Kotori's dungeon cooking show!
はいはい！
[Hello Hello]
みなさんげんき！
[How's everyone doing!]
Welcome to Kotori's dungeon cooking show!
Today's menu!
Forest Ape with a Forest Tree reduction
What? It doesn't look good?
Well please try it
It doesn't taste good either?
...
It's not supposed to!
Kotori had found that the [Hunter] skill is very poorly named. Although it would allow Kotori to feed on the defeated dungeon monsters it also allowed her to eat the dungeons themselves. Not that it was easy to do it in the first place. If she were to describe it, the feeling was similar to trying to gather water from a steam vent. With enough time if she concentrated enough she could gather a decent amount to eat but it wasn't very efficient. Killing monsters was still more efficient in general. It wasn't so much that the mana contained within a dungeon was a low amount but rather it would swirl and dissipate however it pleased which meant that "grasping" it was quite hard.
It was a similar feeling to casting [Magical Musician]. When casting [Magical Musician] it was like she was taking a torrent of mana and turning it into an organized form. But when casting [Hunter] the mana was outside her body and thus all she could do was try and pull it towards her with [Hunter] the closer she was to the target the easier it was to pull.
Kotori found it quite amusing when she would put her hand on a tree, activate [Hunter], and then a section of the tree would instantly disappear into a small MonMochi.
Their time with Yooma was almost up and Kotori was ready to be done with the Monkey dungeon. If she had to deal with another screech skill she would be the one screeching herself.
Through this new application of the [Hunter] skill, Kotori had found out something from Amelie's slave collar.
She could take it off.
[Hunter] was a skill that would suck up mana from something. When she tested to see if it would activate on Amelie's collars she was surprised to find it did indeed work. While it would've been nice to simply remove it Kotori didn't for the sake of being able to continue being an adventurer.
She also learned partially what the collar did based on the [Hunter] skill. Her guess that it was a mana crystal was in fact correct. Yooma was also likely not lying when he said it was a slave collar, the collar was attached to an unknown mana signature and would respond to only that mana signature. Who it was attached to Kotori didn't know but it could probably induce the victim to action if the owner of the collar infused it with a command and a bit of their mana.
The mana stone itself acted as a battery and held quite a bit of mana inside it.
It really was a clever piece of equipment. Still, Kotori assumed that it had to have been created from a skill. There was no way something like this could appear naturally. And since the collar was still connected she assumed the owner was somewhere in the city. But the connection was so light she couldn't really trace it without accidentally eating the mana stone.
She had already accidentally eaten a small part of it trying to analyze it so she didn't want to accidentally eat the entire thing. A closer inspection would see the mana stone in Amelie's collar was slightly deformed but that was only to someone who was trying to observe the stone. It was small but Yooma didn't notice and Kotori was grateful for that fact. Though, she wondered if it would matter if Yooma noticed. The worst that would happen is Amelie would get another slave collar and it wasn't like Kotori couldn't take a second slave collar off.
With this issue out of the way, Kotori and Amelie began to develop their adventurer life further. They spent a lot of time in dungeons killing monsters. Not that it really mattered that much since they would be giving their profit to the kingdom, but it was at least a good amount of exercise.
Kotori began to earnestly try and collect the MonMochi. Her experience with Nero still painted all her actions.
Once their assignment with Yooma was up they were assigned to another adventurers group. Kotori didn't bother to learn who they were. Frankly, they didn't even bother to show up for their assignment. No one seemed to bother them so they continued to visit the various dungeons around the area.
There was an ice climate dungeon with assorted wooly mammoths and dire wolves type monsters. There was also a Mangrove dungeon with walking mangrove trees and piranha swarms.
The difficulty of the dungeons overall was very similar to each other and frankly, it seemed like a matter of preference as to what adventurers liked to run. Of course, some were harder than others but they were very consistent in their
This was what made Nero's dungeon so bizarre. Not only was Nero a dungeon monster with age his dungeon had a vastly different difficulty curve. The beginning floors were rather easy but Nero himself was extremely difficult. It almost felt like it was bait to get adventurers to challenge Nero.
Kotori once again was beginning to feel that buzzing feeling to kill him. She was distinctly aware of it this time and took a more objective lens. Every time she was faced with a stronger opponent she felt like... beating them. It was very bizarre. She felt it was unusual and almost a little scary. Something was influencing her and she didn't know what.
Still, she was strong enough right?
All this time eating MonMochi must've raised her stats enough. And she could use [Hunter] to restore mana to counter Nero's [Overlord]'s mana drain.
Umi and Shu seemed to egg her on of their own volition even though Amelie didn't really mind as long as she was willing to run if things got hairy.
Kotori was suspicious of the feeling but didn't really see a reason why they couldn't at least try to at least kill Nero.
...
As Kotori started bedding down for the night in their now familiar inn. She did her weekly check of stats and was shocked to find something new
Sato Kotori
Race: [Human] Age: 9
HP: 29(+4!)
Mana: 27(+2!)
Agility: 20(+3)
Strength: 16 (+5)
Defense: 15 (+5)
Karma: -100,008,304
Skills: [Magic Musician], [Hunter], [Desire of Monte Cristo](Removed)
Traits: [Spirit Seer], [Monte Cristo], [＊*ーか＊](NEW!)
[What the heck is a [＊ーか＊]!]