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Butcher Demon Chapter 331 Treasure Chest
"Yakumo, Look. another, chest."
I called out to Yakumo like a parent on an insect-collecting trip, trying to give kudos to his child.
There was that familiar chest again on our path.
Placed alone on a tree stump, as if inviting us to open it, he seems to love that chest, based on last time.
Yet, Yakumo was nonchalant, completely indifferent.
Yakumo seemed uninterested today. He sat on Wojtek's back, gazing at the nearby trees. Why is that? The whims of adolescence, perhaps.
"――Hah..."
Out of the blue, Tiriel stopped, took a deep breath, and paused, like she was gearing up something.
"Since no one seems to say it, I guess I'll be the one to ask."
With that, she looked back at us.
"...And why are there treasure chests on the ground?"
The elephant in the room——the question everyone had silently avoided was finally stated.
Untouched, pristine chests placed randomly in the deep forest trails and riverbanks felt out of place. Up until now, it's been like this unspoken rule, like a ghost story nobody wanted to talk about.
Probably everyone thought it was weird. But nobody mentioned it, so I kept quiet too. Being a former Earthling, I just couldn't get why. What's the big deal with a treasure chest, anyway?
"I was wondering about that too," Susu, the mermaid prince, said, standing near the treasure chest. He glanced around as if trying to remember something.
"The chests materialize as a crystallization of the dense magical power in the dungeon and appear on the surface. In other words—"
"Nearby dungeons have undergone outbreak?"
Kyo said, and Faye next to her continued, "Or perhaps—"
"The whole Hyperborea is getting taken over by dungeons."
Everyone present held their breath at her words.
"But, is such a thing possible?"
Faye furrowed her brows slightly. She seemed to doubt her own words.
"Only, Hyperborea, wrong. Entire world."
At that point, I shared the information I gathered on the internet—rumors suggesting that not only Hyperborea and Australia but the whole world was in a similar state. By the way, Yakumo and I experienced it firsthand, having teleported halfway around the Earth and all.
"Wow... Gevaudan-san, you're surprisingly well-informed. Where did you get that information from?"
Kyo looked at me her droopy eyes, impressed.
Then Tiriel leaned in, looking into my hands, and said, "Inta-net? That thing called the Inta-net, right?"
She loved the internet.
Natsuki showed her the way that you can endlessly watch flashy music videos, cute animals, and beauty tutorials in the online world. Language didn't matter as long as you could tap those icons and thumbnails, you were set for a dive into a whole new universe. It was like a cool info magazine that modern girls loved. That's the internet for you.
Unfortunately, the internet is out right now.
When I showed Tiriel my broken smartphone, she dejectedly muttered, "Inta-net..." and returned to her place in the line.
The poor smartphone, brutally wrecked, somehow still had power. I checked if it could catch a signal or not from the one corner of the screen that wasn't cracked. Sometimes, I'd think about stuff, staring through the cracked glass, trying to keep that last connection with Earth. Like a homesick butcher stuck in another world.
"Are you saying that the whole world is potentially turned into a dungeon.....?"
Faye was speechless.
Susu furrowed his brow similarly.
"I reckon there's no one else capable of inducing such an unprecedented tectonic upheaval, merging Miforsis with a subhuman planet and transforming it into a dungeon, except for the Demon King Narus Exista..."
"Prince, even for a Demon King, such a scale is too great."
Fukoidan (Floraitan?) said, and Susu cleared his throat in response.
"――Something unimaginable may have happened."
"Could it be that thunder...?" Faye grabbed the chest of her clothes.
"There are more strange monsters than before," Kyo also half agreed.
"――...!"
While everyone else shook their heads in disbelief, only Tiriel covered her mouth and stared at me. She looked at me with wide eyes.
Maybe she, too, was thinking about the thing that seemed like the most obvious cause. After all, she's part of all this.
But are we really to blame for it? I don't think so. It was just a big accident.
Orlando's decision to gather a large army at Titania's nest. Cause Titania to summon an Elder Spirit to counter the threat. Then targeted by the monster of a cannon called the Candle of Destruction. Just before the warp, Titania likely lost control of it. Come to think of it, she was chanting quite a complex spell just before. She might have been in the midst of some intricate task. All these factors overlapped.
Well, it's unclear exactly how we ended up in this situation.
As a lowly foot soldier like me, it's difficult to come up with hypotheses. Maybe Titania-sensei would understand. I need to find that busty beauty teacher quickly and continue the lecture.
For now, let's keep the details of the incident a secret——I sent a "shh" gesture to Tiriel with that thought. She swallowed her saliva and nodded slightly.
"――then? Chest, open?"
"Let's not."
When I pointed at the treasure chest and asked, Susu shook his head.
"I don't want to trigger any traps right now. The worst could be a teleportation trap or a monster... but when activated on the surface, I have no idea what might happen. It's too dangerous."
Then, someone opposed the prince's decision.
"Not opening a big chest like this would be a shame. No orc would abandon such treasure. I'll open it. You guys watch."
An orc who had come with the Yakumo escort from the orc village.
"Ah, stop!"
"Move, coward."
Ignoring the prince's warning, the orc reached for the treasure chest.
――Click.
The lid of the chest opened a few centimeters, at that moment.
I looked into the orc's eye, and I saw something eerily shining.
It was like watching a bud bloom. A bright red flower, kind of like a dahlia, and then, in the next moment, bones shot out from the orc's back.
"Gu, agu...!"
The orc froze, his spine arched, with fractured ribs jutting out from his back. Blood splattered onto the ground.
Having witnessed such a gruesome scene, Susu shouted without a pause.
"Mimic!"
As Susu drew his sword from his back, a dramatic change occurred in the orc's body almost simultaneously.
Skin peeled off all over with a ripping and cracking sound. Meat, bones, and organs, making sounds that living beings shouldn't make, turned the orc's body inside out.
A living being's body turned completely inside out——
Exposed flesh, bones, and organs fell to the ground. And like worms converging, they came together to form some kind of formation.
"Hi――"
Tiriel's scream.
Wojtek let out a fierce growl. Next to him, Kyo, looking serious, smacked the ground with a whip. Faye and the others also took a step back together. Everyone there had serious faces, reacting to the punishment against the orc.
Opening the chest alone was already an excessively harsh action. But this show was far from over. I took the Butcher Hammer in hand, deciding to watch how this bizarre ritual would unfold.
The bones of the orc that had fallen to the ground assembled and formed a box.
The orc's skin stretched inside the box, creating a nice velvet-like lining. On the outside, where the bones were exposed, the bones were coated with flesh and viscera layer after layer.
As the tragic show came to an end, a new chest appeared before the treasure chest. A perfect replica.
Lastly, from the already discarded and mangled remains of the orc, some entrails plopped down around the neck area, and we witnessed them neatly settling into the new chest.
As we were all stunned, a treasure chest, Mimic, bounced! It made a jump into the new chest, and the lid closed silently.
Silence fell. It was the end. With the Mimic now in the new orc chest, it seemed to have grown a size larger.
"Wow."
Rude as it may be, I couldn't help but be amazed.
"Unfortunately, the resistance check failed. Once it comes to that, there's no saving them..."
Susu sighed sadly while holding his sword in a defensive stance.
"So that's a Mimic... first time seeing one, and it's ugggh..."
Tiriel wiped the sweat from her forehead and exhaled shakily.
Apparently, a Mimic is a creature that ensnares those caught in its trap within a new Mimic chassis, gradually expanding their bodies. Quite a sight.
"Destroy?"
I said, and Kyo cautioned, "It's better to leave it alone."
"Mimics retaliate fiercely if you attack them. So, people say they're not easy to beat—"
"Foolish imbeciles, trying to mess with someone like me with no good gear? Hah! Stop daydreaming! Despite appearances, I'm a seasoned veteran who's eaten dozens of humans! I won't go down that easily, you fools! If you don't want me to fight back, scram, you small fries! If you still wanna fight, be ready, 'cause I'll make good use of your pretty chests, your precious little sacks, and your beautiful faces!
It's the voice of the orc that died earlier.
However, the voice clearly came from inside the chest. A startled look came from everyone.
"Ah, this is not good..."
Susu's face turned into a face like he had bitten a bitter bug.
"It seems it acquired a voice."
"Dangerous. Let's destroy, Prince."
"If we leave a Mimic that has voices, the number of victims will skyrocket."
Fukoidan and Floraitan stood in front of him, blocking his way.
It looks like the stuff that went into the chest last thing earlier were the orc's vocal cords.
So, Mimics can snatch a part of the victim's body. If an ambush-type enemy can lure prey with its voice, the danger goes up a lot. I can picture that.
"Box, scary. I'll do it."
What comes to mind now is how I smashed the crab monster with the hammer. Breaking things just feels like such a good way to let out frustration. I really want to smash this annoying box. I mean it.
But as I prepared to step forward with the butcher hammer in hand, Susu held back my arm.
"It's reckless to deal with this Mimic now."
Really? It's just a chest, though...?
Then, as if reading my thoughts, Susu continued.
"Mimics might look like regular chests, but they're actually considered one of the most dangerous monsters in dungeons. They use ancient <Magic Eye> that is believed to be lost to the annals of time. If you can't resist it, you end up with a gruesome death, like what happened to the orc earlier. Because of their size, it's hard to guess how long it would take to destroy them. Sticking around in their sight for too long is basically suicide."
"Leave?"
"It would be better to report it at Meteor Lake and have a specialized strike team dispatched."
"What!? Are you scared? You wimp!"
The Mimic taunted.
"Do you really have a little guy down there, huh? If you're going to come, come! Come on! I won't run or hide! Even if your thing is so small that can't be mistaken for a clit, I'll eternally put it to good use together with that elf's stinky cunt when it's inside me! Do us all a favor and pass over that, would you? Gyehahahaha!!
"――Ugh!!"
Tiriel clenched her staff and shouted at the Mimic.
"It doesn't stink at all! It's still sparkling new!"
——Eh, really...?
"Elves live for so long, if you don't use them, they get all dusty and go bad before you know it."
"That's not true!"
"There's a reason for that, you know. Do you want to know why? Then come closer! Come on, come on! What's wrong? I'm right! This elf cunt is already rotten."
"Shut up! You're nothing but a box waiting to be robbed!
"Yay, Yay, elf's fermenting cunt!"
"That's why even the Demon Lord doesn't treat you like a human! Even goblins become one, but you're left behind! Your kind should be locked up in a dungeon until you're all perish!"
"Tight by dry like desert~"
"You're a stupid chest!"
"You stupid elf!"
A stupid argument continued.
Even Tiriel forgot for a moment that she was mad at a box. The Mimic's cursing is so low-level that it's annoying and gives me secondhand cringe as the one who has to listen.
"Keeeeeh――I've had it enough!!"
Tiriel, with tears in her eyes, grabbed my apron.
"Gevaudan, crush that Mimic! For the honor of the elves!"
As juvenile as it might sound, the dirtiest of mouths often triumphs in a war of words. It was the same in the world of aliens. The refined elves found it a bit too much.
Alright, leave the rest to me.
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Tags:
Butcher Demon