Chapter Eight
Learning Fear
Even though Rosie was the tank, she hid behind me as soon as we made it to the dungeon.
Forgotten Cemetery.
It was, as one might assume by the name, a cemetery. It looked like a pretty typical graveyard-type dungeon that one would frequently see in games. We stood before a large, metal gate that served as the entrance, and the entire cemetery was surrounded by dead, twisted trees.
The whole place was dark, too. An unnatural darkness surrounded this dungeon to make it look like it was night even during day.
The moon hung in the sky rather than the sun, there were dark clouds covering up that beautiful blue visible from the city, and there was a sort of purple haze that filled the air.
Still, I couldn’t help what I was about to do.
“Did… did you just sniff the air?” Rosie asked me.
“What? This is one of my favorite early-game dungeons,” I answered. “Isn’t it natural to want to smell it?”
“We’re at a graveyard full of rotting corpses and undead!”
“And I’m going to appreciate every last thing there is about a dungeon!”
“There’s nothing to appreciate! It stinks!”
“You just don’t understand, Rosie.” I turned to face her and placed my hand on her shoulder while looking her in her eyes. “But don’t worry. I’ll teach you how to appreciate everything that dungeons have to offer.”
“I don’t want to learn to appreciate this!”
“Walk the path of dungeons with me, Rosie. Together, we’ll sniff every dungeon there is.”
“I don’t want to walk down such a weird path!”
I was going to say something, but I heard the sound of combat coming from up ahead.
It wasn’t anyone who needed help this time. Instead, it was a party of five women working together to beat up some poor skeletons.
“That’s going to take getting used to,” I said.
“What is?” Rosie asked.
“Seeing other people in dungeons. I mean, it makes sense. It’s not like the dungeon opens a separate instance for everyone, right?
If it did, I wouldn’t have been able to meet you.
It’s just… you know, in the game, it was only ever the player’s party in a dungeon at any given time even if it was canon that multiple parties explored them. ”
“Oh. Yeah, here, lots of people adventurers make their living in the dungeons, and there are lots of shops and restaurants that depend on buying drops from dungeons to stay running, so. It’s the worst on the weekends.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because that’s when most people are going out to get shopping done or to go out and eat. All the merchants put out bigger orders for materials on the weekends, so the dungeons get packed full of parties fighting over spawns.”
“Makes sense. Dungeoneering is a whole business in this world. Though, I would think that it would encourage more of them to get stronger and to tackle higher-level dungeons for less competition and more exotic loot.”
“Risk versus reward, I guess.” Rosie shrugged. “It’s easier, safer, and you make more money faster farming lower-level dungeons.”
“Not even the ones in their twenties and thirties?”
“The more people farm those, the less merchants are willing to pay. Supply and demand, I guess.”
“Huh. Yeah, that also makes sense. Back in the game… it was the kind of game where you could sell a single merchant thousands of one item they have no use for and they would have infinite money to buy it with.”
“Life here isn’t that convenient.”
“That’s alright. It makes things more exciting. Plus it means we’ll really strike it rich once we get into the dungeons nobody else has cleared yet.”
“I’m still terrified of that… but I’m excited, too.”
“Then let’s get stronger together. Look, a nice skeleton just respawned for us.”
And by that, I meant a skeleton just climbed out of the ground ahead of us.
Rosie was already trembling with fear.
“Rosie,” I said. “You’re afraid of horror, not fighting, right?”
“Ri-right,” Rosie said. “I know I’m not in danger… especially with you, but… I—I hate horror.”
I gave Rosie a pat on her back and stepped forward. “You came here without hesitation, so I’m already proud of you. Now, I’ll show you just how weak their bones are. Take it from the expert on weak bones.”
I also wanted to test out my improved sickle even if it wasn’t that effective against skeletons. After all, skeletons had no flesh to cut. They were another enemy where blunt damage was most effective.
But that didn’t stop me from charging forward.
The skeleton, which was just a simple skeleton without any kind of armor or weapon, turned to shamble toward me once it noticed me.
I drew my sickle and went straight for its neck. Even if there wasn’t flesh to cut, I could still go for a decapitation, and I activated Strong Slash for increased damage.
The skeleton, officially referred to as a Living Bones, was only level four and the weakest trash mob of the dungeon. My enhanced sickle combined with Strong Slash was enough to take it out in one attack, sending its head flying off before landing on the ground and disappearing into dust.
And to my surprise, a piece of loot was left behind.
These skeletons were going to spawn in such huge numbers that they weren’t worth giving drops to since any drops from them would become annoying, useless garbage flooding a player’s inventory. So, why did a single skeleton just drop something?
I went to check out what it was.
//Bone
//Type: Commodity
//A bone that can be ground up and used to create fertilizer for fields.
… huh.
“Two things,” I said. “One, see? That was easy. Two… what’s a ‘Commodity’ type item?”
“You don’t know?” Rosie asked, her eyes still looking around to make sure no more skeletons were in the immediate area.
“They weren’t in the game. Neither was a simple ‘Bone’ item.”
“Huh. Well… those items are worthless to us adventurers. They can’t be used for crafting anything we’d care about. But, they’re important to civilians.”
“So, they’re helpful for keeping the world running, but their only use to us is selling them to merchants.”
“Basically! Or like, you know that food we ordered for breakfast?”
“On our date? Yeah.”
Rosie cleared her throat before going on. “A-anyways. Umm… it’s actually kind of hard to explain. Okay, I know an easy example, I think. Let’s say you find a commodity item in a dungeon that’s a cabbage.”
“Alright.”
“You go and sell that to a merchant.”
“Mhm.”
“The commodity item then stops being an item registered by the system and becomes… well, a non-system item. It becomes the same kind of cabbage a farmer would pull from their field. If we tried to pick it up again, nothing would happen. It’d just be a cabbage.
We wouldn’t be able to put it back in our inventory, either.
Oh, and it’s not just limited to items of the commodity type.
You can convert any item into a non-system item, it’s just that commodity items are only good for that.
System items can also only be made with other system items.”
“I think I get it. Unless something has a special use within the system, its only value is being sold to a merchant who’ll make something the old-fashioned way out of it.
Then if, say, I go to a crafter to get a weapon made, they would have to make the handle out of wood gathered from a dungeon instead of wood gathered from a random tree outside the city.
And even if the wood was gathered in the dungeon, if it was already converted into a non-system item, it wouldn’t work. ”
“Right!”
“And I’m going to guess that even if you make something out of the exact same materials, making it with non-system materials will never make an item as strong as something made with system materials.”
“You’ve got it!”
“In that case… I can’t say I don’t understand why a full party would be farming here.
If every single skeleton killed helps out farmers with producing enough food for an entire city of people, I’m guessing some parties would be willing to spend years farming the same dungeon every day for a living. ”
“Basically, yeah. There really, really aren’t that many adventurers who adventure for the sole sake of…
well, adventure. It’s just another job to most people.
The people who want to adventure for adventure’s sake mostly just stick to video games.
We’re the weird ones for wanting to adventure in real life. ”
I couldn’t help but to chuckle from hearing that.
“Reminds me of people who love truck driving simulators but who had no interest in actually driving trucks. Then the people who did drive them just did it for the money. I never would have imagined that adventuring in this world would be the equivalent of truck driving, but… yeah, it makes sense. Though, there were also the guys who would have crazy truck-sim-driving setups inside their actual trucks, so they could drive trucks when taking a break from driving trucks.”
“I—I still play RPGs sometimes…”
“We’ll have to play them together sometime. I’m looking forward to seeing what games this world has released. But for now, we’ve got some monsters to grind. The next skeleton is all yours.”
“Ugh… but, fine. I—I have to prove that I’m the woman of the relationship anyways. No guy wants a girl who he always has to protect…”
“This world’s standards.” I shook my head. “Don’t worry. Being the protector sounds great to me. That being said, I won’t say no to watching a beautiful girl protect me.” I shot her a wink.
Rosie’s ears flapped and her tail swished. “You—I’m… going to start believing I’m not an ugly cow if you keep saying things like that… and I’m going to get super clingy if I get that confident, so you better be care—”
“Oh no, a beautiful girl is going to cling to me and rub her amazing chest all over me that I constantly wish I could be touching at any given moment. Whatever shall I do.”
“I—I said be careful! You don’t know what you’re signing up for! I bet if some girl was always touching your dick and wanting to grope and play with it all the time, you would hate that!”