Dragging its feet over the ground, the mascot walked down the plaza's road. It pulled along some of the garbage lying around, or stomped it further into the crevices between the cobblestone. It passed by an old food cart, one of the sort that were scattered around the entire zone. Of course, the monster didn't pay it any mind. That was why it didn't notice when Maximus jumped up from behind it, cutting through its thick neck.

  He didn't manage to quite cut all the way through, so its head was still hanging on literally by its skin. Dark, rotten blood flowed out from its neck as the monster's head folded down onto its torso. Still 'spasming', the mascot started swinging its arms out with little accuracy, just like a physical reaction it couldn't even control on its own. Though, it was only able to try attacking a few times before Ryan came in and swung a massive war-hammer made of ice against its skull, finishing the monster off.

  [You have killed a level 3 -Rabbit Mascot-]

  The head dropped down in front of Modak and Silvia's feet, starting to fall apart and crumble away into mana almost immediately after. The two of them were staring at the dead body in front of them, as Ryan wiped the splatters of blood from his face.

  "Uhm... is that..." Silvia started, looking her friend in the face. There was a puddle of blood forming at his feet as the viscous liquid flowed out from the monster's body, "... sanitary?"

  "Huh? Oh, yeah, don't worry. Every part of the monsters' bodies disappear after they die, including their blood. There's no bacteria here anyway. I guess, unless the dungeon replicated those as well, but we would just need to leave the dungeon to be 'cured'. Bacteria would be like tiny dungeon monsters, and their bodies are destroyed outside of dungeons," Ryan explained, as he pushed into monster's body with the icy hammer to help it break down faster so that he could quickly get the coin.

  "I didn't realize they're so... realistic," Modak pointed out. He had a bit more curiosity on his face than Silvia's startled disgust, but even he was quite taken aback. And Ryan definitely understood why. Even he was pretty taken aback the first time he was here, and had to adjust to all of this. And that was all with the violent history that he had. Not all that long before Ryan came here the first time and killed his first 'bleeding' monster, he was ruthlessly shot and had bits of a real man's brain on his face. In comparison to that... monster blood wasn't all that big a deal.

  Though, he did have to admit, considering the zombie-like nature of the mascots, plus the fact that they didn't really look like real people, made it a bit easier to get used to it, "Just be happy we're not heading to the Petting Zoo."

  "P-Petting Zoo?" Silvia asked with horror on her face, "Okay, yeah, now I get why you were unsure about us joining..."

  The elf shuddered slightly, but then shook her head, "But I guess if they're not 'real', it's... okay?"

  "It's still not a great feeling. But the dungeon doesn't really have a perfect understanding of anatomy. To be honest, I haven't checked super closely, but I saw some mascots with multiple hearts or missing their stomach or a lung. I'm pretty sure some of them don't have bones in all the places? Like, their limbs are just... flesh tubes. Like sausages."

  Modak and Silvia looked at the quickly decomposing mascot, the word 'disgust' practically spelt out on their faces.

  "Oh come on, stop looking like that. You two were the ones that wanted this. I tried to tell you," Ryan pointed out, as he picked up the plastic coin from the monster's guts. He quickly threw it over toward Silvia, who caught it with a taken-aback expression. With a sad grimace, she looked down at herself.

  "Man... my cloak is dirty..."

  "It'll be gone in a couple minutes, don't worry. Just hold onto that for now. I'm going to grab a couple more. I want to see if Modak can get a card even without mana," Ryan explained, looking at the orc, "They don't really bring unawakened here, so I don't think they ever tested the gift shop with one. And you're a more special case than just an 'unawakened'."

  Modak considered it for a moment, though he wasn't quite sure, "I don't know, things like that usually can't interact with me. You know those tracking sensors that the police use? We tested one of them out on me at the tower, and I was basically invisible to it. If it works similarly, I am doubtful if it would work."

  "Hm, sure," Ryan nodded. That's the same thing that he figured, but it wasn't like they really understood a lot about how this dungeon worked exactly. There might still be a way for Modak to get something out of it. And though the orc wasn't sure, and was clearly a bit nervous, Silvia was extremely curious and excited.

  "What do you guys think I'll get in the shop?" Silvia wondered out loud, as if already having forgotten about the bloody coin in her pocket, "I think it would be cool to get some new paints, or a cool magic brush! I'm using some pre-made stuff right now, but getting something special would be neat!"

  "You could have just asked Runar for that," Ryan pointed out, but Silvia shrugged.

  "There haven't been a lot of chances for that recently. He had promised to give me access to his pigment stash, but that didn't happen yet either."

  "Well, we'll see. I've got a slight hunch that it gives us items we could somehow get through potential skills anyway. Like, that the dungeon somehow triggers dormant abilities in our classes," Ryan pointed out, "It's also why I'm curious about what would happen with an unawakened. Will nothing happen, or will it try to access something else?"

  With a slight, fake sniffle, Modak turned his head away, "So what, I'm just an experiment to you?"

  Ryan reacted immediately, placing a hand onto his friend's shoulder, "No, of course not... you're also pretty cute."

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Modak stopped for a few moments as a satisfied smile formed on his lips, "You know, what? I can live with that."

  "Perfect. Cause now I need you two to just shut up and be pretty, another monster is coming," Ryan said immediately, pulling the hood over Modak's head to activate the 'stealth' effect on the cloak him and Silvia were wearing. The two of them quickly stepped away again, hiding in the spot that Ryan was telling them to. The mascots weren't exactly the most perceptive, so it was easy to trick them with those cloaks. Though, even Ryan had to admit that they were pretty effective.

  He could still tell they were there, obviously, but when he unfocused his eyes when looking in their direction, they just completely blended in with the environment.

  Apparently, Silvia had made these cloaks after combining her 'Insight' into the stealth of one of those support guys that went to retrieve Gaia's last core fragment together with Yamada, with Kindly's innate mimicry ability. Those, together, seemed to turn the cloak into something like a chameleon's hide. The fabric changed colour and texture as long as the wearers stayed still.

  Ryan ducked into an alley, quietly whistling to try and lure the nearby monster toward him, since this one was a bat mascot. Amongst the mascots, this one had the best hearing.

  However, as the saying goes... it was 'blind as a bat'. As the mascot entered the alleyway, Ryan threw Maximus up into the air. The spirit fell down onto its head and stabbed through its skull. The water energy of the attack tore through its brain, and the mascot quickly fell to the ground. With how easy it was for the knight to cut through them at his level, these guys were incredibly easy to take care of.

  Ryan called out to Silvia and Modak, and the three waited for the next coin before moving on from the mascot plaza. Now that they had two coins, they moved on and headed toward the next stop; the food stand area. It was really just rows and rows of these different small shops that used to sell pretzels, pizza, waffles, ice cream, and all that classic amusement park stuff.

  "So, what kind of monsters are here?" Silvia asked, looking around with mixed curiosity and nervousness, but Ryan quickly shook his head.

  "I already explained it to Modak while you were resting earlier, but this is basically a safe-zone. There aren't any monsters here or anything. But I feel like there might be some kind of hidden puzzle around. I can't imagine that the dungeon would just make a zone with... nothing in it. Especially not one as big as this. It's rarer, but it's almost as big as the average mascot plaza."

  "Hm... couldn't it just be a coincidence?" Modak wondered, and Ryan just shrugged.

  "Maybe? But I don't know, that's not how this dungeon does things. Like, the gift shop, for example. It's just a small area, with a single building. And it looks basically the same every time, too. That's why I want to check this place out. If this is just a puzzle, with you two here, it should be pretty easy to solve."

  "Heh, you got it," Silvia said smugly, looking around, "So... what should we check out first?"

  "Hm... I'm not so sure, actually. Let's just go through things and see if we find anything," Ryan suggested, looking around. He wasn't explicitly feeling anything from around here, but he figured if they looked around, he might get a gut feeling about something here. But when he was figuring out where to start, Modak was taking out something from under his cloak. It was a small tablet, but it was way thicker than normal. The camera in particular was pretty hefty.

  He quickly held it forward, pointing it into different directions, "It looks like there's something going on at the pizza stand?"

  Confused, Ryan stepped around Modak to take a look at what he was seeing. It was basically just a view of everything in front of him, but different areas were marked with colour overlays. And Ryan quickly realized what was going on. He had used a similar method to find Gaia's first fragment in the foundry dungeon. It was taking advantage of the distortion that mana caused in cameras.

  "I made this as part of my visual magic synthesis. To do that, I just needed to understand mana a bit more, and seeing how it acts under different circumstances-" Modak started, though he quickly stopped himself. He didn't want to start rambling about his work when it wasn't that important right now, "Anyway, basically, there's multiple active cameras here with different sensitivity levels. That way I can properly analyse the distortion and turn it into a more visually useful image that I can check out. Right now, it's basically on a mana-density mode. I'm still working on other analysis algorithms."

  "So... the areas marked red have more mana than the others?" Ryan asked, trying to take a closer look. Silvia was also growing extremely curious.

  "Ooh, that's actually kind of pretty!" she pointed out, pulling the tablet away from Modak. She pointed it around, trying to see different areas around her through the filter. And then, Silvia took a step back, looking at Ryan and Modak next to each other, "Whoa, that's kind of... wow."

  She took a snapshot of what she was seeing, and showed it to the two of them. Basically, the entire screen had an overlay of different shades of red, green, or blue. Ryan was mostly covered in a more reddish hue of orange, though there were a few areas on him that were a deep, intense red. His earrings, the horn hanging from his hip, and something he was carrying around in his pocket.

  And then, there was Modak right next to him. The base picture was grey-scale so that the actual colours wouldn't influence the overlaying filter. But Modak himself was still completely grey and colourless.

  "Yeah... That sounds about right. I'm just kind of a complete void of mana," Modak sighed awkwardly, taking back the tablet, "I took a baseline measurement of the ambient mana and filtered it out to have a more accurate assessment of the different levels of mana, so a picture of me with this will just have... nothing."

  "Of course, I know that, but actually seeing it feels different, you know? But I don't know, it kind of makes you look cool and mysterious. Like a freeze-frame from a movie where a narrator is talking about you right now, all like..." placing her hand onto her chest, Silvia cleared her throat, "Modak Stonebreaker, the prodigy of the magic tower. He was always..."

  While Silvia and Modak were doing their... thing, Ryan went off for now to try and check out what exactly Modak's camera saw in that pizza stall. It didn't look like the other ones had anything special on them. There was some general mana that was flowing through each of the structures, of course, but beyond that everything was just a slightly purple grey. But something in the pizza stall was a dark, deep red instead that he couldn't ignore.

  He tried the door at the side of the small hut, but it wouldn't budge. Ryan considered just breaking it open for now, but he didn't want to risk breaking anything. Instead, he just climbed through the open serving window in the front, using his torch to quickly light up the room. Set into the floor was a small hatch.

  "... Huh?" Ryan stared at the floor. He pushed some of the scattered garbage and pieces of rotting wood to the side, and tried to carefully pull on the hatch, but it wouldn't budge. There was a thick metal lock connected to it. It took a three-digit code, but it didn't have numbers on it. Instead, there were symbols he had never seen before. As he pulled down the dials to check out all the symbols, he realized that instead of the 10 different numbers that it should be, zero to nine, there were way more symbols on it. The first one had 23 symbols, the second one had 15, and the third had 29. Some of them were the same across the wheels, but not all of them. It looked like there were a total of 40 different symbols.

  Ryan stepped back for a moment, turning the horn of shapeless water into a large, heavy pickaxe. He took a deep breath, and slammed it down on the lock. It didn't get even a scratch on it.

  A few moments later, Silvia and Modak came rushing over, trying to figure out what was going on, and Ryan quickly turned around toward them, grinning excitedly, "I think we found what we need to do to clear this thing."

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