35. Is It Wrong to Try Shoveling in a Dungeon? (7)
35. Is It Wrong to Try Shoveling in a Dungeon? (7)
"A man who treats a lady roughly is gonna stay single for life!"
"Tch."
There was a slot for a head, so I tried putting Millia's head into it, but it was smaller than I'd expected. I'd hoped I could get at least one part for free.
As if this shitty world would ever hand me a lucky break like that. It would screw me over without hesitation, but it would never let me cheese a dungeon. After ten years of this, I was still entertaining false hope. I must have gotten soft.
I sighed and pulled Millia's head out of the coffin's head slot.
"I am not a key!"
"Oh, so this isn't getting censored."
"You see me as nothing more than a key?! I am—!*()@&(!$#*&!"
"Shut up."
I shoved jerky into Millia's mouth and hung her from my belt. The sight of her eating jerky, tears streaming down her face while her lips curled into a goofy grin, was nothing short of grotesque. What in the world had turned Millia into this? I looked away from her and examined the coffin again. A coffin with slots for the head and limbs. No torso section.
A closer look showed that the limb slots differed slightly in size and length.
So it wanted parts taken from several corpses rather than one body. A morbid puzzle in an equally morbid place. I had no idea who had built this dungeon, but whoever it was had appalling taste. Judging from the setup, they were probably a necromancer or a lich.
Those two were practically synonymous with the undead, and a lich seemed especially likely.
Then again, I could be wrong. For all I knew, it might be another fantasy staple like a death knight.
...I could only hope it was not a dragon.
"Yohan, look at this! I found something!"
At Reni’s call, I walked over and took the paper from her. It was so old that it looked ready to crumble at the slightest pressure. Five lines were written on it.
[The shameful head.
The mother's left arm.
The son's right arm.
The daughter's left leg.
The father's right leg.]
"Now that's a straightforward hint."
"It is? I have no idea what that's supposed to mean..."
Reni looked at me as though asking what any of it meant. I took a moment to organize my thoughts.
The lines looked incomprehensible at first glance, but the problem was fairly simple once I thought about it.
Family.
Family meant sharing the same surname.
So it probably meant that we had to read the names on the gravestones, find people with the same surname, retrieve one body part from each of them, and fit the parts into the coffin.
The problem was that there were no other clues, so we had to infer the family relationships from the names alone. Surely it wouldn't pull some bullshit like giving a man the name Elizabeth or naming the daughter William.
Or have several different families sharing the same surname.
"So what does it mean? Explain it."
"What do family members have in common?"
"Uh... they're related by blood?"
"I know! They share the same surname!"
Wait, she was from this world. Why was she saying that as though she had only just figured it out? I glanced at the clueless Millia and continued.
"Right. Like Millia said, members of the same family would share a surname."
I pointed to a gravestone along the path I'd used to make the wall.
Henry Sigmund.
"...Ah!"
"We just have to look for people on the gravestones who share the same surname. Probably take one part from each corpse buried below... no, there's another possibility."
I frowned at the possibility that occurred to me mid-sentence. The difficulty would jump sharply—more precisely, the amount of tedious work would. The second floor being a graveyard, and the zombies continuing to emerge...
Putting everything together led to one conclusion.
"The family members written on this paper might be among the zombies that appear here."
"So you're saying we have to catch every single one of those zombies and check?"
What was with that disgusted face? We might have to do exactly that. I scratched my chin and stared at the distant gravestones.
Five parts to collect.
A puzzle that required circling the graveyard around the entrance hill and gathering five parts. It was the kind of thing that would have appeared in an old 2D pixel-horror game stream. Considering that this world was the setting of a game, it wasn't particularly strange.
"Ugh... my head hurts. So we've to circle the graveyard, cut off four limbs and a head, and put them in there? But what does ‘the shameful head’ mean?"
"...I don't know. Probably another hint on the gravestone."
First, we had to inspect every gravestone. This really did have the feel of an old game. What era was this, with a grindy puzzle like this? This was why people called it a trash game. Not that someone who had sunk more than a thousand hours into that trash game had any right to complain.
"So what's the next plan? Go straight out looking for gravestones? Or head back first?"
"We head back first. We need to tell Karina."
Reni nodded and turned around. We strolled back to the shelter with the pounding on the walls as background noise. When I opened the door, Karina was praying with her hands neatly clasped. She greeted us with a delighted smile.
"Welcome back. Did you have any success?"
"I think we found the door to the third floor."
"That's wonderful! So can you open the door right away?"
"No. We have to solve a puzzle."
I showed the paper to Karina. After reading the lines written there, she clapped her hands, her eyes sparkling.
"We just need to find gravestones with the same surnames?"
"Probably."
"Is there anything I can help with?"
Was there anything she could do? I studied Karina for a moment, then looked at Millia. Still apparently sulking, Millia rolled back and forth across the table and whined.
"To treat a lady like this..."
"Ah, yes... Lady Millia. A smart girl like you would know something, wouldn't you?"
I showed Millia what was written on the paper. Apparently pleased by the compliment, the corners of her mouth twitched upward.
"The shameful head? It means the head of a bastard child! Or you might have to catch a redhead and offer them up!"
Strangely, Millia's voice came out clean and clear, without so much as a trace of censorship. So this wasn't censored? Maybe the information wasn't important enough. Or perhaps the restriction allowed the bare minimum of clues needed to clear the dungeon. Either way, she seemed to have helped this time.
"An illegitimate child... And what do you mean by a redhead?"
At my question, Millia continued her explanation with a smug face.
"Back when I was famous as a beautiful lady, red hair was considered a symbol of misfortune! Whenever a red-haired child was born, they'd kill the baby immediately! Though some of them occasionally survived..."
Millia trailed off with a gloomy expression. Naturally, all of us looked at her.
How could we not?
Millia, reduced to nothing but a head before us, had red hair herself.
"...Anyway, that's what the shameful head means!"
"Got it."
I felt a little guilty toward Millia. After putting a piece of jerky in her mouth, I looked between Karina and Reni. The grim story had left both of them slightly subdued. I clapped my hands to change the mood and spoke.
"Then we'll rest for a bit before going around the graveyard to collect bones."
At my words, everyone nodded quietly.
-------------------------
"...Can't sleep?"
"Just woke up."
The pink-haired Saintess sat beside me on top of the shelter and looked out over the graveyard. A pleasant scent drifted from her, and I naturally turned to look. She sat close enough that I could have touched her by extending an arm. Leaving that subtle distance between us, Karina kept her gaze on the graveyard and asked me a question.
"Yohan, where will you go once you escape this island?"
"Hard to say."
Honestly, even if I reached the bottom of the dungeon and managed what gamers called a clear, I had no way of knowing whether that would let me escape the island. But if I really did succeed...
If I did...
What was I supposed to do?
It was not as though I could attend the academy. I had to be close to thirty by now, and wearing a school uniform at that age would have been criminal.
Even if I entered the academy some other way, I had no desire to involve myself in the game's storyline. From what little I remembered, Survival Academy was not a cheerful story. I didn't want to interfere for no reason and end up paying for it. By the ending, roughly one-third of the students were guaranteed to die.
And that was only the Good Ending. I didn't even want to think about the Bad Ending...
I had no idea what the True Ending added most recently would be like, either.
Maybe I would have chased the True Ending in a game, but I had no desire to suffer for it in reality.
Besides, I didn't even know the requirements, so attempting it was impossible.
"I-if you have nowhere to go, I can help you."
What did she mean by that? I met Karina's eyes. They were clear and full of pure sincerity. At the very least, she wasn't speaking out of empty politeness; pretense wasn't in her nature. I lowered my gaze to her small, fidgeting hands, then looked back at the graveyard.
"Thank you."
After my brief thanks, we watched the graveyard in silence.
Until everyone else woke up.