On the tenth of this month, the book edition of "Isekai Tensei no Boukensha" will be released. The book edition features revised content from the web version, along with additional story arcs and newly written side stories.
Additionally, as a purchase bonus from Toranoana, limited-quantity leaflets with a bonus SS will be distributed.
Going forward, I'd appreciate your continued support for both the web and book editions.
"Slarin, Shiromaru, if enemies show up, you handle them. Solomon, you're helping me."
"Waou."
"Kyuu."
Right now, we were delving into the thirty-second floor of the dungeon. Incidentally, it was just me and my familiars—no one else. Grandpa had a prior engagement with Agri, and Branca had gone to see Master Gantz. Amour had tried to tag along, but Branca had dragged him away. Apparently, his stock of weapons from the tournament had run dry, and he'd arranged for the master to make more. Today happened to be the day for that. So for the first time in a while, we were out on a gathering expedition on our own.
The division of labor was straightforward: Solomon and I handled the gathering, while Slarin and Shiromaru served as our escorts. Since Solomon wasn't much use fighting (or flying around) in dungeons, he paired up with me. Slarin could gather too, but that would leave Solomon without anything to do, hence this arrangement. Specifically, Solomon's job was collecting the rocks I shattered.
We'd been at this since morning, repeating the process deep in the dungeon, but the Mithril we were after was proving elusive. We'd found barely a kilogram, if that. Normally, that would count as a decent haul, but for my purposes, it was a drop in the bucket.
"Maybe we need to push to a lower floor... The monster materials we picked up weren't anything special either."
Whether mining or resting, no monsters had dared to attack us head-on—likely intimidated by Shiromaru. The only exceptions were insect-type monsters and ones we stumbled into without noticing, but neither was any match for Slarin and Shiromaru. On the bright side, we'd collected a fair number of magic cores, so the profit looked decent enough.
"Alright! Let's aim for an area that looks unexplored and head to the lower floors!"
We pressed onward toward the lower floors after that, but the Mithril remained stubbornly scarce. As expected, all the promising spots in this area had already been pretty thoroughly excavated.
"Mithril really isn't something you just stumble across... We did find a good amount of magic iron, though."
We hadn't even managed two kilograms of Mithril, but we'd collected close to fifty kilograms of magic iron. After more than half a day of delving, fifty kilograms was a substantial haul. Its market price was considerably lower than Mithril's, but demand for it actually exceeded that of Mithril. That was because Mithril products were expensive—often priced beyond what even veteran adventurers would casually spend—while most magic iron weapons and armor fell within reach of beginners willing to stretch their budgets.
"That said, magic iron has all sorts of uses, so I'll just store it in the bag rather than sell it."
We weren't short on cash at the moment, so there was no particular need to sell off everything. Between the Magic Bags we'd received from the gods and the ones we already had, we still had plenty of room, and we could always make more if needed.
"I think it's about time we headed back... Hmm?"
Just as I started preparing to leave, I noticed someone heading our way. But Shiromaru didn't seem particularly alarmed, so finding that odd, I used Appraisal to check—and it turned out they were all people we knew.
"Shiromaru, take care of the welcome."
"Woof."
When I gave Shiromaru the instruction to play a little trick, he gave a small reply and walked toward the source of the sound without making a footstep.
After Shiromaru's figure disappeared, a few minutes later...
"Whoa!"
"Gah!"
"Aaaah!"
"Uwah!"
I heard familiar screams. After the screams, I could also hear voices scolding Shiromaru.
"Tenma! Don't pull any weird pranks! You startled us so badly I thought my heart was going to stop!"
The ones who came running over with clattering footsteps were Jin and the others from the 'Dawn Sword' group. Jin, Garat, and Menace were walking on their own feet while complaining, but Lina was riding on Shiromaru's back with luggage piled on her like a load.
"What happened to Lina? Shiromaru has a rather rare apologetic look on his face..."
"Don't listen to him!"
"Please don't ask..."
Looking at Lina, who seemed on the verge of tears, I didn't pursue the matter any further... I'll pretend I didn't see her trying to nonchalantly hide her wet bottom.
When I looked away from Lina and asked Jin and Garat the reason for their being here (in that opening, Menace took Lina and hid around a nearby corner), it seemed they had been reviewing their coordination in a cleared floor before advancing the dungeon conquest. That review had reached a break, and they were heading toward the nearest warp zone when they encountered Shiromaru.
"So, what was Tenma doing here? With Shiromaru standing watch, you must have been working on something, right?"
Jin spoke with quite a bit of conviction, and since it wasn't something I needed to hide, I decided to tell him my purpose.
"Hmm, that's a tough one."
"Well, I'll take my time with it. As a worst-case scenario, I'm also considering making the outside out of Mithril and the inside out of magic iron, and then remaking it later."
"That might be the most realistic option... Wait a sec? Tenma, how far down in this dungeon have you actually gone?"
Garat seemed to have hit on something and asked me about the deepest floor I'd reached.
"Um... I'm pretty sure the thirty-eighth floor is definitely reachable via the warp zone."
"Then why not aim for the forty-second floor from there? Most of that level is covered in lakes, so there's barely any land, but on the flip side, that means the ceilings and walls without footholds are almost completely untouched. If you can float through the air, Tenma, wouldn't it be worth targeting?"
Garat was right — if that was the case, it would be far more productive than gathering around here. Besides, I'd been thinking about heading to the lower floors soon anyway, so there was nothing to lose by checking it out.
"You're absolutely right. Thanks, Garat."
When I thanked him, Garat looked a bit surprised. When I asked why, he said it was because he hardly ever got thanked by me, so it felt a little strange.
I knew it was pretty rude of me, but Garat had given me genuinely useful information this time, so I couldn't very well punish him as usual, and that was probably going to stress me out a bit.
"Still, going there right now is a bit tough. I wouldn't have cared before, but with the old man around, I need to head back first... I'll go to the lake in a few days."
"Normally people tackle this area in units of a month... And you're talking a few days..."
"Don't go saying that too loudly to anyone else. You'll cause confidence crises or create delusional weirdos."
Jin and Garat were both staring at me with dumbfounded expressions. Well, if I used 'Exploration' effectively, just passing through would be even shorter, but for the sake of these two's mental well-being, I decided to keep that to myself.
"Are you done talking?"
"Sorry to keep you waiting~"
The conversation had reached a natural stopping point, and Menace and Lina had returned. Lina didn't seem to have changed on the surface, but if you looked closely, her pants were a different color. However, since Lina and Menace were acting as though nothing had happened, we all pretended not to notice.
On the way back, just as Jin and the others had suggested, we returned to the surface through a warp zone located only a few dozen meters from where I'd been, and parted ways with them at the guild. On the road to the guild, I asked Jin and the others for more details about the lake level, but they didn't know all that much. Apparently, that floor offered very little incentive for ordinary adventurers.
According to what they told me, the lake floor was the widest level they knew of, but it was essentially one long corridor to the exit, with hardly any land — making it difficult to fight. The only silver lining was that no particularly strong aquatic Monsters lived there, but even so, people still managed to lose their lives or suffer grievous injuries every year from letting their guard down.
The lake's maximum depth was about twenty meters, and the Monsters that appeared were several species centered around C-rank. The numbers weren't large, but they had a tendency to swarm when they smelled blood, so apparently falling into the lake mid-combat was fatal.
The Monsters were generally one to two meters in size. Even on land, they could leap out of the water to attack, and they could stay on land for roughly an hour, so if you mistook them for being on their last legs and let your guard down, you'd receive a devastating counterattack.
Even so, when they were on land, they weren't that difficult to deal with, but underwater they became extremely hard to kill. On top of that, the materials you could harvest from them were barely worth anything, and their bodies were tough and smelly, which meant very few adventurers bothered lingering on that floor.
Even after parting ways with Jin's group, I did a bit of research at the Guild, but there wasn't much in the way of new discoveries. Thinking I'd head home for now, I stepped outside and realized it was already dark. The taverns and such were quite lively.
"Crap!"
I'd completely forgotten about Gramps and the others. By the time I realized, I'd already rushed back to the apartment, and it was too late—I got an earful from Gramps. He lectured me, saying that next time I should tell them beforehand if I was going to be late before heading into the Dungeon. Watching this, Branca burst out laughing.
For reference, Gramps and the others hadn't eaten dinner yet because they'd been waiting for me. As a result, after the scolding, I was made to cook dinner. Tonight's menu was hamburg steak. Shiromaru's vegetable-centric life was promptly abandoned, but to smooth things over with Gramps and the others, it couldn't be helped… Shiromaru, upon seeing the hamburg steak that was served, shed tears as he savored it.
Two days later, I was standing on the lake floor I'd been told about. In one day, I'd hurriedly cleared floors thirty-nine through forty-one to get here. Since I hadn't gathered anything along the way, once I finished investigating this floor, I planned to do it all over again.
"It's really huge… How many soccer courts would this be?"
"Kyuu?"
Currently, only Solomon was out with me. Slarin was inside the Magic Bag, on standby for sorting the Mithril I'd collected. Shiromaru was also inside the bag, on standby for the same sorting purpose, since getting wet would be a hassle. Therefore, Solomon, the only one who could fly, was out as my stand-in. Well, up until now there hadn't really been anywhere he could fly around, so this also served as a bit of a mood lifter for him.
"I'll start by taking a look around, I guess."
This floor had a path along one wall, but halfway through, you had to cross a shallow part of the lake to reach the path on the opposite wall. The shallow area was only knee-deep, but it was where you were most likely to be attacked by Monsters, so you had to be careful. Well, in my case, since I could move around while floating, it shouldn't be a problem.
"Solomon, I'm about to start my work, so keep watch on the surroundings. If you think you can handle even one, feel free to go, but if the opponent looks tough or there are too many, let me know even while I'm working, got it?"
"Kui!"
Solomon raised one hand in what looked like a salute before beginning his vigilance patrol. He started digging at spots near the entrance that caught his eye, but after checking several places, no Mithril turned up.
"I thought Garat's reading wasn't bad, though… Clearly, Solomon's haul is way bigger."
"Kui?"
Solomon continued hunting the aquatic Monsters that targeted me, and within the first hour, he'd taken down over twenty. The Monsters he defeated consisted of ten Thunderfish—large, electric fish—three Angler-cats, which looked like a cross between a catfish and an anglerfish, and eight fish named Crocodylidae. Crocodylidae were fish shaped and sized like alligator gars, and they were said to grow up to the largest size in this lake—about three meters—but the ones Solomon took down were all in the one-to-two-meter range.
I'd heard the fish in this lake weren't tasty, so I was thinking of just taking the Magic Cores and dumping the rest, but Solomon seemed reluctant, so I decided to bag them and bring them back. Well, I'd heard that electric fish and alligator gars were edible fish in my previous life, so maybe the Thunderfish and Crocodylidae could be made to taste decent with the right preparation. Besides, if the Angler-cat was a best-of-both-worlds combination of catfish and anglerfish, it might actually be surprisingly good. If it was the opposite, I'd just have to resign myself to eating it anyway.
Ideally, I would have wanted to gut them, but since Solomon strangled them as he caught them, I had no choice but to give up on that.
"Let's move to the next spot… Huh? This is…"
Just as I was about to move since no Mithril had turned up, I spotted something glinting in the shallow water. Picking it up, I saw it was a ring. And when I Appraised it, I found it was made of Mithril.
"Oh! Profit! ...Could there be more scattered around?"
Mithril had been turning up so rarely that I decided to move around while peering into the water for a change of pace, and I ended up finding all sorts of things. The most common were weapons like throwing knives and swords, though there were also pieces of shields and armor among them.
"So even when they're sitting right out in the open, nobody's willing to dive in while Monsters are swimming around, huh... This is way more efficient."
Recovering the weapons that had fallen in was difficult even at a depth of just one meter. That was because Thunderfish and Crocadiles, having heard the sound of someone walking, would circle at a distance watching—and the moment you so much as stepped into the water, they'd attack.
In my case, I'd been having the Golems handle the retrieval, so there was no danger. But if this were a flesh-and-blood human, unless they were clad head to toe in armor, they'd be bitten to death in less than ten minutes. Of course, even if you did cover yourself in armor, you'd just get dragged down into the deep and drown instead...
"Let's keep searching the shallows like this. Solomon, let me know if you spot anything from up above. And keep standing guard, will you?"
"Kyi!"
The lake's transparency wasn't all that great, so from Solomon's altitude, he probably couldn't see all the way to the bottom. But he was flying around so enthusiastically that I didn't need to say anything extra.
After that, I brought out three Golems and set them to helping me recover the lost items in the shallows. While Solomon and the Golems cooperated to repel Monsters and gather loot, I dug into the walls and ceiling searching for Mithril.
Mithril still didn't turn up, of course, but Solomon and the others made steady progress on recovery in the meantime. By the time our allotted time was up, we had a combined haul of over fifty kilograms. Of that, five kilograms were Mithril, twenty kilograms were magisteel, and the rest was copper, iron, and steel. One-tenth Mithril sounded impressive, but in reality there were alloys mixed in and parts like handles made from other metals, so I figured having half that much pure Mithril would be lucky. Incidentally, the Monsters that Solomon and the others hunted amounted to nearly three times the weight of the recovered items.
"Not bad for a first run? The real question is the fish, though... Let's give them a taste, I suppose."
For the first round of cooking, I prepared two simple styles of grilled fish to get a sense of their flavors. The first was plain, grilled with nothing added. The second was salted and lightly dried before grilling.
Without salt, the ranking was Thunderfish, Angler Cat, then Crocadile. With salt, it was Angler Cat, Thunderfish, then Crocadile.
The reason first and second places swapped between unsalted and salted was apparently the moisture content in Angler Cat meat. Without salt the taste was muddled, but salting drew out the moisture and made the flavor much clearer. All three tasted better with salt, but the Crocadile had a strong gamey smell and tough texture, so it came in dead last by a wide margin whether salted or not.
"Thunderfish has the mildest flavor of the three. Not much character to it, either. Angler Cat is kind of like a slightly gamey anglerfish? And the Crocadile... it's more meat than fish. The smell is strong and it's a pain to work with."
Compared to the Crocadile, Thunderfish and Angler Cat could be considered decent-tasting, but stacked up against sea bream, horse mackerel, salmon, or sweetfish, they fell short by a wide margin. Not fish you'd go out of your way to eat.
"The Crocadile's gameiness seems to be concentrated in the skin and organs. If you just eat the center, it's actually close to chicken breast. The Angler Cat works pretty well as deep-fried karaage once the moisture cooks out. And the Thunderfish is better deep-fried in oil too."
After trying various cooking methods, I learned that each was at least somewhat edible. I wouldn't bother eating them on the surface, but as dungeon rations go, they'd do just fine. I'd have to teach Jin and the others about this next time.
"The Crocadile—since it's got 'croc' right there in the name, the hide looks like it could work as a crafting material... though it stinks."
If it weren't for the smell, the hide was quite durable and could probably be used for armor. It seemed water-resistant too, so making bags out of it wouldn't be a bad idea. Maybe Crocadile leather bags would even become a trend.
"It looks like Shiromaru and Solomon like the Crocadile the best."
"Wau!"
"Kyui!"
It seemed they preferred the taste and texture, which were closer to chicken than fish. Slarin, seeing the two fixated on the Crocadile, was busy eating the other dishes. None of the three seemed to mind the smell much.
This time I'd cooked quite a lot since it was partly experimental, but there was still over a quarter of the fish left. I might have caught too many, but the lake still seemed to have plenty of fish. Their breeding rate must be incredible, or maybe there were hidden waterways somewhere.
"That's it for today. Let me set up a bed."
Usually I'd just pull out the carriage, but I'd left it at the apartment, so I had to make do from scratch.
Of course, since the bed was stored in my Magic Bag, I could use the usual dead-end trick and it wouldn't take much time.
The problem was that this floor didn't have any dead ends, so I'd have to go up one level.
"Alright, bed's all set... Now the question is how to explore the bottom of the lake."
Sitting on the bed I'd taken out of the bag, I planned tomorrow's schedule. I could search the shallows using the same method as today, but there wasn't even half of the explorable area left. Even if I picked up the same amount of Mithril as today, it wouldn't be much of a haul. That meant I'd have to consider searching the deep areas too, but I couldn't think of a way to do it.
I considered simply free-diving to search, but fending off attacking fish while exploring the bottom was unrealistic and didn't seem efficient. More than anything, I didn't want to dive into a place where I had no idea what might be down there.
"Hmm, what should I do... Oh, I left the kettle on the fire."
I'd been so deep in thought that I didn't notice until the water was fully boiling. I hurried over to take the kettle off the stove, and seeing the boiling water suddenly gave me an idea.
"I might be able to do it with that... Either way, I'll try it tomorrow."
I wanted to try the method I'd just thought of right away, so I lay down on the bed immediately, but whether from excitement or not, I just couldn't fall asleep. Nearby, Shiromaru and Solomon were sleeping soundly, and their snoring got on my nerves a little.
"Wau."
"Hm?"
When I came to, Shiromaru was peering down at my face. It seemed I'd fallen into an unusually deep sleep. Normally, I never slept this deeply in the dungeon or outside, but maybe my sense of time was a bit off from struggling to fall asleep.
I wanted to head to the lake early to try the new method, but Shiromaru and Solomon's stomachs started a chorus, so I decided to have a quick meal. Fortunately, there were leftovers from yesterday, so I made do with those and some ready-made stuff from the bag. After a brief post-meal rest, we headed for the lake.
If the method I came up with works, it'll definitely expand our range of operations going forward.
"If I told Namitaro about this method, he'd say something like 'you have to make it work no matter what'... Come to think of it, I also need to make a version of the family crest with Namitaro included... Maybe I'll ask the King through a letter next time."
I remembered the matter I'd nearly forgotten about and felt a bit exasperated...