Side: Amahashi Kakeru
After classes let out, I parted ways with Kitamura—who was juggling the soccer club on top of this—and made my way to the Dungeon Club's clubroom, where Horii-san and Aizawa-san had already arrived ahead of me.
"It's a pretty bare room. What do the other clubs do about it?"
It wasn't that I was asking for luxury, but an empty, echoing clubroom did feel a little unsettling.
"For equipment we either use what the school has lying around, or we buy it. There should at least be a bookcase and a whiteboard in the storeroom."
So even Horii-san hadn't gotten that far yet. We decided to go hunting for the bookcase and the like once Kitamura showed up, and for today we were going to talk a bit about our future activities.
"Filia and the others said they're up for it—it sounds interesting to them, so they don't mind joining."
"Oh, that's wonderful."
"But, like, are we really going into a dungeon?"
Horii-san seemed fairly serious about it, but it looked like Aizawa-san had just gone along with the others. Honestly, she didn't look like someone who wanted to set foot in a place that dangerous.
"For now it's just getting ready to go in. I looked into physical-ability enhancement a little."
What Horii-san showed me was information on physical ability that had been made public overseas. Some of it was even papers released by reputable research institutions. This was news to me, too.
"Your learning ability goes up too?!"
"Apparently so."
What Aizawa-san had latched onto were the materials on mental faculties. It was data on foreign soldiers, but it wasn't just muscle—the figures for the brain were up across the board too, with memory and reasoning trending upward as well.
The media did report on it, of course. As things stood, the public's reaction was somewhere around half-skeptical. For people like Aizawa-san who didn't follow it with much interest, it stayed at the level of information they simply didn't know.
"So the downsides are unknown, huh."
Dungeon leveling-up in the first place—scientific analysis of it had made no progress whatsoever. Not within the publicly disclosed range, at least.
Over the medium term, they'd measured people's condition before and after entering a dungeon and compared the two, and all they'd done was confirm that physical ability improved inside one.
I doubted they had any item to measure levels or Skills.
"If you fret over it too much, you won't be able to live at all. There's no such thing as air or water with zero harmful substances in it, either."
Well, that was probably true. Horii-san had a point. As things stood, when it came to dungeons, even the underlying theory was still unknown, so no one could state anything for certain.
"Some volunteers in America have a site where they've compiled everything about dungeons. There's all kinds of information there. First, on physical ability—the condition for improving it is defeating the monsters that appear inside. The timing of the improvement varies from person to person, and the amount you improve in one go is limited. How many times you can improve is apparently still under investigation."
"It's just like a game."
I couldn't blame Aizawa-san for sounding exasperated. Hearing it described, leveling up really did sound like a role-playing game.
"Incidentally, among the monsters that appear, there are some still unconfirmed because there's no actual footage of them, but apparently there are monsters that seem like non-living entities too. The sort you'd call golems and wraiths, that kind of thing. And it seems there were zombie types as well."
"A wraith… you mean a ghost?!"
Aizawa-san's face stiffened. Was she bad with ghost-type things?
"Right, and apparently those can't be defeated with firearms, so the site says combat is not recommended."
That figured. It was one of the reasons plain firearms were avoided in that other world. You couldn't expect them to be effective against non-living-entity monsters, and you needed to mix gunpowder and all that, so they were poor value for the cost.
Golem types could be smashed apart with sheer power, but wraiths and undead were rough going without a magic user or a cleric. Magic weapons and holy water that worked on undead were things you could get your hands on over there, but here you probably couldn't.
"Even if we do go into a dungeon, weapons are the problem."
In Japan, the only people doing dungeon exploration with firearms were SDF members. Even if dungeons did end up being opened, for a civilian to use a firearm the licensing would probably get as strict as it is for hunting rifles.
There was no question we wouldn't be able to use them.
"What about a bow? It's outside the scope of the Firearms and Swords Control Law."
Oh, is that so. I hadn't known that.
"I think you could manage one against something like that thing we ran into before. At the very least, it might not be a bad idea for the two of you to practice with it."
A bow could be used together with Skills and magic, so over there they were perfectly common. Honestly, there was no harm in learning how to use one.
"Hmm, could I manage a bow too, I wonder? It's not like I'm dying to get strong or anything, but money would be nice, right?"
Aizawa-san still didn't seem to have actually made up her mind to go into a dungeon, but at least she wasn't opposed to thinking it through on the assumption that she might.
"True. Our school's tuition isn't cheap, either. And going forward, once you think about university and all…"
"Right? It's not that I want the kind of fortune everyone's making a fuss about. But if we're going into a dungeon anyway, I'd want to earn at least a little. Though if it actually came to going in, my dad would probably be against it."
It was a hard-nosed way to put it, but what moved people was money, I supposed. Thinking about it that way, did dungeon exploration make more progress in countries with steep gaps between rich and poor?
Japan was much the same now, though. A while back there was apparently an era when they called it "a hundred million, all middle class,"¹but to us that was just a past we had no real sense of.
"Shall we call it here for today and head home?"
After that, we talked about dungeons while discussing our future activities, but for the time being there was nothing to do but talk after school.
We'd also been saying we wanted to learn self-defense at some point, but where and in what form to do it was something we ended up needing to talk over a little more.
There was the option of thinking about entering a dungeon while we kept spending time with Filia and the others, but there wasn't a dungeon nearby we could enter in the first place.
I had a feeling this was shaping up to be a club where all we did was chat after school.
We left the school building with the setting sun streaming in, then headed out of the school together with Horii-san and Aizawa-san.
"Boys really are such children, aren't they."
I agreed with Aizawa-san's exasperated voice from the bottom of my heart. When Horii-san and I were together, we drew everyone's stares.
"Hehe, it's rather fun, actually. I've never had this kind of experience before."
"Oh, come on, you've been popular this whole time, surely."
When I glanced at Aizawa-san, she gave me a look that plainly said, obviously.
"I was popular, yes. But Amahashi-kun is the first to get close enough to me for people to get the wrong idea."
Hey now… she didn't even bother being modest about it.
"It's an honor, truly. But it's a bother to have someone take a liking to me before I've properly gotten to know them."
Aizawa-san burst out laughing at that, and I got pulled along and ended up laughing too.
"It's fine for you to say things like that~"
"Amahashi-kun will be all right."
Was this what they called girl talk? Was I being trusted, or written off as a weirdo? Which was it, I wondered.
I was too scared to ask.
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