Ramato: Sometimes referred to as “orange wine.” It is made with the same production method as a red wine, only using white grapes. However, since the pinot grigio white grapes it uses have a tiny bit of color to them, the wine takes on a gorgeous shade. (Note that there are various methods to produce it, from skin contact to a process known as “macération finale à chaud,” and each vintner can get creative in deciding how much color to imbue or how much tannin to impart. Pale, elegant colors seem to be more common lately.)

  The word “ramato” is Italian for a copper color, and this term is commonly used in the Friuli region. On a related note, they say that a winemaker from that very region, Gravner, brought orange wine back into the modern market.

  Methods: The traditional structure used for scientific and technical papers is called IMRAD. It stands for the following steps:

  Introduction

  Materials and Methods

  Results and Discussion

  Conclusion

  The second step is generally shortened to “methods.” Third parties follow this step when trying to replicate a paper’s results.

  Using communication devices inside dungeons: People actually ended up gaining this ability in volume 9.

  Catching a cab to Yokohama: A reference to volume 5, January 9, 2019. Yoshimura said, “Just once, I’d like to hail a cab and tell them to go all the way to Yokohama.”

  Commentary

  Ummm...so what exactly am I supposed to explain about this story?! (heartfelt shout)

  The character count on this one was surprisingly up there though. Quite strange. Also, akazaebi is delicious, in my opinion.

  Don-gitsune is long gone, of course, but she sure was cute, wasn’t she?

  Releasing a photo book for the character was a bit over the top, though. (lol)

  Yoshimura and the others have been continuing to experiment in various ways when it comes to constructing facilities inside of dungeons. It started with the Benzetho-Blast system a while back, and since then they’ve attempted to make things out of materials from inside the dungeon, and even tried to eliminate the slime problem via constant surveillance. Unfortunately, for the time being they have to rely on the Arthurs for that, which isn’t exactly a solution the general public can employ.

  However, the next volume (which is volume 10, since this collection was released between volumes 9 and 10) will have more about fantasy metals, which sound pretty promising! Will things go well...or to hell?

  Chapter 7: Birds of a Feather

  Foreword

  Both the English phrase used in the title, “birds of a feather,” and the Japanese equivalent “onaji ana no mujina,” meaning “badgers of the same hole,” are often used with an overall negative connotation. My intent was to incorporate a touch of exasperation and hypocrisy into the title.

  The reason I used English was simply because all the rest of the short stories except for the one in volume 3 had English titles as well. Maybe I’ve just been making a half-hearted effort to do that...or maybe it was a subconscious decision because I had originally written the short stories in a horizontal orientation. Either way, some of those titles, especially for volumes 5 through 7, have nuances to them that would’ve been harder to express in Japanese.

  Anyway, since the previous short story had turned out how it had—a product of me being under a ridiculous amount of pressure at the time—I distinctly remember having a renewed desire to make sure I wrote a proper story this time around. Of course, we all know what can happen to the best-laid plans...

  Birds of a Feather

  “Please?”

  When I showed up at the entrance to Yoyogi Dungeon that day, there was a young girl wandering around among the explorers. Running up to people here and there, she seemed to be asking in a desperate tone for them to do something for her.

  “I wonder if she’s waiting for her father to come back from a dive or something?”

  It was always possible she had been separated from her parents, but if so, the Dungeon Management Section was supposed to handle those types of issues—it was probably best for ordinary dungeon-goers to stay out of it. That was how things had played out back when Naruse had first come up and talked to me, after all.

  Although I was somewhat concerned about the girl, I went ahead and proceeded down to the first floor to get in my daily orb hunt.

  ***

  Two hours later, having successfully procured what I was after, I passed through the gate again and headed back to the entrance area. I saw no sign of the girl from earlier in the morning.

  Breathing a small sigh of relief, I had just started making my way toward the main entrance when I saw her there just to the left of it, seated by the connecting stone wall. She seemed rather exhausted.

  If the JDA hadn’t taken any action, that meant she wasn’t a missing child, and her issue was probably unrelated to the dungeon after all. Something about the whole situation didn’t sit right with me, but randomly going over to a young girl and chatting her up could instantly lead people to believe I was the problem.

  After wrestling for a while with what to do, I decided to go ahead and approach her anyway. I walked up to her and crouched down a short distance away.

  “What’s the matter? Are you okay?”

  The girl looked up at me in surprise.

  “Mister, do you go inside the dungeon?” she managed to squeak out imploringly.

  “I-I suppose I do. No need for the ‘mister,’ though; my name’s Keigo.”

  “Keggy?”

  Keggy? What am I, some kind of beer mascot?

  “Keggy, can you help me?”

  “With what?”

  “It’s Mama. She’s... She’s...” The girl’s eyes gradually filled up with moisture until she suddenly burst into tears, as if something awful had befallen her.

  “Wh-What’s wrong?!”

  This is definitely going to give people the wrong impression! Someone could easily decide to call this in. Considering it’s right in front of Yoyogi Dungeon, there are a ton of people hanging around too.

  It felt as though at any moment the people walking by would start murmuring to each other in suspicion and pulling out their cell phones.

  “She’s...gonna die...”

  “What?!”

  Her declaration seemed to silence the noise of the street around us. I was once again in shock.

  After that, I handed her a small towel and did my best to calm her down. As best I could tell from what she managed to tell me, it sounded like her mother had been badly hurt. The girl had apparently heard that dungeon explorers could bring her medicine that could fix anything, so she had pulled together all the money she had saved up and came to Yoyogi to buy some.

  I asked about her family, but it sounded like she didn’t have a father, and she had no idea about any other relatives either.

  Choking back tears, she held a hand out to me. “Here...”

  Clenched tightly inside her tiny fist were seven ten-yen coins.

  “Sorry it’s not much money,” she added quietly, turning her gaze downward, her lips pursed and quivering.

  Apparently various explorers had been ignoring her all morning, and a few had probably said some rather unkind things to her. It was unlikely that anyone out there wanted to deal with a small child trying to buy a potion for a fistful of pocket change, after all.

  “No, this is plenty,” I assured her. It was probably the poor girl’s life savings.

  Even I like to show a bit of a humanitarian side every once in a while. And helping out a little girl’s sick mother, even if it’s for my own selfish sense of satisfaction, probably isn’t going to count as bad karma or anything.

  I wasn’t exactly sure who I was trying to explain myself to, but at any rate, I took out my cell phone and called up Miyoshi. Items dropped in the dungeon belonged to the entire party, so obviously I needed to get her permission first, but I knew there was no way she would refuse at this point.

  ***

  “Kei, she’s way younger than your usual type...”

  “Did that really have to be the first thing out of your mouth?!”

  Miyoshi had come to join me at Yoyogi immediately after I had called her. I was grateful for her promptness, but I definitely could’ve done without her telling me she was only hurrying because the longer I was there alone, the more likely I was to get carted off by the police.

  The girl, whose name was Megumi, peeked her head out from behind my thigh, holding on to it tightly.

  “Are you Keggy’s friend?”

  “That’s right. You can call me Azusa, okay?”

  “Azzy?”

  Miyoshi squealed at the nickname.

  “Wow, what a little cutie! I totally understand how she reeled you in, Kei!”

  “Do you have to make it sound so creepy?”

  “Keggy, are you and Azzy gonna help Mama?”

  “We sure are,” I replied.

  She jumped for joy several times at my response, then started leading us somewhere on foot.

  “Kei, are you sure it was okay to make a promise like that without even knowing what she’s sick with?” Miyoshi whispered to me, making sure that Megumi up ahead of us couldn’t hear.

  “We’ve got plenty of potions for if she’s injured, and if it’s some kind of horrible disease, worst-case scenario, a seventh-rank cure potion should do the trick.”

  “Are you sure we want to go that far?”

  I shrugged.

  “I’m the type of guy who always ends up hoarding his elixirs until the very end of a game anyway. As long as you’re okay with it—”

  “That’s not what I meant. If it’s something so serious that we need to use a really expensive potion, we’re gonna attract attention.”

  “Ah, yeah...”

  We generally did our best to keep a low profile, but both Miyoshi and D-Powers as a whole had been making a lot of waves lately, to put it mildly. If a terminally ill individual suddenly ends up making a full recovery right after the two of us go into their room, it wouldn’t take a genius to figure out what happened. And considering some weird cult started skulking around behind the scenes after the whole Asha incident, we probably should be extra careful, huh?

  “Maybe we could just sneak in, fix her up under the radar, then sneak out?” I suggested.

  “In a strictly controlled environment like a hospital room?”

  “Didn’t you do basically the same thing once at the Police Hospital in Nakano?”

  I distinctly remembered her heading there to intimidate a certain director named Himuro under the pretense of a hospital visit. Considering he had been involved in a police incident, it was hard to imagine they would’ve admitted anyone who wasn’t a family member to see him. I figured she had to have gone into his room via some covert means.

  “That was just a normal hospital room. If she’s in the ICU, there are definitely going to be security cameras. And even if she’s not, a lot of the time there are cameras set up in rooms for people who have serious illnesses too.”

  So even if we managed to sneak in, our “treatment” would still get caught on candid camera, huh...

  “In that case, we could make our own entrance somewhere in the vicinity of her and her bed, positioned to where it’s hidden from view—”

  “We don’t even know what the room layout is like,” Miyoshi pointed out. “There’s no way we could pull off anything that precise on the first try.”

  And if we try to open up random holes in the area to get a better lay of the land, those might get caught on camera too, I suppose.

  I doubted security cameras in hospital rooms had views of the ceiling, but that was nothing more than conjecture on my part.

  “Anyway, we may as well just head there first and see what the situation is,” I said.

  “Roger that!”

  After about fifteen minutes had passed, which hadn’t really taken us all that far at a child’s walking pace, we found ourselves traversing the winding back alleys of Motoyoyogi.

  “Do you remember there being any big hospitals out here?” I asked Miyoshi.

  “Well, there’s Keio University Hospital out past Shinjuku Gyoen, then there’s the Red Cross Medical Center just before you get to Nishiazabu, but I can’t really think of any other hospitals in this outer part of Yamanote that would take in critically ill patients...”

  If we went further south, there was the Toho University Medical Center and the JSDF Central Hospital, but I had a strong sense that most university hospitals were concentrated in the Yamanote area.

  After following Megumi down a number of narrow roads, Miyoshi and I sharing perplexed looks with each other the entire way, we finally arrived at a small, rather old apartment building at the end of an alley.

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “What? She’s not in a hospital, then?”

  Miyoshi blinked.

  “So this is where your mom is, Megumi?”

  The girl tilted her head at the question.

  “Mama isn’t my mom.”

  “Huh?”

  Gotta hand it to kids—they really do say the darnedest things. Wait, there’s always the possibility it’s her dad’s second wife... Something along the lines of “You’re not my real mom! I’m calling you ‘Mama’ instead!” maybe? Nah, that doesn’t make any sense at all—even to me, and I came up with the idea.

  “Right there.”

  Megumi was pointing at a dilapidated prefab storage shed next to the apartment building. It had most likely been used to store cleaning supplies at some point in the past, but it no longer appeared to be in use. The rusty sliding door had some small gaps in it, and didn’t seem to be locked either.

  “Here?!”

  There’s no possible way anyone could be lying down in a place like that.

  As Megumi yanked open the stuck door with a heave-ho, we saw a pair of unnaturally short hind legs wrapped clumsily in handkerchiefs.

  “A cat?!”

  The poor black cat must have been hit by a car. Its hind legs had apparently been completely torn off—it was a miracle it was still alive. There were two tiny black kittens curled up next to its belly, letting out occasional soft mewls.

  “Well I certainly did not expect this,” Miyoshi murmured.

  Tears began to well up in Megumi’s eyes as she looked up at us.

  “You can’t help cats?”

  “Er, it’s not that we can’t...”

  A potion would’ve done the trick if she had just been injured, but she had clearly lost both of her rear legs entirely. The only hope of recovering those would’ve been a Super Recovery orb—but finding a way to get an immobile cat a D-Card would be even more difficult than it had been for Asha.

  If she were well enough to move, maybe we could douse her paws in benzethonium chloride and have her swipe at a slime... Nah, we’d still have to rack our brains to figure out how to get her to break the core. Besides, she can’t even walk properly at this point.

  Miyoshi’s gaze moved from Megumi, who was on the verge of tears, to the mother cat, who was hanging on by a thread, to me, who was struggling to come up with a plan.

  “Kei. Are you planning on using a Super Recovery orb, by any chance?” she asked, her expression dead serious.

  “That’s the only way to fix this, isn’t it?” I replied. “Provided we can figure out how to get her a D-Card, that is.”

  “You realize this is a stray cat?”

  “I sure do.” It had already been proven that animals could use skill orbs and exhibit observable effects from them.

  Miyoshi sighed.

  “Sometimes I have a really tough time deciding whether to praise you or chide you for having the set of values that you do.”

  I understood her dilemma. Queen of the Merchants though she might have been, she wasn’t about to bring up money at this point in the game. Though according to what Simon and Lance had told us, there were still loads of humans out there champing at the bit for a copy of Super Recovery.

  Sorry to say it, Miyoshi, but... Well...

  “Honestly, I’d rather help out a child I got to know out of pure happenstance than some random bigshot I’ve never met before.”

  Grinning widely at my excuse, Miyoshi gave me two solid pokes to the chest.

  “Well, this would definitely be considered ‘doing what you can,’ I’d say.”

  Oh, that’s right. Back when we were wandering around in the darkness on the thirty-first floor, she was the one who told me to “get out there and do what you can.”

  Putting on a strained smile, I took out a first-rank potion, snapped it open, and poured the contents over the weakened black cat. After being enveloped briefly in a faint glow, the cat’s breathing seemed to become more relaxed.

  “Is Mama gonna get better now?” Megumi asked, looking up at me worriedly.

  The potion would keep her going for a while, but I still hadn’t been able to figure out the issue of getting her a D-Card, so I wasn’t sure how to respond.

  “Is she not...?”

  “Uh, well, you see—”

  “Kei,” Miyoshi interrupted, seeing how deep in a bind I was. “Remember when we were talking to Dr. Argyle not too long ago, and he mentioned a ‘special side effect’?”

  “Side effect?” I raised an eyebrow. “What side— Oh!”

  That’s right! Eating dungeon-grown wheat has the side effect of granting a D-Card to whoever consumes it!

  “But we aren’t even sure if it works for animals besides humans, and we don’t know what quantity needs to be consumed either, do we?”

  “We can calculate the amount based on comparative body weights. We know that Silkie ate exactly one pancake.”

  “Um, Keggy?”

  I knelt down next to the poor anxious girl, looked her in the eye, and smiled.

  “It seems like she’s gonna be fine, Megumi.”

  “Really?” A smile broke through her tearful expression like a blossoming flower, and she crouched next to the cat and began to gently pet its head. “I’m so happy for you, Mama!”