9. Survival Rule #1: Don't Eat Anything You Pick Up (3)
9. Survival Rule #1: Don't Eat Anything You Pick Up (3)
Did you know what mattered most when searching for food on a deserted island?
Not drinking seawater?
Field dressing a hunted animal?
Learning to tell which bugs were edible?
No.
The most important thing was not to eat mushrooms.
No matter how close you were to starving, never eat mushrooms. You were better off digging up earthworms and eating them.
For an ordinary person who wasn't a mushroom expert, distinguishing edible mushrooms from poisonous ones was nearly impossible.
A mushroom could look exactly like a button mushroom and still be poisonous. The same was true of one that resembled enoki. What I meant was that even if it looked 100% identical to a mushroom you recognized, you should never touch it.
Because it could be a poisonous lookalike!
And in a place crawling with monsters, what could those mushrooms possibly have grown on?
Just remembering the early days of my island life—when I hadn't known any better, ate a familiar-looking mushroom, and spent a week hovering between life and death—still made me shudder. I had developed such a grudge that whenever I saw mushrooms, I harvested every one and took revenge by extracting their toxins.
"This bastard just devoured every mushroom, poisonous or not..."
So what the hell was this bastard? Why was it eating every mushroom it found? Were there creatures that lived on poisonous mushrooms? I didn't know what it was, but one thing was certain: it was insane. Countless kinds of mushrooms grew wild in this forest. Some could kill even a bear if eaten, while others caused drug-like hallucinations. There was no way anything that ate them all could be normal.
...Though it might have been extracting only the poison, as I did, without eating them.
It could have been an intelligent monster that extracted and used only the spores' toxins, but that was extremely unlikely. Even bears, which had much stronger resistance to poison than humans, avoided poisonous mushrooms.
Then the possibility that it might be human occurred to me. It was plausible. I had no idea how a human, rather than a dragon, could roar loudly enough to shake the entire forest, but someone like Reni might have been capable of it.
"...If it really is Reni, couldn't we settle this through conversation?"
As long as it wasn't the Traitor Route, depending on the route she could even become an ally. If the invader's identity really was Reni, things would get much simpler. The problem was that she'd cleaned out all the mushrooms. But first, I figured I should assess her condition from a distance.
Reni wasn't the kind of character who would die from eating mushrooms, but anyone who ate them couldn't possibly be fine.
I arrived at the base of the hill I'd set as my final destination. The area below was completely devastated. Body parts scattered everywhere. A massive crater, maybe twenty meters across, gouged into the earth like a meteor had struck it. A scene of pure, naked violence and destruction laid bare.
At the very edge of my vision, I could spot some remnants of the trap I'd built, but it had been almost completely destroyed. Little remained except the tip of the bone spear. Had the intruder made this crater while breaking free? The trap must have worked remarkably well. Nothing would have created a crater like this unless it was furious.
"...Time to stop sightseeing and head up."
If I loitered there and ran into the intruder, my island life could end that very day. I'd scraped through ten years of survival; I couldn't let it end in that kind of Bad Ending. At the very least, if I was going to die, I wanted to smell civilization first... I moved with every sense on alert, heading for the top of the hill.
Fortunately, there were no interruptions.
That was only natural. With a creature capable of making a crater like this nearby, what animal would have dared approach? Only idiots looking for a place to die—and it seemed they had already become corpses...
At the top of the hill, I lowered myself and slowly surveyed the other side. The forest there also lay devastated in places, and several tree roots had been dug up. The intruder seemed to be pulling up every mushroom it could find.
I lay flat in the thick grass and held my breath. I intended to hide there until the bastard showed up. It would be tedious, but that was what survival was all about. To survive, you had to be more cowardly than anyone and braver than anyone.
And so I lay flat for three straight hours.
I was itching to move.
But I couldn't.
Because a single careless move made for momentary comfort could cost me my life.
"Had the intruder gone far away...?"
The intruder had been gathering mushrooms, so it might have moved somewhere with more of them. That would be troublesome. Mushrooms grew across the entire island outside my territory, so I might even have to enter the snakes' domain. Entering it wouldn't necessarily cause a disaster, but there was always a chance.
...And if I happened to run into the Hydra, things would get way more complicated. That'd be a problem too.
They were exactly the kind to pounce the moment they saw an opportunity.
I had no chance in a head-on fight, so if they caught me, I'd go straight to a Bad Ending.
I was still debating whether to move when it happened.
Something clad in gleaming silver rose among the fallen trees. Bare skin showed through in places, suggesting it was in poor condition. It held a sword with the blade snapped off. A knight? The gleaming clothing looked like armor.
Standing there with one arm hanging limply, it looked like a zombie, but it wasn't one.
Its movements were too natural for a zombie. Zombies moved stiffly, like wooden puppets.
That meant it was most likely human, though even from a distance it clearly was not in good condition.
"...I can't tell who it is from this distance."
Was it Reni? Even if I wanted to confirm it, I couldn't approach and check because I had no way of being sure whether the other party would be hostile. The hair color, at least, was exactly the same as the Reni I'd seen in the game, but there was always that one-in-a-thousand chance.
The figure I presumed to be Reni stood there limp for a long while, then picked something up off the ground and shoved it into her mouth.
We were too far apart for me to see what she was eating, but it was probably a mushroom. If the figure was eating mushrooms, maybe she was intoxicated by them. There was a drug-like mushroom in this forest, similar to one that had caused a stir before I transmigrated. I still vividly remembered taking one bite and not regaining my senses until a week later.
Surely she wasn't eating that?
Was she insane? Eating that mushroom meant suffering hallucinations for a week... Wait. Could it be?
...She ate that, went berserk, and slaughtered every last bear? The hell.
She was living up to her final-boss reputation in the strangest possible place.
As if to prove my theory, the slumped-over swordswoman suddenly started swinging her broken sword at a tree. At the same time, a thunderous voice that shook the forest rang out.
"...Where is Karina?! Tell me, now!"
That was a tree, though. There went another innocent one.
And it looked like it was indeed Reni. If the lore I knew was right, Karina had only one escort—Reni. I couldn't properly confirm her appearance at this distance, but the hair color was the same reddish-brown, so there was a 99% chance it was her.
Failing that... well, nothing I could do about it.
BOOM.
A giant tree, the sort you'd spot from a long way off, failed to withstand Reni's merciless blade-work and collapsed, scattering a cloud of dirt.
I looked at the newly horizontal tree and offered my condolences. Thanks to it, I'd been able to positively identify Reni, so I still had the decency left to mourn a tree that had made a worthy sacrifice.
In any case, I'd verified she was rampaging around roughly like that, so now it was time to put together a plan.
I had no intention of fearlessly approaching someone who was hallucinating. She couldn't have been rational, so there was no way a conversation would work. I'd be lucky if I didn't end up lying beside that tree.
You could only attempt a conversation with someone who was capable of reason.
"Mushrooms, mushrooms, huh..."
Thinking back on the mushrooms that had caused all this, I quietly rose to my feet. My target was fully occupied hacking a tree to pieces and paying this direction no mind whatsoever, so I was able to slip away safely.
"I'll have to set a trap."
That was the conclusion I reached after thinking it through. A trap might have seemed meaningless against a monstrous knight like her, but now that I'd gathered the information I needed, I was confident I could catch her with one. It would've been impossible if she were in her right mind, but Reni was anything but rational then.
I cut through the forest without hesitation. I'd already chosen the location in my head—the spot where I'd execute the plan of laying a trap to capture Reni. The geography I'd painstakingly memorized while trudging all over this island was hard at work inside my skull, churning out the answer.
A clearing on the outskirts of the forest. There were traces of the ground being torn up for mushrooms here too, but the clearing's condition was decent.
A few mushrooms still remained, as well. That would be useful.
"Better wrap this up quick."
First, I had to work out the dimensions.
I began drawing lines across the clearing with my shovel.
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"Karina..."
Where in the world had you gone?
I had no one but you, Karina.
These wretched creatures wouldn't open their mouths. To think they hadn't uttered a single word even after I used every torture method I could remember... Tough bastards.
But there was no need for you to worry, Karina.
I, Reni, would find you and escape this island even if it cost me my life.
That was what an Escort Knight was for.
So...
"M-medicine... I need medicine..."
My head hurt.
I needed medicine.
Medicine, medicine, medicine... Where was it?
It itched.
It itched.
It itched.
It itched.
It itched.
My throat hurt.
I needed medicine.
Medicine... medicine...
Right, the mushroom.
The medicine was the mushroom. Mushroom... I needed to eat the mushroom...
Mushroom. It was a mushroom.
The mushroom had flown at me. So mushrooms here had wings too. Amazing.
Mushroom...
It tasted bad. But they said good medicine tasted bitter, so that was only natural.
Mushroom. More... more... give me...