The Red Fruit Trap.

“Sweets~!”

“Kyuu~!”

Standing right at the edge of the clearing after crossing the log bridge was a tree laden with clusters of vibrant red fruit. The fruits were roughly the size of ping-pong balls, and their red skin boasted a brilliant, glossy sheen that looked remarkably appetizing.

Perhaps because of their experience with the Blue Currants, Yoru and Kuu had apparently processed the hard data that anything round growing on a branch was guaranteed to be sweet.

Their eyes flashing with intense excitement, the two little entities lunged at the tree before anyone could stop them. Vaulting into the lower branches, they snatched the fruit and bit down aggressively, drool spilling from their lips.

After rapidly shifting their jaws to chew, their eyelids clamped tightly shut and they cutely puckered their mouths.

“Sour~!”

“Kyuu~!”

It appeared the fruit’s acid parameters were exceptionally high.

They frantically flapped their arms and legs for a brief moment, but the exact fraction of a second they stabilized, they immediately stuffed another fruit straight back into their cheeks. Once again, Yoru and Kuu’s features twisted into a grimace.

However, looking closer, the corners of their mouths were wide open in a blissful grin.

“So they actually like it…”

Completely bypassing my coordinates as I rushed over out of parental concern, the two beast-girls began meticulously masticating the flesh, unleashing a series of crisp, rhythmic crunching sounds. Their cheeks were puffed out completely round, mimicking a pair of squirrels hoarding winter nuts.

They had succumbed to their gluttony so thoroughly that they were vacuuming the fruits whole into their mouths.

“Hey, hey, ease up on your consumption velocity. You’re going to choke.”

I called out to them, but my words flatly failed to register in their sensory loops. Plunked flat on their rear ends on the dirt, their faces were filled with pure happiness as they single-mindedly continued to devour the fruit.

“This is a wild crabapple tree, Nino-sama. However, for it to bear fruit during this specific seasonal window is…”

Ethan-san had seamlessly re-entered my perimeter, and answering his observation, I looked up into the canopy of the tree laden with red fruit. Now that he mentioned it, the structural layout of each individual fruit was a miniature textbook copy of a standard apple.

If my memory served me right, this was the exact classification of produce referred to as club apples or micro-apples back in my previous world. While the fruits were significantly smaller and boasted a much harsher sour index than ordinary apples, their systems were highly prized for processing into jams and juices, making them an exceptionally popular commodity on the surface exchanges as well.

“Oh, how nostalgic~! I used to run gathering sweeps for these in the forest all the time! Mhm, mhm, sour-delicious~!”

Extending her arm to pluck a red fruit, Mia popped it into her mouth without a single millisecond of hesitation, her lips puckering happily.

To verify the safety parameters, I harvested a single specimen to audit its item description on my inventory interface. The text strictly displayed the entry Crabapple; zero suspicious prefixes like Poisonous or Rotten registered within the data loop.

Satisfied, I took a casual bite myself.

The moment my teeth broke through the skin, meeting a perfectly crisp structural resistance, a massive burst of sweet, vibrant acidity instantly blanketed my tongue. Reflexively, my lips tightened from the sharp flavor profile, but running a deeper sensory check, the acid parameters weren’t entirely overwhelming. As I chewed through the pulp, a gentle, subtle sweetness systematically diffused across my palate.

The tart yet exceptionally refreshing juice intersected with the faintly sweet flesh, perfectly elevating one another’s flavor profiles. Landing a drop like this after a long, exhausting march made it taste comprehensively magnificent.

“Yes, the taxonomic identification as a crabapple is entirely correct. However, evaluating that data leaves us with…”

“Yes… quite a terrifying volume,” Paula finished, her voice trailing off.

The northern sector formed a gentle, ascending slope that rose toward the absolute rear boundary wall, and dotting the landscape across those hills was a massive orchard of these red-fruited trees. Running a quick, sweeping visual audit, there were easily close to fifty trees deployed across the quadrant.

“ …It’s a literal goldmine,“ I muttered.

“Granted, navigating your frame near those coordinates will require an immense volume of mental fortitude,” Ethan-san pointed out.

True to the hunter’s tracking data, flying loops across the spaces separating the heavily laden crabapple trees was a massive swarm of monsters. Because of the sheer distance, I couldn’t run a flawless diagnostic check, but their physical specifications appeared to scale around twenty to thirty centimeters in length. Their wing-vibrating thoraxes and the venomous stingers anchoring their abdomens were heavily painted in a vivid, high-visibility warning pattern of yellow and black.

The hostile demographic commanding the tenth floor’s hill sector was an absolute army of Hornet Swarms. While their toxic stingers presented an exceptionally tedious status hazard to calculate, an isolated specimen didn’t possess a formidable power parameter.

However, running the exact same programming logic as the Great-Eyed Moths, their capacity to deploy the absolute violence of numbers was a threat you could never afford to miscalculate. Simply picturing a scenario where a vanguard is swarmed and systematically punctured by dozens of venomous stingers was enough to trigger a wave of intense psychological dread.

“Well, as long as our chemical Monster Repellent remains active, their tracking arrays shouldn’t register our position, so they won’t aggressively close the distance.”

Vocalizing that reassurance, I extended my hand to touch a branch of the crabapple tree. Up until now, I had been manually plucking the fruits one by one to hand over to Yoru and Kuu, but the repetition was turning into an incredibly tedious administrative grind.

Right as I initiated a sweeping auto-harvest loop to vacuum the inventory all at once, a sharp, frantic warning hijacked the air.

“My Lord, abort the command immediately!”

Paula’s tactical intervention was a single frame too slow.

The entire payload of red crabapples blanketing the tree vanished into thin air in a single split second, seamlessly digitized into my specialized spatial storage interface.

Simultaneously, with the foliage density suddenly dropping to absolute zero, the cleared branches exposed a hidden entity clutched tightly against the bark: a distinct black-and-yellow striped silhouette.

It appeared a stray hornet had been quietly running a rest cycle inside the deep cover of the leaves.

Blindsided by the instantaneous evaporation of its crabapple shield, the hornet aggressively jerked its head from side to side to recalibrate its sensory arrays. For some completely cryptic reason, its threat assessment flagged my profile as the absolute perpetrator; vaulting into the airspace, it curled its abdomen forward and launched its venomous stinger like a missile.

Perhaps the fact that my loadout consisted of a pitch-black robe had triggered a hard-coded aggression response in its AI.

Before my eyelids could even execute a single blink, the white, razor-sharp projectile zipped across the distance.

However, right before the dynamic fraction of a second it could connect with my frame, a black shadow whipped through the air, intercepting the projectile and knocking it off its vector at the absolute last microsecond.

A full second after the threat had been neutralized, a comprehensively brain-dead murmur escaped my lips.

“Eh!…”

The exact fraction of a second I registered that the asset that had saved my life was Paula’s leather whip, the deflected hornet stinger came spinning downward through the air—

And pierced straight into the back of my exposed hand.

“Ow, son of a—!”

“My Lord!”

The next dynamic split second, Yoru and Kuu vaulted several meters into the air in a single, high-velocity leap, unleashing every ounce of their raw physical strength to deliver a crushing barrage of punches and kicks straight into the hornet’s frame. Simultaneously, Ethan-san loosed an arrow that flawlessly severed the structural joint linking its head to its thorax.

I watched the shattered fragments of the hornet scatter across the soil while aggressively managing my internal pain metrics.

“Are you okay, Sensei?! Whoa, whoa, it’s buried completely deep inside your skin!” Mia shrieked, her panic scaling to maximum.

“My Lord, deploy an antidote to your system immediately!”

Bypassing the frantic cries of the girls, Ethan-san stepped into my personal space, his fingers moving with exceptional dexterity to swiftly extract the stinger from my hand. Moving with highly deliberate force, he ripped the leather glove off my arm.

“First, we must apply a localized thermal drop to cool the inflammation. While hornet venom induces immediate localized swelling, its base toxicity parameter shouldn’t be lethal.”

“Does the pain metric breach your comfort threshold? I am comprehensively sorry, My Lord… If my tracking arrays had intercepted the entity a single fraction of a second sooner…” Paula murmured, her head dropping in shame.

“No, your support loops performed beautifully. If your whip hadn’t rewritten its trajectory, that projectile would have guaranteed pierced clean into my chest cavity.”

Soothing Paula’s security anxieties, I slowly flexed my fingers, running a basic structural diagnostic loop on my hand. My joints were responding perfectly to my inputs, and zero data indicated an incoming swelling response.

Granted, the localized entry wound was venting a small bead of blood and still carried quite a sharp, stinging bite.

“Victory~!”

“Kyuu~!”

Cradling the two little entities who were anxiously clinging to my legs to stabilize my morale, my eyes caught the dull, silvery gleam reflecting off my finger, and the underlying calculation behind why the venom had flatly failed to process clicked in my mind.

“Ah, right. The status affliction was entirely neutralized by the Ring of Poison Resistance.”

The moment my words verified the safety parameters, the rigid tension vanished from Paula’s features. However, within a single split second, her expression locked right back into a state of severe alert.

“My Lord, look at the sky!”

Following the vector of her outstretched finger, my scanning arrays caught a cataclysmic visual: a colossal, undulating cloud of black-and-yellow stripes had detached from the hills and was actively accelerating along a straight vector toward our precise coordinates.

Locking eyes with my platoon for a single fraction of a second, I pivoted on my heel and unleashed a high-volume scream.

“R-Run for your absolute lives—!!”