Chapter 12
Stay calm.
With Aspilia’s help I had cleanly taken care of the red giant spider. On paper, there was nothing at all wrong with the situation.
Yeah. That was how I should have seen it… but I simply couldn’t. Not even close.
Clutching my face in both hands, I sank down onto the floor and let out a long, silent sigh in my mind.
She had stolen the last hit. If this were still a game, we would have been in a party, so the experience would have been split cleanly and the red giant spider’s materials would have dropped as loot on their own.
But this was reality. Experience points might not have mattered much, yet the materials were another matter entirely. Unless you harvested them yourself from the corpse, there was no natural way to obtain a monster’s byproducts.
In short:
Getting the most expensive of the red giant spider’s materials—its eyes—had gone completely out the window.
…How much were those even worth?
With half-dead eyes I stared at the ruined carcass of the red giant spider. Depending on their condition, the eyes traded for anywhere between two and five gold. I remembered the prices well enough; I had sold them myself in my previous life.
In the game they had always been fixed at three gold, but this world was reality.
Two to five gold. Taking the average at three and multiplying by eight eyes… twenty-four gold.
In a single moment, twenty-four gold had simply vanished into thin air.
Twenty-four gold… how much is that?
The thought that enough gold to cover at least part of my plans had just dissolved into nothing left me laughing hollowly. But I shook the feeling off just as quickly. Whatever had happened was already done, and money was something I could always earn again with future knowledge.
Come to think of it, I ought to get started on that soon too.
Investment was best done early—and when success was guaranteed, even more so.
Casting off the disappointment, I rose to my feet. Drawing a long breath, I watched Aspilia’s trembling hands as she strapped her double-edged axe across her back, then walked over to her.
“Aspilia.”
“……”
“Good work.”
“No… yeah. You too.”
She still sounded a little dazed as she answered. I gave her a wry smile while she lingered in the afterglow of the fight, then turned my gaze back to the red giant spider’s corpse.
…What a real waste.
As I stared blankly at the remains, I noticed a faint glimmer deep inside the body.
…Hm?
I rubbed my eyes and looked again, but there was no mistake—something inside the carcass was glowing, however weakly.
Certain now that light was there, I swallowed dryly, drew my sword, and approached the corpse.
If my guess was right, that had to be…
A core, right?
In martial arts novels they called it an inner core. In this world it was known as a mana stone.
I remembered the setting—that it dropped from a red giant spider at an extremely low rate—but I had never confirmed it in the previous cycle. Of course not; the creature’s hard carapace had sealed the mana inside so completely that nothing leaked out.
Aspilia had turned the spider into paste, shattering that shell, and the mana had finally begun to seep free.
In other words:
Lucky break.
I had failed to get the materials I planned on, yet I had obtained something I never expected. In pure value the mana stone far outstripped the eyes, so I found myself thinking the line every regressor muttered like a habit.
Smiling in satisfaction, I reached into the carcass and pulled the stone free. From beside me came a sharp, startled eek…!
She may have killed the red giant spider with her own hands, but her loathing of insects clearly had not yet settled.
Ignoring the reaction, I drew the stone out fully. A deep crimson mana stone emerged, glowing with a clear, brilliant light.
“Ohh…”
“That’s… a mana stone?”
At first Aspilia kept her distance, still revolted, but the moment she realized what I held she stepped closer, curiosity winning out. She had cleared plenty of dungeons; she must have seen mana stones a few times herself.
Every mana stone was different, shaped by the creature and the quantity of mana it had possessed. Even identical monsters never produced identical stones, so each new one was always a small wonder.
So this is a mana stone.
Even I was seeing one in person for the first time. I could only stare blankly at the crimson glow. It was beautiful. I could not begin to guess how much mana was packed inside that small crystal. After a long look at the vivid red light, I slipped it into my coat and turned away.
I would claim the sword that came as the boss-room reward as well, but I had no intention of handing the mana stone over to Aspilia. This was a dungeon I had found, and after she had ruined the boss’s materials she would get nothing—not even the leftover scraps.
Consider this payment for emptying my wallet, you pest!
I banished the useless thought, felt the solid weight of the mana stone against my chest, and smiled in genuine good spirits. Aspilia recovered herself and fell into step behind me.
With the boss dead, it was time to collect the reward.
“……Have you been to this dungeon before?”
“Hm? No? First time.”
In this cycle it truly was. Today had been the Academy entrance ceremony, and this dungeon lay inside the Academy grounds. When I answered her obvious question with casual ease, she tilted her head and kept tilting it. The blank expression she usually wore had returned after the spider fight, yet the constant tilting forced a bitter smile from me inside.
Knowing the red giant spider’s strategy and every trap in the dungeon so thoroughly could not be explained away by simply being good at reading the flow of mana. Still, I could not give her a detailed answer—and her lingering suspicion was no bad thing—so I let silence serve as my reply.
“This way.”
“Yeah.”
Leaving her questions behind, we stopped before the door on the opposite side of the one we had entered. The moment the boss fell I had seen the reward-room door crack open; without hesitation I pushed it wider.
Creeeak…
Compared to the boss-room door it opened almost weakly. I stepped inside and found a sword I knew all too well waiting for me.
A crimson hilt, a jet-black blade. It was the very sword I had used through the early stages of every playthrough, including the previous cycle.
It stood thrust into the center of the floor. Without a second’s hesitation I closed my hand around the grip.
The familiar texture traveled up through my fingers. In the first cycle I had carried this sword all the way to the fight against the Demon God; there was no way it would feel strange now.
In the game it was a starter weapon you discarded once better gear appeared, but better gear had always required party play, so in previous cycles I had never been able to replace it.
…This cycle is different, though.
On my own strength I would eventually obtain a blade fit for the final stretch. Until then, I would put this one to good use.
It carried no special additional options, yet the raw stat boosts attached to the blade itself were solid enough that players had called it an early-game bully.
In the game its name never appeared, so I still don’t know what it’s actually called.
It was rare for an early sword to show up as [???]. Plenty of players had decided there had to be a secret and dug into its lore, yet nothing of substance ever came to light.
Some claimed it was a sealed end-game weapon. Others said the developers had planned a hidden story for it and simply never finished. In the end every theory remained pure rumor.
Anyway—I’ll take good care of you.
Nothing unusual had happened with it in the first cycle either, so I settled on the simple conclusion that the developers had never bothered naming it, and drew the sword free with a satisfied smile.
The gleaming blade, the grip that fit my hand as if made for it. After carrying it for so long in the previous cycle, holding it again felt strangely different—almost as if I had grown attached to the thing.
I exhaled a short breath, sheathed the sword, and looked around the room.
Hmm.
This boss room’s top reward was the sword. That did not mean there were no secondary prizes, so I set off at a brisk pace to claim the rest.