The smell was the worst part. Not the guts, not the flies, not even the crunch when the shovel bit through half-rotted bone—but the smell. Yuji gagged as he scraped a raccoon off the highway, its insides sun-baked and maggot-blooming.
"You chose this," he muttered to himself, eyes watering.
It wasn’t entirely true. He didn’t choose the student debt, the dropout spiral, the way even a minimum-wage job in retail seemed too human-facing. But this—dead animals on the side of the road—this was something he could do. Until the gag reflex kicked in.
He bent over, hand to his mouth, and puked. Hard. Right in the middle of the ne.
The horn came too te.
Yuji looked up, eyes wide, vomit still on his lips.
THUNK.
Bckness. Then a faint hum. Something mechanical. Something wrong.
A digital interface blinked into existence in the void:
[REINCARNATION PROGRAM RUNNING][SELECTING WORLD...][SELECTING JOB TYPE...][ERROR: JOB-WORLD COMPATIBILITY FAILED][RESELECTING WORLD: PRIORITIZING JOB TYPE...]
Yuji floated, weightless.
[JOB CONFIRMED: CORPSE LOOTER][SPAWNING ENTITY...]
He hit the ground with a thud.
The dungeon floor wasn’t quite a battlefield, but it had the air of one cleaned up in a hurry. Cracked stone, scorch marks, and the occasional streak of something that might've once been a face. The others worked like overworked janitors with swords—slicing through corpses, grimacing, and stuffing loot into sacks with the energy of people who’d rather be anywhere else. No one moved fast until someone yelled. Then it was all motion, all gritted teeth and full sacks.
There were five of them total:
One of them—the girl who’d renamed him Yuuge—was pretty in a blunt, unimpressed sort of way and had already scolded him for puking. Another was a squat, thick guy silently chewing on what might’ve once been food. A third, tall and pale, with long bck hair, drifted between corpses like smoke and occasionally startled Yuji by appearing directly behind him. He didn't seem to be doing much work. Sometimes, your ability to fade into the background is what saves your back. Yuji was sure he had the opposite quality, whatever it was. From somewhere deeper in the dungeon, a commanding voice echoed out, calling for someone to "bag the fresh tendons."
He tried to mimic Chu, who was expertly slicing into a hobgoblin and yanking out a mana gnd.
Yuji picked a smaller goblin and unsheathed his dagger. The body twitched. He gagged.
"Yuuge!" Chu called, exasperated. "You're wasting time and bile."
"Here," she continued, handing him a dagger, "just put all the fallen weapons with the green glow in the sack and try to stay out of the way. And don't make eye contact with the heroes—it's in our contract."
After nearly an hour of work, Yuji was managing to hold it together. Kind of. The smell was still awful, but he stuck some torn-up rags up his nose. He knew this permanently put him on ice with any girl he were to meet out here, but still he had to do it. In the back, if you could step over the bodies, it was actually kind of quiet. There was a kind of solitude down in the dungeon that he appreciated.
Picking stuff up wasn’t so bad. What was it, really? Just discarded things. Unwanted things. He almost felt a kinship with them—if they weren't so... oozy. He mused on this philosophically to himself, but that distraction prevented him from seeing the most gross thing that he could possibly have ever seen. If he hadn't had his head in the clouds, he might have been able to avoid it. His foot bumped it first.
Then he saw it. He didn't know how he knew what happened. Something in his mind had come to this conclusion—accelerated panic calcution of the subconscious. It was the only way to expin what he saw, and his mind was desperate for an answer:
A giant ogre, bloated and blistered, y split open down the middle like an overripe fruit. Its belly had been distended from weeks of hoarding cheese—whole wheels of it—which had melted into a bubbling fondue under the heat of a fire spell. At some point during its death throes, the ogre had released a massive, sulfurous fart, igniting into a secondary explosion that cooked three nearby goblins alive. Those same goblins, now hacked apart, were infested with squirming maggots accelerated by a miscast time spell, so they were visibly decomposing at high speed, their skin sliding off like meat from boiled bones. The smell hit Yuji like a backhand from a demon. He nearly bcked out. He had never seen—or smelled—anything so tragically grotesque.
His gut clenched. He leaned forward, about to retch—but stopped himself. Unsure why in this moment, he chose to try to wrest back self-control. Perhaps it was the extremeness of the situation, or maybe he was just tired of being kicked around.
Breathing hard, but with visible effort, he wiped his mouth and turned—
—and saw a faint shimmer out of the corner of his eye, almost a blink. For a second, he wasn't sure that he had seen it at all. It seemed to come from inside an opening in the wall, like a door—but not. If you weren't looking directly at it, you'd never have seen it.
Curious, he crept over. The shimmer blinked again. This time he was sure, and he stepped into the opening.
—and the floor gave out beneath him, and he began to slide.
He nded hard in darkness. Something cold and wet cushioned the fall.
Yuji looked down.
It was a corpse. And he was face-first in it. Reality was literally shoving its grossness into his face.
He scrambled back, gagging again, and furiously wiped his face. Were goblins infectious? While contempting, he saw something move in the tunnel ahead. Maybe it was a hero, and desperately he raced ahead to catch up, putting the entirety of his aesthetic unpleasantness on hold.
A red goblin, holding a sack. It stood there frozen, just like Yuji.
They locked eyes. It looked panicked—but moreover, surprised.
Yuji slowly reached inside the loot bag—somehow he had retained it—pulling out a rusty dagger, quickly, his hands shaking visibly. The dagger was so old and rusty, he was afraid that it would fall apart from the shakiness of his hands.
The goblin did not retaliate. It only looked scared. Visibly so. And for a moment, they just stood there frozen, terrified of each other.
But then the goblin did something wholly unexpected. It reached into its sack, pulled out a glowing scroll, and offered it, arms outstretched.
Yuji blinked. Hesitant, but his hand stopped shaking. Slowly, his knife hand dropped to his side, and with his other he reached out and took the scroll.
The red goblin gave a brief nod, paused himself, then ran away, feet cttering.
Yuji breathed a sigh of relief, and then—
CRUNCH!
A stone sb fell from above, crushing the goblin instantly, the impact so heavy it almost popped Yuji onto his feet.
Yuji whipped his head around, staring. There was nothing left that he could see but a barely twitching left hand. Even the satchel was crushed underneath—the stone was so massive.
Soon, footsteps echoed behind him.
"Yuuge! Did you disappear down here?" It was Chu's voice.
Panicked, Yuji looked around. He felt he had to stash the scroll—but not in the bag, it would be discovered, he thought. There was nowhere to stash the scroll—except… he loosened his belt.
Chu dropped in, scanning the room. His comrades had closed exceptionally quickly.
"You find anything?"
Yuji turned, trying to act casual. She plugged her nose at first—clearly he smelled—then she looked down. In his haste to conceal the scroll, it now created a bulge in his pants.
"Are you ill, new hire?"
"I'm fine. Just dungeon nerves."
The squat guy dropped in after her, muttered something inaudible. He was chewing on something. Yuji hoped it wasn't monster parts.
Chu nodded.
"Come on then, we can't lose another newbie. We'll have to do..."
She started counting on her fingers.
Yuji did his best to conceal his smirk. She couldn't do math.
After that, they emerged from the dungeon, their backs breaking under the weight of massive loot sacks. Yuji could barely stand. They loaded up into the carts that took them back to town. There were only a few carts. For some reason, Yuji had expected something more.
Just inside the town gate, the sorters' area was chaos—giant conveyor belts, shouting crews, sparks flying from enchanted tools. But Yuji didn't mind. The gate guards looked intimidating, as well as the city itself—like a small tree that had quickly grown into an oak. He was gd to be free of its impressiveness and past any scrutiny. They tossed their bags quickly, and the woman with the commanding voice from before gave the signal.
To Yuji's surprise, Chu grabbed his hand and pulled him along.
"What about the loot?"
"The sorters will take care of that, come on, or we'll have to help!" she shouted back, ughing.
They were all ughing, as they ran through the metal corridors.
The secret hot springs were powered by whatever massive furnace was heating the rest of this building. Mist curled into the air. Dark torchlight lit the cavern. It reminded him of the dungeon. He wondered if the stone pool they swam in originally was meant for this purpose. The guys and girls were separated by a low wall, but voices carried.
Yuji sank into the water with a sigh. His skin stung from scrapes and bruises, but it was worth it.
Chu’s voice carried over: "If I lose another toenail, I’m quitting."
The squat guy, half-submerged and chewing, grunted: "Quit after dinner."
Yuji closed his eyes.
“…you’re part of it now.”
He flinched.
The pale, whispering one had appeared behind him. A shiver went up Yuji's spine.
"What do you mean?" Yuji asked.
But the man said nothing. He casually spewed water like a fountain from his mouth and submerged again, the dark long hair draped over everything but his eyes.
Yuji sank lower into the water.
He wasn’t sure what he’d just stepped into—but it was warm, wet, and probably cursed.
Just like everything else. Like that cursed scroll, now in its cursed hiding pce.