Chapter 6: First Steps Into the Dungeon.
...
After Hephaestos left, Hestia found Kihara in the kitchen and drifted to his side while he was cutting vegetables.
"Kihara — how about you start exploring the dungeon from tomorrow?"
"Why?"
"Mm..."
Hestia bit her lip. Hephaestos's lecture had driven the point home with considerable force — sitting at home playing the mascot while the falis ran out wasn't just bad for the Familia's development, it was actively burying the potential of someone who could become a genuine hero. But the last thing she wanted was for Kihara to do something purely because she'd ordered it, against his own inclinations. She couldn't find the right words.
Ultimately, she abandoned dignity entirely. She squeezed herself into his arms, tilted her face up toward his, and blinked at him with large, deliberately pitiful eyes.
Wordlessly.
Weaponised cuteness was shameless. It was also extremely effective.
Kihara exhaled quietly, set down the knife, and rested his hand gently on top of her head.
"Alright. Regular adventuring activities — that's what you want, right?"
"Yes! Yes yes yes!"
She nodded with the enthusiasm of someone agreeing to something wonderful, her twin tails bouncing with each bob of her head.
"You know, you can just say what's on your mind. You don't have to hold it in." He looked at her with an easy, unhurried expression. "A lot of heroes set out on their adventures for the simplest reason imaginable — because there was someone they wanted to protect."
"W-well — that's — I'm not going to distract you from cooking anymore!"
Hestia fled his arms like a startled bird, bare feet pattering across the floor all the way to the bedroom. She launched herself at the bed, bounced twice in the centre of the mattress, seized a pillow, and rolled back and forth in a state of profound personal happiness.
"Kihara-kun said he wants to become a hero for me— hehehehe~"
The irony was not entirely lost on her. Countless gods in the divine realm had pursued her with treasures and ancient poetry, and she'd felt nothing. One plainspoken man in the lower world kept landing direct hits on something she hadn't known was there, and she had absolutely no idea what to do about it. Even Hephaestos couldn't offer useful advice on this particular problem.
She would figure it out as she went. And at least for now — while the Familia was still small and new — Kihara was entirely hers.
The following morning, Kihara said goodbye to Hestia, who stood in the entryway seeing him off with an expression that suggested she was physically preventing herself from clinging to his arm, and joined the stream of adventurers flowing toward the centre of Orario — the great white spire of Babel.
The Adventurer's Guild occupied the tower's ground floor. The entrance to the dungeon was here as well.
Shortly after joining Hestia's Familia, Kihara had taken an afternoon to register at the Guild. His assigned advisor was a half-elf with a composed, quietly pretty face and wire-rimmed glasses, whose name was Eina. The moment he stepped through the Guild's main doors, he felt her attention lock onto him from across the hall — and the look on her face as she emerged from behind the reception counter was the kind that made the surrounding adventurers fall silent out of sheer instinct.
"Mr. Kihara. A word, please."
She had his arm before the sentence was finished, and marched him into one of the soundproofed consultation rooms. The moment the door shut behind them, the hall's noise resumed like nothing had happened.
"Did you see that? That new guy looked familiar—"
"No idea what he did to make Eina so angry, but honestly I'd love to get dragged into a room and yelled at by her too."
"...Mate, what's wrong with you?"
Inside the consultation room, Eina stood with her arms folded, looking at him over the rims of her glasses with an expression that had settled somewhere between professional displeasure and genuine concern.
"Would you care to explain why you've registered as an adventurer and then made no attempt whatsoever to actually enter the dungeon? Leave it much longer and your registration will be revoked."
"I've been looking after my goddess. She can't brush her teeth without me."
"You're lying."
Kihara smiled slightly. "Is it that obvious?"
"I see more adventurers in a day than most people see in a year. Your lying is noticeably amateur by comparison."
"Fair enough. I've been lazy about dungeon exploration — that's on me. I'd appreciate any guidance you can offer to a newcomer."
Eina accepted this without further comment and produced a small booklet — faintly scented, Kihara noted, with something light and pleasant — and placed it in his hands.
"This is the Guild's compiled beginner's guide for floors one through five. Most Level 1 adventurers operate in a group, typically within the first three floors."
She held his gaze, her voice shifting into something more measured and deliberate.
"I'm aware of what you're capable of — your reputation from the duelling grounds is not exactly a secret. But I would still strongly encourage you to find reliable companions before you go deeper. A party is meaningfully safer than solo exploration, regardless of individual ability. And please — don't let short-term opportunity put you in a situation you can't recover from. Coming back to the surface alive is the only thing that matters down there."
Kihara accepted the guide with genuine respect, then reached into his dimensional storage and placed a beautifully packaged jar of golden honey on the table between them.
"Thank you for your concern. A small token of appreciation."
"Golden honey?!" Eina stared at it. "This is far too much — I can't possibly accept—"
She had heard about this honey. Two days ago, word had spread that someone had bought out the entire available stock, and the subsequent shortage had made it effectively unobtainable at any price. She hadn't imagined she was looking at the person responsible.
"Don't worry about it — I'm the one who cleared out the supply." He produced several more gleaming jars from the storage. "I have plenty. Please take them."
Faced with this evidence, Eina accepted the gift.
"Then — best of luck with your preparations. I hope the dungeon treats you well."
The practical necessities for dungeon exploration came down to three things: water, torches, and food. Everything else — rope, potions, miscellaneous emergency supplies — existed primarily to improve a new adventurer's odds of surviving the unexpected.
Kihara, equipped with a dimensional storage that was immune to the passage of time and therefore rendered food spoilage a theoretical rather than practical concern, bought enough provisions to sustain himself underground for a full month in a single efficient pass through the shopping district. He had no intention of staying that long. He simply found repeated supply runs inconvenient.
To avoid being stopped at the dungeon entrance for looking insufficiently adventurer-like, he picked up a light breastplate, a standard longsword, and a grey travelling cloak — enough to pass as a new recruit at a glance. Thus equipped, he made his way to the entrance.
The descent began on a spiral staircase lit at intervals by pale blue magic-stone lanterns, the light growing colder and more diffuse as the surface fell away above him. When the staircase ended, the dungeon opened up around him — damp stone, low ceilings, the particular silence of a place where the silence itself felt inhabited.
Floors one through five conformed to a standard cave labyrinth layout. Nothing architecturally surprising.
The first floor's primary population was goblins — small, opportunistic, and equipped with the kind of threat level that made them useful for calibration purposes. Given Kihara's current physical parameters, standing still and letting them swing at him would have produced no meaningful result.
He tucked the standard longsword away and pulled something else from the void — Kurogane, the oversized handgun, its dark finish absorbing the ambient light of the dungeon as he levelled it at the goblins shambling toward him with their wooden clubs and pitchforks. He smiled.
"Ever heard the expression about a three-body problem beating a primitive civilisation?"
Bang. Bang. Bang.
The gunshots rolled through the cave passages like something between a thunderclap and a monster's roar. The goblins dissolved into dark smoke where they fell, leaving behind thumbnail-sized fragments of purple crystal scattered across the stone floor.
...
Thank you for reading.
(T/N: These days i didn't get much time to translate, so from tomorrow onwards I'll be uploading only 1 chapter a day.)