About five minutes after Veronica’s out-of-the-blue remark.
She was still holding her hand up, and had finally managed to get permission to speak.
“Why did you suddenly say something like that?”
At Elladrien’s question, Veronica answered dejectedly.
“If we get to know each other well, our teamwork will be better… and we’re going to be together from now on, so it’d be nice if we got close.”
The moment I heard her, I nodded.
It wasn’t completely wrong.
When you’re alone, you can do whatever you want.
But when you move as a party, your coordination with one another is truly important.
Of course, before taking action, you call things out to each other.
I’m going left, you take the right, and so on.
But in a tense situation, it can be extremely difficult to convey something through words.
There will also be times when the person listening fails to hear it and lets it slip by.
When things get chaotic, the enemy right in front of me takes priority, not a party member’s callout.
That’s why coordination—the kind that lets you make judgments on your own to a certain extent, avoid overlapping with one another, and find the optimal move even without callouts—is incredibly important.
If urgent situations were rarer than expected, its importance might drop a little.
But “rare” doesn’t mean “nonexistent.”
What good would it do to make excuses after dying later, saying you didn’t think to coordinate because situations like that didn’t happen often?
You’d already be dead.
And urgent situations don’t happen rarely; they happen more often than you’d think.
As you live, there are probably more difficult situations than easy ones, and I believe everyone can accept that without any special explanation.
Anyway.
Getting close to each other? Of course that was good.
But the reason we were acting like this right now was because this wasn’t the timing to say it.
We were already overwhelmed and flustered enough by the sudden addition of an unplanned party member, and now recreation on top of that?
“Now that I hear it, that’s quite a good suggestion! Right, Elladrien?”
But it seemed the saintess had been immediately convinced by that short explanation.
“…Are you sure that’s all right?”
“Of course! It’s all right!”
“No, I wasn’t asking. I was saying we can’t.”
“Oh my…”
Ariel made a slightly blank expression and was sucked into a maze all on her own.
Two heroes… Two heroes!!!!!
Kraaaaaaagh.
Were Elladrien and I the only two people in this party who could play the role of adults?
Still, maybe Signica would be different…?
She’s a mage! That’s a profession that should be rational!
When I looked at Signica with that expectant expression,
“Haa…”
As if pushed into it, she spoke her thoughts.
“It’s true that this is a rather flustering situation right now. A lot of things suddenly happened, too. But I do think that if we’re going to get close quickly, now is the only time.”
“Hmm…”
After hearing Signica’s opinion, Elladrien rested her chin on her hand for a moment and thought.
“Certainly… if you focus on that, I suppose that’s true.”
Her contemplation did not take that long.
“As time goes on, there’ll only be more things to do. I don’t think they’ll decrease. In fact, the damage caused by monsters is gradually increasing…”
At that moment, Veronica, who had been sulking, heard that and said,
“Right! That’s why I said it!!”
She suddenly defended herself fervently with an expression that said, “That’s it!”
The problem was that her expression showed it far too clearly, so no one believed Veronica had actually said it with that in mind…
“So… then how are we going to do this recreation thing?”
“Who knows?”
“Indeed…”
All four of our gazes turned to Veronica.
“Veronica?”
It seemed Veronica had naturally become the leader of this group project called recreation.
Well, since she was the one who brought it up first, that was only natural.
In any case, as though we had all agreed in advance, we waited for Veronica to speak.
“Uh, um…”
“Ve. Ro. Ni. Ca?”
For a moment, I had the illusion that a shadow had fallen over Elladrien’s face.
It was like there were signs that if even the slightest thing went wrong, she would immediately turn dark…
“…Sorry.”
In the end, Veronica chose the lesser evil of a swift apology.
It seemed her feelings had gotten ahead of her and she’d brought up recreation, but she had no concrete plan.
At this rate, the already chilly atmosphere seemed like it would get even colder.
‘Sigh… I guess I’ll have to mediate.’
Clap.
“I think it would be good for all of us to think about the recreation together. It’s not as if we’ll decide based on just one person’s opinion anyway.”
I spoke with a slight smile.
“Hah…”
At that, Elladrien glared at Veronica one last time and sighed.
Her expression gave off a strong feeling of, “I’ll let it slide this once.”
“Fine. Let’s all talk it over.”
And so began the dream group project with no free riders.
***
“What kinds of things did you do to get close before?”
“Before?”
“Uh… I mean. There must have been a time when the four of you first met, right?”
“Ah, then?”
Elladrien briefly looked back.
“Well… there wasn’t really anything special?”
I thought it would take a little longer, but Elladrien continued smoothly, as though it had happened yesterday.
“Those three were classmates at the academy. So by the time I arrived, they were already close.”
Aha. It wasn’t that it felt like yesterday—for an elf, she really had only joined about as recently as yesterday.
“As for me… I don’t know. We just fought together a few times, washed up, ate meals, and that was about it. Did you three do anything separately?”
The three of them, including Veronica, began to think hard.
Their recollection took longer than expected.
I couldn’t tell whether it was taking long because there was nothing in particular to find, or because there were too many things and their reminiscence was dragging on.
Or maybe Elladrien’s had simply been too short.
“For us too…”
“Right.”
Ariel and Signica surrendered first.
It seemed that no matter how much they thought about it, nothing in particular came to mind.
“How can you all be like this! Do you know how much time we’ve spent together until now?”
At the two of them’s answers, Veronica protested as though hurt.
“Then what did we do together?”
“Ugh…”
At Signica’s question, Veronica’s 고민 only deepened.
And before long, in the end…
“We ate in the student cafeteria! And we went out to eat! During exam season, we gathered at cafés and studied together!! We washed together!! We hunted monsters together too!!”
She ended up saying the exact same thing as everyone else.
“Sigh…”
Elladrien ultimately let out another sigh.
Originally, Bell… I mean, Veronica didn’t seem like this kind of character. I became a little curious what people who had only encountered the hero through newspapers would think if they saw Veronica now.
“Then first… studying is out. Washing together is out too, since Evan is a man. Then should we just eat together?”
After summing up everyone’s opinions, Elladrien quickly gathered and organized them.
Seeing her speed and skill, it really did feel like Elladrien had been acting as the mother of this party until now.
Everyone seemed accustomed to it and agreed with her opinion.
“That sounds wonderful! Having a meal with Brother Evan!”
“It’s neat, and there’s nothing particularly difficult about it. Sounds good.”
Except for one person.
“No!! For something like this, we have to meet separately one by one! That’s how we can get to know each other more deeply! If we all meet together at once, the conversation gets too scattered!!”
It seemed she agreed with eating together.
But Veronica was rejecting the idea of handling it all together at once.
“Haa… fine, all right. Then let’s do that. Happy?”
Fortunately, I thought the discussion would go on a little longer,
but it seemed Elladrien had yielded one step to Veronica’s stubbornness.
“Then let’s do that. Instead, decide now when and with whom you’ll eat.”
And just as the four of them were coordinating times for when they would eat with each other,
one person who had been left out dropped a very crucial question.
“But before that, aren’t we forgetting something?”
““Ah!!!!””
At Signica’s words, all of us seemed to snap back to our senses and immediately rose from our seats.
“Right! The dungeon!! Why didn’t we think of that??”
The dungeon, which had been forgotten because of Veronica’s sudden bombshell declaration incident.
Due to the nature of dungeons, which gradually recover as time passes, it was important to clear it as quickly as possible. But right now, we had spent nearly half a day talking.
“Everyone, get ready!! Signica!!”
Before Elladrien could even say it, Signica was already holding her staff and gathering mana.
“You’re ready, right?”
She swept her gaze over all of us once and nodded.
Then,
“Teleport.”
Signica activated her magic without hesitation.
***
‘Having a mage really does make things convenient.’
I was purely impressed by the fact that a distance that would normally have required several hours of travel by carriage had been shortened to mere seconds with a single 7th Circle mage.
To the point that my old self, who had been diligently walking and running until now, seemed pitiful.
“Haa…”
Perhaps slightly exhausted, Signica leaned on her staff as support for a moment.
It seemed teleporting five people at once had been quite a strain.
“I’m fine. Let’s go.”
Perhaps sensing everyone’s gaze, Signica told us first that she was all right.
We trusted her and finished preparing to enter the dungeon.
“Signica. Could you undo the disguise magic?”
Snap.
At Veronica’s request, Signica lightly snapped her fingers.
Then Bell’s appearance gradually disappeared from Veronica, and she soon returned to the form of the hero well known to the people.
Though she was simply holding a sword and her appearance had changed, the atmosphere around her was quite different.
“Let’s go.”
Veronica took the lead and entered.
Behind her was me, another frontliner, and after that came Ariel, Signica, and Elladrien, in that order.
***
“A lot of trees have grown.”
After the hero’s party first came here, this place had been completely devastated.
When Veronica saved me, it had been a meadow where grass had grown slightly.
But now, while it was not dense, it had nevertheless taken the form of a forest made up of thin trees.
“Kwieeek!”
In the distance, I could see a few baby Abraxases as well.
But there weren’t as many as when I first came here, so,
“Magic Missile.”
Boom, boom, boom!
With one simple spell, they could be killed in no time.
Creeeak.
We opened the door and immediately entered the second floor.
Fortunately, this place was exactly as it had been the last time I saw it.
Corpses of Abraxases split in two were strewn about here and there.
The blood that had pooled on the floor and dried made it even clearer that they were all dead.
‘Seeing it again, it really is amazing.’
Of course, they hadn’t been in perfect condition, but when I thought about how she had cut down in a single technique the Abraxases that had pushed me to the brink of death, I felt that I still had a long way to go.
Well, that was that.
I had to do what I had to do.
This was a dungeon, after all.
I ran ahead first and examined the door leading to the next floor.
“This… looks like a boss room.”
I’d said that the appearance of a dungeon’s entrance could differ depending on the dungeon’s concept.
And the same applied to boss rooms.
The door to a boss room had a slightly different design from an ordinary door used to move between floors.
Then you might ask, since everyone else would know that too, was there really any need for me to say it was a boss room?
That was because there were more kinds of doors than just boss rooms.
In other words, just because the design of a door was different didn’t mean it was always a boss room.
Well, anyway, I’ll explain that later when it comes up.
Now, once we subjugated the boss, our request would be finished.
“Then, let’s end this quickly.”
With a declaration that had the same wording as what I had once said, but felt a little more reliable,
Creeeak.
we opened the door and entered the boss room.