A Special Prescription for Lazy Heroes
"The packaging…? What does the ingredients label say…? What's even in this…?"
"Heh-hem! Don't freak out, Sonia! This is top-tier intel I got from a porter lady I met on a pretty long dungeon run…"
Adventurers hunted monsters, stacked experience, and leveled up. In a harsh world, growing stronger always came at a price. Just as heroes collected their pay, investing in one's own growth was non-negotiable. Deep in a dungeon's core, only after the boss monster fell would the treasure-chest-packed vault swing open.
But money wasn't waiting only in those rooms. Rare magic items and the minerals Sky City's cutting-edge industries demanded weren't the whole story either. There were also the special zip-lock plastic packs that could safely hold even monster parts—porter essentials that sealed shut like an air cushion the moment you pulled the strip.
While adventurers pushed into the next zone, the porters were the specialists who stripped everything of value from the wreckage: monster remains, medicinal herbs, whatever would sell. And the zip-lock packs they favored most of all? The one Luce had set on Sonia's dining table clearly had something inside.
"Ta-da! …Well? Sonia…?"
"Even if you ask me how it looks… isn't this just… a spider leg…?"
The mascot of the plaza in front of Alubi Dungeon was a spider for a reason—it was the most common monster that spawned there. Even now, countless adventurers were reducing them to raw experience points. Most people pictured a fist-sized spider, but dungeon monsters were different. In reality they were savage beasts larger than a big dog.
Luce pulled a single spider leg from the pack, sealed up like dried squid. Sonia took it and turned it over in her hands.
"…It just looks like a spider leg… white… and then was it red after that? Or black…? My memory's getting fuzzy…"
Sonia tapped the table with the spider leg, hard as a metal chopstick. It rang with the same solid clack—and yet a hollow emptiness mixed into the sound, as if the inside were completely vacant.
Those spider legs were both the number-one reason Alubi Dungeon's porters ended up in the hospital and, at the same time, their primary source of income. Harder than most hunks of scrap metal, they were prized as projectiles or sold straight to weapon shops. Surprisingly light, yet sharp as a blade at the tip. Sonia looked up at Luce, the one who'd brought the leg, with eyes that clearly demanded an explanation.
"Eeh… that's a little much, isn't it…? Even if they hired them, still… that feels… kind of wrong. I think they got what they deserved, Luce. So what happened to those academy students after that?"
"Right? Right? No idea what came after. I just walked out myself."
Before launching into her real pitch, Luce started unloading a recent unpleasant experience. Twirling the spider leg in her hand, she vividly reconstructed the day. Everything had begun with a pickup party thrown together on the spot.
"I joined a random party—y'know, a pickup group—by myself. Somehow I ended up going in with a few porters and these academy students who only hung around with weirdly fancy-looking young ladies."
"A ladies' academy?"
"No question. Nobody in their right mind walks around with those huge round bread-roll hairstyles, and every sentence out of their mouths sounded like a rich girl from one of those cartoon shows. 'If you would be so kind~, hohoho~' and all that. Looking back, I should've felt something was off right then—but it mixed with the dungeon atmosphere and somehow felt natural."
"Ah… uh… is that so…?"
Sonia tilted her head, but Luce barreled on regardless. Apparently the young ladies had come to Alubi Dungeon for an off-campus practical assignment, and the moment they stepped inside, a bizarre scene had unfolded.
"A dress…? I've never heard of anything like that…"
"A battle dress…? I don't really get it either, but one of them shouted it and light just started seeping up from their bodies like magic! Then their clothes completely transformed—into something like what you're wearing right now, Sonia! Total ladies'-academy vibe. I never thought people who actually say 'It seems rather warm today…' existed in real life, but… anyway!"
"Ah… ahaha…"
Sonia's ears pricked at the word transformation. She herself had just changed clothes and watched her eye color shift while a barcode appeared on her body—so Luce's story didn't sound like pure bluster.
"So… even though it was only normal difficulty, nothing that hard… they tried to just leave an injured porter behind and push forward?"
Luce's story was cresting toward its climax. The party had been clearing the dungeon smoothly enough—until a spider monster lunged from a corridor corner and one of the porters failed to dodge in time. A leg punched straight through his thigh.
He hit the floor screaming. The academy students' reaction was ice-cold.
"Exactly, Sonia! I was so floored… they actually said, 'It's a pickup party, so it's not our responsibility, is it?'"
A pickup party with murky lines of accountability. That might have been the rule of this world—but abandoning a bleeding, moaning comrade was something no adventurer should ever do. Unable to just watch that cold-blooded display, Luce had gone to the porter with the spider leg through his thigh and started first aid. She'd wrapped the bandage, waited until he could think through the pain, and eventually helped him back out to the dungeon entrance.
"Then the police! …Ah, right, you said it was a pickup party… so there wasn't much you could do, Luce. But you still did the right thing, didn't you? For a Luce like that… want a potato chip?"
Sonia held out a single chip as a gesture of comfort for the good-hearted adventurer. With a little shrug, as if a king bestowing a royal gift, she offered one perfectly crisp potato chip.
Luce took it with a dazed look and popped it into her mouth. Crunch—the cheerful sound scattered fragments across her tongue, exploding with a fierce salty tang. It was the kind of aggressive saltiness that almost made the tongue pucker, but the teal-haired D-class adventurer didn't care about something that minor and pressed on with her story.
The tale circled back to the unlucky porter whose thigh had been pierced by a spider leg harder than a metal chopstick. After wrapping a rough bandage, Luce said, the two of them had sat together on the dungeon's cold stone floor until he recovered enough to talk, trading all kinds of stories.
"I figured there'd be something like that, of course… but apparently every neighborhood has its own porter network? They even have a separate online community, and it's way more organized than you'd think. So those young ladies…? They were a little weird, sure, but the word is they'll never be able to hire a porter around here again. Good riddance, honestly."
"And what does any of that have to do with you bringing a spider leg here…?" Sonia asked, still tilting her head in confusion.
A sly grin spread across Luce's face.
Judging that the long-awaited bite had finally taken the hook, the adventurer who was neither particularly pure nor particularly righteous wiped every trace of that face away in an instant—and smiled instead with the cunning, confident gleam of a door-to-door saleswoman about to land the big catch named Sonia.
"A painkilling effect…? I had no idea it could do that…!"
"No, no. You've got it wrong, Sonia. Not a painkilling effect—they used it to induce a state where you just don't feel the pain."
"I've never heard of a spider leg doing that."
No matter how carefully she'd wrapped the bandage, Luce had neither professional medical skill nor a healing ability. No painkillers, no proper medicine—a hopeless situation. And then the porter she'd saved had pulled out a spider leg he'd already prepped from the room they'd just cleared, given it "a little treatment," and without hesitation driven it straight into the back of his own uninjured hand.
The wound itself hadn't closed—but with the expression of someone who'd just been hit with a powerful narcotic analgesic, he'd let Luce support him out of the dungeon. One thing led to another and Luce ended up going all the way to the hospital with him; thanks to that connection, she was let in on a shady folk remedy that had been passed down in secret among porters for generations.
"That's how it went, Sonia. Well… isn't that exciting?"
"Hmm… so that's the principle. Field medical patches and painkillers are expensive, and porters naturally get paid less than adventurers… Is that 'little treatment' you mentioned what you're doing right now? Stuffing things into the leg one by one?"
Nod, nod. Luce nodded with total confidence. Convinced she had almost closed the deal, she carefully began packing tiny, faintly blue-tinged monster mana stones—each about the size of a grain of rice—into the hollow spider leg like loading BBs.
According to the porter's explanation to his lifesaver Luce, simply jabbing yourself with a plain spider leg only left you feeling vaguely nauseous and miserable all day. To maximize the dulling, intoxicating effect of the spider venom and steer it in a useful direction, you had to use these tiny, commercially worthless mana-stone grains as a catalyst.
It wasn't direct mental magic like hypnosis or charm. This was a method that, through powerful self-suggestion, tricked the brain into registering the sensation of pain as something else entirely. The secret behind the spider-leg folk remedy porters had used for generations to deal with pain.
"Alright…! Come on, come on! If you get it, put your hand out already! Sonia! …Can't see anything under the bodysuit… then the neck… or the neck… wait, can I just stab you above the chest, Sonia? Huh? Did you—did you just dodge?"
Whoosh… whoosh-whoosh…! At a reasonably brisk speed, Luce thrust the spider leg toward Sonia's soft chest, left largely bare by the bodysuit. Sonia slipped the attack with surprising agility. The ambush had failed—so all that remained was to dig thoroughly into her target's personality and desires and persuade her with words alone.
"I understand that the spider leg puts you under self-suggestion. But… why are you suddenly trying to stab me with it?"
Tumble… tumble! Crying "Defense mode!", Sonia dropped onto the living-room floor and started rolling herself into a thin blanket like a chrysalis. With only her face peeking out, she mumbled, "Th… that is kind of amazing, though…"
Clues… clues… It's Sonia, so… how do I…
Luce was, without question, a hot-blooded adventurer who led with her fists more often than her head—but right now she was desperately combining every scrap of evidence she'd collected. How could she drag this blonde, busty hero out of the house, and how could she make her a party member to clear dungeons together?
Then Luce's eyes landed on the fine layer of dust blanketing the dining table. The trash bags had been taken care of, but apparently no one had wiped the table or mopped the floor. The moment she started hunting for individual problems, the fact that Sonia's nest desperately needed a deep clean began to jump out at her.
Cleaning… cleaning… cleaning… hmmm… Luce frantically rewound everything Sonia had said.
—Maid bots are way too expensive, you know? Just installing the maintenance port alone is a little… much…
—Cleaning my room is such a pain…
—Sonia… is in defense mode! Luce!
Mode… maid robot… cleaning… tidying the room… That's it! That's the one!
Like the moment a mystery novel's protagonist finally unmasks the culprit, the scattered hints snapped together in Luce's mind into one perfect picture.
