Chapter 86.1

86 Part 1

Let’s be an Adventurer! ~Defeating Dungeons with a Skill Board~ 86

Arc 3 Epilogue: The Strongest One

About half a month after defeating the rare species that appeared in the garage dungeon, a parcel arrived for Haruki and Karen.

It arrived through the Ichibishi Armor Store, and the sender was Masatsugu.

““–HUH!?””

Seeing the name of the sender, Haruki and Karen both screamed at the same time.

The hero Masatsugu.

He was the man who regained Shinjuku Station, which had been snatched away for a long time by the second Stampede that shook Japan.

He put together a team of Rankers and defeated the Stampede’s boss.

As their leader, Masatsugu was becoming more and more brilliant like a star shining over Japan’s skies.

“A package for us from Masatsugu?”

“Don’t ask me, I don’t know anything.”

The package was sent using Ichibishi’s transportation route, but Akane did not seem to know that the sender was Masatsugu.

She was curious about the package’s contents.

A package had arrived directly from the hero Masatsugu, who was said to be the strongest in Japan.

Furthermore, it was addressed to the practically unknown Haruki and Karen.

Haruki wondered what kind of joke that was all about.

However, since it was sent through Ichibishi’s transportation route, it probably wasn’t even a joke at all.

The strongest man in Japan, the man who bears the future of Japan.

Unless it was Masatsugu himself, the only one who had those titles, the package couldn’t have arrived through a company as large as Ichibishi.

And that fact was what made the package’s contents even more intriguing.

“Let’s open yours first, Karen.”

“Huh? Mine?”

Haruki was curious about the contents of his package, but not as much as Karen.

She had been holding and shaking her own package with sparkling eyes.

She was like a fan who had received a letter from her idol.

If she was that excited about it, then there was not much else to do.

After all, the sender was none other than the hero Masatsugu, a Top Ranker that is well-known among adventurers.

Even Haruki was doing his best to suppress the urge to scream from his chest.

“Okay… Here goes!”

Getting herself pumped, Karen placed the package on the tangerine box and slowly opened it.

Inside the 30 centimeters box, there was a round ball of about 10 centimeters.

The top side of the ball was white and its bottom side was red. It was like a big Gacha Gacha capsule.

“Umm…”

Karen seemed to be a little confused.

Her eyes looked like she wanted to ask “What could this be?”, but Haruki hadn’t seen one of those before.

So he wouldn’t have been able to answer that question anyway.

“Ah, there’s a note inside.”

“Really?”

“What does it say?”

Karen quickly opened the note, which was folded in half.

“Umm… It seems this is a recently discovered item. When they did a detailed appraisal for it… Completely unknown?”

“Completely unknown?”

Akane’s voice echoed throughout the entire prefab, probably since she was so surprised by Karen’s words.

“Does it really say they’re all unknown!?”

“Ah, er… Yes.”

Karen went pale due to Akane’s vigorous response.

Akane’s reaction was like hearing the death of a loved one.

“Hey, Akane. What’s so surprising about that?”

“Even when a detailed appraisal is unable to appraise everything, it should definitely be able to at least tell what kind of item it is. It’s the first time I hear a detailed appraisal can’t even do that.”

“How can they tell for sure?”

“When you see this, what kind of weapon do you think this is?”

After saying that, Akane took out a stick.

No matter how one looked at it, it was a wooden stick. It might have dropped from some nearby tree, and it seemed to be slightly dirty.

“If it’s a wooden stick, it could be either a club or a staff.”

“Right. And the same goes for detailed appraisals.”

“… Ah, I see.”

Haruki had a rough idea of what Akane was talking about.

The detailed appraisal identified the type of item in the same way that Haruki just now looked at a wooden stick and decided that it “could be either a club or a staff”.

However, it was on a completely different level.

“I wonder how it wasn’t able to tell what kind of thing this ball is…”

“Maybe because it’s not a weapon or something like that?”

“It works on things other than weapons and armor. Things like medicine and materials. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be able to identify stuff like the rare Werewolf materials we’ve sent them.”

“Ah, right.”

Certainly, if only armor and weapons could be appraised, there would have been no point in Haruki turning the Werewolf materials in for a detailed appraisal.

Akane brought her face closer to the capsule-looking ball with a mysterious expression on her face.

“Hmm? Hey, there’s a slit in the middle, should we open this?”

“Is that true? … Ah, it seems it can be opened! It says so on the memo. But…”

“But…”

What was written in the memo?

Haruki and Akane both tilted their heads at Karen as she stopped speaking.

“It says here that they don’t know if something will come out of it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Let’s see… It seems that this is one of five balls that they’ve obtained as drops. All five of them looked exactly the same, and the detailed appraisal for them was also completely unknown. But when they opened the other four, they all had different contents.”

“… Ah, so that’s why the result was ‘completely unknown’, huh.”

Akane nodded several times, as if she had noticed something.

“Did you realize something?”

“Yeah. Perhaps the contents of these balls aren’t determined until you actually open them. So even if you do a detailed appraisal, it wouldn’t be able to tell what kind of item they contained.”

“Their contents aren’t determined…”

For Haruki, it was an unbelievable speculation.

But the theory held water.

“Karen. Try opening that capsule.”

“Ah, sure!”

Karen stiffened her expression a bit and opened the capsule using both of her hands.

Then, inside…

“Is it empty?”

“No… There’s something here!”

From Haruki’s perspective, the capsule was empty.

However, Karen disagreed, and quickly put her hand inside the capsule.

“Wha-!?”

— All the way to the elbow?

Haruki was startled by what he was seeing.

But he quickly regained his composure.

— I see. This capsule must work kind of like the magic bag, right?

As Haruki expected, Karen took out a bracelet –a bracelet larger in diameter than the capsule that contained it.

“… It’s big, huh?”

“It’s huge.”

“It’s really, really big…”

The bracelet’s diameter was about 12 centimeters.

Its width was about the right size, but its diameter was too large for it to properly fit the wrist.