Chapter 160
It didn’t take long for the [Soft-cone Kings] to destroy the 6 [Fondue Golems] with their overwhelming size and aerial bombardment. However, in that time, we somehow hid ourselves amidst the nearby cookie trees; head-on confrontation with that huge monster didn’t have to happen.
After destroying the [Fondue Golems] in no time at all, the [Soft-cone Kings] began jumping around and leisurely playing with each other, as they had been doing before the altercation. Kim Sangyoon and I peered through the trees to catch glimpses of the [Soft-cone Kings] and quickly discussed amongst ourselves on how to break through this encounter.
“We could survive if we pit the monsters in this area against each other, just like before,” Kim Sangyoon spoke first. He raised his telescope, examined the location, before turning his head away. After confirming that each recessed pit contained a half-demolished golem, he spoke with a dark expression, “In return, we won’t get any experience points.”
As Kim Sangyoon had said, all 6 [Fondue Golems] had been smashed, but our experience bar did not change. 1 golem was almost worth 1 level-up, so the 6 golems stolen by the [Soft-cone Kings] were a waste of experience.
In addition, seeing as how the [Fondue Golem] that Kim Sangyoon and I had defeated by combining our powers was defeated in an instant by a single [Soft-cone King], the difficulty of leveling up with these monsters would be quite different.
We were able to lure the [Fondue Golems] away and defeat them one-by-one, but the [Soft-cone Kings] crowded with each other. I couldn’t think of a way to easily lure one away, and, even if we clashed with one alone, it seemed difficult to inflict damage on something that large.
“It’d be impossible to break that cone and topple it over, right?” I asked.
“Won’t it immediately jump in and attack us?”
“Mmm…then maybe we have to jump down onto that ice-cream part…”
“Seeing how the golem that was hit by the soft-serve ice cream couldn’t budge one inch, that doesn’t seem like ordinary ice-cream.”
I sighed deeply and leaned back against a nearby tree. Taking care to avoid Kim Sangyoon’s gaze, I secretly took a glimpse at the expressions on my detestable servants’ faces.
‘Those bastards… They look like they know something but won’t tell me.’
Somehow, I felt that they took joy in this struggle as well.
Of course, unlike Seo Dawon and Jung Garam, Kim Olim stood with a constant vigilant and blunt expression on her face. However, she also did not easily open her mouth either.
‘Is this all for the sake of training…?’
Eventually, I threw away my regrets at the unfairness of this all and looked at the [Soft-cone King] again.
‘…Huh?’
However, one of the monsters in the large herd was acting strangely. Should I describe it as shivering…? It couldn’t stay still and kept trembling before finally jumping in place as it shook its body.
[Kyaa. Kyaa.]
I heard a faint noise as that happened.
I felt that there was something to observe, so I borrowed the telescope that Kim Sangyoon was holding and watched the oddly behaving [Soft-cone King]. Like that, I saw how every time the [Soft-cone King] shook its body, ice cream and small cookies fell off.
Most of the sweets that fell off the ice cream monster’s body were the [Cereal Babies] I had seen earlier. The [Soft-cone King] was probably shaking off the mini-cookies that had climbed up onto its body.
I also saw that the expression drawn with chocolate syrup on the soft-serve ice cream’s surface had changed to an (X.X) symbol. Puzzled, I realized the monster did not only find the cookies annoying, but, rather, seemed to hate them.
‘What’s going on…?’
Come to think of it, didn’t the [Fondue Golems] also snatch up the [Cereal Babies] in order to throw them into the chocolate river? Considering the relative insignificance of the mini cookies’ martial ability, it was strange to see these gigantic monsters making such a fuss over them.
After noting the [Soft-cone King]’s unusual behavior, my eyes caught, out of the corner of my view, a [Cereal Baby] climbing on a branch.
Small [Cereal Babies], the size of a thumb nail, were slowly climbing a roll-wafer tree. When I looked closely, something fluffy like a cotton ball was attached to the cookie’s body, so it could climb the tree easily without falling off.
As the [Cereal Baby] passed by, its path subtly changed color. A long, faint trail remained, as if something wet had passed by.
“This mini-cookie… Is there something more to it?”
“Yes?”
“Whether it’s the Fondue Golem or the Soft-cone King, anytime those two see these things, they try to kill the cookies. It seems like those monsters despise these cookies a lot.”
“Eh, is that so?”
At that moment, just as we were speaking, I noticed that a [Cereal Baby] was trying to climb up Lackey’s body through the gaps of its toes. Before I removed the nuisances, I opened Lackey’s [Status Window].
Though it didn’t seem like Lackey was irritated much by the [Cereal Babies] climbing up its body, the skeleton wiggled its skinny toes, feeling the cookies’ ascent.
Now that I think about it, the [Cereal Babies] seemed to cling more to Lackey than to me or Kim Sangyoon. I moved to remove the cookie and moved it to the branch. Then, I realized that sticky caramel sauce was left on Lackey’s feet; I sprayed water to wash it off.
As soon as I washed the skeleton’s feet, the cookie children that had been notably hovering around Lackey scattered away. The cookies’ nature reminded me of a bug.
My gaze followed the scattered [Cereal Babies]; the mini cookies moved slowly, but they roamed lightly on their feet. And, a large number of these cookies began climbing the trees near us.
At first I had thought these trees were simply palm trees, but, in fact, the trunks were made of roll wafers coated in chocolate; the leaves were cookies coated with green tea powder.
The [Cereal Babies] climbed onto one such tree and stayed atop for a long while, making sounds as if someone were walking on freshly fallen snow. The cookies gathered in a very small space, but the tree melted fairly quickly; a hole started to appear. The cookies began slowly digging into the hole they created.
I gently grabbed one of the [Cereal Babies] that had now dug its body in halfway, and, trying not to break it, pulled it out with as little force as possible. And, looking into that hole…
[Crunch Crunch Crunch…]
The [Cereal Babies] that had been bustling and bumping into each other stopped all movement when I looked at them. Goosebumps rose on my skin; I tore my gaze away from the hole.
Then, Seo Dawon, who was watching me, opened his mouth, “Cereal Babies are especially attracted to chocolate and caramel. That’s why they sometimes dig into particularly slow monsters and eat them from the inside out.”
After saying that, Seo Dawon pointed to the six [Fondue Golems] that had been destroyed. I followed his fingertips to the pits created by the [Soft-cone King]’s cones; within, I saw a pile of [Cereal Babies] that I had not noticed before.
The [Cereal Babies] had swarmed onto the now stationary golem, tangled in its various sweets that made up its body. Apparently, they had gathered to eat the half-destroyed corpse. In particular, I could see that the dark chocolate-coated head was already full of small holes.
And we weren’t the only ones looking at the pit full of swarming [Cereal Babies]. I could feel that the [Soft-Cone Kings] were blatantly staring at the pit as well.
They may have just been simple monsters, but the expressions drawn out in chocolate syrup were somehow familiar. I wondered if it was similar to the expression I held when I suddenly found my teacher in our dormitories back when I had attended university.
“Have you found something?–Ack! W-What’s that,” Kim Sangyoon stuttered.
“Mmm… I think the [Cereal Babies] are…considered pests here.”
“No way, the golem…Are they eating the golem?”
“Yes… If the sweet moves too slow, I think they just eat it all up.”
Perhaps Kim Sangyoon was also weak to insect-like beings; even though he wasn’t a dessert, he approached me, fed up with this business, and avoided the nearby [Cereal Babies]. While observing Kim Sangyoon, I had suddenly thought of using this information to get rid of both the [Soft-cone Kings] and the [Fondue Golems].
First of all, I knew that the [Cereal Babies] wouldn’t look for any old scapegoat. So, I began to observe the [Soft-cone King] that had been previously shaking off the cookie nuisances earlier.
At first, I didn’t notice anything different between it and the other members of its herd, but, after scrutinizing it closely, I found that my target’s cone was slightly cracked along the bottom. Chocolate and soft-serve ice cream were slowly leaking out, little by little.
Though the thin crack could not easily be seen with the naked eye, after staying in place for a long while, chocolate syrup naturally flowed out of the cone and stained the ground. The [Cereal Babies] followed that syrup trail and climbed up the [Soft-cone King].
“About our situation…” I explained to Kim Sangyoon what I had seen and began to expand on my hypothesis on how best to easily defeat these monsters.
TL: Lee-kyung is slowly learning how to think through dungeons! (ofc made safe by the Red Lotus guild members). Also, something’s so sinister about such small things swarming and eating larger monsters D:
Sorry for the late update! I’m also going slower even if I wanted to do a bonus chap this week–it didn’t end up happening bc I’m in crunchtime for finals. As apology, though, I translated a fan comic, which I’ll put into the discord thread for Necromancer Survival.
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