"He spilled it easier than I expected."
Vihera muttered briefly in front of the room three doors down from the researcher's quarters—a room being used as a warehouse.
Easy, she said, but in reality, the researcher had initially refused to answer Rei's questions about where the Black Crystal was located and had tried to deflect with other information.
That remained the case even after both his arms had been pierced multiple times by Long Needles. Still, the researcher refused to say where the Black Crystal was.
He looked visibly miserable, but given the researcher's words and deeds, there was no room for sympathy. A faint smell of blood even hung in the room.
The fact that he absolutely refused to talk about critical information even after all that—though he would readily divulge trivial details—suggested the man was competent as a researcher.
Or rather, it could simply be said that he harbored a powerful obsession with the Black Crystal he was researching.
At any rate, the reason the man, who had kept silent for those reasons, finally revealed where the Black Crystal was located came down to Rei declaring he would tear the nails off both of the man's hands, carve up his fingers, then carve up his palms, and then carve up his arms.
No, he didn't just say it—he actually tore off the nail of the man's pinky finger with a knife.
That became the decisive blow that finally broke him.
Of course, the fact that he hadn't divulged anything even after both arms were pierced by Long Needles meant it wasn't simply that he had succumbed to pain.
It was simply that losing the use of both hands would deal a fatal level of damage to him as a researcher.
If he could no longer perform experiments, then naturally he couldn't write reports or do anything of the sort either.
With a Magic Item prosthetic hand, some things might be manageable, but that was only if it were an extremely high-performance Magic Item prosthetic.
As for whether Jaya would provide such an expensive Magic Item prosthetic to the man... probably not.
The man was competent as a researcher, but not so irreplaceable that no one could substitute for him.
If it came down to it, there were other researchers with similar abilities, and the man had not originally belonged to Jaya—he had been forcibly brought in.
Given that, they could never fully trust him.
The man himself understood that, which was why he revealed the Black Crystal's location with true reluctance—with a feeling that, to him, wouldn't have been surprising even if he had shed tears of blood.
(The deepest layer of the fifth basement floor. ...Well, that's pretty much the standard, the expected pattern.)
Watching Byune attempt to unlock the door, Rei thought about where the Black Crystal was located.
The distance from the man's room to this warehouse wasn't that great, but perhaps because it was an emergency, traps had been set.
However, Byune had disarmed most of them, and even the ones she couldn't disarm could have been easily broken by Rei and the others.
Byune had essentially become a combat-specialized thief, but her pure skills as a thief were by no means low—she possessed average proficiency.
Sure enough, even now, Byune was trying to pick the lock on the room being used as a warehouse.
...The man's room earlier had been secured with a bar brace, but perhaps because this was a place for storing consumables, it still warranted a proper lock.
Though simple, the door was firmly locked.
"That man was, for better or worse, a researcher. ...Honestly, given what he was researching, I couldn't bring myself to like him. But if he'd been researching something else—something harmless, like potions—I probably wouldn't have felt such disgust."
"Even potions can be a matter of life and death depending on the situation, you know?"
"That's true. I've heard that excessive consumption is bad for the body. And I've also heard stories of people who developed an immunity to potions after using them continuously."
"...What? Immunity? You mean potions stop working?"
What came from Elena's mouth was news Rei was hearing for the first time as well.
"It's true. Of course, it's not something that happens with just a few vials. It's about using potions continuously for days on end, so under normal circumstances, you don't need to worry about it."
"Using potions for days straight—what kind of opponent would you have to fight for that to happen?"
"From what I heard, it was a fight against a massive Golem excavated from an Ancient Magic Civilization ruin... one so tall it would match the height of about three Mejougo buildings. Apparently, it took over five days to defeat. Of course, no one was fighting alone the whole time—multiple parties took turns in rotation."
"...That's a little interesting."
"Yeah. I'm interested too."
Vihera agreed with Rei's words.
However, the aspects that interested Rei and Vihera were subtly different.
When Rei said he was interested, it was simply because he wanted to see that Golem for himself. He wondered if it might be something like a super robot. But in Vihera's case, her words came from a desire to fight such a powerful enemy.
Since Vihera was fundamentally someone who had no complaints as long as the opponent was strong, a Golem larger than a house was exactly the kind of foe that would stimulate her combat lust.
Letting those two's remarks pass, Marina continued.
"Anyway, the adventurers who overused potions during the battle with that Golem apparently could barely recover using potions for a while afterward."
"Uwaa..."
A murmur tinged with pity slipped from Vihera's mouth.
Rei understood that feeling as well.
Mages were already a considerably rare existence to begin with.
Among them, those who could use Recovery Magic were even fewer, and being able to form a party with someone who could use it was extremely fortunate.
Those who weren't blessed with such fortune naturally had no choice but to rely on potions for recovery.
If potions stopped healing injuries or became harder to recover from, it would be difficult to continue working as an adventurer.
For the record, the one currently using Recovery Magic in the Crimson Lotus Wings was Marina.
That was because Water Spirit Magic included spells that could heal injuries.
When Rei had been operating solo, potions were his primary means of recovery.
Of course, in Rei's case, he had the Dragon Robe—a powerful piece of armor—and his own sharp reflexes, so he was rarely injured in battle.
"Mn!"
As Rei and the others were talking about potions, Byune suddenly murmured.
Turning his gaze toward the door at the sound, Rei saw that it was open.
(I could have just smashed the door down and gone in... but she stopped me, saying that if there were traps, we wouldn't be able to get what was inside.)
Since what was in this warehouse was supposedly just consumables, it wasn't as if he wanted the contents that badly.
However, if there turned out to be fewer Magic Items than he had initially anticipated, he needed to make up for it somewhere.
...In reality, Rei already possessed enough wealth that an ordinary person could live in leisure for several lifetimes, so it wasn't that he desperately needed more. But this was likely a reflection of Rei's personality—taking what he could get.
Moreover, considering what might happen to this Underground Facility in a few hours, everything in the warehouse could potentially turn to ash.
That was why he had Byune unlock the door, but...
"You're right, you could call these consumables. I never expected to find a mountain of cloth, though."
What was inside the warehouse was a massive quantity of cloth.
Whether it was used for experiments or daily life, Rei didn't know, but fairly good-quality fabric was packed into the room, filling it to the brim.
"What could they have been using it for? ...Maybe that man from earlier was sewing his own clothes?"
At Vihera's wildly incongruous guess, Rei imagined the scene and couldn't help but burst out laughing.
But he immediately voiced a denial.
"No, that's probably not it. From the look of him, he was quite slovenly. And his clothes—who knows how many days he'd been wearing them."
Rei wondered if perhaps the man wore clothes until they got dirty and then threw them away instead of washing them, but he kept that thought to himself for now and picked up a nearby piece of cloth, storing it in the Misty Ring.
For the time being, he decided to store whatever he could.
He stashed the cloth from the warehouse one piece after another, until eventually there was nothing left in the room but shelves.
What all this fabric was used for and how was beyond Rei's imagination, but it would probably be useful for something. At worst, he could sell it as-is to some shop.
Normally, cloth was quite bulky and hard to transport, but for Rei, who possessed the Misty Ring, that was no problem at all.
"Alright, then the next one is the room five doors down from here. ...How about we just smash the door open quickly instead of unlocking it? It doesn't seem like there were any traps in this warehouse either."
"Mn!"
At Rei's words, Byune expressed her dissatisfaction, as if to say, Don't take my job!
Byune was self-aware as a thief, but there were few situations in this party where her Thief Skills came in handy.
After all, Rei and the others could handle most things through sheer force, so there was honestly no need to bother disarming traps.
The possibility that this was why Byune had become a combat-specialized thief couldn't be denied.
Rei understood that Byune was unusually unhappy with his words, and he spoke as if to reason with her.
"You might be forgetting, but we're conducting a raid on this Underground Facility. It hasn't been that long since we entered, so I don't think it's a problem yet... but you understand that we should deal with things as quickly as possible, right?"
"Mn."
At Rei's words, Byune murmured, her tone softening just slightly.
In truth, Rei wasn't as worried as his words suggested.
The largest entrance to this Underground Facility was being guarded by Set.
He couldn't possibly imagine that anyone in this nation of Reblurina—or in Jaya—could fight on equal footing with Set.
The man from earlier hadn't known, but since it was certain that this Underground Facility had other entrances, the possibility of reinforcements arriving from somewhere else couldn't be denied.
...Even so, Rei would insist there was no problem.
After all, none of the opponents they had fought in this Underground Facility had made him feel threatened so far.
Even the gatekeepers, said to be the elite, could only end up being routed by Vihera and the others.
The only concern was, as expected, the Giants.
How strong were they exactly? And how many were there?
Without understanding those details, he could only count them as an unknown factor.
"At any rate, we should hurry as much as we can... the Giants are one thing, but we need to do something about the Black Crystal."
Ideally, Rei would have liked to do something about the prostitutes who were pregnant with Giants as well, but there was no means to do so.
The moment a Giant was born, the prostitute would lose her life.
Or, if she had only just become pregnant, there might be some way to forcibly induce a miscarriage... but Rei couldn't think of any such method.
(If anything could be done, it would be to kill them without suffering, without even letting them realize they had died.)
Though she probably wasn't reading Rei's thoughts, Byune showed no sign of complaining any further.
Confirming that all the cloth in the room was gone, Rei and the others stepped outside.
They continued down the passage and eventually arrived at another warehouse.
"Mn? This is... I see."
The moment the door was broken open, the scent that drifted out made it easy to imagine what kind of room it was.
Even without a sense of smell as sharp as Rei's, distinguishing the aroma drifting from the broken door was not difficult, and the others also realized what was inside the warehouse.
"You're right—researchers are human too, so there's no way they could go without eating."
As Marina murmured thoughtfully, everything inside the warehouse was food.
And Rei, figuring there was no such thing as having too much food, began storing everything into the Misty Ring one item after another.