"I've come to realize that there are only two treasures in this world.

Those you can take for yourself, and those that you take for others.

If it can't be yours, it can't be a treasure."

Elaine couldn’t believe her eyes.

She’d only heard about it in stories, seen it in fictional games; never in her wildest dreams did she thought she would have the honor to see one in real life.

If ever she managed to get back to her own world, would other people believe her? Comparatively, being able to see a dragon was a much more believable tale. But there was no doubt about it. Its appearance, its texture, even its smell; they were all what Elaine had imagined it to be like.

Her fingers trembled and her eyes watered. She could barely control her breathing in excitement. Saliva pooled in her mouth and every gulp took quite a bit of effort.

“I… it’s…”

It was a genuine—

Real life—

Authentic—

True to life—

“TREASURE CHEST!”

She could almost hear the entire world celebrate with her, fireworks and party poppers and all.

And there wasn’t just one of them; it was an entire treasure room! Three massive chests faced the center of the room symmetrically. Each of them was probably the size of a cow. They were all made of wood and had a coarse appearance. Rusted steel fastened by nails lined the edges of the woodwork. They were housed in what Elaine could only describe as a storage room, with mostly empty wooden and stone shelves lined across the walls. There were also some barrels around, but all of them were broken. None of the chests had any keyholes, so it should easy to loot. And since she was in a dungeon she had no issues with claiming the booty – whatever it was.

Hopefully none of them were mimics, though. Just in case, she would have Claire, her zombie, open them for her.

The undead walked towards the first chest without any sense of wariness. Somehow it seemed to have a more natural gait than before, but it may just be Elaine’s imagination. Fortunately the first chest wasn’t a trap, and Elaine was absolutely elated with what she saw.

Weapons! And it wasn’t just one, there were tens of them!

… But none of them looked special. Elaine had the impression that high level dungeons were supposed to have wondrous loot within. Was she still at the surface levels? Didn’t she fall for quite a distance already? Underground dungeons should only become harder but more bountiful as one went deeper, right?

Cautiously she tasked ‘Claire’ to dig through the pile to see if there was anything special among them. Much to her disappointment, the only thing that stood out was a purple dagger that had quite a bit of wear on its edge.

She was disheartened by her discovery, but quickly perked up as she remembered that there were still two more chests she could open.

But in the end she was just as quickly disappointed yet again.

The second one contained nothing but old armor and clothing, and the last one only had various, rusty tools for different uses.

“Give me my excitement back…”

She was vaguely aware that life wasn’t fair, but still—

“Damn!”

If there was one good thing that came out of that farce, it was the all the additional clothing that was suddenly available to her.

At that point in time the dungeon’s trembling had happened enough times that the accompanying drops in temperature had caused the dungeon to become way colder than she was normally able to take.

It was already as freezing as winter at midnight.

“There aren’t any proper jackets, but I guess this is fine… brr—“

Her breath turned into heavy mist. Fortunately there were a few pairs of old leather gloves within the clothes chest. She chose the one that smelled the most tolerable, and they fit her small hands quite snugly. Did they belong to a girl before?

“At least it’s warmer now.”

In addition to the gloves, she also found a thick black coat to help her cope with the cold. It had a funky smell, but at least it wasn’t intolerable. There was also a worn out scarf that was torn in places. As long as it would keep her warm, it would do. She donned a pair of pants with thick material, tightened with a piece of cord sewn around the waist. For her feet, there was an old pair of heavy boots; the only remaining usable ones among the pile.

“… What should I do about you, though?”

Her zombie, Claire, was still essentially naked. Elaine didn’t know if it was safe to give her any kind of clothing. Wouldn’t they all explode once she expands?

She suddenly wondered about Hulk Hogan’s clothing bills.

“I guess it wouldn’t hurt.”

So she decided to let her wear something. Since armor would be useless due to the way she fought, she picked a few choice pieces for her undead; a pair of loose, pleated red trousers over a yellowed robe.

“… Wait. Isn’t this what they call a ‘hakama’?”

Yes. Yes it was. Numerous useless thoughts ran through her head. In the end she snapped her fingers in disappointment.

“Damn it, if only there was a leotard here…”

Life wasn’t fair after all.

Aside from that, she wondered what to do with everything else. She had no qualms in leaving most of the clothes behind and only bring a few with her; she could also choose between the many tools inside the other chest to take. What about the weapons? They were far too heavy to carry. Rusty as they were, they were still weapons and could probably sell for a stretch of cash.

“Got any suggestions, Claire?”

“Aaaa…?”

“My bad.”

It would be great if she had one of those unlimited backpacks that could bend space and time.

Did those even exist? She couldn’t imagine being able to fit so much mass inside a small container even with magic. Then again that world was magical. So surely…

“Oh.”

“Uaaa…?”

.

Claire had been acting strange ever since… she was named, Elaine reckoned.

At first there had been no change to how she acted, disappointingly. She hoped that being given a name would allow her to gain some form of consciousness, or at the very least make dull responses similar to lethargic people. That didn’t happen. But as they travelled around, the zombie slowly started to pick up speed. Elaine no longer had to stop to let her undead catch up to her as often as she once did.

Was it because of the name? Or did she eat something weird? Maybe she grew stronger the more she ate, like P*dge.

But the most surprising thing was her new… ‘skill’… if it could be called that.

Another chimera lay idle in the middle of the halls. Since the dungeon climate turned harsh, most of the beast-type monsters she’d encountered were all either hibernating or inactive. The same could be said for reptilian ones, and worse, some of them lay dead.

That kind of cold was definitely not natural for that dungeon.

Just like usual, Elaine sent a mental order to Claire, which the latter followed after a brief delay.

But unlike usual, after Claire obtained a line of sight with her prey, she didn’t explode into a wall of teeth and flesh like how she did previously. Instead, she reached out with one of her arms and spread her hand. The gauze on that arm unravelled only partly from her hand, and in an instant, it expanded and shot towards the unwary victim. The way it grew so abruptly from her skinny arms was surreal. The size was noticeably smaller, but it was still large enough to completely engulf the large monster.

Unlike the usual as well, the moment the chimera was swallowed, it was crushed so forcefully within that the noise of its bones breaking was like it came from a cinema surround sound.

The mass of bloodied flesh writhed for a short while, like a pair of cheeks when it was masticating food inside. As it went, it became progressively smaller until became ‘merely’ as wide as Elaine was tall. After all of that commotion, it simply retracted back to Claire’s arm and turned back into a hand.

Elaine sighed in relief. She recalled the time when she was almost eaten back in the forest. A beast that piled fruits on top of its body as bait had come just a few inches away from sinking its teeth into her. At that time, if Ss’zsl hadn’t come, she would have already been dead. But the speed at which that animal closed in on her was incomparably slow compared to Claire. The time between Claire’s hand transforming to completely swallowing the large monster took only half the time and covered a far larger distance than the one that caught Elaine.

But that wasn’t the end of it.

They were deep in a high level dungeon, definitely. The fact that they could defeat the beast and reptilian type monsters due to the dangerously low temperatures the dungeon had at that level might have just been a mere stroke of luck for her. In any other circumstances she may not have been able to get past them so easily. But true to her premonitions, not all the monsters were affected by the cold.

Something warm and sticky splashed all over Elaine’s back. She turned around to find that a large amount of dark green fluid had spilled on the ground with her undead nowhere in sight. Then, something shiny caught her eye floating in midair. There were numerous blades suspended about three meters off the ground, and around each of them a steady stream of the same green fluid flowed continuously around an outline and dripped to the floor.

Light bent around that outline slowly, and like an old television catching a steadily clearer signal, static formed and made way to the figure of a giant black wolf the size of a concrete mixer. No light reflected off its fur and its outline seemed to blur around the shadows ever-present within the insufficiently-lit halls of the dungeon. A shining black horn adorned its forehead. Impressive and intimidating as it appeared, though, its face was twisted in pain and it looked at Elaine as if it was asking for her help. Blades had stabbed it from the inside of its belly, letting the lifeblood escape it. When it collapsed, the ever-familiar sound of tearing flesh and breaking bones once again haunted Elaine’s ears.

The body was soon engulfed in a mass of teeth and flesh. In the end, Claire stood in the middle of the corridor, victorious but unaware.

She must have been swallowed by the invisible wolf monster without Elaine noticing. Claire then had used the weapons stored inside her to pierce through the wolf’s thick stomach. As to why she didn’t just eat her way out, it may have had something to do with the stomach not allowing her to loosen her binds.

Elaine decided to test it out. If her undead could selectively err… expand certain parts of her body and use weapons she stored, then the possibilities were quite numerous.

“Claire, can you shoot a sword over that wall there?”

Her zombie nodded slightly and turned towards the direction Elaine pointed. She expected her zombie to raise her hand like earlier and shoot a blade out of her palm, but before she knew it a metallic pinging sound had already echoed throughout the area.

As she thought, Claire could do it.

… If only she didn’t shoot them out of her face, that would be wonderful.

.

Something was definitely wrong with the dungeon. It shouldn’t be possible for it to get so cold. As the trembling continued, the temperature continued to drop to the point where frost had started to form on the corners of the walls and floor. Some parts of the dungeon were littered with the corpses of monsters and critters that had died from hypothermia, and the ones that had better resistances, like the chimeras she commonly encountered, had already entered some sort of hibernation.

Elaine fared slightly better. During the course of her exploration she had encountered more chest rooms; each of them contained either clothing, armor, weapons or tools, or a combination of them, similar to the first one she ran into. That meant she could stack more and more clothing to insulate herself from the frigid climate, even if it did made her look like a caterpillar. As for the weapons, she had Claire ‘eat’ them all. None of those weapons would matter much in the hands of a complete scrub like her, anyway. Tools didn’t mean much in comparison, and even the one compass she saw didn’t work due to the dungeon’s weird, twisting space and time.

“What’s happening here…?”

If this was a natural phenomenon then there wouldn’t be monsters living there that would die from it. She’d seen Blanc resist direct exposure to flames, and she was definitely immune to the cold she created herself. Or… was that situation even more unique than she thought it was?

It didn’t make much sense for monsters that could summon pillars of wind or conjure walls of fire to be so weak against ‘just a little cold’, right?

At the very least, it didn’t affect Elaine by much, and it also didn’t affect Claire.

Why was she so worked up about it? It’s good tidings for her, right?

Still, a mystery needs to be solved.

They continued walking through frozen corpses. Their situation had become considerably calmer since everything started freezing to death. Even monsters that should normally be wreathed in flames, like a gigantic golem that had a charcoal-like shell, lay still on the ground, with a layer of snow on its body.

Even the traps had stopped working. Once, she had stepped on a pressure plate of some sort and she immediately jumped backwards in fright. But the only thing that happened was a series of creaking sounds from the walls. She sent Claire as a sort of meatshield and, after she deemed it safe, she herself went to see that the wall should have opened to… do something, but was instead stuck due to a thick layer of ice between the joints. Pit traps broke the same way. What she could assume to be magical traps had broken when the frost cracked the floor and walls where the magic circles had been engraved.

Incredible relief washed over her. That was what she had worried about the most. Because of her carelessness she had unwittingly activated more than ten traps, but not a single one of them worked as intended.

The trembling continued. The floor grew colder still. Snow had even started falling from the topmost area of the floor. Dead silence enveloped the halls of the dungeon. She wondered if it would continue until she got out. Impossible, right?

Jinx.

Her undead suddenly stepped in front of her and raised her arm. A blazing wave of heat assaulted Elaine. She screamed in shock, but was otherwise unhurt. As she looked up, she saw Claire with her right arm expanded into a wall of meat with weapons covering her skin. The surface of the blades burned brightly, completely ignoring the snow-covered walls of the dungeon.

The swords on Claire’s flesh writhed. They spun in a blur, tossing the flames away, and in an instant, they shot towards the darkness beyond the abyss.

Loud metallic pings echoed throughout the hall. Claire had missed.

Elaine had never seen Claire act that fast, and without her own commands. Her previous fall came to mind. Claire also saved her that time without being ordered to. She turned to her and saw that her eyes were still glassy, unfocused and dull. Did she do that? It seemed like it was an automatic response instead.

“Huhu… hahaha…!”

Child-like laughter haunted Elaine’s ears. They sounded so ephemeral that she thought she might have just imagined it. But it continued, and the voice shook the snowflakes that drifted down from the ceiling.

“Amazing! What an incredible cors! Oh!”

“Can we play with it, I wonder?”

“Can we take it apart, I wonder?”

“No, no, it’s not ours. Ask permission!”

“Don’t worry. Big sister isn’t selfish.”

“May we borrow her, just for a bit?”

“Just a bit!”

“It’s just a dead body, riiiight?”

“It’s just a named dead body, riiiiight?”

The voices came from the darkness above; they came from the darkness beyond; they came from the darkness beneath her feet.

Elaine vaguely remembered the feeling. It was just like when she talked with Alice. Her voice seemed to echo inside her head, yet it also felt like a voice that came from everywhere at once.

Were they fairies?

Alice had a strange kind of presence. Though she was just an oversized fairy, her movements were graceful and her body was perfect. She overflowed with feminine charm, yet at the same time, she had a masculine feel. But even with such a fragile-looking body, her presence was enormous. She completely dwarfed the dragon that chained her down.

Elaine wanted to avoid fighting one of her kind. It was too risky. Though she already gambled with fighting the other monsters of that dungeon, she only did so with the opportunities provided to her by the abnormal cold that assaulted them. But judging from their carefree voices, they seemed to have no issues from the same thing that had been killing the monsters on that floor whatsoever.

"Hey, I have a few games we can try instead?"

Besides, from her interaction with Alice, she knew they were weak to any form of entertainment. They were easily distracted, with the kind of attention spans even kids would get jealous of. And, of course, there was no way she was going to just hand over the one... undead keeping her alive.

“Aww, but we want that.”

“That’s the only thing we want.”

“Yes, the only thing.”

“Come on, lady! Please!”

“Yes, please~!”

“We really want to play with it.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll give it back.”

“Promise!”

“After we break it!”

“It’s still giving it back, right?”

Press X to doubt.

If Claire was gone, how could she survive? How could she get out? Most importantly, who was going to carry her stuff?

She had already pilfered so many things from dirty old chests that she had to have Claire carry them all.

So what should she do?

It was obvious.

She glared at the empty space. The heavy feeling grew worse. They were outraged that a mere human like her would defy them. But unfortunately for them, Elaine wasn’t completely unprepared. She could barely make out their dark figures in the distance, as if they had lost all the light and glamour on their bodies.

“Oh?”

“Oh? Oho?”

“What’s with that look?”

“You wanna fight? I’ll take you on!”

“Don’t cry and call for mommy when you lose, ‘kay?”

“After we’re done, we’ll just take your toy!”

With one mental command, Claire’s bindings came off through her trousers. Her body rapidly expanded, and tendrils made of tens of arms and legs shot out towards the walls and the floor. She looked exactly like a twisted attempt at imitating a spider. But whatever. Bearing with the smell, Elaine let herself be carried away by the ensuing tide of meat.

Yes, in that form, Claire was quite fast.

“Run! No way we’re fighting fairies.”

There was no need to fight. She recalled that Alice was also accompanied by thousands of smaller fairies. If what the army monsters did see was the same dragon that bound her friend, then Alice was indeed very likely to be there in that dungeon, together with her swarm of fae. No, she was sure she was. But could Elaine find her?

She gripped her locket tight. Decisions would come later. First, they needed to run away.

Fairies were definitely faster, though. No doubt about it. She heard them yell out to give chase much quicker than she anticipated, too. Every time fire was shot towards them, Claire would block the projectile by launching one of her bodies towards it. It really was quite a disgusting display of skill.

They needed to escape. Thanks in part to having met their kind earlier; Elaine managed to recall important details quite quickly. She took one of the vials from the bag; one of the most frequently used by Blanc during their time together, though not as frequent as another. She apologized silently to the arachne and dumped the contents to the floor.

Immediately she heard the fairies curse out. Then, the attacks stopped altogether.

They were safe. For a short while at least. She’d read that there several ways to keep fairies away from them, one of them being iron, and there were also a few flowers they stayed away from. Building a house out of iron nails were almost a guarantee to repel them. She, however, didn’t know what she had that was made of it. She also did not have the luxury to keep throwing things at them hoping one of them would be made of iron – or if any of them were. What she did have, and a lot of, was salt.

It wasn’t to repel them – it was just to distract them. Thankfully, it worked.

Though she didn’t know why fairies had to count the grains of salt poured in front of them.

And she had at least seven small pots of them.

Elaine contemplated for a bit as she sped through the dungeon in her horror sled.

When she met Alice for the first time, there was a kind of magic to it; like a real fantasy world come to life right before her eyes. The fairies with her were playful, inquisitive, and danced in the air like nothing in the world could hold them down. To them, thought was inconsequential, desire was transient, and emotion was fleeting. The only thing that mattered to them was the moment, and every passing one had a different thrill than the other. For such long-lived species, Elaine could only imagine how they thought of time. One second to them may not be any different from a year.

But the ones she had just met were different. They held malice, intent, and attached themselves to an idea enough to rage out as it slipped from their fingers. Though it wasn’t strange for them to try to kill her, it was like… they’d been born just yesterday.

She suddenly felt concerned for Alice.

… But Elaine didn’t have the luxury to look for her. Yet.

As the dungeon quickly became colder again an uneasy sense of tranquillity returned to them. There were still only the corpses of monsters in their way, though. But that was fine. As long as her luck held out, she’ll live.

And she’ll continue to live. Aimlessly. Searching.

It was at that thought that red light littered the halls.

Her locked allowed only a few spots of light through its lid. It lifted itself outwards, struggling to escape the confines of multiple layers of clothing.

Elaine hurriedly opened her locket, and out came the Fairy Heart, glowing as it did many nights ago. It stopped in place immediately after being released, and she had to make Claire stop her sprint and return to it.

The orb spun several times. And then, it moved, towards the wall. It then passed through stone and disappeared, allowing the halls to regain their dull white glow. Curious, Elaine sent one of Claire’s tendrils towards the wall, and sure enough, it disappeared inside it.

She gulped. The Heart was once again guiding her.