Drop Item
The Ice Golem's corpse was suddenly bathed in a brilliant light.
It was bright enough that it was hard to look at directly. I turned to Alta, who was shielding his eyes in the exact same pose as mine, and asked him about this bizarre phenomenon.
"Hm? First time seeing it? That's the process for obtaining an Artifact. When you kill a monster, on rare occasions its corpse transforms into something useful. No telling what you'll get, but it's guaranteed to outperform anything like a mere magic tool."
An Artifact?
Come to think of it, the mask Noah always wore was supposedly an Artifact too. So this was what it meant to obtain one from a monster!
Kill a monster and get an item drop... is this seriously real life?
The phenomenon we'd witnessed back in the lab, where monster corpses shattered into fragments, had already been strange enough — and now corpses were outright dropping items? At this point, I was starting to genuinely suspect I'd reincarnated into a video game.
Shuuuu—
The steadily glowing light gradually began converging toward a single point, until it had compressed into a lump roughly the size of a human head. Strangely enough, there was nothing left where the light had vanished. Which meant the corpse had been compressed in its entirety.
...Doesn't look like we're getting a magic stone out of this.
"Here it comes!"
The moment Alta finished speaking, the flickering light compressed even further. Whatever was coming, it didn't look very large. About five seconds later, the light died away and a tiny object dropped to the ground.
Tap.
"This is... a bracelet?"
The final legacy of the massive Ice Golem was a crudely shaped bracelet made of blue ice. Far too thin to serve any defensive purpose, yet surprisingly heavy in the hand. As an accessory, the design left a lot to be desired too.
"Hey, Jack! Bring the compendium over here."
"Already got it."
"Now let's see..."
At Lovrick's intrigued shout, one of his companions brought over a thick, heavy book. Some kind of encyclopedia, apparently. Watching grown men huddle together with their heads bent over a book was oddly charming.
"Hmm... it's in the compendium. Though it's a tricky one."
Lovrick's hand stopped as he paged through the thick volume. There, on the page, was an illustration of a bracelet identical to the one I'd picked up.
"The Glacier Bracelet?"
"For all intents and purposes, it's nothing but a cursed trinket."
Drastically increases the user's durability.
Side effect: progressive calcification of bones, muscles, and nerves.
Reported cases include loss of strength and nerve damage.
Recovery is nearly impossible; use is recommended only in emergencies.
"...The side effects on this thing are terrifying."
"Right? The effect's great, but with drawbacks that nasty... Still, you'd fetch a few gold coins for it if you sold it in the city, so you're not taking a loss. You're the one who brought down the Ice Golem, after all. It's yours."
"Thank you."
Tsk. Would've rather had the magic stone.
I handed the compendium back to Lovrick, doing my best to hide my disappointment. A monster that strong would have netted me quite a few points.
"Come to think of it, you'd normally get an Artifact from a dungeon core when you clear a dungeon too..."
Still, there was no telling whether the bracelet might have some other use, so I was carefully stowing it away when Lovrick struck up a conversation with Alta. Apparently Artifacts were a guaranteed drop from dungeon cores.
"Oh, that? I couldn't be bothered waiting around for the core to turn into an Artifact. Just took it as-is."
"Aw, what a waste."
"Ahem! It was a low-grade dungeon anyway. Nothing worthwhile would've come out of it."
"...Even at its worst, it'd be worth a few gold coins."
"Shut it."
When Lovrick butted in with that inconvenient little fact, Alta grumbled under his breath and trudged off toward the village. He had a point, though — that much in gold coins was a serious sum.
There was no doubt about it: he'd headed out early because he'd been worried about us.
"Haha."
Alta, soaked in blood, his magnificent fluffy fur shriveled into a sorry mess. This was the same beastman who hated having even water touch his fur — for him to come back drenched head to toe in blood, he must have been worried sick.
For such a big guy, he was awfully prickly about it.
"Something's bugging me. You thinking something weird right now?"
"No, sir."
Alta, who had been striding along, abruptly twisted around to look back at me. I quickly wiped the smirk off my face.
And so, bathed in moonlight, we trudged our way back to the village.
By the way, when exactly is that moon going to disappear?
I tilted my head back and looked up at the moon, still hanging there in the sky. Maybe it was the exhaustion, but the round face of it seemed to have the faintest hairline crack running across it. It would have been a curious thing to mention — but it was too uncertain and I was far too tired, so I said nothing.
Once Lovrick's relic had confirmed that the monsters in the area were well and truly gone, the villagers threw themselves into the real recovery work.
The most urgent task was the mountain of monster corpses piled up around the village. Rotting and putrefying was problem enough, but if the stench of blood carried, it could become a natural lure drawing in yet more monsters.
"Dump all the useless meat!"
"What about the hides?"
"If you lot can cut into it, that means it's Rank 9 or lower — so that goes on the pile too!"
"But this is all money..."
"Time matters more than anything right now. We have no choice. Look — the sun still hasn't come up."
The colonial occupation — no, the moon's occupation — was still in full force. We were safe for now, but there was no telling when another monster assault might come, so working fast was essential.
The corpses of most monsters, stripped of nothing but their magic stones, tumbled into the deep pits that had been dug in advance. It was a necessary trade-off to save time, but to the villagers, who had always lived frugally and wasted nothing, the sight was clearly an uncomfortable one.
Needless to say, the merchants shedding visible tears of regret were in a league of their own.
Anyway, while we were hard at work hauling the heavy carcasses, Lovrick waved us over from a corner of the clearing. When we got close, he abruptly held out a small leather pouch.
Jingle.
"What's this?"
"Purple magic stones. Your share."
I opened the pouch to find, just as he'd said, purple magic stones rolling around inside. Twenty or so, at a rough count? We'd taken down around thirty Rank 7 monsters together, which meant he'd cut us in on nearly two-thirds of the haul.
Wait — didn't he need to split this with the squad too?
"We already settled that with them. Honestly speaking, even with mana-coated rounds, landing a meaningful hit on a Rank 7 monster is genuinely difficult. They know it as well as anyone, so they waived their claim on that part."
"So it's like a bonus, then. But are you sure you can give us this much? Alta's here too, after all."
"Alta handed over his own share outright. That's why the amount coming to us grew so much. And... normally, you'd just split loot evenly among everyone of the same rank, but... I do have a conscience, you know. Your performance was unmistakably outstanding."
Lovrick half-thrust the pouch into my hands, telling me not to refuse, then wandered off before I could argue.
Free real estate?
While I was still mulling over what to do with it, Noah emptied the pouch, gathered every magic stone into her palm, and held them out to me.
"Convert them into points."
"All of them?"
That seemed like a waste. Don't we need gold coins too?
"You can't buy strength with money, so... oh! On second thought, that's not quite true either. You could simply purchase magic stones with money, couldn't you? In any case, we only need to keep the bare minimum on hand. Let's focus diligently on accumulating points."
"Well, talents are what matter. In that case..."
I absorbed the purple magic stones directly into points.
Two hundred points from this alone! Combined with the points I'd been steadily stockpiling in the village, I was sitting on roughly four hundred.
"...Still nowhere near enough."
"If we collect payment for the ordinary magic stones too and convert everything, that would bring us to around six hundred, wouldn't it?"
"Probably."
"Not bad. Although... what's the most expensive talent out there right now, at this point in time?"
"No idea. As you know, there are simply too many talents. That said, the priciest one I've found so far runs ten thousand points."
I opened my status window on a whim. The talent list, still crammed full of corrupted script, showed no end no matter how far I scrolled.
Would the day ever come when I could learn all of it?
"A ten-thousand-point talent... that's far too expensive. So how many points' worth are you planning to restore this time?"
"For now, I'm aiming for a two-thousand-point talent. The required cost climbs with every talent I acquire, so I figure I should just go for the expensive ones."
"Hmm. Talents aren't fixed quantities, you see. Restore one that's exceptionally rare, and the required points might climb that much higher in turn."
"I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. Hey, want to take a look at this?"
I pulled the Glacier Bracelet out of my pouch. There was something I'd wanted to test but couldn't, what with all the eyes on us earlier. If my hunch was right, this Artifact was as good as made for Noah.
"Hmm... I should be able to use it. Let's give it a try."
"What? Wait a—!"
Click!
After examining the Glacier Bracelet for a while, Noah abruptly clasped it around her wrist. The bracelet locked into place with a metallic snap. Despite my alarm, Noah just waved the bracelet-wearing hand around this way and that, then answered with perfect composure.
"Just as I suspected... I appear to be immune to this side effect."
"Seriously?"
"Yes. It seems the durability the Artifact grants extends, to a small degree, to the flexibility of tendons and blood vessels as well... and as you're aware, my body is made of metal to begin with. It could become a problem once organic components are installed later, but for the present, it's entirely irrelevant."
"How's the performance?"
"Genuinely impressive. My durability has risen by at least a factor of three. My movements have become somewhat stiffer, but that falls well within projected parameters."
Unlike a delicate human body, Noah's steel frame was tough down to the very last tendon. A curse that would be fatal to any person meant nothing to her.
At this rate, could she use other cursed Artifacts as well?
"What a relief. The moment I heard what this Artifact could do, I knew it was made for you."
"Thank you. To be honest, I hadn't mentioned it, but there was a lingering concern with my body ever since the battle with the Shadow Bear... it's completely resolved now. Shall we test just how resolved it is?"
Thereafter, at Noah's insistent request, I brought ordinary sword energy down against her wrist — and astonishingly, her body shrugged it off without so much as flinching.
At this point, wasn't she practically a walking fortress?
It didn't resolve the fundamental problem with Noah's body, but it had undeniably bought us a considerable amount of time. Though Noah, for her part, remained skeptical that the issue could ever be solved outright.
"To obtain a body that requires no periodic maintenance, we would need to raid something on the level of the Defense Department's classified vaults. Nanomachines are a requirement, you see."
"That day will come eventually. Dream big, I say. Back when we left the lab, you couldn't have imagined that things like Artifacts even existed, right?"
"...Fair point."
Who knows — maybe one day I'd find her a fully artificial body, like the homunculus, and give Noah a complete human form. It was nothing but a fanciful daydream, so for now I kept it as a secret tucked away in my heart.
Having more or less wrapped up the day's accounting, I got to my feet.
"By the way, when exactly is that damned moon going away?"
"Judging by the hairline crack, it appears its end is near. Curiously enough, the cracking began shortly after that crimson aura drained away."
"Oh really?"
"I have been monitoring it continuously. And yet... I keep arriving at the thought that the moon transformed the way it did in order to give birth to that colossal monster."
"Why does all this have to happen the moment we show up... I just want to live in peace, you know."
Noah's guess that the moon would vanish sooner rather than later proved correct.
Three days later, the false moon finally shattered, and the sun reclaimed its rightful place in the sky.
Naturally — it goes without saying that the villagers wept tears of joy.