Crocodile Hunting
“Captain, the crocodile fiends have gone up to the banks. They were shivering like they were cold. They were falling asleep, too.”
When Red, who was scouting out the marsh, returns, he gives his report on the situation.
Captain Kerioyl, reclining atop a large boulder, says “Good work” and waves a hand. “Sounds good to me, but even if they can’t move, the others will react if we attack. Vice Captain, can you block their sight with mist magic?”
“It isn’t impossible, but covering the entire marsh in mist has its limits.”
Mist magic? Cool. There’s a certain elegance to mist hovering over a marsh. I would very much like to see that, but I guess the area she’d need to cover is too big. If we want to create mist on the marsh, then I wonder if this will help.
“So what do we do?” muses Captain Kerioyl. “Split them up and… What are you doing, Boxxo?”
Upon seeing me change forms, the captain’s hat slides down. This time, I change into a vending machine with a silvery, cylindrical body and a clear door attached at right about the middle.
I open the door and let a white chunk of matter fall from a silver tube inside me. It sits there, white steam billowing from it.
“Wait, what’s this?” says the captain, seeming interested and jumping off the boulder to get a closer peek at the white lump. “It’s too cloudy to be ice. Is it like a hardened chunk of snow?”
He moves to touch it with a finger, at which point I drop another one and say, “Too bad.”
“Captain, I think maybe Boxxo is saying you shouldn’t touch it,” suggests Lammis.
“It might be dangerous to touch bare-handed,” adds Hulemy.
“Welcome.” They’re both right. But actions speak louder than words—I drop more of the white matter, and it overflows from my compartment and falls into the stream. As soon as it touches the water, it begins to emit clouds of vapor.
“Whoa, what’s that?!” cries the captain. “It spouted mist!” He jumps behind me, staring at the white matter floating down the stream, creating white smoke—dry ice. That was a funny reaction, Captain.
I think everyone’s tested at least once how dry ice creates white smoke when you put it in water. I wasn’t sure if this could be a substitute for mist. What do they think?
“Mr. Boxxo, this is incredible!” says the vice captain. “If we combine this with my mist magic, we might be able to cover the entire marsh with it.”
“That’s really something, Boxxo. I knew it was a good idea to bring you along.”
“Yes, he’s more useful than you are, Captain.”
“Guh!” The vice captain Filmina’s cold words cause the captain to clutch his chest and stagger backward.
“We should just make Boxxo the captain.”
“That’s a good idea, White,” says Red. “The name Menagerie of Fools is pretty dumb, too. We could change it to something cute like the Boxxo Brigade.”
“H-how could you?” stammers the captain, fighting against the twins’ follow-up attack. “I thought long and hard about this perfect, tasteful name, and that’s what you thought about it this whole time?”
“I mean, fools? A menagerie?” pipes in the archer girl, adding her finishing blow. “Boxxo Brigade sounds cute. I bet it will be popular with girls. If Mr. Boxxo is our captain, we can have as much to eat as we want! I like the idea a lot!”
“Aaarrrggghhh!” The captain curls up and stomps on the ground. How sad.
“All right, all right, let’s leave the fooling around at that,” says the vice captain. “Don’t lose your nerve now, Captain. Your instructions, please.”
“Ugh. Just take them down however you want. Your useless captain will have some sweet tea and watch from a distance so he doesn’t get in your way.”
Ah, he’s kicking stones by the stream, obviously sulking. What are you, five?
Of course, his whining doesn’t work, and the other members drag him away.
“Um, I’m going to go, too,” says Lammis. “You have to stay here and keep putting that into the stream, right? Will you stay behind here with Hulemy?”
“Welcome.”
“Sure. Take care out there. If it gets dangerous, come back right away.”
“Yup. I’ll be back soon!”
I can’t move from here, thanks to my job dropping the dry ice, but not being able to go with her makes me uneasy. They’re only going to hunt a group of weakened enemies, so I don’t think there’s much chance anything will happen to them, but it makes me worry when she’s not at my back.
“Hey, don’t worry. The Menagerie of Fools is a very skilled team of hunters. They know when to pull out. If things get dangerous, they’ll come back, I’m telling you.” Hulemy hits me a few times, apparently trying to be considerate.
I’ll trust that they’ll be all right. I have to focus on my work. As I drop the dry ice into the stream, all I can do is watch silently as they begin to disappear into the mist filling the area.
“You seem bored, Boxxo.”
“Welcome.”
When things are like this, there’s nothing for the noncombatants to do. I’m still setting dry ice afloat in the stream, but I start to feel sorry when I consider the fact that I have no way to fight after being reborn in another world.
“Then, let’s talk about stuff to pass the time.”
“Welcome.”
“For this scouting mission, you remember how I said the director himself came to request my aid, right? He said he wanted me to investigate the state of the Clearflow Lake stratum, since odd things have been happening lately. And that if the crocodile fiends on this mission looked strange, too, we’d have to take extra precautions.”
A frog king and an enormous snake. Even a native of a different world can tell something is off here. If something is up with the crocodile fiends as well, I would naturally assume something is wrong.
“You may not know this, Boxxo, but on each stratum, there’s something called a stratum lord. You open up the next stratum by defeating the stratum lord. Once you beat one, they almost never come back. But in rare cases, they will revive. We still don’t know the conditions, but sometimes it takes years or even decades.”
A stratum lord? That must be the boss character at the end of every stratum, like in dungeon crawler games. Normally, they’ll be blocking the stairway that leads down to the next floor, or waiting for you in front of a door.
“So apparently, the director thinks the disturbances may indicate the stratum lord’s revival. I’ve told the Menagerie of Fools as much, too. If they sense things are bad, I’m sure they’ll retreat without a second thought. Oh, and if you beat a stratum lord, the rumor is that you get an amazing treasure. I’m sure it’s made-up, though.”
Our scouting mission was that important? I wonder what kind of monster the stratum lord here is. Maybe a mixture of frog, crocodile, and snake—like a chimera?
Obviously, it’s going to have to be huge. It might be fifteen feet tall. If I could watch from a safe distance, I’d want to see it in action.
If the stratum lord really has revived, it might be a good idea to consider moving to a different stratum, or to the surface. Well, I’ll have to leave that decision to Lammis and Hulemy.
The stratum lord’s presence worries me, but right now I’m more anxious about Lammis’s safety—or rather, whether or not she’ll mess something up.
“Besides, it’s not like we’d attract the stratum lord from the very beginning or anything.”
Hulemy, we call that a flag where I come from. You have to keep ill-omened thoughts like that to yourself, or they’ll end up happening for real.
If I could talk, I’d give her a witty retort, but a moment later those thoughts vanish.
“What’s this rumbling?”
I can feel slight vibrations from the part of me touching the ground. I have a bad feeling about this, but when I look toward the sound’s source—I see a buar cart charging full speed toward us. The cart’s covering is gone, exposing those riding it.
The red- and white-haired twins are in the front seats. Behind them is the captain, wearing a tense expression. Behind him are the archer girl, Shui, and the vice captain, Filmina, facing backward, launching arrows and magic.
Lammis—where’s Lammis?! I can’t seem to find her anywh— There she is!
She’s leaning back against the cart’s railing, eyes closed, not moving. I-is she okay?!
“Hey, hey, hey, you’ve got to be kidding me! Damn, it’s a firefight. Did the stratum lord show up?!”
“The stratum lord?!” I would have said, if I had a voice.
Hulemy stares dumbfounded, past the buar cart, at the small mountain following from behind.
No, I haven’t gone crazy. An object that can only be described as a small mountain is chasing them from behind. The buar cart looks like a miniature figurine—the thing is so large, it’s throwing off my sense of perspective. On the whole, it looks like a giant crocodile. You know, save for its eight legs and four eyes. One of those feet is big enough to cover the buar cart entirely. I knew it would be giant, but this is ridiculous. Can people even kill something like that?!
It’s got eight legs, so the vibrations continue. I feel my vending machine body almost hop into the air.
“Ahhh, shit!” curses Hulemy bitterly. “It’s even causing a stratum split, isn’t it?!”
I follow her gaze and see fissures running along the ground, and then I catch a glimpse of light flowing out of them. Is that the stratum split?
I don’t really get it, but I do understand this is an extreme emergency.
Wh-what do I do? The buar cart is rushing full speed toward us. They might be able to pick up Hulemy, but will they have time to get me on board? …Not a chance.
Then there’s only one thing to do!
“Lammis is only unconscious!” shouts the captain. “Hulemy, give me your hand! Grab onto mine!”
“What about Boxxo? Are we just gonna leave him here?!”
“Welcome,” I answer to her question to the captain.
Hulemy turns a baffled look on me. I activate Force Field to get her away from me.
“Boxxo, what are you doing?!”
“Sorry, Boxxo. We’ll come back for you, I swear it!” apologizes the captain, lowering his head as they run straight by me and he sweeps Hulemy up, his entire upper body leaning out of the cart.
“Let me go, dammit! Boxxo! Boxxoooooo!”
“Please come again.”
They run farther away behind me, and after a farewell, I stare straight ahead.
Lammis being out cold might actually be a good thing. She would have jumped off the cart and tried to stay with me otherwise.
I know exactly what I have to do here. I may not be able to fight as a vending machine, but I can at least be a decoy! Time for a form change!
My body grows straight upward, reaching a height of ten feet. The colors on it change into something much flashier, and my products turn into only soda. This vending machine is a giant one from a certain theme park, a crazy piece of equipment where you have to stand on someone else’s shoulders to even buy anything.
The approaching giant eight-legged crocodile appears to be going after the buar cart, but the sudden appearance of a giant, conspicuous object in front of it seems to draw its attention.
Its four eyes all lock onto me. To grab its attention even more, I raise my volume to maximum.
“Welcome. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome.”
The eight-legged crocodile reacts to my loud, resounding voice. Its bloodthirsty gaze pierces my metal body. Whoa, that’s terrifying! What’ll you do if my products freeze?
As it gets closer, my view begins to fill with the eight-legged crocodile’s skin color. It’s like a dirty green on black, and soon the color is the only thing I can see. The mud peculiar to marshlands erupts out of the ground—it’ll reach me in only a few seconds at this rate.
I gambled on my Force Field being able to withstand the rubble as it collapses, but if any get through, my chronicle will end. I decide to raise my durability from one hundred to two hundred and my toughness from thirty to fifty.
That consumes ten thousand and nine thousand points respectively, but that might as well be a drop in the bucket.
As I watch the astoundingly large feet stomp toward me, a feeling close to resignation begins to set in—and suddenly, I’m hurtling backward with no respect for gravity.
[Points decreased by 1,000.]
Ahhhh! This feeling like my body is being pulled backward—did that thing kick me away? Vending machines really can fly… No, now isn’t the time for jokes!
I fly dozens of yards away, crash into a boulder, and come to a stop. I didn’t take any damage, thanks to my Force Field, but my points decreased by a thousand for some reason. Didn’t Force Field take one point per second? I didn’t get any message like that when I stopped the rubble with it.
Maybe I can only maintain the Force Field by spending a lot of points if I take an attack that has a higher power than it can handle.
The Force Field is denting the boulder. If I had taken that blow defenseless, I’d have been wiped out of existence.
And now I have an even bigger reason not to let it chase after Lammis and the others.
