Heaven has a road yet you refuse to walk it — Hell has no gate, yet here you come barging in.
Jhin stalked toward the source of the explosion radiating pitch-black resentment like a berserk Unit-01, a savage grin on his face as he rolled up his sleeves.
Pecorine and Kokkoro exchanged glances. Neither of them felt right about stopping him — they both knew that when Jhin had arrived in this world, he'd been caught in an explosion. If his luck had been any worse, he might have crash-landed somewhere genuinely dangerous.
"Master, wait for me!"
"Jhin, don't walk so fast!"
Perched high in a tree, Kyaru watched the trio of them moving across the distance. This whole region was open plains — finding a single tree tall enough to hide in and observe from had been a genuine ordeal.
She was covered head to toe in grass and straw. She'd spent the better part of her surveillance lying flat in the grass under a Concealment spell, and the moment she'd finally found this tree and hauled herself up into it, the three of them had wrapped up whatever they'd been chatting about and immediately started marching toward the spot that had been erupting in explosions lately.
"Seriously! I literally just sat down — why can't you let me rest for five seconds!"
Grumbling all the while, Kyaru dropped nimbly from the branch and fell into step behind them, keeping her distance from her surveillance targets.
The moment they entered the tree line, the gap she could safely close shrank considerably. She reapplied her Concealment spell and crept to within about ten meters of them, slipping behind a dense thicket of shrubs. At last, her fluffy, sharp-tipped cat ears caught their conversation.
"Pecorine, whatever caused an explosion that size — do you think it's a person or a monster?"
"A monster, I'd think. I've never seen a mage in Landosol who could cast anything on that scale."
Kokkoro recalled the commission board back at the Adventurers' Guild — the blood-red commission pinned in the most prominent spot that nobody had dared accept, its contents a subjugation request for an evil dragon. She connected that to the scale of the noise they'd heard, and her grip tightened anxiously on her spear. "Could it be... a dragon!?"
"A dragon?" Jhin's eyes lit up instantly. He had a genuine soft spot for those great four-legged lizards of fantasy worlds.
I wonder — if I draw out Pecorine's Void weapon right now and the two of us team up, could we actually go toe-to-toe with a fantasy-class creature like a dragon?
"There haven't been any rumors of dragons in this region, though. The commission at the guild specified that the red dragon sighting was in the volcanic zone."
"Ah, Pecorine has a point — I was overthinking it. Ahaha." Kokkoro had only just left the Fairy Forest; she hadn't seen much real combat yet. Most of her knowledge came from books, and she was still working out how to apply it in practice.
She knew perfectly well how dragons behaved. Even a green dragon wouldn't appear in a forest — they preferred toxic, fetid swamps. A red dragon, which craved extreme heat, was even less likely to show up here.
"Explosions that loud — if it is a monster, it's got to be at least a Boss or a Lord class, right?" Jhin rubbed his hands together, barely able to contain his excitement.
Monster ranks on the continent of Astraea ran from Common, Elite, Boss, Lord, to Overlord. Anything beyond Overlord was classified as a Demon King's General — direct subordinates of the Demon King himself, each one infamous, each one commanding the highest bounties on every wanted list.
"If it really is a Boss-class monster, we should probably leave sooner rather than later..." Pecorine had no illusions about their chances against something like that.
"If even you're saying that..." Jhin knew full well that curiosity killed the cat. He deferred to her judgment: "If we spot a Boss, we turn around immediately."
The three of them hadn't gone far into the forest in the direction of the explosion before the evidence of destruction made itself known — trees snapped by the shockwave lay toppled and askew across the ground, and the further they walked, the worse the wreckage got.
"Even the aftershock did this much damage. It's definitely a monster, no question."
Seeing Jhin make up his mind so decisively, Pecorine teased him: "And if it turns out not to be a monster, Jhin — what then?"
"Please. A real adventurer commits to their conclusions. If it's not a monster — if it's a female mage — I am one hundred percent recruiting her into the guild." Jhin seemed to draw on some higher power in that moment, thumping his right fist twice against his chest, then pointing straight ahead. "It's definitely a monster. Trust me."
"Why specifically a female mage?"
"Hm?" Jhin glanced back, expression perfectly matter-of-fact. "Are there male mages?"
Pecorine looked at Kokkoro — the only magic-user in their party — then mentally ran through every adventurer she'd encountered on her travels. Come to think of it... she couldn't actually recall seeing a single male mage.
"With destructive power like this, what could it be if not a monster — even my Guren Burst couldn't manage this." Crouched behind an unscathed thicket, Kyaru muttered under her breath: "What is that guy even talking about — of course there are male mages... there are..."
She trailed off mid-sentence, glancing at the white-haired elven "mage" in the group, then back at herself. What little remained of her confidence quietly evaporated.
Male mages... they exist, right? Probably?
Leaving aside Kyaru's tail nearly tying itself in a knot over the philosophical question of whether male mages existed — Jhin and the others had swept the area around the explosion and found not a single trace of any monster.
"Did they go down fighting and take each other out?"
Jhin was muttering quietly to himself when Kokkoro waved at him urgently. "Master! The Wind Spirit is telling me there's a person collapsed on the cliff over there!"
"A person!?"
No way. I only borrowed a move. There's no way it actually backfired on me already.
Jhin complained internally as he followed Kokkoro toward a jagged outcropping of cliff that jutted improbably above the forest floor, conspicuous against the treeline.
"Master, Pecorine — look, right there."
The two of them looked in the direction Kokkoro was pointing. Sure enough, there was someone there: everything above their shoulders hidden beneath an enormous witch's hat, everything below concealed by a black, gold-trimmed cape — and sticking out at the cliff's edge, a pair of orange boots, their wearer lying utterly motionless.
"This one's... a girl, right?"
From the silhouette visible beneath the cape, they did appear to be a petite, feminine figure — but Jhin was keenly aware that the world contained a terrifying category of existence known as the bishōnen, and increasingly these days, the trap. He was not about to assume.
Faced with Pecorine's amused, expectant gaze, Jhin had no choice but to go check himself.
He walked over to the mage of as-yet-undetermined gender, picked up a twig from the ground, and prodded the big witch's hat with it. "Excuse me — are you a boy or a girl?"
"Why," came a low, muffled voice from beneath the hat, its clear and musical tone suggesting at least the sound of a girl, "would anyone respond to a lady who has fallen to the ground by poking at her hat with something resembling a stick?"
But Jhin was not about to so easily admit he'd jinxed it. He stopped poking the hat — and with no intention whatsoever of helping the person up, instead produced a model gun and pressed it against the small of their back. "Name. Boy or girl. Where are you from, where are you going, where do you live, and what do you do?"
The girl couldn't hold back any longer. "Are you out of your mind!?"
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