With the base established—and Sora Aratō's experiment proven successful—his and Asagami Fujino's exploration of this dungeon world finally began to settle into a steady rhythm.
Following Sora's instructions, Fujino led the creatures that had swallowed Worker-Bee Amber into the surrounding forest to scout and search.
The progress of Quest One: The Start of the Hunt continued to climb.
On the system panel in front of Sora, the icon labeled Bestiary kept updating. One by one, photographs of captured creatures were added to the list.
As if meant to match Sora's newly developed spell, Biological Refinement, each creature entry also came with a note describing the kind of amber it could produce:
Giant Bear Amber, Horned Rabbit Amber, Wild Wolf Amber, Piranha Amber, Cicada-Frog Amber, Spider Amber, Slime Amber, Strange Bird Amber…
The number of biological ambers Sora refined steadily increased.
For now, he decided to lump them all under a single name:
Life Amber.
Their effects varied widely—some increased strength, some increased speed, some sharpened vision; some could release wind blades, some enabled underwater breathing, and some even allowed the user to secrete sticky slime.
Because he no longer had a medium as perfectly matched as the hive and worker bees, the ambers formed afterward were nothing like Worker-Bee Amber—with its three interlocking, mutually reinforcing effects.
Most of these new ambers provided only one effect, generally pointing toward a single intrinsic trait of the original creature.
But as long as he produced enough of them… maybe that wouldn't be a problem.
To refine these Life Ambers, Sora spent most of his remaining time in the camp running magical experiments, while Fujino went out to capture targets and explore.
Craft, test, fight, return to base; analyze and evaluate the animals using Life Amber; discuss improvements and adjustments—
then repeat the cycle: craft, test, fight.
Time began to accelerate in the middle of their busyness, their days moving forward in orderly succession.
Sora started combining Life Ambers to build an animal legion.
First, he used Worker-Bee Amber to "process" small animals—then he installed additional ambers onto them to boost their combat capability.
After screening his options, he ultimately chose the horned rabbits as the basic unit for his soldiers: they were widespread in number and easy to catch.
He had originally wanted to use slimes, a staple combat unit in so many fantasy stories—
but unfortunately, because slimes had no limbs, they moved too slowly. Even loaded up with various Life Ambers, their combat performance remained… questionable.
In any case, after a great deal of work—
a rabbit legion with decent strength finally took shape.
He gave them piranha-like teeth for sharpness, giant bear strength, hyena greed, bat vampirism, venomous snake poison, and then, finally, draped them in a slime's self-healing.
A single horned rabbit still didn't look particularly threatening under these circumstances.
But once they gathered into a swarm, their danger level climbed dramatically.
Reality wasn't a novel. Unless the gap between two sides was so vast it became unimaginable—
the advantage brought by numbers was almost absolute.
Given enough ants, even an elephant could be bitten to death.
And with a legion like this…
"It should be time to move," Sora murmured.
The total playable duration of Dungeon World was only seven days.
Pick a powerful target, refine it into the corresponding amber, and take it out of the dungeon world—back into reality.
That had been Sora's plan from the start.
And through nonstop exploration of the surrounding area, he had indeed chosen his target.
The creature he had his eyes on lived in a great canyon three kilometers to the right of their base:
a Sapphire Lizard.
It was actually quite far from their position.
And it wasn't something he stumbled upon by chance—he had found it through deliberate searching.
When Sora entered the dungeon world, he hadn't forgotten what Aozaki Touko told him at the beginning: gemstones were precious.
And the simplest way to locate where gemstones might exist was to pan through the river sand in various streams.
The gravel and sand in a river came from upstream.
Follow the flow upward, and distant mountains—over hundreds and thousands of years—would weather, grind down, and wash into the river as sediment.
No stone was immune to erosion.
In theory, river sand contained fragments of every type of rock found upstream.
Sora's method was simple:
He used Rapid Fabrication to absorb and remove the majority of ordinary pebbles, then spread the remaining sand and grit flat.
Next, he used Strange Bird Amber, which enhanced vision, magnifying his senses. With a bird's eyesight—far beyond human vision—he achieved an effect similar to a microscope.
In this way, Sora quickly sifted through river sand from different streams, searching for traces of unusual ore.
After a period of observation, he found tiny sapphire-like grains in the streambed of one particular area.
So he followed the river upstream—
and ultimately located the canyon.
There, he found his current target:
a lizard with a body length of six meters.
For now, he called it the Sapphire Lizard.
Its entire body was covered in small, protruding, round-granule scales.
Its tail was flattened like a ribbon—resembling a long sword. Along the back of the tail, the scales formed two low ridges, and at the tip grew a sharp cluster of sapphire crystals.
Its primary food source was the canyon's plentiful sapphire ore, much of it exposed directly to open air.
Perhaps because it had consumed gemstones for so long, its skin carried a deep, saturated blue.
It could make its tail emit a blue radiance, turning it completely transparent.
And in that state, when it swung its tail, it possessed power that was almost unstoppable, as if nothing could resist it.
Among everything Sora had seen in the dungeon, the Sapphire Lizard was the closest thing to a true fantasy creature.
Sora had tried attacking it before.
The result was clear:
With only himself and Asagami Fujino, they stood no chance.
During their first attempt at contact, Fujino had been smashed into pulp by a single tail strike.
"It's already the sixth day," Sora muttered, judging the situation. "We've stacked our power as far as it can go. Next, we need to train the rabbits' mentality and combat discipline."
The rabbits tamed by Worker-Bee Amber had been made strong in raw capability—but that alone was not enough.
Worker-Bee Amber, at its core, drove obedience by making animals feel satisfied when they followed orders.
But that kind of satisfaction couldn't make them risk their lives in battle.
If he wanted them to fight for him without hesitation, proper training and coordination were essential.
While performing biological modifications, Sora had handed that training task over to Fujino.
The results she'd produced so far seemed… pretty good.
"I should go check on Fujino's side," Sora decided.
For the moment, there was nothing else demanding his attention.
After finishing his current work, he set off toward the forest to observe Fujino's training.
In his mind, he was going there to evaluate her combat performance and offer guidance.
Perhaps because of how much Fujino depended on him—
Sora had always carried the impression that the purple-haired girl was delicate, someone who needed looking after.
So in his head, Fujino's battle scenes probably looked like this:
The pain-free girl stayed in the rear, commanding the front-line combat units to attack.
Because she lacked normal empathy, her command style would likely be strangely ruthless.
When necessary, she wouldn't hesitate to use Worker-Bee Amber to make the rabbits burn their lives away, forcing their bodies into violent enhancement as they fought the enemy.
However—
what Asagami Fujino actually did in practice… might be even more bizarre than Sora Aratō imagined.
....
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