Rimuru’s Elegant Escape Play – 10
The second day was horrible.
Moving as a group was just not ideal. It was a day of realizing this.
As predicted, the people who went out fishing came back with miserable results.
And of course, we too were unable to accomplish much.
As we weren’t allowed to stray too far from the eyes of the instructors, the area we could go to look for herbs and seeds was very limited.
And these were areas that the other students had already searched on the first day, so it was no surprise that nothing good had come up.
If we were allowed to, I would have wanted to go to the west.
It was a desert area, so the variety of plants over there would have also been quite different.
That made me think that there would be plants suited for cooking spices…
In any case, what we were able to get was a little collection of seeds, edible grass and a clump of rock salt.
Had we gone near the shore, we might have been able to get some water to make sea salt, but of course, we could not do that. I would have been able to manage it alone, but the exploration team had only advanced one-quarter of the way through the island in a day. And so getting salt from the sea was not a very realistic idea.
Had I not realized that the rock was crystalized salt, then we would have had to eat our food without any salt at all…
…No, that is a lie.
The rock salt alone was something that I had secretly prepared.
I didn’t think you could make anything without salt, and so it was necessary for me to prepare this thing at least.
In fact, there was a salt lake to the west, but as we had gone to the same place as yesterday, I could not go over there.
And so with no other choice, I had crystallized the salt in the ground when no one was looking. And then I stuck it onto the rocks so no one would think it was strange.
And then I pretended to be ignorant of it so that Mondo could discover it.
“Thi-this! It is a clump of salt!!”
Mondo was overjoyed when he told me. His happiness was incomparable to my own terrible acting skills, and he was overflowing with happiness at this discovery.
It didn’t result in any points, but no one became suspicious about it.
They were all unsurprised, thinking that picking up some rock salt was hardly enough to get you some points.
And so that was how I was able to prepare some salt.
I returned to the base and started making dinner.
Lunch was either rations or whatever you could find in your environment. And so we had searched for seeds and wild berries…but, it was not enough.
For George and Mondo, it was about the amount, but for me, it was more about quality. It was dry and not sweet. To be honest, they were just bad.
And so I had had higher hopes for dinner, but we had not been successful.
Sadly, I licked the salt and sipped the disgusting grass soup.
It seemed like Magnus and a few other students were sticking to their rations.
I understood why.
Overall, it was such a tragic dinner that I wanted to cry.
At the same time, the smell of the fancy dinner that Julius and the others were eating wafted in the air. And it lit a fire of rage within me.
To be frank, this was a challenge.
I don’t remember ever being this pissed off in the past few years.
This delicious smell was making us feel even more miserable.
“We will have to try harder to prepare a good meal tomorrow.”
“Yeah. I’m too hungry now. I’ll do better tomorrow!”
“Ye-yes. Me too.”
Perhaps there was something intimidating about the way I had said it because George seemed a little taken aback as he nodded.
Mondo was so hungry that he just nodded without really thinking.
The two girls were also in agreement, and with that resolve, we split up for the night.
◇◇◇
And then it was the 3rd day.
I had good luck from the morning of that day.
The pit that I had made on the first day had trapped a pig-like monster.
…No, that’s a lie.
I had worked secretly during the night to find it through ‘Magic Perception,’ and then catch it with ‘Sticky Steel String,’ and then I led it towards the trap.
Today we would eat some good food! It was this hope that forced me to loosen the magic restraints I had put on myself.
Caution? What is that? Does it taste good?
They say that there are many city people who long to live in the countryside or live off of their own produce in the forest. However, most of them soon realize how inconvenient it is once they try it.
I was much the same.
My body is hurting because of my muscles and I’m forced to eat horrible food. Not only is there no entertainment, but there isn’t even a place to take a bath… It had only been two days, but I was already feeling my limits.
And on this third day, I had decided that I would no longer try to bear any of it.
“I’m going to stay here today and prepare this guy to be butchered.”
I declared to my teammates. There was a 200 kg boar-like monster in front of me.
Thankfully, I already had 30 points, so there was no need to worry about getting more.
“You don’t need us to help you?”
George asked. I answered,
“Leave the cooking to me. But it would help if you could gather some logs for firewood.”
Upon hearing this, George readily agreed.
He decided to gather wood during the morning and then go out gathering in the afternoon in order to rack up some points.
He had likely sensed that I was serious, and thought it better to not get in my way.
Now it was just me and one other person left.
It was Marsha.
