Third floor beneath the Labyrinth City of Orario.
The deep-blue crystalline rock walls gave off a faint phosphorescent glow in the darkness, but overpowering that natural light was an artificial, searing tongue of flame.
A campfire had been kindled inside the Dungeon, a place where fire should never be lit so carelessly.
Under natural rock salt and specially blended seasonings, wave after wave of a scorched, savory aroma drifted through the air.
Beside the campfire lay a female adventurer, collapsed near the passage to the upper floor.
Her clothes were neat, her weapon undamaged.
Only the pouch at her waist where she kept her magic stones had been torn open, and through that gap the tiny magic stones, the fruit of a rookie adventurer’s whole day of effort, kept spilling one by one onto the ground.
The one roasting food over the campfire, however, was a misshapen monster, the sort that in the Dungeon is usually seen as prey even a novice adventurer can easily defeat, a Goblin.
The stunted creature gripped a frying pan and flipped its contents with practiced ease, using a short sword scavenged from who-knew-where as a spatula.
Only when it saw the golden hue slowly taking shape within, spearing a piece on the short sword and popping it into its mouth, did a satisfied smile surface in those crimson eyes.
Not bad at all.
Tastes like chicken.
Crunchy, too.
One of the raw ingredients, a Stitch Rabbit, lay slumped at the cook’s feet, letting out whimpers that no one cared to hear.
These beasts, whose magic stones had not yet been removed, had never known such vivid terror.
In a monster ecology where killing and being killed were nothing out of the ordinary, their dull little minds understood for the first time the true meaning of being hunted for food: The tender little rabbit, hard to fill a belly with but delicious, became an appetizer before the main course.
The larger Kobold had been carved open and turned into rich, marbled pork belly glistening gold.
Even the scales of the Purple Moth had been scraped off with a blade in quantity and ground into powdered seasoning.
And the architect of it all, Artorias, was once again today celebrating his rather unfortunate past life and present one through the savoring of fine cuisine.
[Name: Artorias] [Affiliation: ▇▇▇▇] [Level: LV1] [Current Race: Goblin] [HP: 7/10] “If I’d known I was going to get isekai’d, I’d have gone through the original novel and the mobile game story properly back then.” The well-fed Goblin wiped the crumbs from the corner of its mouth and leaned back against the deep-blue rock wall, letting out a sigh full of feeling.
Artorias, a twenty-year-old fresh out of university, had walked through the campus gates only to find that society didn’t quite match what he’d imagined.
And at twenty-one, cheated on his wages and taking home only 750 a month, Artorias was flattened to death by a heavy truck while trying to pull back a middle-schooler who’d been glued to Delta Force on his phone.
When he opened his eyes again, the whole world had become something entirely different.
He hadn’t even managed to be reborn as a person.
A month had already passed since he came to this rotten world.
Relying on the magic stones that dropped and on scraps of information he could occasionally overhear from the people who arrived down here, he’d finally more or less pieced together that the world he now found himself in was the world of “Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?”, the anime he’d watched while he was alive.
The fact that he could only be a Wriggling Goblin on the upper floors of the Dungeon was something he had, by now, grudgingly come to accept.
Along with it, a life in the Dungeon’s lightless depths, with no way to tell the time, was gradually being adapted to by a man who had already survived workplace PUA.
And that word “Current” in “Current Race” had added, to a future he’d all but given up on, at least a Goblin that could lord it over others in the inner world.
With the magic stones he devoured a little more of each day, his face gradually took on a clear difference from an ordinary Goblin’s, and he could visibly feel in his movements that his abilities in every respect had grown markedly beyond what they once were.
He didn’t know whether this process might eventually turn him back into a human, but in the course of growing steadily stronger, he’d figured out a few things.
First, the so-called HP he could see did not decrease when he took damage.
Only after clear, definite death would it drop, together with being reborn once more from beneath the ground.
Second, monsters of different races would slaughter one another, but he seemed to be an exception.
Even Goblins of his own race treated him as a target to attack, and only when adventurers appeared would they prioritize attacking the adventurers instead.
Stack together the triple lure of himself, adventurers, and magic stones, then add the conspicuous cluster of a campfire, and a simple, dependable bait plan took shape just like that.
Thanks to this second discovery, he had set traps like this many times since arriving in this world.
Once all the preparations were finished, Artorias had only to hide in the shadows and wait for the next adventurer to come along and haul the fallen rookie back up to Orario.
He had no intention of taking anyone’s life.
Simply taking half of the target’s magic stones as a death drop was enough to leave him content.
As a monster, it struck down the adventurers who came to explore the Dungeon; As a human, he let the unconscious adventurers keep their lives; And the reward for keeping the two in balance was half of the magic stones the target had labored to gather, along with the portion of weapons and tools he could make use of in this state.
“Shame this one’s an archer, though.
Otherwise I could’ve picked up a few more spare weapons.” So saying, Artorias dug the magic stones out of the worthless Kobold, Poison Powder Moth, and Stitch Rabbit and swallowed them in one gulp, feeling the warm energy spread through his body, and with it the faint sensation of growth.
The monsters that had still been struggling turned to drifting ash in an instant, becoming part of the Dungeon’s natural cycle.
Well satisfied, Artorias nodded and was just about to call it a day when, footsteps sounded from the distant passage.
The Goblin’s sharp ears twitched, and the expression on its face snapped shut, returning to the cold indifference of its monstrous nature.
It seemed another green newcomer had delivered himself to the door, “Huh?
Why’s there an adventurer collapsed over here?” A human voice came from around the passage leading to the upper floors, and another rookie, no different from the woman lying on the ground, drew near Artorias’s hunting range with a face full of confusion.
“Nothing here…
just a single Goblin?
Did she get ambushed while she was eating?” Nowhere in sight was there a monster swarm worth noting, only this seemingly clueless little Goblin before him and the traces of a campfire that had just gone out.
Surely any normal adventurer, seeing such a scene, would draw the very same conclusion.
The rookie adventurer let out a breath of relief, gripped his longsword, and prepared to deal with this lone, feeble monster first before going to check on the unconscious woman.
His gaze drifted a fraction as he made sure the fallen woman was safe.
When he came back to himself, he found that the feeble little Goblin that had been right in front of him had vanished from his sight.
A biting rush of wind came from overhead.
Looking up, the man froze in shock.
A horrifying sight, one he would likely never forget for the rest of his life, was unfolding at close range before his very eyes: The prey that had looked so utterly weak was, at this moment, lunging at him from behind at an astonishing speed that in no way matched the Goblin race.
On that face, so utterly unlike an ordinary Goblin’s when seen up close, was the vicious grin of a schemer whose plot had succeeded, swelling rapidly in his field of view.
Yiya— With a strange screech, the cunning monster leapt into the air and delivered a warm greeting from the Dungeon to the danger-blind rookie adventurer, “Wha—” Before the word was out, a precise blunt strike landed on his temple, and the heavy blow robbed him completely of consciousness.
Still not understanding what had happened, the adventurer swayed and toppled to the ground.
“Jackpot, jackpot.
Two big fish on the hook in a single day.” A grin spread across Artorias’s mouth, and he was just about to loot this adventurer’s little treasury the same as before, when, “Wow, what an amazing Mister Goblin.
I’ve never even heard of a monster that cooks in the Dungeon.” A voice utterly without malice rang out behind Artorias, freezing the hand he’d reached out to collect his underground protection fee.
“But, why a frying pan?” He turned to look, and behind Artorias stood a high-level adventurer who clearly had no business being active on this floor.
The girl wore her light-blue hair short and lively, her figure well-trained and blessed by the heavens, trim and athletic, its lovely lines evident even through her adventurer’s gear.
At some point she had come to stand behind Artorias, her hand already resting on the fine longsword at her waist, plainly no rookie’s equipment, and yet, incredibly, she made no further move.
It was only that the pretty face of this lively, sporty beauty wore none of its usual carefree smile, leaving behind only the surprise and curiosity of encountering something unknown.
____ PS: Chapter 23: Unlocking the Humanoid Form ____