arc3 · 050-ch50

Episode 50: Hidden Condition

"Owww... That fundoshi-holding piece of shit actually punched me? Unbelievable. Absolutely not forgiving this, pippipi."

Suzuka was rubbing both his upper arms as if to soothe them.

He'd taken palm strikes with enough power to blow away even a high-stats Suzuka in a single hit, over and over. The fact that Suzuka was just in pain from it means Suzuka himself is the monster.

His arms were still moving, so his bones probably weren't broken. You couldn't see under his clothes, but he probably had bruises all over. Now that the adrenaline had worn off, even moving his arms hurt—enough to interfere with his movements.

Having used all his mana to reinforce his body as much as possible to throw the Jūryō Frog had paid off. Body reinforcement is a skill that enhances physical functions with mana. Naturally, if attack goes up, defense goes up too. Thanks to that, even taking Jūryō Frog's barrage of open-handed slaps only resulted in bruises.

"Dammit... This is the worst. I didn't want to use it here, but I guess I'll use a potion."

When you defeat a Pseudoviscous that appears in District 3, there's a rare drop item called a potion. There are three types of potions, and they restore HP, mana, and status abnormalities respectively. I heard you can also get potions with all effects combined on the front lines, but that's a story for another day for the current Suzuka.

You can get potions from treasure chests too, not just Pseudoviscous, but the drop rate is low either way. For explorers without recovery magic, it's a treasured item you keep close.

Suzuka has defeated a fair number of Pseudoviscous, but he's only gotten two potions so far. One HP potion and one mana potion. Using the HP potion here feels wasteful, but in his current state he can't hope to fight the Water Blade Weasel afterward.

He'd decided today would be the last day of District 3 exploration, so he didn't want to go home and have Yasu cast recovery magic on him, then come back to challenge it another day.

"...Important to verify the effect too, huh, yeah."

If you use it in a clutch situation and it doesn't have the effect you expected, it's meaningless. Thinking of it as a chance to safely test a potion's effect, it's not so bad.

He took an HP potion from storage. It was small enough to pick up between fingers—a tetrahedron-shaped item that looked like a jewel at first glance.

The color was red, representing HP potions. Blue for mana, yellow for status abnormality potions.

The tetrahedral shape has meaning too—tetrahedral potions are lower grade. A hexahedron is middle grade, an octahedron is upper grade, and the special grade potion that restores all conditions to normal becomes a sphere.

Suzuka tossed such a lower-grade HP potion into his mouth. He'd studied how to use it on DanChuTube the night he got the potions, so he should be fine.

Worried it might hurt his mouth, he bit down and crushed the potion. A refreshing liquid spilled from the potion, which shattered without resistance, and was absorbed into his body. The shard-like fragments vanished cleanly from his mouth too—it seemed everything had been absorbed.

"Whoa, weird feeling. Oh! My arms don't hurt anymore!! As expected of potions! This is convenient!"

The injury that had been causing dull pain just from moving his arms moments ago was healing visibly before his eyes. The pain in both arms disappeared right after using the potion.

"This is amazing. Better than Yasu."

Yasu can use recovery magic, but his skill level is 1. To heal the bruises on both arms, he would have needed to cast recovery magic several times.

"Whew, good that it healed. When I looked it up, they said lower grade potions don't work on broken bones. Good thing they weren't broken."

Suzuka felt relieved that the injury from an Area Boss's attack was minor enough to be fully healed by a lower-grade potion. With this, he could fight the Water Blade Weasel too.

"...AAAAAAHHH!! I messed up!! I forgot to strip off the mantle!!"

Once his body condition returned, he remembered his mistake from the earlier battle.

Normally he fought with an iron pipe or short sword, so he often avoided Jūryō Frog's attacks and attacked from behind. At those times, he'd grab the mantle and forcibly strip it off.

But this time, he'd taken it on head-on with sumo, so he'd defeated it without thinking about the mantle behind its back. Because he'd defeated it according to sumo rules, he was able to defeat it faster than usual, but not being able to strip the mantle was painful.

This was his 9th time fighting Jūryō Frog, and he already had 8 of "Sekitori's Mantle," which he'd enhanced into "Top Dog's Pride" using Snatch. You could say he had enough to distribute, but this isn't the kind of thing where "necessary or not" matters.

Having 9 of them was proof he'd defeated it 9 times, and it had become an item he thought of as a kind of trophy, so the shock was significant.

"Haa, seriously? This kills the mood. Total boner-killer. Super depressed, pippipi... If it was just 'Gama's Oil' again, I'd cry for real."

"Gama's Oil" is an item Jūryō Frog always drops. This item is apparently cooking oil, and when you take it out, there's oil filling a jug with a frog design on it. It's a highly-rated item praised as the ultimate oil that high-end restaurants crave.

However, Suzuka was disappointed that the item dropped from an Area Boss was oil... If it were high-grade meat, he could taste the difference. Of course, the flavor would change depending on how you cook it, but things that are delicious when cooked normally are just delicious.

But Suzuka's tongue isn't refined enough to distinguish the difference in high-grade oils. Especially oil—you never eat it alone. It's an ingredient that tests your cooking skills, used for frying or in dressings.

It was completely an item he had no use for, and so far his only plan was to maybe try using it for ajillo when he goes camping.

"Um, let's see. The results just now were 'Gama's Oil' and... 'Sekitori's Paulownia Trunk'?"

He tilted his head at an item he was seeing for the first time. Jūryō Frog's drop items are 'Gama's Oil,' 'Sekitori's Mantle,' 'Jūryō Mask,' and 'Sekitori's Ladle.' 'Sekitori's Paulownia Trunk' wasn't mentioned in what he'd researched.

When in doubt, just take out the item and check the details. Thinking that, he decided to take out 'Sekitori's Paulownia Trunk.'

What came out was a paulownia trunk (chest). Large size—about the size of a wardrobe. The paulownia trunk had a sturdy appearance, like bamboo woven together reinforced by a wooden frame. And on the side, 'Suzuka' was written in vermilion in a distinctive bold font.

Name: Sekitori's Paulownia Trunk

Grade: Secret Treasure

Details: A paulownia trunk only obtainable by those who defeat a sekitori. Can be filled with items and carried.

"Huh? The grade is Secret Treasure? Seriously?"

It's said that Secret Treasure grade items only appear from areas where the monsters that appear are level 100 or higher. That's not necessarily the case if you defeat an Area Boss, but at the very least it's not an item you get from an Area Boss of the level of Floor 1 District 3.

"Whoa, what's this. Is it because of Snatch?"

But Suzuka hadn't seized anything, much less the mantle. Besides, Snatch is a skill that enhances items, and Jūryō Frog shouldn't drop anything equivalent to 'Sekitori's Paulownia Trunk' to begin with.

"Could it be... 'defeat a sekitori' means winning at sumo... is that it?"

This time, Suzuka challenged Jūryō Frog without weapons and defeated it following sumo rules. On this dohyō, attacking monsters with weapons isn't a rule violation, and you can fight normally. However, even if you use weapons to make a monster touch its knee to the ground, it doesn't turn to smoke—unless you deal a certain amount of damage as usual, it won't turn to smoke.

Come to think of it, that was a strange phenomenon. I figured that's just how sumo is, but even for Jūryō Frog, getting thrown out of the ring to a degree that wouldn't normally cause damage made it turn to smoke. The rules were clearly different from a normal dungeon.

In other words, a hypothesis emerges: to get 'Sekitori's Paulownia Trunk,' you need to defeat Jūryō Frog 1-on-1 with sumo without using weapons.

"That means... this is a hidden condition!? Ohhhh!! This is amazing! Seriously!? This pumps me up!!"

There might be other explorers who've gotten 'Sekitori's Paulownia Trunk,' but it's not public knowledge. Either secret information, or he's the first to meet the condition.

Suzuka gets excited about having found a hidden condition. It's like discovering an Easter egg in a game himself. Something Suzuka had never done even once in his life.

"Wait, wait, wait. What if, like, there was something if you defeated the Twin Poison Serpent with poison magic!? Seriously!? Things to try are gonna keep coming up infinitely!!"

If monsters he's fought up to now, and monsters he'll fight from now on, all have different drop items when you meet certain conditions, that's huge. He'd have to keep defeating the same monster in all sorts of different ways.

"W-w-well, this was just a coincidence. Just lucky. If I start thinking about this, I won't make any progress."

It takes considerable courage to patiently continue doing something with no answer. If he feels like he's reached the limit of dungeon exploration, he might look into it, but for now he should probably avoid it.

"Th-that's right! In the end, what can you use this for?"

Suzuka's eyes are locked in with brain juices leaking out, but he doesn't know how to use this item yet. Opening the lid of the paulownia trunk, the inside is empty with nothing in it.

"Um, 'can be filled with items and carried'... wait, does that mean storage-capable?"

Suzuka genuinely surprises himself. But the empty paulownia trunk is practically begging for you to put something in it.

Nervously, he takes a chocolate snack from his bag. This is Kazunoko Village (chocolate-coated peanuts). He's about to put it in the paulownia trunk, then stops once.

He promptly opens the outer box, takes out the inner bag, and puts only the outer box into the paulownia trunk. He didn't know what would happen, so he couldn't afford to lose his precious snacks.

In that state, he put it in storage—and it went in normally to storage. When he took the paulownia trunk out again and opened the lid, the Kazunoko Village outer box was still inside in the same condition he'd put it.

"Whoa whoa whoa whoa. This is too much treasure. Whoa... no, whoa..."

At this sudden appearance of a treasure, Suzuka doesn't know what to do and paces around restlessly.

And that's natural—even a pouch-sized storage bag is an item worth several million yen at minimum. With this much size and being an Area Boss drop, it's probably worth over 100 million yen.

Of course, he doesn't intend to sell it. But having such an item personally owned and getting it known to those around him would be problematic too.

Another reason Suzuka has to get stronger has appeared.

"...Nope. Even if I think about what to do, I can't figure it out. For now, I got a convenient item. That's all."

Suzuka's style is to leave things he can't organize inside himself alone for now. Putting the paulownia trunk back in storage, he sprinted toward where the Water Blade Weasel was.