Chapter 224: Chapter 224

Vines slither alongside my stomping feet, the lush green tendrils of the jungle creeping along my side like a uh… like a big group of snakes. A pack? No. A herd? Mm… no… what’s the word for a bunch of snakes? A school of snakes? No, I think that’s just for fish. Hmm… I’m just gonna go ahead and say a slither. A slither of snakes. Yeah, that sounds good.

 

  - Creeping along my side like a slither of snakes, the thick tendrils sliding across the ground, pressing through the dense foliage as they accompany me. They aren’t really doing anything, but I can’t help but feel like their quiet presence is an implied threat in and of itself. Either from the dungeon or from whatever is left on floor sixty-one.

 

Dense, thick, lush, green foliage surrounds me. Plants and ferns and vines of all manner fill the entire space. The air is thick and heavy and wet. Yet apart from the tendrils, nothing else stirs in the jungle. It’s all dead. Lucky me.

 

Something sharp snips in the distance, like a pair of closing scissors.

 

I push through the plants, my boots sinking a little into the schlocky, wet goop that makes up the jungle floor. A thick, dense mud through witch the tendrils slickly slide.

 

Witch?

 

Which.

 

  I scratch my head. There was a witch on floor uh… sixty-seven? I think? But there’s no witch here. Here, there’s just the jungle and myself. Well, and the tentacles. And the slime-girl. Who is also sort of tentacles in her own way. But that’s okay. What really matters are the tentacles inside of us.

 

Wait…

 

She bubbles in excitement, but her hands are busy reaching out to touch the plants as we walk past them. I suppose she’s never seen anything like it really. All of this green.

 

“It’s like that time I was a lizard!” she says, looking at the bright green world around us.

 

“Yeah, well no, but sure,” I tell her. It’s because lizards are green, you see. So it’s the same thing. Sort of. It’s complicated.

 

The thing about the jungle is that it’s a strange place. It’s a mixture of an odd sense of healing mysticism and at the same time -

 

The tendrils slip through a hollow skull, coming out of the other end as they slide through the mud.

 

  -At the same time it’s also a place where things die. I suppose the jungle is sort of an extreme like that. It goes both ways. Either you swallow it or it swallows you, haha, but one way or the other, somebody is getting eaten. Jungle plants have great medicinal properties though. The adventurers love it, because it’s basically an entire floor full of free medicine.

 

Something snips ahead of us. Probably a collector.

 

I press through the foliage before us, pushing a thick shrub to the side and stepping through it, looking into the small clearing where a large, four-legged creature scuttles around. It’s a giant, deceased crab. An undead crab, covered in a mound of decayed plant matter that it collects.

 

*Schink*

 

  I watch as it grabs hold of a vine with one of its pincers, cutting it in half and simply throwing the broken vine over its back, adding it to the rest of its collection of plants. It scuttles over the muddy floor of the jungle, over to the other side of the clearing, where it begins trimming a large shrub, grabbing large bushels of leaves and tossing them onto its back together with the rest. As it moves, it loses mounds of its collected greenery. But it doesn’t seem to care, it simply keeps snipping away more plants and adding them to the pile.

 

It’s not eating them. It’s just kind of… collecting them.

 

I step out into the clearing, the crab freezes after turning with a quick jolt to the left, to face me.

 

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Its pincers click in excitement.

 

The slime-girl pops out of me, holding her hands into the air and mimicking the crab’s clicking noises. Though hers sound a little more uh… wet, tell you what.

 

“Hi~!” calls out the undead crab in excitement, its voice oddly high pitched and squeaky. Like an excited fairy.

 

I tilt my head. That’s weird. But, not wanting to be rude, I raise my hand and wave. “Hi.”

 

“Hi!” calls the crab again.

 

Uh…

 

“Hi?” I ask.

 

  “Hi!” it calls again. I’m starting to think that’s the only thing it can say. Shrugging, I step into the clearing, taking the extra effort to walk around the giant crab, that is as easily wide as I am tall in this body. It follows me, turning with its body to always face us with its front, its pincers in the air. The tendrils continue to slither and slide through the mud, following me.

 

“Hi!” it calls again in its strange, squeaky voice.

 

“Hi,” I awkwardly wave to the crab, walking sideways past it.

 

“Hi!” calls the slime-girl excitedly, waving to the crab who waves back.

 

“Hi!” says the crab again.

 

“Hi!” I nod to the deceased crab, getting to the edge of the clearing and slowly stepping back into the jungle.

 

“Hi!” calls the crab as we leave.

 

“Hi!” shouts the slime-girl back as the greenery rises back up around us.

 

Well that was weird. I don’t think it was a metaphor. I think it was just a weird crab. That’s fine, guy, you know? Sometimes life gives you metaphors. Sometimes it gives you crabs in an untrimmed jungle.

 

Wait. I scratch my head. Is this… Nah. The dungeon wouldn’t sink that low. Looking down to the slick tentacles, sliding through the thick, slick mud, I nod to them. They nod back.

 

It’s probably fine. Keeping on walking, I do my best to ignore any innuendos or metaphors. I just kind of want to leave, you know? I’m not really in the mood to learn any lessons right now.

 

“Hi!” calls a voice from far behind us.

 

“Hi!” I shout back with a loud tone at the strange crab. It’s just good manners is all.

 

 

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