Cephalopods Are Delicious
When he heard the word "rock," the first thing that sprang to Karem's mind was a golem.
Fungusby had been cut off by endless waves of the things. Mushrooms, yes—but still.
Karem briefly swapped the word "mushroom" for "rock" and ran the scenario again in his head.
"Whoa. That's brutal."
"What is?"
Catherine glanced over at him as she followed the soldier.
"The rocks, I mean. I was wondering if a pack of golems had swarmed in like they did at Fungusby."
If they had been mushrooms, maybe. But solid rock bodies? He could already picture how little ordinary skill would accomplish against something like that.
"A rock golem would certainly be that bad. Half-trained people would only get in the way, and even veterans couldn't afford to let their guard down."
Catherine returned her gaze forward, tapping the ground lightly with her staff as she nodded.
"There are plenty of people in this procession who can carve rock like cheese, but that doesn't mean there won't be casualties."
One change of material and it gets this vicious, Karem thought. He suddenly remembered hearing about water golems and fire golems, too. If you had to destroy the core, where would those even keep it?
"Still, it isn't a rock golem the way you're imagining."
"You're that sure?"
They hadn't even seen it yet.
"Think about Lady Alicia."
Karem understood at once.
"Even with that small frame of hers, you can feel the floor shake when she comes running from a distance. So what would a rock golem be like?"
"You'd hear the ground rumbling from three days away."
"An ordinary rock golem is about the size of a decent inn. Even a quarter of that and you'd feel the tremors from half a day's march."
Catherine rapped her staff with a finger for emphasis.
"More importantly, the mana is too stable for something that formed naturally."
"You mean the Mana Supersaturation phenomenon?"
"Exactly."
Catherine turned to the soldier guiding them outside the campsite.
"Have you received any reports regarding mana?"
"No, my lady. Nothing of the sort."
"Then how did you learn the scouts had gone missing?"
"The scouts who left yesterday still hadn't returned by this morning."
The soldier tapped his own helmet with a knuckle.
"So we formed a search party right away… and they found traces of the scouts not far from camp."
"Traces?"
"A Snowrunner that had belonged to one of the scout riders."
They skirted a stretch of forest that jutted out across the clifftop grassland. In a hollow deeper among the trees, Catherine found far more people than just herself. Alfred, ringed by his guards, was nodding along to the reports around him.
"Is that the rock in question?"
Some distance across from them, a boulder the size of a three-story inn sat there in plain sight. Anyone would have called it suspicious.
"Atanitas. You've arrived. And yes—that is the rock in question."
"There's certainly something off about it."
"You can tell just by looking at the rock?"
"Look at the surroundings."
Catherine nudged Karem and pointed her staff at the ground around the boulder. Sections of the tall grass lay flattened as though something had dragged itself through.
"The trail is far too clear to blame on wind snapping the stems. My lord, has a conclusion been reached while I was on my way?"
"In a manner of speaking. There is one person who is certain of its identity. The trouble is, I've never heard of the creature he claims it is."
Alfred glanced toward one side of the crowd. An old adventurer who caught the look thumped his chest with vigor.
"Ha! Who would dare spout nonsense in front of Your Grace? That thing is a mimic!"
Karem's eyes snapped to the rock on pure reflex. No matter how he looked at it, it was simply a massive chunk of stone.
Only a handful of people agreed with the old adventurer. The rest wore expressions of pure disbelief.
It just looks like a rock.
Descriptions of mimics varied from medium to medium, but one element never changed: they always disguised themselves as treasure chests. Their usual habitat was dungeons. Europa's mimics were much the same.
Yet the three-story-building-sized object in front of them was no treasure chest. It was, as already stated, a rock—with a light coating of moss for decoration.
One person I could write off. But several of them are calling it a mimic.
"If it truly is a mimic, that would explain things."
At Catherine's folded-arm remark, every head that had rejected the idea whipped around.
"Traces like those would be only natural."
"You're saying that boulder is a mimic?"
"Yes. A mimic. One this large… this is only the second—no, the third—I've ever seen. I never quite get used to them."
That was enough to make the skeptics waver. No one present was unfamiliar with Catherine. Her reputation alone carried weight.
Still—where exactly was the treasure chest in that thing? It was just a rock.
"Ha! What did I tell you? It's a mimic!"
"If you don't believe me, prove it with someone's horse or Snowrunner! If I'm wrong, I'll pay double!"
With the guarantee of one of Coldon's only two sage-rank archmages—a former S-rank adventurer and the Great Spirit of the Cold Wave—most people took a step back.
Most.
"Ha! Raising your voice like that doesn't mean no one will answer!"
"I'll put up my Snowrunner. I happened to need a spare anyway."
"Double or nothing! I'll throw in my boar as well!"
There were always people willing to leap into a fire even when they knew it was a fire. The presence of money only made them keener.
Two Snowrunners and one boar. The animals were readied at once; their owners smacked their rumps, and the startled beasts bolted straight for the rock. Every eye followed the three tails.
"But is it really a mimic?"
Karem cast his mind back over the mimics of his previous life—treasure chests with tongues and teeth, lanky stick-figures wearing chests like hats, giant hermit-crab monsters nesting inside chests.
"Yes. As long as a mimic isn't killed and keeps receiving a steady supply of food, it just keeps growing. There's only one way they die."
Catherine's gaze tracked the three animals racing freely toward the rock.
"When they're hunted down and forced to spit out all the gear of everything they've ever eaten."
"But once they get that big, the chest… ah, the rock?"
"Exactly. When they can no longer find a treasure chest that fits and the dungeon grows too cramped, a mimic finally leaves. Then it draws in nearby dirt and stones with its secretions and hardens them around itself. Keep eating victims and growing, and eventually…"
Catherine left the rest unsaid. She didn't need to.
Krrrrrk—
The rock split into eight segments.
And Karem beheld a kind of mimic utterly unlike anything he had ever encountered, even in fiction.
Ssshhhrrrk— whoooosh—!
Thick, slug-like tentacles—far thicker than any ordinary log, studded with hundreds or thousands of suckers—erupted outward. All eight of them shot forth at once, snared the horse, the Snowrunners, and the boar in a single motion, and squeezed.
Crrrack! Snap!
That was the end of it. The animals that had been both wager and bait died on the spot. The tentacles hauled the bait slowly back into the rock. Once every tentacle had withdrawn, the broken segments locked together like puzzle pieces and became an ordinary boulder again, as if nothing had happened. Only the grass crushed by the tentacles remained as long, telltale trails around the rock.
"…That's a mimic?"
"Yes."
"Not a land kraken?"
Karem had clearly seen the horizontal pupils unique to cephalopods, set deep behind the rock fragments and tentacles.
No one answered him. Knights and veteran adventurers who had seen nearly everything still blinked in open shock; even they had never witnessed a scene like this. Only the people who had been betting on the mimic kept making noise, and even they looked thoroughly startled.
"Hmm. Put that way, the resemblance is rather striking. There may be some connection to octopuses or squid."
"…Looking closer, it does look a bit like a mimic."
"Good heavens. There are more of those hideous giants out there?"
"Squid? Octopus? What kind of monsters are those?"
They didn't know what squid and octopus were?
What was that supposed to mean?
No—maybe it made sense. He had seen shrimp and crabs often enough in Winterhome, but never squid or octopus. Their bizarre shapes hardly suggested ordinary animals. Still, a few people clearly recognized the names. They were probably rare in Iceland or on the Seophon islands, but common enough elsewhere.
"Lady Catherine, do you not eat squid and octopus?"
"Hmm? Outside of Servianus, people generally don't. I can understand their reactions. More importantly…"
Catherine cast a sidelong glance at the noisy crowd, then deliberately raised her voice so everyone could hear.
"A specimen that large makes me rather curious about how much treasure it might be holding."
"Treasure?"
"Yes. When you kill a mimic, the equipment of its past victims tends to be quite lucrative. That's another reason you rarely see ones this huge."
The eyes of the people who had been reeling from the creature's land-kraken size and shape suddenly changed.
"My lord, what do you intend to do? We still have several days before the procession must leave."
"Indeed we do."
The moment Catherine floated the idea, Alfred understood exactly what she meant.
"The blasted thing has planted itself right in the middle of the grassland. Cutting through the forest is out of the question, and circling around it offers no guarantee it won't go after the column."
Alfred Felwinter picked up her thread at once and surveyed the expectant gazes gathering around them.
The world called it greed. The duke knew how to use it well.
"Then I shall order a subjugation, abrupt though it may be."
"And the rewards?"
"In addition to the participation bounty meant to raise morale, all materials harvested from the monster will be distributed among the participants."
"For convenience we can collect everything and then divide it according to contribution."
"In that case we may need to exclude certain high-level fighters such as Sir Churchill, for the sake of the other participants."
"Then I shall sit this one out as well."
With every exchange between Alfred and Catherine, the adventurers' eyes lit up as if they had already spotted gold coins. Even the soldiers and knights escorting Alfred began to look interested.
Land kraken, dungeon monster—none of that mattered anymore. A mimic grew in proportion to the number of victims it consumed. So how much treasure—no, how much gear from its victims—was that boulder larger than an ordinary inn holding inside it?
I have to take part in this.
The eyes and atmosphere of everyone trailing Alfred back to camp had completely transformed. The announcement that everything would be collected first was even welcomed. The Duke of Iceland was famous for his generous hand and meticulous accounting; he was equally famous for never breaking a promise.
It would take time, of course, but they could wait as long as necessary.
"I never imagined a mimic would look like that."
"Hmm? What is it? Finding it grotesque?"
"No. More like…"
Karem replayed the mimic he had just seen. Enormous tentacles, hundreds or thousands of suckers. An appearance that was half octopus, half squid.
Even in his previous life, Karem had never been especially fond of mollusks the way some people were. That didn't mean he lacked favorite dishes. Takoyaki, stir-fried squid, smoked squid and octopus, seafood jjamppong, sautéed squid and octopus—plus countless foreign recipes that fried, grilled, or braised the same creatures.
Suddenly his mouth watered.
He had never faced one this large in his previous life either—wait. Didn't the giant squid that went into jjamppong look fairly similar?
The last shred of resistance vanished.
And of course Catherine, standing closest, caught the shift in his eyes at once.
"Karem. Don't tell me—"
"…Does a mimic happen to be poisonous?"
"Mimics aren't poisonous, but—wait. You're serious?"
It was the exact look anyone who had ever witnessed one of Karem's sudden culinary charges would remember. Confronted with those darkly gleaming eyes of pure appetite, Catherine recoiled.
Not from Karem himself, exactly.
Servianus cuisine is delicious… No, wait. What am I thinking?
She recoiled from the fact that the suggestion didn't disgust her at all—that she was already half-wondering how it would taste. Realizing she had been thoroughly corrupted, she was appalled.
"So. Are you saying you won't eat it?"
"…Tell me what you plan to make first."