3-1 Reunion

Below me, a rocky wasteland stretched out.

How do I put it… not “dunes” as in the typical desert, but more like the other meaning of “desert,” the kind that’s barren—then made extra rocky.

When people in the UK—where English originated—say “wilderness,” I feel like they mean a place that’s overgrown with grass and full of rocks.

While looking out over a grand landscape you’d never see in Japan, I flew through the sky with a strange feeling.

Apparently people often dream about flying, but I never had.

Once you got used to actually flying like this, it became completely ordinary.

At first I’d thought, “Flying is amazing!”

But now it was more like, “I’m gonna hop on my bike and run to the convenience store.”

Even riding a bike took me a while to learn at first, though.

While I was thinking about that, I’d already arrived at the northern dungeon city.

Unlike Adros, this place actually had a proper gate.

Only now did it click: Adros was left wide open because they didn’t want a massive slum forming right outside the royal capital—so they made it easy for people to flow in there instead.

A dumping-ground city, basically.

No wonder it always reeked of something shady.

If I hadn’t been attacked by bandits—and if I hadn’t been able to get ID—then I probably would’ve been turned away at the capital’s gate and ended up in Adros anyway.

And without access to the royal capital’s Adventurers’ Guild, I might’ve just dived into the labyrinth aimlessly, scraping by day to day.

Or maybe in this city, I could’ve become an adventurer without as much trouble.

Though for ordinary people, whether they could keep that job was another matter.

Only the people judged “useful” got a free pass into the royal capital. Everyone else had to stand in a long line to enter the capital, then head back to the dungeon, bring back valuable loot, raise their rank—and only then earn unconditional entry without lining up.

And after that, if you didn’t behave like a “good” adventurer under the rules, your qualification got revoked and you went right back to being a drifter.

At the entrance to the northern dungeon city, I showed my adventurer card and slipped inside.

Unlike Adros, there was an entry screening of sorts.

Though in a dungeon city, it was mostly just for show.

As a legitimate adventurer, I didn’t get charged an entry fee—but it seemed ordinary people weren’t charged either.

Because ordinary visitors were the source of new adventurers.

In these labyrinth cities, adventurers were consumables—there always had to be a steady supply of replacements willing to gamble their lives in a resource mine.

Man, this was nice.

Getting into a city this easily.

Back in the first city, Elmia, I’d been miserable because I couldn’t even enter.

The scenery here also resembled Adros.

Maybe dungeon cities all looked like this.

But… did this place feel a bit more run-down, or was it just me?

Even the faces of people passing by looked a little lonely.

I headed straight for the dungeon.

I had no business anywhere else.

Then the soldier checking the entrance muttered, just as sadly:

“A B-rank, are you? High-rank adventurers are more than welcome. A lot of high-rank folks end up going to the neighboring country. This place isn’t like Adros, with the royal capital nearby.”

Ah. That made sense.

The neighboring country had lots of dungeons—and most of them had teleport stones.

This was the same common type as Adros too: an underground dungeon, a cave in a rocky mountain.

But unlike Adros, there were no shops at the entrance.

I could see the remnants of what looked like they used to be there, though.

No wonder it was dying.

I fired off detection-type skills one after another and deployed my radar map.

I also applied body enhancement and other buff spells.

Alright. Let’s go.

The moment I entered, I sprinted full speed.

Using the radar function to track other adventurers and monsters, I threaded cleanly through the gaps.

And in no time, I reached the “boss room.”

Yeah.

In dungeons with teleport stones, there was a boss room, and you couldn’t proceed to the next floor unless you defeated the boss.

Only one party could enter a boss room at a time, so I was glad there wasn’t any waiting.

…Or maybe it was just empty because the place was so run-down.

The first-floor boss here was—familiar as ever—a goblin.

That was… depressing.

And there weren’t even any accompanying goblins. Just the boss alone…

No wonder high-rank adventurers didn’t come here.

You had to keep killing low-rank bosses like this over and over just to progress.

With slope-type dungeons, if you were confident, you could ignore the small fry and just sprint through.

Like I’d just done.

That boss bared its teeth and raised a rusty sword, trying to intimidate me with “boss dignity,” so I quickly fed it to my magic rifle.

When I passed through the opened door, there was the teleport stone.

I analyzed it immediately, and I kind of understood how it worked.

Teleportation space magic had been embedded into it with overwhelming strength, like it had been engraved by some form of magical crafting.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t store the teleport stone.

It was built into the dungeon as part of the system—it didn’t seem like it could be removed.

When I poured mana into it—of course with Observe active—

I came out at the first-floor teleport stone point.

This wasn’t somewhere I’d seen on the way in.

It looked like a place you could only access after using a teleport stone from below once.

It was a narrow little room.

And sure enough, I had gained Teleportation Magic Lv. 1.

Good.

Now I had two methods of teleportation—magic and a magic tool.

Damn.

I knew it.

Not by logic—by instinct.

Just like I expected, even if I used this, I couldn’t return to Earth.

I actually tried it, but getting back to Japan was impossible.

Even if it was pointless, I might as well grind levels.

If I could imbue this teleportation magic, I should be able to create teleportation magic tools—but I didn’t know if they’d match the performance of the one the first king made.

That bracelet didn’t even accept copies, after all.

As I moved forward, I exited the teleport-stone room to the outside.

From the outside, it looked like nothing more than a hollow in the terrain.

When I stepped into that hollow, I slipped smoothly back into the teleport-stone room.

Probably the hollow only connected to floors you’d already passed through.

You likely couldn’t even enter that spot at first.

Otherwise it wouldn’t mean anything.

Even if you could enter, you probably still couldn’t teleport.

The hollow itself seemed to be linked to the teleport-stone room somehow.

Maybe the hollow was already part of a space-magic domain.

When I touched the teleport stone and pictured the second-floor entrance, I teleported there.

Then I tried using teleportation magic, and it properly sent me outside the dungeon.

Dungeon-internal teleportation magic might work even in a dungeon that didn’t have teleport stones.

I should go test that now.

Ah—there’d been a ledger at the entrance.

If you didn’t submit an exit report, they’d eventually mark you as dead.

So I teleported back inside, returned to the entrance from within, had them confirm my exit, and then left properly.

After greeting the manager here, I moved—out of sight—to the dungeon near the royal capital, to Adros, using teleportation magic.

Then I tried teleporting into the Adros dungeon itself, and it worked perfectly.

Since I was used to the teleportation bracelet, I could use it the same way.

Maybe the first king also analyzed the dungeon’s structure and built that bracelet.

For now, I teleported to the tenth floor.

From there, I tested moving within the dungeon to the deepest point I’d reached so far: the fifteenth floor.

As expected, I could only go to floors I’d already visited.

That was probably a spatial-coordinate limitation.

Then I teleported back to the surface again.

Everything worked without issue.

This was convenient.

I’d probably be relying on this a lot.

I’d wanted an “escape from the dungeon” spell for ages.

Now I could dive whenever I wanted, on my own schedule.

Then I remembered I hadn’t eaten lunch yet and moved into Adros’s streets.

As I strolled around, browsing shops, I caught a child’s voice I somehow recognized.

“Please. My mom is going to die.”

“Shut up!”

When I looked closer, it was the kid we’d rescued in the dungeon the other day.

If I talked to her… would that get me reported as a suspicious incident!?

Stop thinking stupid things and talk to her.

She clearly needed help.

“Hey, Eri. What’s wrong?”

“Ah… big brother…”

She answered in a weak voice and dropped her gaze.

She stayed like that for a moment, then—like she’d made up her mind—she spoke.

“Please, lend me money. If I can’t buy medicine and bring it back, my mom will die.”

“What happened!?”

And somehow, one thing led to another, and I ended up going to Eri’s house.

This city was dressed for adventurers, so the areas around the dungeon—the places adventurers frequented—were lively and expensive.

But everywhere else was shabby.

Most homes here felt like they were in a slum.

Maybe lots of people who’d hit rock bottom in the capital—or out in the provinces—drifted here.

In one such block, a particularly run-down… no, “quaint,” rather… house was Eri’s.

Eri lived with her mother, a seven-year-old brother, and a four-year-old sister.

Their names were Paul and Marie.

Because a stranger had come, the two of them clung together warily.

Yeah… debt collectors must show up all the time.

I crouched down, smiled, and offered them sweets.

They hesitated, but accepted—glancing at their big sister’s expression.

“Paul, Marie. This is big brother Alphonse—the one who saved me in the dungeon. He says he’ll check Mom too, with healing magic.”

The moment they heard I’d treat their mother, they perked up.

“Mom’s gonna be okay?”

“Okay—?”

They were adorable.

I wanted kids like this too.

But… at my age, it was a bit late for that.

“Well, I don’t know. I have to examine her first.”

Saying that, I patted their heads.

Their father had been an adventurer, but he’d died.

Eri was ten.

She said she was too scared to enter the dungeon after that incident.

Fair enough.

Apparently their mother, who’d already been sickly, had gotten much worse.

This morning, she’d coughed up a lot of blood.

Stomach? Lungs?

Or another organ?

Spitting blood made me think along those lines, but I wasn’t a doctor, so I didn’t really know.

When I looked at her, her face was deathly pale—she looked like she was about to die.

If she were healthy, she’d probably be considered quite beautiful.

Her hair was likely naturally a pretty blonde, but it had dulled badly.

Appraisal: Severe malnutrition. Severe internal organ disease. Severe blood disease.

I didn’t understand that at all.

If it said “internal organ disease,” maybe it wasn’t cancer…?

Or would cancer show up like that too?

Even if I asked a Japanese doctor online, they wouldn’t understand.

Cancer ran in my family—starting with my father—so I’d seen it plenty.

This felt a little different.

Tuberculosis? Leukemia?

But she wasn’t coughing, so TB didn’t seem right.

Or maybe it was some local disease unique to this world.

If so, I might be out of my depth.

But it hadn’t spread to the kids, so maybe not.

Either way, I should start with what I could do.

Don’t die, ma’am.

First, I gently tested with Heal.

Some color returned to her face.

I tried stacking Heal twice more.

Then Cure and Clear Blood.

No big change.

So I cast each of them two more times.

Her complexion looked noticeably better.

We needed to get nutrition into her, but dumping a nutrition drink on her all at once was probably bad, right?

I pulled out soup for everyone from my inventory.

And soft stick bread with sweet potato mixed in.

The little ones, clearly starving, ate like crazy.

When I gave them pudding, they practically exploded with happiness.

Kids in Japan loved that too.

I gave them seconds.

It reminded me of Eileen.

Appraisal: Moderate malnutrition. Severe internal organ disease. Severe blood disease.

Oh—she improved a little.

How hungry had they been?

So what even was this “blood disease”?

If “cleaning the blood” didn’t cure it, then the disease itself remained…

So it wasn’t poison?

Or maybe multiple conditions had piled up and turned into a severe combined state.

For now, I’d watch and wait.

She didn’t look like she was dying immediately anymore.

If healing magic boosted immunity, maybe the condition would improve after some time.

High Cure. High Clear Blood.

Appraisal: Moderate malnutrition. Moderate internal organ disease. Moderate blood disease.

Better again.

I wasn’t a doctor, so illness was hard.

Injuries and poison were easy—one recovery spell and done.

This might only be temporary and could worsen again, but maybe if I treated her daily with patience…

For now she seemed stable, so I tried giving her a nutrition drink.

I told them: watch her condition, strengthen her nutrition, I planned to treat her every day, there might be days I couldn’t come due to circumstances, and they didn’t need to worry about money.

“Thank you. Truly…”

Her mother thanked me with tears in her eyes.

It reminded me of my own mom, who’d always been sickly.

Near the end, it felt like I was living only for her.

I really couldn’t handle stories like this.

I left them a lot of my stored food.

Bread, vegetables, fruit, soup base from the city, and nutrition drinks too.

And I made sure to say clearly: only one drink per day.

I also gave them some money.

I left bedding and blankets too.

Then I purified the room with a cleansing spell, making it feel fresh.

I told Eri I’d come again at night, and left.

I went back into town and rented a room at an inn, but… well.

It was just a normal inn.

Maybe in this rough city, this still counted as “pretty good.”

There were more expensive inns too, but those weren’t worth it—just blatant rip-offs.

Tourist-trap inns.

Well, it was an adventurer city, so I guess that was how it went.

I bought a bunch of things for Eri’s household.

I tried digging through medical knowledge online, but it was all technical terms and I didn’t understand.

I was a beginner—nothing to do about it.

Worried, I headed to Eri’s house early— and a debt collector was there.

Bad.

That kind of stress made sick people worse.

My father started worrying about money in the hospital and then suddenly… he just went.

I rushed inside.

“Please, go home for today,” her mother—apparently named Risa—begged.

“Don’t bully my mom!”

Oh. Paul.

That’s a boy right there.

I stomped up from behind, grabbed the sneering man by the collar, and dragged him outside.

Ignoring his filthy shouting, I tossed him into a nearby square.

Well, of course he screamed.

This kind of thing… even at my age, it was just my nature. I couldn’t stop.

My dad had been the same.

He’d yell in a gangster’s face without fear.

That troublesome blood of his drove me to act like this.

And more than anything, I’d had it drilled into me since childhood that “a man from Mikawa seized the nation.”

Now that I’d been rejuvenated, that mindset was accelerating.

Young people might say, “Look at that old man acting tough like a kid,” but you only understand this once you’ve lived long enough.

This wasn’t new.

Back when I was a kid, there was even a shounen manga—famous as an oddball even then—about a rejuvenated grandpa rampaging wildly.

These days you couldn’t even find it used, and you couldn’t buy it digitally, but that sharp-eyed, heroic rejuvenated old man still lived in my grandpa-soul.

And that grandpa-soul was currently exploding hot and violent in another world.

Plus, this situation hit my weak spot: “sick mother” stuff.

This guy might as well have come just to pick a fight with me.

So I displayed the blood-soaked, dismembered corpse of a chimera right beside him.

A pathetic scream burst out of him.

“Don’t touch that family. That woman is my patient.”

“What…?”

He forced the word out, trembling.

“Because of you, my patient—who was finally starting to recover—got worse. How are you going to take responsibility for that? By the way, that chimera was the one messing with Prince Emilio yesterday, so I killed it myself. I’m the prince’s lifesaver. I even had an audience with the king. Want to line your head up next to that corpse?”

Since I’d already done that kind of thing to the bandits before, threats like that slid smoothly out of my mouth.

I’d been fantasizing about lines like that since I lived in Japan.

At this point, from the outside, you couldn’t even tell which of us was the gangster.

Honestly, it was a problem.

I wasn’t a civilized person anymore.

“Th-the third prince…?”

The man’s face turned blue.

Prince Emilio was cute, so apparently he had lots of fans among the people.

Say something careless about him and you’d be in trouble.

I showed my adventurer card and pressed the intimidation further.

B-rank and above had a ridiculously flashy design, so it was obvious at a glance.

“I’m a B-rank adventurer—baron-class status. I hear if I enter service and apply, I can even get an honorary peerage. And honestly, killing villains suits me better than healing patients. Want to pick a fight with the Bloodstained Baron who can sever the head of a fifteen-meter A-rank chimera in one blow?”

Hearing that, the man went even paler.

For the finishing touch, I drew my orichalcum blade out of thin air, letting its distinct golden-amber sheen glitter in the sky.

If I did this in the royal capital streets, guards or the royal knights would come flying.

But here, nothing happened.

He seemed to understand what I’d pulled out.

Normal people—B-rank adventurer or not—didn’t carry legendary weapons like this.

That was a priceless masterpiece, the sort only royalty—or at minimum, rare A-rank+ adventurers—would possess.

“Honestly, you’re not enough to satisfy me. The other day I slaughtered about forty bandits, and it didn’t even take long. If you want to pick a fight with me, bring a hundred dragons. Oh—and next month is the A-rank exam, so do it after that. Don’t lay a hand on that family again. Do you know the phrase ‘as long as you’re alive, you can start over’? Seems that innocent little chimera didn’t. That’s why it ended up like this. Now get out of here.”

He ran off in a panic.

I’d put a radar marker on him, just in case.

That function was convenient.

You branded the target with a magical mark, and you could track their location on the map.

First time I’d used it—felt exactly like a tracking beacon.

Then, after I stored the chimera, I remembered:

“…Wait. I forgot to sell this.”

I returned to Eri’s house immediately, and her mom’s complexion was a little worse.

A heavy air filled the room.

“That guy won’t come back for a while. I gave him a little warning.”

I said it with an extra-wide smile, trying to reassure everyone.

Appraisal: Minor malnutrition. Moderate internal organ disease. Moderate blood disease.

Huh. It wasn’t actually worse.

That nutrition drink was impressive.

One bottle took malnutrition from moderate to minor.

Since I was here, I did a little more treatment.

High Heal, High Cure ×2, then High Clear Blood ×2.

Appraisal: Minor malnutrition. Minor internal organ disease. Minor blood disease.

Oh—somehow, she was clearly improving.

Maybe time had let the effects take hold, or maybe the symptoms had eased enough for her own natural healing to start working again.

Overdoing it all at once might burden the body, so I’d leave the rest for tomorrow.

“Alright. Take good care of yourself. Looks like you’re getting a lot better. And you don’t have to worry about those guys anymore. I’ll come again.”

“Thank you, big brother.”

“Thaaank you!”

“Thank you. Bye-bye!”

I waved back at the children seeing me off, then turned on my heel and left quickly.

I checked the marker I’d put on that man.

Then I teleported to the closest available teleport point.

It was nearby, so I sprinted over.

Lately, even without buffs, my physical ability had gotten ridiculous.

I used skills to erase my presence, and also cast Invisible to trigger invisibility.

Then I slipped quietly into their hideout.

He was talking to a higher-up-looking man.

Was this the boss?

“Idiot. So you came back with your tail between your legs? You worthless trash.”

“But that guy’s dangerous… He called himself B-rank, but he can solo an A-rank monster like it’s nothing. He’s not an ordinary adventurer. That’s at least A-rank—some kind of monster. And even though no one’s ever seen him in this city before, he suddenly made a name for himself in Adros. On top of that, he had an orichalcum sword—something you couldn’t buy even if you piled up money. He’s connected to the royal family too. He’s definitely not normal. If we’re unlucky, he’s S-rank, no—he’s a monster. The kind of guy who could solo even a dragon…”

“Shut up. Next time I’ll send a few men with you. Make it happen by next week!”

“Y-yes…”

Persistent bastards.

They still weren’t giving up?

I considered finishing them right here, but an extremely bad feeling wouldn’t go away.

It felt like my Seventh Sense was telling me not to.

I could never ignore that warning.

Especially lately—since coming to this world, that guy I’d been a bit distant from had suddenly grown more active again.

So I decided to move carefully.

I photographed their faces and, for today, withdrew.