Berserk of Gluttony (LN) - Volume 5 - Chapter 7

Chapter 7:

Ancient Monsters

LAINE GOBBLED DOWN THE SANDWICHES we’d brought while Roxy and I sat quietly and waited for her to finish. She hadn’t eaten since the day before. 

Seeing an opening, Miria tried reaching a tentative hand into the basket herself.

“Hey! Those sandwiches aren’t for you!” Roxy snapped.

“But I skipped breakfast too! I skipped it to wait for you guys! Lady Roxy…” Miria pleaded. “Can I have a sandwich too?”

Although I was already used to it, this must have been the strangest sight to anyone else, as it now looked like Fate and Miria were close friends. I knew Roxy was inside my body, but anyone who didn’t know would have been shocked. The scene was straight-up preposterous. Even Laine looked on as if she were observing an interaction between two rare specimens.

Roxy sighed. She always went easy on Miria when she begged, so I already knew what she was going to say. “Fine, fine… Laine, would you mind sharing your sandwiches with Miria?”

“I don’t mind, so long as you’re happy for me to do all the analysis I need after breakfast.” 

It was just like Laine to say something like that. Roxy had actually made the sandwiches, but once they were in Laine’s possession, they belonged to her. She was rational and emotionless to a fault, and those traits made her a great researcher. Mind you, the fact that she felt no pangs of conscience in the pursuit of her research, no matter how far she pushed, caused me no end of grief.

Regardless, as soon as Miria had permission, she grabbed a sandwich and went to town on it. “Lady Roxy’s homemade sandwiches! Yes!” she cried before taking a big bite with her small mouth. As soon as she did, tears streamed from her eyes like tiny waterfalls, and she cried out again. “They’re the best! Now I can die without regrets!”

“Why would you even say that?” I groaned.

“You eat Lady Roxy’s homemade food all the time, so someone like you couldn’t possibly understand my feelings. You don’t deserve such happiness! I should be in your position, not you!” Miria glared at me furiously as she gobbled down her sandwich. 

No matter how confused she had been at first, she had completely adjusted to our new situation. Well, almost. Because I was in Roxy’s body, Miria sometimes brushed against me without thinking and flushed with embarrassment.

“This is ridiculous,” she said. “You look like Lady Roxy, but if I hug you, I’m actually hugging Fate. But if I hug the real Lady Roxy, then from the outside, it looks like I’m hugging you. What’s the best hugging protocol for a situation like this?”

The seriousness of Miria’s face made it seem like she faced a quandary of vital importance. She looked to me and Roxy for answers.

“How are we supposed to know?!” I shouted.

“For the time being, please stop hugging me,” said Roxy.

“You guys are so rowdy,” said Laine, watching us as she devoured the last sandwich. “It’s been a while since I had such a chatty breakfast. In any case, shall we get on with things?”

Laine wiped the crumbs from her mouth with her handkerchief and guided us to a separate room. It was a familiar one, being the location where Laine ran all her tests and examinations. Greed and I visited it regularly.

Hm? Actually, where is Greed, anyway? I thought.

I put my hand to the sword hanging at my belt, but there was no response. Then I remembered. I was Roxy now, so I had Roxy’s holy sword. That meant Roxy had Greed. I had been so caught up in being in a new body that I’d completely forgotten about my annoying black sword. I wanted to hear his take on the situation, so I called out to Roxy.

“Roxy, can I have my sword for a minute? I want to ask Greed something.”

“Oh, right. Yes,” she said, “we should get his opinion about all of this too. I completely forgot that I was wearing him. Here.”

I took the black sword from Roxy with thanks and engaged my Telepathy skill, but… “It’s not working!”

Roxy and I looked at each other in surprise, but Laine tittered.

“Of course not. Your souls swapped bodies. Here’s the interesting part: Skills aren’t connected to a person’s soul; they actually reside inside the body. That means that you don’t have the Telepathy skill, Fate. Roxy does. That said, I’m not sure if she can use it yet. Your souls are probably still unused to their new hosts.”

“Still, it’s worth a shot,” said Roxy. “Fay, will you pass me Greed?”

“Sure.”

I passed the sword back to Roxy and waited to see if she’d have any luck using the Telepathy skill.

It seemed like there was no response at first, and a confused frown crossed Roxy’s face. However, after a few more tries, her eyes lit up in surprise.

“I can hear him! I can hear Greed’s voice! It’s lower than I expected—and huskier.”

“He’s also got a rotten attitude, so be careful,” I added.

I tried to warn her, but Roxy only laughed in surprise and said that Greed was a most gentlemanly blade. That couldn’t be right. Greed was arrogant and, on top of that, greedy enough to live up to his name.

“I don’t believe it…” I muttered.

“Don’t say such things, Fay. Greed is your partner.”

“I’m just not convinced. But whatever. What’s he saying?”

“Let’s see…” Roxy turned to the sword, nodding as she listened. Then her face went red. 

Uh-oh. What are they talking about? I stiffened. “Roxy, what’s wrong?”

“Er…” Roxy was hesitant to say exactly what she had been told, but essentially, Greed had told her to keep an eye on me to make sure I didn’t do anything too “risqué” with Roxy’s body.

Damn you, Greed! What the hell are you telling her?! I would never do anything too risqué—not like that!

“I’m really disappointed in him,” I said. “Why would he say something so harsh?”

“Fay, why did your eyes look so shifty just now?”

“Oh, they were shifty all right, Lady Roxy!” said Miria. “He’s a boy, after all. We’ll have to have someone on guard duty with him tonight to make sure he doesn’t do anything untoward with your precious body!”

Their level of trust in me was in free fall. I just wanted everyone to remember what had happened just that morning when I woke up. Had I had any dirty thoughts then? No! I’d been worried about the body swapping and only the body swapping! Sure, now that things had calmed down, I had a few…idle thoughts, but I was a young man! Every young man at my age had…thoughts!

Roxy’s gaze pierced into me as she spoke. “I believe in Fay,” she said. “I believe that my body is in safe hands!”

“What?!” Miria cried. “Really?! But—”

“It’s in safe hands, Miria!”

Miria desperately tried to convince Roxy otherwise, but Roxy refused to change her mind. She had worries, and it showed, but in the end, she put her faith in me. In any case, our lives hung in the balance; this wasn’t the time for impure thoughts.

“Thanks, Roxy,” I said.

“It’s fine. We went through so much together in Galia. Compared to that, this is almost nothing.”

Someone cleared their throat nearby, and we turned to find Laine looking rather annoyed. “Can you get into that stuff afterward, please?” she asked. “Certainly you must appreciate that, at this rate, things will only get worse.”

“Sorry!” we replied.

It was always too easy for me to just get lost in conversation with Roxy. Even when I knew better, it still happened. We had too much fun. But we both knew it was becoming something of a problem. 

Meanwhile, Miria decided to chip in with her own opinion. “Yeah, Laine is right! She’s trying to tell you guys something really important right now! Listen carefully!”

Roxy and I were so shocked that we said the same thing at the same time: “You’re one to talk!”

Miria had given us the biggest runaround in the first place. Roxy knocked her right off her proverbial high horse. I’d never seen her scold Miria like that. It was very cool, and she managed to look so valiant doing it. 

I soon realized that if Mugan had been there, he would have stopped this from happening before it even began. However, Mugan was away with Eris, investigating the mountain city where Rafale’s remaining hideout had been located. Only now that he was gone did I realize how tough Miria was to handle. 

Laine seemed to understand too, because she took Miria by the collar and dragged her from the room. 

“What? Why are you taking me outside? Miss Laine, wait a minute. Miss Lai—”

Laine slammed the door and swiftly locked it behind her. Realizing she’d been locked out, Miria stood with her nose pressed against the thick glass window, staring in as tears streamed down her face. Laine ignored her completely as she returned to Roxy and me.

“Well, that takes care of that,” she said. “Now we can finally talk. Whenever Miria is here, the subject keeps changing and we can’t stay on track.”

“Ah… Yeah, that sounds about right,” I said.

“Indeed,” added Roxy.

Not one of us mentioned that it was kind of sad to have to lock Miria out. On this occasion, we were all in agreement that we had no other choice. I glanced at Miria. She stood by the window, looking at us like a helpless, abandoned kitten left out in the rain. I told myself to ignore her. It was a small price to pay for some peace and quiet.

Laine walked past the locked door to a section of the room filled with a variety of machinery and materials. After a little while, she returned with a trolley carrying a glass jar filled with green liquid. Inside, we saw the gray arm.

“That’s the arm from yesterday, yeah?” I asked.

“It is. It’s a very important sample, so I went to great pains to halt its decay. What do you think? It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” 

By the look of her crooked smile, it was clear that Laine expected approval. She pushed her cheek against the glass canister as the arm floated within it. There was a distant look in Roxy’s eyes as her face twitched. I probably wore the same expression.

“Uh, but more importantly, did you find out what monster the arm actually belongs to?” I asked.

“Of course I did! You’re going to be so surprised!” Laine turned back to the gray arm with a longing gaze.

She continued to stare at it until Roxy and I shouted at her. “Well, what is it?!”

“Okay, okay, indoor voices please.” Laine placed the canister on a desk. “According to my analysis, it belongs to an ancient monster that went extinct more than four thousand years ago. I checked the specimen against all known existing monsters, but I couldn’t find anything similar. So, I extended the search further to include fossils recovered from Galia and…bingo!”

“An ancient, extinct monster…?”

An image of the great canyon of Galia flashed through my mind. It was the only place in the barren wastelands of Galia that remained a fertile oasis of plant life. Additionally, it was home to a host of fossilized monsters, all of them quietly left to their eternal slumber beneath the canyon’s surface. According to Greed, the monsters of the current era couldn’t even hold a candle to the ancient monsters in terms of strength and ferocity.

“But why would an ancient monster suddenly appear in the Hobgoblin Forest?”

“That I don’t know,” said Laine. “However, it seems the arm belongs to a monster called a goblin shaman. That’s what we’ve gathered from ancient monster data extracted from Galian relics. I never imagined that data would come in handy at a time like this.”

Laine turned to a piece of machinery and began fiddling with it. A few moments later, the monitor in front of us came to life with the image of a gray monster. It wore some kind of decorative headpiece made from what looked like roc feathers, and it held a large staff in its hands. It was taller than a regular goblin, but not quite as big as a hobgoblin. The most surprising trait of the monster was its eyes. Regular goblins only had two eyes, but the goblin shaman had four.

“Talk about a creepy goblin…” I muttered.

Roxy nodded in agreement. “Yes…it’s very much unlike the usual sort.”

From what we could tell, the horrifying monster on the monitor had cast the soul-swap spell on us. According to Laine, it wasn’t unlikely that ancient monsters had access to hidden skills and spells that were otherwise long lost to the monsters of the modern world.

“Most intriguing, wouldn’t you say? I’d love to get my hands on a sample of the whole thing, not just the arm.”

“Before we get distracted with that, how do we reverse the effects of the soul-swap spell?” I asked.

“It’s very simple. The magical seal you showed me was similar to spells that are still in use today. Though it must be said, none of them are so strange as to allow for soul swapping.” Then Laine added with a smile, “In any case, you just have to kill the goblin shaman.” 

“That’s it?”

“Indeed. This particular seal is a sort of hex. The caster uses their magic to maintain the spell. That means that even now, that shaman is out there somewhere, still concentrating on this spell.”

I could just picture the goblin shaman somewhere in the darkness of the Hobgoblin Forest, seething at its lost arm while it went on muttering its curse.

Now that we knew how to break the spell, I wanted to get moving straight away. We could think about why ancient monsters were reappearing after we’d returned safely to our own bodies. 

“Roxy, we have to get to the Hobgoblin Forest—Roxy?!”

She hadn’t registered that I was speaking to her. Something was wrong. Sweat had begun to bead on her forehead.

“Fay…”

It took everything Roxy had just to utter my name before she collapsed where she stood. 

I rushed to catch her, but she had already fallen unconscious. Laine’s face turned suddenly serious as she studied Roxy’s condition and laid her on the machine that she always used to run her analyses on me.

No more than ten minutes passed, but my thoughts were in such disarray that I couldn’t track the passage of time at all. Usually, I would have turned to Greed for advice in a situation like this, but that was impossible while I was still in Roxy’s body. 

“Something is happening to her soul, Fate… Something you know very well.”

“You don’t mean…”

“The Gluttony skill is transitioning into its starved state. The shock of such a transformation must have been too much for Roxy to handle, so she fell unconscious.”

I was left utterly stunned by the results of Laine’s analysis. Laine’s expert opinion was that I had developed a certain level of tolerance for the effects of Gluttony because I had been born with the skill. I also had Luna with me now, helping me by making some sort of defensive barrier around my soul. Thanks to her, the pangs of Gluttony’s hunger were weaker. Those two factors had helped me maintain my sanity until now. But Roxy didn’t have any of that.

When I considered Gluttony’s current state, I realized that Roxy was enduring a hunger above and beyond what I had experienced when I devoured the Divine Dragon in Galia. Just thinking about it made my hair stand on end. 

Laine hadn’t predicted that it would be this dire, either. “I’ll look after her, but you should do your best to kill that goblin shaman before her symptoms get any worse. According to my calculations, her soul won’t be able to handle this for too long.”

But I had a better idea. I knew someone who could help.

“No,” I said. “I’m going to take Roxy back to Barbatos Manor. She can take care of her.”

“Huh?!” Laine said, shocked. “Who do you mean?”

“Sorry, there’s no time to explain!”

“Fate, wait!”

But I didn’t answer. I simply hefted Roxy onto my shoulder and opened the door. Outside, Miria was waiting, worried, and this time, she was silent. At least she knew how to read the room when the situation called for it.

I had to hurry. Memil would be at the manor. Only she could help Roxy now.