Chapter 8: Questing for Snails and Dignity

The Whispering Woods were not, in fact, whispering. They were groaning. Every creak of a branch, every rustle of a leaf seemed to be mocking our very existence. Our first official quest as adventurers was to fight snails, and I was already convinced we were going to fail.

"I can't believe this," Kenta whined for the tenth time, swatting at a fly. "A hero of my caliber, reduced to fighting gastropods. It's humiliating."

"Oh, I'm sorry, is this not living up to your epic power fantasy?" I snapped, tripping over a tree root for the fifth time. My dress was now less 'divine' and more 'distressed.' "Maybe you should have thought of that before you decided to 'choose' a person as your starter item!"

Our bickering was interrupted by a loud, squelching sound. We peeked through a bush and saw them. The Giant Forest Snails. They were… giant, alright. Each one was the size of a large dog, with a thick, slimy body and a swirling, rock-hard shell. They were also surprisingly fast, inching their way across the forest floor with a disturbing eagerness.

"Okay," Kenta said, trying to sound brave. "Five of them. We can do this. I'll take the lead!"

He charged out from behind the bush, letting out a war cry that cracked halfway through. He ran up to the nearest snail and threw a punch.

SQUELCH.

His fist sank into the snail's slimy body and got stuck. He tried to pull it out, but the creature's slime was like super glue. "Uh oh," he mumbled, wiggling his fingers uselessly. "I'm… I'm stuck."

The snail, seemingly unbothered, continued its slow crawl, dragging a horrified Kenta along with it.

"Idiot!" I yelled, grabbing a sturdy-looking fallen branch. "I'll save you!"

I ran up and swung the branch at the snail's head with all my might.

THWACK. SQUELCH.

The branch made a satisfying sound as it connected, but it also became firmly lodged in the snail's goo, right next to Kenta's hand. Now we were both stuck to the same snail.

This was it. My lowest point. Across seventeen lifetimes of ridiculous deaths, this was somehow the most humiliating situation I had ever been in. Stuck to a giant snail, tethered to a gacha-addicted otaku, in a forest that smelled like wet moss.

The sheer, overwhelming misery of it all was too much. The dam of my composure broke. I started to cry. It wasn't the dignified, single-tear-rolling-down-the-cheek kind of crying you see in movies. It was the loud, ugly, snot-and-hiccups kind of crying.

"This is the worst!" I wailed, my voice muffled by snail slime. "I was a goddess! I had a desk! And a promotion! And now I'm going to be slowly slimed to death by an overgrown garden pest!"

My complete and total breakdown seemed to snap Kenta out of his own panic. He looked from my tear-streaked face to the snail we were attached to, and a flicker of something - guilt? responsibility? - crossed his face.

"Okay, okay, don't cry!" he said frantically. "I'll get us out of this! I just… I have to think!"

He stopped struggling and started observing. His INT stat may have been his only good one, but at that moment, it was our only hope. He watched the other snails as they moved. He noticed how the light filtered through the trees, casting shifting shadows on the ground.

"That's it!" he suddenly exclaimed. He looked at me. "Akane! Your shadow! When a shadow passes over them, they get scared and pull into their shells!"

"What good does that do?!" I sobbed.

"Just trust me!" He started awkwardly shuffling his feet, trying to pull me and the snail into a different position. "Angle yourself so your shadow… falls on that snail over there!"

It was a ridiculous request, but I was too miserable to argue. I shifted my position until my shadow fell across a different, non-Kenta-and-Akane-covered snail. Just as he predicted, the creature instantly recoiled, pulling its slimy body completely into its hard shell.

"Now!" Kenta shouted, pointing with his free hand. "While it's inside! Find a big rock!"

I finally understood his plan. Wrenching my branch free with a final, desperate tug, I scrambled to find a heavy-looking rock. While the snail was turtled up, its soft body was protected, but it was also immobile. I lifted the rock over my head and brought it down on the shell with a grunt.

CRACK!

The shell shattered. The snail was defeated. It worked.

It was the most inefficient, exhausting, and disgusting battle strategy in the history of adventuring, but it was a strategy. For the next hour, we repeated the process: I would cast a shadow, the snail would hide, and Kenta, having finally freed himself, would smash its shell with a rock.

By the end, we were covered head-to-toe in snail goo, panting from exertion, but we had five shattered snail shells. We had won.

We were gathering the proof of our kill when my legendary luck decided to make an appearance. As I bent down to pick up the last shell, I accidentally tripped over my own feet. My flailing leg kicked a small, loose stone.

It was a one-in-a-million shot. The stone flew through the air, ricocheted off a tree trunk at a perfect angle, bounced off another tree, and then shot directly into a large, papery beehive hanging from a high branch. The hive wobbled, then dropped, landing with a loud thump squarely on the head of a massive, sleeping bear we hadn't even noticed.

A Dire Bear.

It woke up with a roar that shook the entire forest. It was angry, it had a beehive on its head, and it was looking right at us.

My maxed-out LUCK stat wasn't a blessing. It was a chaos engine.