I looked at Midori with the most annoyed face I could manage, like every drop of life had been drained out of my soul. She just stared back, that irritating grin plastered on her face, eyes glowing with way too much excitement, clearly dying to mess with me.

  “Where did that even come from?” I snapped. “And, no. We don’t have time to waste.”

  “Come on. Until we teleport, it doesn’t really matter which way we go, right?”

  “How does it not matter? And this teleport thing… isn’t it easier if you’re closer to the target?”

  “Well, sure,” she shrugged. “It sure needs less mana that way. But that only saves us about an hour or two... Not a big deal.”

  “Not a big deal?” I snapped. “An hour or a minute, it all matters. I want the old man back even one second sooner. So please, let’s save this hell thing for later and head for the mountain already.”

  “Fine, fine,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You’re no fun at all.”

  I stayed quiet. I really wasn’t in the mood for fun anyway. All I wanted was to do something that might ease the pain and guilt sitting in my chest. One step forward, one move that could pull me out of this pit.

  We traveled in silence for a while. By sunset, the demon town was long gone behind us. We were far away now, yet the mountain was still there, distant and unmoving, almost like it was drifting farther away from us.

  As night slowly fell, memories of the previous night crept back in, and a bad feeling crawled up my spine. We hadn’t run into any monster so far, but night felt different. It always was. Hunters worked at night. So I turned to Midori, feeling a bit tense.

  “Uh… are all monsters around here boss level?” I asked. “I mean, aside from those wild dogs, everything I met was like that. You, the scorpion, even that slime…”

  “Alright,” Midori said, “there’s a misunderstanding here. I think you mixed up size with boss rank. The only boss level monster you’ve met so far is me.”

  “What? But didn’t you say the scorpion was too? And what about the slime then?”

  “I’ll admit it, I messed up about the scorpion,” she said, waving it off. “It was strong and frightening, so I just labeled it a boss.” She paused, then grimaced. “Turns out there was a Demon Lord inside it. That’s why it was so huge. Now that I think about it… if not for you, I would have kept soaking up that stupid amount of mana and probably blown myself up.”

  “That would’ve been bad...”

  “Very. And the slime? Not even close to a boss.” She gestured at the ground. “It was a rock slime. Rocks are everywhere, as you can see. It just got lucky and never ran into a lunatic like you. It kept eating, kept growing. That’s it.”

  “Okay,” I said, still lost. “So how do we even tell if a monster is a boss or not?”

  “Size is one thing, sure, but it’s not everything,” Midori said. “What really gives it away is the inherited talent. Sometimes it’s amazing, like mine. Sometimes it’s just… meh. But it’s always unique. If you run into one, trust me, you’ll notice before you die.” She smiled far too calmly.

  Somehow, asking questions to calm myself only made me more tense. So I decided to shut up. We kept going. By the time night fully fell, Midori suddenly slowed down. A dark cave opening passed by us, and it caught her eye. She steered her boar toward it.

  “Come on,” she said, waving me over as she rode inside.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, following her in.

  “We’re staying here for the night,” she replied. “Light a fire. I can’t see a thing.”

  “Hold on…” I muttered. I formed a small fireball in my hand, just enough to light the way.

  “Great,” Midori said, hopping off her boar and rummaging through the bags on its back. “From the spider webs, this place is either abandoned or no one ever comes here.”

  That eased my nerves a bit. I guided my boar next to hers and got down. We all needed rest, both us and the boars. Especially mine. I had drained more than half of its mana this morning just to convince it, the poor thing. Its mana was still lingering around me, and when our eyes met, I felt a small stab of guilt.

  “All right, pants down,” Midori said in the most casual tone possible, still digging through the fabric bags on the boar’s back.

  “…Excuse me?!” I froze.

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  “I said, strip,” she repeated.

  “W-why? Just like that, out of nowhere…”

  “I’m changing the bandage on your injured leg,” she said, walking toward me with a bottle and a cloth in hand.

  I backed up until my spine met the wall and slid down like my legs had given up on life. She walked toward me and when she bent down to reach for my pants, I slapped her hand away on pure survival instinct.

  “I can help if you want—”

  “No! Uh, I will do it myself.”

  I grabbed my pants and started pulling them down. Slow and painful in a way pride never recovers from. I stopped halfway. Midori just stood there, staring with blank eyes, waiting.

  “Aren’t you going to turn around?”

  “What? Why even?”

  “What do you mean why? Please turn around until I'm done!”

  “Fine, fine.” She turned her back, then muttered, “But just so you know, they say that thing hurts. You can’t really do it alone.”

  “Thanks. Very helpful,” I said. Somehow, doing it while she was watching would hurt way more.

  I pulled my pants down to my knees and unwrapped the bandage around the bite, it was still a piece ripped from Midori’s old clothes. Then I opened the bottle. The liquid inside was dark red, smelled sharp and strange. The moment a drop hit the wound, it recoiled like acid.

  “Ahhh!” I screamed in pain.

  “Told you so,” Midori said, suddenly turning around and stepping toward me.

  She snatched the bottle from my hand, grabbed the cloth, and shoved it toward my mouth. “Here, bite down if you want. Just so you don’t scream in the middle of the night and attract unwanted trouble.”

  I shook my head, took the cloth, and sank my teeth into it. Then she poured the liquid on my leg, far too generously. It felt like someone had dumped hot coals on me. She pinned my legs to keep me from launching into the air. I screamed into the cloth, tears pouring down my face. When it was over, she pulled the cloth out and started wrapping my leg.

  “This… what kind of… treatment is this?” I wheezed, still gasping in pain.

  “The fast kind,” she said, calm as ever. “We don’t have time to waste. And if we run into a monster, I don’t want you tripping and face-planting while fleeing.”

  “Why fleeing? Aren't we going to fight?”

  “No. I told you already, you’re not ready. And right now we have a bigger problem.” She leaned against the wall next to me. “I guess you’d rather grab the plant that heals the old man and run, instead of picking a fight with an unknown monster,” she said, raising an eyebrow at me.

  “You’re right.” I said, nodding. “And we don’t even know if that plant is really there though... By the way, where did you find the one you ate before? I think you said it wasn’t on the mountain we are heading to.”

  “No, it wasn’t. It was very, very far from here. I found it while wandering the elf lands. You could say the other side of the world.”

  “Elf lands?” I almost yelled, way too excited. “There are elves in this world? I always wanted to see one. Why don’t we go there instead? You already found the plant there. Our chances should be better.”

  “I’m afraid we can’t. My teleport has limits. Or rather, ours. You can’t just jump from one end of the world to the other. To get there, we would need at least three jumps.”

  “That’s stupid,” I said, annoyed. Not seeing elves and having to face some monster I knew nothing about didn’t help my mood.

  “Stupid or not,” she said calmly, “I never claimed my talent was the best.”

  “No, sorry. Actually, it’s a really powerful thing most can’t even imagine… I just really like elves.”

  Midori shot me this weird look, like I’d just said something absurd, then started laughing. “Oh wow, I wasn’t going to laugh, but here’s a demon saying he likes elves!”

  “What? What’s so funny about that?”

  “Demons and elves are eternal enemies, silly,” she said, still laughing. “Especially elves, they hate demons way more than demons hate them.”

  “No way!”

  I was surprised at first, but it didn't last long. Elves, all pure and kind; demons, all darkness and evil. Eternal enemies, obviously. Thinking otherwise was just dumb. And even if I couldn’t exactly call demons evil… being one was probably enough to crush any hope of meeting an elf.

  Then she wandered over to the boars, grabbed our sad little sandwiches, handed one to me, and plopped down next to me, eating hers like she was born in the cave. Her ridiculous, laid-back vibe somehow both calmed me and made me tense.

  After we finished eating, I used some wood Midori had prepared to start a campfire right at the cave entrance. We sat next to it, backs resting against the cave wall, and without realizing it, we both drifted off to sleep.

  I had gone to sleep hoping for perfect peace and a fresh morning. Instead, I felt a violent shake. Something yanked me hard, like I had been thrown across the world. I woke up instantly and saw nothing.

  I was inside something. Smooth, white, dark on the inside. There were tiny gaps, just enough air to breathe, but not enough light to see what the hell was going on. I tried to move. Nothing. Not even an inch. It felt like someone stuffed me into a box and locked it. The space was tight. And I really, really hated tight spaces.

  My breathing got messy. Sweat broke out. Panic kicked in. I stopped thinking and acted. I flooded the space around me with mana and sparked fire, pushing it harder and harder until whatever trapped me started to melt and disappear.

  When it finally burned away, I dragged in a deep breath. Then I looked around, and my lungs forgot how to work. It didn’t take long to get it. I’d been wrapped up in a spider cocoon, neatly packed for dinner. And I wasn’t the only one. There were dozens. I panicked and rushed from one to another, burning small holes in each, just enough to peek inside, trying to find Midori.

  “Midori? Hey? Not here either? Midori? Midori? Where are you?!”

  

  That was when I heard it behind me. Way too many hard legs slamming into the ground at once. I turned around and almost redecorated the cave floor with my last meal. Dozens of man sized spiders were crawling toward me, clearly hungry and angry.

  "Damn it, Midori, which one are you in!" I shouted, frantically tearing through the cocoons while I ran. Every single one was already rotten, turned into some unidentifiable goo.

  “And just because there’s a spider web somewhere doesn’t mean no one’s there. It means there are angry spiders there.” I yelled it at the cave ceiling, fully aware it wasn’t going to help, and just as aware that I was completely screwed.

  The spiders didn’t seem impressed. To them, I was just a meal that had left its place without permission. They all started marching straight toward me, ready to put me back, or worse, eat me on the spot. I tried to back away, tripped over something, and slammed into the wall. I just sat there, frozen, eyes wide with fear, with dozens of spiders closing in.