Chapter 21: Chapter 21
Not long after into our clearing of the horde of Killer Ant's in which we got the Excellia to upgrade within our spears for that upgrade, a party of higher leveled adventures came through and dealt with the horde as they made their way down towards Rivira apparently. "Some guys got you with Ant pheromones right?" One of them asked and I nodded wryly and the guy shrugged in a 'what could you do' manner as he bluntly said. "Well you got to the next floor so you are safe, and seeing as you still have your limbs, you obviously got off easy." He said frankly.
And he was right, so while that higher leveled party slaughtered the ants that were trying to get up the staircase and get the drops for their 'hard' work. Tina and I moved out, moving deeper into the sixth floor which didn't have the fucking cancer that was Killer Ants.
"So like, a bird's house but with padded heavily on the inside," I muttered to myself as I fused several small planks of wood and some thick blankets together with a strong mental image of what I wanted and I thankfully got what I wanted as the resulting bird house with a hook on top was thickly padded within and came with a weighted trap door that would activate once something flew into the house.
So with the trap done, I took out the large trash can filled with the heavy sticky golden dungeon sap. "Alright, so should I fuse it into the trapped birdhouse? Or just compress the dungeon sap into something else?" I mused partly to myself as I then took out the birdhouse that was more along the size of a good-sized dog house that came up to my hip.
At my thought though, Tina threw in her own opinion. "Well if you plan on capturing anything bigger, you are going to need a bigger trap house, uhm... Maybe you can make the trap house super light and able to shrink so after we capture a monster we can take it back home and tame it over time and not in the dungeon?" She continued and that gave me a pretty good idea.
As I already tried and found I couldn't stick a still-living monster or person within my fusion space, but what I did a Harry Potter expanded trunk or somewhat that could shrink?
I blinked as I took out some more wood, a bunch of the killer ant monster stones we got... And a good helping of nothing at all. 'What the hell can give a spatial attribute to an item here in Danmachi?' I mentally mused before shrugging as nothing came to mind, as hyper esoteric things like space and time weren't something I could so easily get my hands on if it at all.
So I relied on the pure magical energy within the magic stones to force the concept of spatial folding... So I could get a collapsible house that would fold down from its full size into something close in size to a box of cards.
With a heavy thump, I looked at the weirdly crumpled-looking wooden box and read its description. [Spatial Box] [Box may be compressed and forced into smaller size due to spatial expansion properties within objection, with objects within not being crushed due to the space within the box remaining the same size.]
"This can work," I muttered and then I fused one of the two sap-filled trashcans we got into the trap house, and when it came out of my fusion space, it lost its wooden veneer and was clearly leaking dungeon sap from within the box and I blinked as I realized the interior of the box basically was a miniature Pantry. It almost perfectly mirrored the hoard room, in how the center of the box had a dip in it with a glowing crystal at the top of the trap house slowly leaking sap in thick drops that would drop into the sweet-smelling sap pool.
With the trap done I bit my lip before I looked over to Tina with a wry smile. "Come on Tina. We need to head back home and get cleaned up and wash our clothes so we can get rid of the pheromones." I said realizing going back down to the seventh floor with all the new dungeon monsters would only lead to us being chased fucking endlessly by the damned killer ants that endlessly would call more hordes onto us.
Which made acquiring the Blue Papilo monster I wanted for an on-demand healer impossible with our forms covered in literal horde bait.
"Alright Jake, you are probably right," Tina said with a sigh so then we made out way up through the dungeon floors dealing with all the weaker War Shadows, Frog Shooters, and Dungeon Lizards on these higher floors to fill up our growth weapon's quests.
But as we reached the first floor I got an idea... A terrible and great idea.
See the most valuable single dungeon drop until you got past the twentieth floor and met things like Vouivre, Unicorns, and Mermaids and got their drops was the Jack Bird and its Golden Egg. I paused as we were on the first floor and I realized that with our growth, I at best had a good couple weeks maybe a month till I leveled up and thus the Jack Bird would avoid us like the fucking plague somehow merging into the walls of the dungeon to avoid higher leveled adventurers who wanted to kill the monster for stupidly easy money.
"Tina... Let's break Orario's economy." I said with an evil smile.
My fun-sized diet lover didn't have any idea what I meant but regardless she followed me along as I set up the trap house and then used some fused wood to make a literal wood wall with a small hole on the side to allow the Jack Bird through and to keep out the goblins and kobolds that inevitably got attracted to the strongly smelling sweet sap.
And so we waited... I used some rubbed-off dirt and stone dust from the wall of the dungeon to make a thick net that looked like the walls of the dungeon that I mounted against the wall of our dead end so we could hide behind the curtain and sit in relative comfort within some nice armchairs.
The goblins and kobolds as we assumed, quickly used their enhanced senses to track down the scent of the dungeon sap filling the dungeon's first floor, and the wall of solid fused wood held fine due to its solid mass that could easily resist the barehanded scratching of goblins and kobolds. But using the patience I got from sitting in an uncomfortable as-hell tree stands for literal hours in ice cold fucking temperatures while hunting deer in my previous life, I waited silently.
That patience eventually paid off as a light screech rang out as a Jack Bird forced its way through the small hole that the goblins and kobolds couldn't fit into. And once it got past the wooden wall it warily look around but seeing nothing around it, due to the patterned net that obscured its view of us. The Jack Bird cockily as fuck, all but pranced forward to the sweet-smelling sap and I watched with twitching lips as it sniffed heavily at the sickly sweet sap that's scent wafted from the box like a snobby wine drinker taking in the aroma.
And then like a proud cock entering the henhouse to see to its harem it bounded in and then with a loud snapping noise the wooden plank that formed the door snapped shut smacking the proud bird in the backside and throwing its bitch ass into the pool of sap while the door sealed itself shut with a clicking noise.