“Well then — off we go~!”
The Palm-Top Rabbit Expeditionary Force, Sonya commanding, has been formally established.
Wardrobe-wise they’ve fully committed to the explorer bit: beige shorts, short-sleeved jackets and shirts, and hats… the exact outfit you’d wear to a jungle shoot.
Ouroboros prepared it all with tremendous enthusiasm — though how these creatures know the stereotypical Japanese variety-show “explorer team” aesthetic remains an unsolved mystery.
So, per Cornelia… high-level monsters are running thin in the neighborhood lately.
Cornelia’s income comes from hunting magic beasts and selling them to the demon realm, and a letter arrived recently amounting to: PLEASE, for the love of everything, ease up.
Her position: hunting is fine, but hunt with MODERATION — which is a concept you simply cannot explain to our attackers, the palm-top rabbits.
True to the “Gluttons of Massacre” epithet, standard operating procedure is that nothing survives their passage. Not even the weeds.
Root-cause analysis: they’re originally a nomadic species running slash-and-burn culture, so permanent settlement was always going to strain the local ecosystem.
—Hence: the expedition.
You already know the Forest of No Return is itself a dungeon — but it turns out there’s ANOTHER dungeon inside the forest.
A legend-class one that has swallowed and killed scores of high-rank adventurers, its depths supposedly stuffed with gold, silver, treasure, and the effects of the fallen.
“Departure~♪”
Expedition roster: Sonya, Maria, and twenty palm-top rabbits.
It’s apparently a genuinely lethal dungeon and Maria wants to go approximately not-at-all — but leaving it to the rabbits alone… well, we can all picture how that ends.
Their sense of monetary value rounds to zero, remember.
There is a live risk they’d walk past the gold and haul home CARROTS.
Hence my personal request that Maria accompany them.
“Yeah — stay safe out there!”
And the expedition set off for the dungeon.