Beneath the vast ceiling overhead, brilliant light illuminated everything around them.
After a brief discussion, Sora Aratō and Asagami Fujino made a unanimous decision about their base:
they would use the beehive right beside them.
They still knew nothing about what kind of ecosystem this "Dungeon World" truly had.
And the known was always more reliable than the unknown.
This area, at least, had a confirmed fact: the region's apex power—the giant hive swarm—had already been defeated by them. For the time being, it could be treated as safe.
If they wandered into some other zone, who knew what they might run into?
More than that, the hive's location itself was ideal. As the queen's command center and the point from which worker bees once spread out, it sat near the heart of the mountain—open sightlines, central position.
From a strategic standpoint alone, it was excellent.
"Of course, the most important thing is that we'll need to eat for the next seven days."
In Dungeon World, characters were governed by three indicators:
Satiety, HP, and Sanity.
Based on what Sora had learned earlier in the game:
If satiety dropped below half, the character would enter a weak, hunger-induced state.
If satiety fell to zero, both HP and sanity would begin to plummet rapidly.
Back when they were only dealing with the single objective "Clear the Giant Beehive," food hadn't been a problem.
But now, things were different.
Standing beside the huge hive, Sora examined the polygonal, honeycomb structure within, searching as he went.
Compared to eating unknown dungeon plants or beasts, honey—an obviously non-toxic food source—was plainly more suitable as nutrition.
Given the scale of this hive, they might genuinely survive all seven days living off honey alone.
Sora extended a finger and scraped up a small layer of honey from the inside.
In the sunlight, the sweet, cloying honey reflected a rich golden glow.
He placed his finger in his mouth.
On his tongue bloomed a sweetness mixed with floral fragrance, fruit notes… and something unmistakably meaty.
Compared to the honey he remembered, what he tasted now was closer to an absurdly delicious, nutrient-dense, concentrated meat broth.
Even though Sora didn't particularly care for sweets—
he couldn't help being startled by how good it was.
"So these bees are actually omnivorous?" he muttered. "There's flesh mixed into the honey?"
The taste instantly pushed him to that conclusion.
Thinking back, during their last extermination of the giant bees, they had barely seen any other large predatory creatures on the mountain.
In nature, if there's an ecological niche, something will occupy it.
If the mountain had no other meat-hunting species, then something must be filling that role—
and now it looked like the giant bees were the answer.
"Can flesh really be brewed into honey?"
A crisp voice sounded beside him.
Fujino spoke softly near Sora's shoulder.
"Who knows?" Sora said, turning to her as he spoke. "Their bodies already don't follow natural law. If they have some method to turn flesh into honey… it's not impossible. We can study it later if we have time."
Then he noticed it:
Fujino's gaze was fixed firmly on his finger.
She'd been carefully watching his actions from the start.
In fact, she'd even thought—just for a moment—
that maybe she could suddenly lean in and take the honey from his finger with her mouth.
The scene had already played out in her mind.
But in the end, she only imagined it.
In reality, she didn't move at all.
"The taste really is good," Sora said with a smile, following her line of sight. "Want to try?"
"…Yes. I'll try too."
Fujino nodded and answered quietly.
She didn't attempt to explain away her real thoughts.
Asagami Fujino was timid—someone who didn't move.
All her life, she had restrained and endured her impulses.
She couldn't act as she pleased.
Because her way of thinking was different from everyone else's—who knew whether the thoughts inside her head might expose her as abnormal?
Being isolated and being "wrong" were sins in themselves.
She didn't want to become an outsider in other people's eyes.
Imitating what Sora had done, Fujino leaned her head toward the crack in the hive, scraped some honey with her finger, and lifted it into the light to examine its color.
Perhaps because Sora had mentioned it might be made from flesh—
or perhaps because she was inherently sensitive to such things—
Fujino felt like she saw a faint hint of blood within the honey's golden hue.
Honey and flesh—two things that shouldn't blend—
and yet here they were, mixed.
That alone carried a sense of unreality, like something drifting far outside the real world.
This was something that didn't exist in reality.
—This was the world of dreams. This was a game.
In a dream, you could be a little bolder.
…
And while Fujino stared at the honey, slipping into that distant, wandering state—
Sora reached into the hive again and scraped out more honey.
This time he wasn't doing it simply to eat.
He was observing it from the perspective of magecraft—testing whether the honey could serve as a material for constructing rituals.
He intended to cast the magecraft he had just learned once more.
Even if the hive's true ruler—the queen—had been taken out of this world by him…
the countless giant bee corpses they had killed last time were still here.
And since time in the dungeon seemed to freeze whenever they left, those corpses could be treated as "recently dead."
"Bury the creature," Sora murmured, recalling the method, "refine it into 'coal' through a special process… and when necessary, burn that 'coal' to squeeze out the life-force again, turning those lives into power."
Magecraft was a technique for reproducing the past—history and concepts.
The "Coal Witch," Liddel, and the aristocratic Achesrot line she represented, had risen during the First Industrial Revolution.
In that era, burning coal as a power source pushed human society forward.
That history became the foundation of the Achesrot family's power.
And Mei Liddel Achesrot's magecraft was rooted in that very concept.
"It's grand and legitimate—power born from the Industrial Revolution," Sora thought aloud, "so why does it still feel like necromancy?"
Even as he mused, his hands never stopped.
Just as coal's power required factories and machinery to harness—
Coal Magecraft likewise needed "coal-adjacent" things to construct a device that could refine coal.
And for giant bees…
what could be more perfect than using their own hive to refine them?
Or, more precisely—
"As true social insects, the workers are nothing but tools," Sora said, his eyes gradually brightening. "They exist to be squeezed for labor. From the moment they're born, they're already being refined."
Now he had a direction.
If he leveraged the relationship between worker bees and the hive—
and used Coal Magecraft's foundational method to refine them—
then Sora believed he could produce exceptionally high-quality "coal."
....
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