Chapter 36. The Reason Wings Rot in the Cave (4)

[You obtained 2 rotis and 91 widgets!]

It was a small amount of money.

I took the wallet and asked Rena, "Bathing in a valley in this weather? Isn't it cold?"

"It's not winter, just autumn," she replied.

I tossed the wallet back to Rena.

[You gave 2 rotis and 91 widgets!]

"Take your bath at an inn."

"Want to join me?"

I didn't respond.

Rena cleared her throat and continued, "How about we keep doing this?"

"Doing what?"

"Instead of just waiting around... I'll lure humans here, and then you handle them."

"

Hmm

..."

Rena's suggestion was somewhere in between hunting humans outside versus sitting around waiting for intruders.

"Are you volunteering to be the bait?"

"I find it easy and convenient. It suits me. I can bring them in—

ugh!

"

Rena coughed. She had probably caught a cold from spending days without eating and being in cold water.

Clack, clack.

I clicked my teeth together because I didn't have any better ideas. I decided to let her handle it.

"Then it seems I'll have to stay here a little longer."

Rena, swallowing her cough, nodded.

"No more than a month. Staying too long would be dangerous. In the meantime, we'll lure as many as we can and clean them out."

A month.

Any longer and I probably wouldn't gain any experience anyway.

Rena added, "If adventurers keep disappearing, the lord will take notice."

Her words made me curious.

"Aren't they just the scum of society? Why would a lord worry about adventurers?"

"Adventurers might feel offended if they heard that. Don't they play a part in the division of labor in society? They protect humans from monsters."

"Really?"

"No, not really. They're all troublemakers. They only cause unrest. They're a nuisance, really. But it's funny because the lords still encourage them."

"The local lords encourage adventurers? Aren't they an unlicensed armed group? You'd think they'd be wary of them."

"That's true. But both the imperial family and the lords encourage adventurers. They even offer bounties if their ranks are high enough."

"Why is that?"

Rena scratched her head, searching for the right words.

"Well, it's because they need an enemy." She swallowed and continued, sitting on the ground, "They need to shout that there are monsters outside. The more the threat is exaggerated, the scarier the monsters seem. That way, it's easier to suck blood from those inside."

"

Hm...

"

"So they have to pay attention to the adventurers, don't they?"

Rena tapped my arm, laughing.

"These are people who fight against monsters like you."

"..."

I didn't reply.

"I'll gather more information from around here. I'll also buy some items with the money you gave me!"

Rena grinned and walked out of the cave.

***

I spent another night inside the dungeon.

Thud! Thud!

I threw the four corpses into the empty space at the back of the hall.

Plop.

I leaned against the stone coffin. I didn't feel particularly tired. I had killed four untrained humans. Their strength made them better than a Lv. 1 Skeleton Soldier, I guess. But now, my actual stats were at Lv. 66. Killing them had been instant, like dust to be brushed off with a hand.

The four men buried in the cave were no more than that. Rather, they should have been, but some uncomfortable tension was nagging at my mind.

It was guilt.

I felt the weight of the lives they had lived, and would have lived. It did not disappear but settled like a stain on my bones, and a damp path of water flowed into the depths of my heart. It was easy to be submerged in that emotion and sink into it. However, a question began to surface from a deeper place.

Clack.

I thought this emotion was odd, suspicious even.

Why do I feel guilty? Why am I the only one who feels guilty?

During the twenty years I lived as a Skeleton Soldier, I never felt guilt toward the adventurers who attacked me.

They merely sneered, wondering how a skeleton dared to attack them, and swung their weapons with all their might to subdue me. Even when they fought among themselves over rank and ideology, they always banded together to come at us.

To them, I was experience points and a tool. Now that I could subdue at least some of them, nothing could stop me from thinking the same way. There was no need to feel guilty thinking from a human's perspective about human happiness.

They never cared about the skeleton's perspective or the skeleton's happiness, after all. I wasn't human. I wasn't their kind. I started to understand what Rena had been trying to say.

***

Another night passed. Rena returned, freshly cleaned. She must have thoroughly dried herself because there was no moisture on her hair or clothes.

"How do I look?"

I nodded. "At least you're clean."

"Oh, come on, take a closer look. Is it good enough? I just picked it according to my taste. How does it look? Do you think I'll get a lot of attention?"

I looked at her with an expression that asked what she expected me to say.

"I'm not one of the human males you're trying to seduce."

"But there's such a thing as an objective perspective, right?"

Rena spun around in front of me, walking this way and that. Forced to critique, I looked at her slowly. Beneath the new black evening dress, her slim, white legs stretched out. Her waist, cinched with a leather belt, curved in sharply. Her chest wasn't particularly large, but it was softly rounded. With her balanced proportions and good figure, her body appeared quite toned overall.

"If you walk alone like that, people will probably follow. Yes, I think they will. If not, I'll have to go shopping again."

"That seems likely."

"Great, then it's settled!"

Rena twisted her body slightly and extended her arm. Then s dagger shot out from the sleeve of her voluminous dress.

Swish!

"How's that? Isn't it useful?"

I nodded approvingly. Three days passed like that. Days of seduction and slaughter continued. Rena lured men, three or four at a time, which were just the right number for me to handle, and I kept cutting down the adventurers.

It was an invitation to death. Our collaboration to exterminate the adventurers passing through this area wasn't bad. Rena seemed to enjoy it even more than I did.

"Are you having fun?" I asked.

"Yes!"

"How do you manage to lure them in so easily?"

"Because they haven't been properly tempted yet."

"What?"

"Humans, I mean. Those who don't end up as slaves or corpses... they just haven't been properly tempted yet."

Rena licked her lips and flashed a playful smile.

"Just make sure you sell the stuff properly."

I pushed the adventurers' loot toward her. It was Rena's job to sell off the equipment the adventurers had left behind, but her comings and goings seemed a bit excessive. Sometimes she went back and forth between the dungeon and the city twice a day.

"Why do you keep going back and forth so much?"

"It's not good to take too much at once. It makes you look suspicious, doesn't it?"

But watching her constantly going back and forth made me suspicious. I wondered if she was meeting someone in the city.

What is she doing there?

It seemed like she was hiding something. She spent less and less time in the dungeon, and even when she was with me, her mind seemed elsewhere.

Yet I didn't bother to ask. I hadn't fully trusted her from the beginning anyway. The scenario window that had appeared at the start had warned that she might stab me in the back at any time.

Still, I decided to use her. After all, in the worst-case scenario, I'd just have to die.

Ding!

[Dungeon Message: Intruders have entered!]

[Number: 4]

A message popped up as usual. Rena entered the dungeon with three men who looked excited. They were moderately equipped adventurers, but not with high-quality gear. They seemed like suitable prey.

As I waited for them to approach, I looked at the inscriptions on the cave wall. The words ”Beginner's Playground” and ”Do not break the skulls had been erased. New words were carved there.

Trespassing: Death Penalty

Rena engraved those words.

Slash!

And I faithfully enforced that inscription on the new intruders, making hot blood splurt from their severed necks.

Did anyone ever refuse Rena's invitation?

The stream of adventurers seemed truly endless.

I thought these people walking defenselessly into the dungeon were truly insane. Before they could even encounter the other rattling skeletons, I would sever their heads at the entrance of the dungeon or shoot them dead with a crossbow.

Sometimes, when she brought weaker groups, Rena would also slit the men's throats with a dagger. For every three I killed, Rena would kill one. But more often than not, I ended up killing them all myself. Rena would sometimes complain, asking me to let her handle a few more.

I silently ignored her. I was a bit reluctant to let her gain experience points.

One day, I asked her, "How do you lure the men in so easily?"

Rena replied, "I just recruit them. It's easy. You just have to walk along a mountain path, and they gather quickly. Humans lust for sex all year round, you know. But for someone like me, it's more concentrated at certain times..."

"I'm not that interested."

"Even if you're not, you should listen a little. Don't you think it's important to understand your companion's desires?"

"No, enough."

"I can help, you know. Your body is also hard."

"..."

Being teased by a human was a very unsettling feeling.

We continued making corpses. Rena seemed to truly not consider them her kind, showing no empathy whatsoever, killing without any hesitation. As she cut off the breath of the human males who had fantasized about mating with her, she never even grimaced. Of course, I, too, had no reason to feel troubled about killing humans.

Both my level and Rena's increased little by little. But the effect was completely different. I was a skeleton. Each time I leveled up, my stats increased by one. Meanwhile, Rena's stats increased by three each time she leveled up. Humans generally gained two stats per level up. Someone like Rena was usually what humans called a prodigy.

I'm going to get caught up.

I thought it might be dangerous if I didn't kill her. But there was still a considerable difference, and leveling up wasn't that easy anyway. I thought that if things continued this way, in about a year, there wouldn't be a single male adventurer passing through or living around this area.

Rena remarked, "This is good work for humans too, you know. I heard the natural sex ratio is about 1.1:1. If we don't kill these overexcited human males like this, it would be a problem."

She continued, with a bright face, saying that the desire for ejaculation was similar to the desire for death, and therefore, she was doing the right thing. I did not judge her logic. No matter how absurd the nonsense Rena spewed sounded, it had nothing to do with me.

Whoosh!

The sword that had pierced the adventurer's heart was pulled out. Warm blood sprayed fiercely, coating my white bones.

[Experience increased by 118.]

[Dungeon Affinity increased by 0.14%!]

As long as my experience points kept increasing like this, that was all that mattered.