At last... I had escaped. I waited, waited for the manticore to fall asleep after eating that food... I patiently observed and waited more, trying my best not to doze off. Then she passed out, lucky bastard. It was my cue to move. And here I am, at the mouth leading out of the cave.
I could see the outside scenery. It was nighttime, it seemed, and as I moved closer, it was getting freezing colder. But I don't have time to complain. I could see glimpses of stars twinkling in the sky, and the rustle of leaves as winds passed over trees. But I can't mistake it for the real world; even if I came out of this cave, I'm still trapped in an unknown dungeon.
Doing my best to crawl out made me already exhausted. I definitely feel so sleepy that I could lose consciousness at any moment. The only thing that keeps me moving is fear and determination. In fact, my eyes are blurred and my eyelids are shutting off. But a voice gained my attention to open them back again.
"Hello, li'l goblin."
My first thought at that moment was to move back and hide behind some stalagmites. I believe it is the right call. With those infected creatures and the manticore, having a normal decent entity around is just hard to imagine. And why would anyone greet a goblin? A sane line of thought would be to exterminate them like pests as soon as they see one. This is what I would have done if I were still a human.
My eyes cleared, and I noticed the fog-like substance around the tunnel. I've been passing through it a lot without me noticing, but I recalled that those are the moisture that keeps the cave warm inside. It seems like the pond inside the cave kept evaporating and condensing by itself over time and that produced the thin and almost transparent fog around.
Then my eyes drifted to the one who greeted me. I was surprised to find out that it was an old granny.
"Oh, don't be scared. I'm just a regular old lady passing by."
Passing by? In a dungeon full of sick monsters?
While her smile is seemingly normal and harmless, her tattered clothing made me frown for a moment. It's almost identical to the beggars on the outskirts of the town of Parmedia. That made her invoke my somewhat inner pity, but that's what made me wary. It's impossible that a random beggar just willfully entered a dungeon without a weapon and ended up on the 27th floor. She may be an adventurer but why dress up like some random nobody?
If she's an old adventurer who's still active at her age, she might be considered a witch or an elder witch, meaning she is a very strong mage. No need to deceive a goblin with feeble clothing.
Then here's what makes me more wary.
"Do you want some sweets?"
The grandma picked up something from her pocket, and as she opened her hands, there was candy wrapped in paper packaging... then there were black spiders crawling out of her hand.
"Oops, I dropped it." She intentionally dropped it! I saw it! Then she tried to reach it back again but was unable to bend her back or her knees. "Ow ow... My back! It seems like old age did a lot in my body. Can you pick it up for me, little goblin?" She smiled widely without any teeth!
She felt like a kidnapper trying to steal kids to sell their organs in the black market. You won't deceive me by that, fool! And so I crawled slowly backward... She became so desperate by then that she offered something strange.
"Don't go away! Fine. I'll let you see my boobs! No, I will let you grope them!"
WTF! NO! But she's freaking serious that she bent on her back and her loose clothing revealed her saggy chest! YUCK! Large boobs are greatness, flat chests are holy, and saggy chests are despair. They look like outgrown skin wagging on someone's torso like a worm. Plus, it has a lot of wrinkles as deep like trenches of hell.
So I decided to go back... I don't know her intention, and I don't want to know. She's trying to get me out of the cave, but there is no reason that she couldn't get in with just a few steps. Is she afraid of the manticore? Lucky for me, I owe that beast one for protecting me from this unholy pervert.
Looking back at the dark tunnel that I had once crawled through, the eerie silence made me gulp. So... there are a lot of dangerous people out there, much more deranged than the manticore, huh?
"..."
No matter, I'll leave once the granny is gone or killed or whatever... Damn, why is it okay for me for a weak-looking granny to die? The thought made me worried for a moment, and I looked back.
"Gotcha!"
Only to see her standing right behind me with a melting face, oozing yellow pus. Her eyes almost popping out of the skull, and there are a lot of worms crawling out of her nose and ears. She grabbed me tightly with strength I couldn't imagine an old woman could possess. Then she proceeds to walk out of the cave while her body slowly deteriorates from the inside out.
"Gahh! I'm melting! My Queen, I'm melting!"
The woman screamed in pain while I was also in fear. She smelled rotting, and her touch was cold as a corpse... Damn, she's a fucking infected! I struggled to release myself from her grasp but she was far stronger than me, even in the state where her arms were bony and spurting a lot of pus.
Then as we got out, she threw me on the ground only to pull my legs towards her back again.
"Come on. Touch my boobs. Touch them and suck my nipples hard until they bleed."
She tore off the chest part of her clothing to show me the despairing boobs attached to her torso. So I screamed hard, harder than I could imagine. "NYOOOO!"
Then I kicked her face and threw some rocks into her eyes that stuck in her eye socket. She released her grip and sighed.
"Why...? Why won't you ever grope me!? Ah... so that's how it is. You want to touch younger girls instead. No, don't be a pedophile. Women are like red wine, the older it gets, the more delicious they become. Not because I'm old means I'm ugly."
BUT YOU'RE UGLY!! WHAT THE FUCK!?
"Ah... I miss my baby. She often bit my nipples even without teeth."
Ughh! AGHH! My body! I feel so cold... I feel like I am getting stabbed in every direction. It felt like something is sucking all of my blood and eating me from the inside. My body felt stiffer, I saw my veins swell into extremes that blood was popping out of my skin. My sight is turning all dark... then... I...
"You're having a nightmare."
My eyes opened when I felt the blunt part of the manticore's tail push against my cheeks. Did I fall asleep? What the...? But I did my best to stay awake... This body is really inconvenient!
"I forgot to tell you. If you leave this cave, the infection will spread throughout your body within seconds."
Hmm...? Did I really fall asleep, or did I pass out after I was attacked? That nightmare was so vivid that I thought it was the end of me. I scanned my body for wounds but found nothing. But the manticore might have healed me after I passed out, so I couldn't rule out that possibility. Still, whether it was just a nightmare or it really happened, the image of the granny burned into my retina... and her saggy boobs still haunt me to this day.
"Come. Eat."
The manticore offered me something to eat. Now, instead of roasting the flesh, it had a soup with no other ingredients but the bony meat. I didn't want to eat this, but I was too hungry to resist. But I felt weirded out... Last time, the monkey was large enough that the manticore ate as well, but now she's eating nothing at all. The quantity of the meat might be the reason. Yeah... Last time, she only extracted the edible parts of the monkey and disposed of the rest that was too rotten to recover. Maybe this time, the rotten portion is too much that she only extracted this much? Well, whatever.
I sunk my teeth into the tough meat. It didn't taste like wine at all... What am I even saying? It's just that the meat's texture felt so old that it reminded me of something. But the taste, it was better than last time. I wondered if the manticore had cooked the same monkey monster or something else.