Chapter 35: Ryuu: Come at Me Directly If You Dare!
...
Ryuu watched from her position near the entrance as Kihara ate, drank, and conversed easily with a group of creatures that should not have been capable of conversation. The confusion she felt was genuine and ran in several directions at once — how these beings had learned to speak, why they were building structures in a hidden corner of the dungeon, and how a human adventurer had come to be on terms with them that looked, by any reasonable measure, like friendship.
Her understanding of the dungeon's monsters was the same as any adventurer's: endlessly spawning, entirely without reason, hostile to anything that moved. The creatures around that fire were offering her a different model entirely.
Coexistence.
Guros — the half-dragon — had been watching her watch them. As the Xenos community's most conservative voice, he had maintained since the beginning that open contact with humans was premature at best and catastrophic at worst. Kihara was the one exception he'd accepted without argument. The man had given them a home and a direction. That warranted a different category.
But the gap between the Xenos and the surface world was not something that goodwill alone could close, and Guros had not forgotten this. Kihara hadn't dismissed his position — had in fact said something that stayed with him:
Every people that wants to survive needs someone who stays cold when the rest are warm. Someone who pours the water when heads start running hot. That's not pessimism. That's how a species avoids being destroyed by its own hope.
He understood what the words had meant beyond the surface: stay useful, stay vigilant, don't let the peace of this hidden place become a substitute for the work still ahead.
Right now, that vigilance meant addressing the elf.
"Elf. I don't know why Lord Kihara chose to bring you here rather than leave you behind. But I want to be understood clearly."
The amber slit-pupils fixed on Ryuu with the specific quality of something that had survived by correctly identifying threats.
"If anything happens to Lord Kihara on the surface because of what you've seen here — I will find you. And I will take your throat in my teeth."
The threat was delivered without performance. It was a statement of intent.
Ryuu was genuinely surprised. A monster — a speaking, reasoning, fire-building monster — was threatening her on behalf of a human's safety. This wasn't something her experience had given her a framework for.
She wasn't going to say anything regardless. She had no intention of reporting what she'd seen. She held Guros's gaze and gave a single, clear nod.
"Good."
He returned to his position near the entrance, resuming the patient stillness of something that intends to remain there for a very long time, watching his kin laugh around the fire in the distance.
After filling his dimensional storage with the ore the Xenos had mined — a quantity that made the entire trip worthwhile many times over — Kihara went through the usual notes and reminders with Lido and Fei, then shouldered Ryuu and headed back toward the upper floors.
The Xenos sent him off with a gift: a fishing rod assembled from twisted vine and scavenged metal, the construction reflecting more care than the materials would suggest.
[Xenos Custom Rod: Made with the gratitude of a newborn people. Fish caught on the twentieth floor automatically gain +1 quality tier.]
He read the description twice.
This was, objectively, excellent news. He'd been eyeing the twentieth floor's fishing spots since discovering them and had no rod to use. The Rock Fish available there reached 600 gold at iridium quality — the highest-value catch currently accessible to him. With the passive tier boost on every catch, silver quality became the floor rather than the ceiling. The financial strain of Pelican Town's mid-development infrastructure — signal stations, the broadcast tower — effectively ceased to be a concern.
He walked with Ryuu on his shoulder for about twenty minutes, found a suitable spot, set her down, and pulled the cloth from her mouth.
The fabric unfolded in the air. Ryuu's complexion completed a rapid journey from white to red to the specific shade that precedes strong language.
"You deviant — you absolute deviant — you've been carrying a woman's underwear on you and you put it in my mouth — I'll spit on you—"
He sidestepped the projectile with a small hop, and slid Hestia's lace undergarment back into his dimensional storage with the expression of someone who would like to move on.
"In my defence, this was an entirely unexpected coincidence."
"Every humiliation you've put me through — I will return it a hundredfold—"
"Miss Ryuu." His tone shifted, just slightly. "You might want to reassess your current situation."
He let his eyes drift toward the considerable length of leg visible above her boots, and manufactured an expression that suggested the calculation was going favourably.
"You can't really stop me from doing whatever I want right now, can you~"
Ryuu looked at him. Then the tension in her shoulders released, and something moved in the depths of her teal eyes — brief, sharp, closer to amusement than anything else.
"Then do it."
Kihara's manufactured expression collapsed.
That was not the response. Under any normal social framework, that was not the response. She had essentially walked up to the gun and pressed her forehead against the barrel.
"...I knew you were performing."
Ryuu had spent the better part of six months on intelligence collection — a combination of information extracted carefully from Chloe and her own covert observation. She knew his character reasonably well by now.
And stripped of the single incident that had ignited the whole sequence, her actual assessment of him was, if she was being honest, quite high.
One month as a registered adventurer. Level 1 to Level 3 in a single advancement. The seventeenth floor Goliath killed solo. Every major Familia's recruitment offer declined in favour of a newly-formed household with no resources and no reputation. Soma himself acknowledging that Kihara had resisted the divine wine. A list of achievements that would have made most adventurers retire to a comfortable life of drinking and self-congratulation.
Instead: home, dungeon, Hostess of Fertility, repeat. Six months of it, without variation or complaint. Whatever the opposite of self-indulgence was, he had it.
A person who could ignore that much external validation and kept going anyway — their character didn't bottom out somewhere embarrassing. That wasn't how it worked.
She had lost to him twice. The obsession with revenge had run its course and left something more useful in its place. Without a Familia's chief deity to update her status, her Level 4 parameters were the ceiling of what she could bring to a fight with him.
Trying again would produce the same result.
A different approach made more sense. Use what she knew. The darkness embedded in Orario's understructure had been something she'd spent years identifying and documenting, waiting for an opportunity that never quite arrived. Here was someone capable, functional, and apparently not yet committed to any particular agenda.
She let the residual amusement leave her expression and looked at him directly.
"Mr. Kihara. Would you be willing to help me remove something from Orario? There's a specific kind of rot that's been growing in this city for a long time. I've been watching it. I know where it is."
His eyes sharpened immediately. The connection to Ouranos's third task formed in his mind without effort.
He sat down cross-legged on the stone floor.
"Tell me everything. I'm listening."
.....
Thank you for reading.
(T/N: Yoo guys, I've uploaded my new translation.
You can check it out on my profile...)