression and waited for her to set me down.
“The cave entrance looks cleaner than expected?”
“Yeah. I thought it’d be crawling with monsters too.”
It was strange. When I’d come here to farm in the game, I remembered not just slimes but goblins, bats, and all sorts of creatures appearing. Had my presence created some kind of variable?
Dorothy stared quietly at the entrance before stepping forward.
“I have a slightly bad feeling… Cain, support me from behind. I’ll take the lead.”
“Huh? I can make myself insanely tough, you know? I’ll be the meat shield…”
“No matter how tough the armor is, it’s still just armor. If the contents are as thin as paper, how could it possibly be fine?”
Shit.