Copyright
IS IT WRONG TO TRY TO PICK UP GIRLS IN A DUNGEON?
ON THE SIDE: SWORD ORATORIA, Volume 5
FUJINO OMORI
Translation by Liv Sommerlot
Cover art by Kiyotaka Haimura
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
DUNGEON NI DEAI WO MOTOMERU NO WA MACHIGATTEIRUDAROUKA GAIDEN SWORD ORATORIA vol. 5
Copyright © 2015 Fujino Omori
Illustration copyright © Kiyotaka Haimura
Original Character Design © Suzuhito Yasuda
All rights reserved.
Original Japanese edition published in 2015 by SB Creative Corp.
This English edition is published by arrangement with SB Creative Corp., Tokyo, in care of Tuttle-Mori Agency, Inc., Tokyo.
English translation © 2018 by Yen Press, LLC
Yen Press, LLC supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact the publisher. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
Yen On
1290 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10104
Visit us at yenpress.com
facebook.com/yenpress
twitter.com/yenpress
yenpress.tumblr.com
instagram.com/yenpress
First Yen On Edition: February 2018
Yen On is an imprint of Yen Press, LLC.
The Yen On name and logo are trademarks of Yen Press, LLC.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: O–mori, Fujino, author. | Haimura, Kiyotaka, 1973– illustrator. | Yasuda, Suzuhito, designer.
Title: Is it wrong to try to pick up girls in a dungeon? on the side: sword oratoria / story by Fujino Omori ; illustration by Kiyotaka Haimura ; original design by Suzuhito Yasuda.
Other titles: Danjon ni deai wo motomeru no wa machigatteirudarouka gaiden sword oratoria. English.
Description: New York, NY : Yen On, 2016– | Series: Is it wrong to try to pick up girls in a dungeon? on the side: sword oratoria
Identifiers: LCCN 2016023729 | ISBN 9780316315333 (v. 1 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316318167 (v. 2 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316318181 (v. 3 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316318228 (v. 4 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316442503 (v. 5 : pbk.)
Subjects: CYAC: Fantasy.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.O54 Isg 2016 | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016023729
ISBNs: 978-0-316-44250-3 (paperback)
978-0-316-44251-0 (ebook)
E3-20180321-JV-PC
Contents
Cover
Insert
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue: A Moment of Water and Rest
Chapter 1: Passage and the Present
Interlude: Flip Side of the Farce
Chapter 2: Rabbit Rookie
Interlude: Flip Side of the Compromise
Chapter 3: ⅓ Pure Passion
Interlude: Flip Side of the Stage
Epilogue: Homeward Bound
Afterword
Yen Newsletter
PROLOGUE
A MOMENT OF WATER AND REST
It feels good.
Aiz thought this to herself at the sensation of the water surrounding her.
“Ah……”
The breath escaping her lips felt distant. The sound of splashing water tickled her eardrums as the foam lapped at her skin and ears with soft, gentle caresses.
She was as naked as the day she was born.
Her eyes closed as water droplets drew rivulets down her smooth skin. They traced the curves of her breasts, down past her navel and slender stomach, before returning to the water’s surface. Her beautiful golden hair was spread out like a fan, lilting to and fro in the water together with her glistening body.
She was gorgeous, her features rivaling even those of a goddess, and the sight of her lying where the water’s surface met the air created a spectacle reminiscent of forest nymphs—mysterious and surreal. Had an artistically inclined individual been present to witness it, the scene would undoubtedly have been captured by brushstrokes.
It was a moment of pure bliss. She could actually feel the tension leaving her muscles as the pent-up fatigue racking her body melted away.
It was here and only here that she could forget everything, wrapped up in this protective world of water.
These thoughts trickled through her head as she let out another sigh that vibrated in her slender throat.
“…?”
All of a sudden.
Something blocked the white light shining on her closed eyelids, shrouding her face in darkness.
There was someone nearby, peering down at her—she could feel it in the ripples breaking against her skin.
She opened her eyes…revealing the pink-flushed cheeks of a certain elf maiden at point-blank range.
Lefiya…?
As the girl’s name rose to Aiz’s lips, the elf in question began appealing to her vehemently, her hand shielding her mouth and nose. Aiz, however, couldn’t make out the words, her ears still beneath the water.
She was frantic now, and Aiz couldn’t help but notice that Loki was right—the elf really was maturing. In fact, her bust behind the cover of her arm was almost the same size as Aiz’s.
Aiz lowered her feet to the bath’s floor and righted herself in the water.
“—have it all wrong, Miss Aiz! While I must admit the fantastical sight of you floating there in the water borders on the alluring, I…! I-I mean, were I artistically inclined, I would love to capture this scene in a painting to adorn my chambers, but I…! I-I mean I would never dream of sinking to the level of that lecherous goddess of ours! I-I merely noticed you over here and thought I would pay you a visit…!!” Lefiya was blushing hard as she sputtered out one excuse after another.
Though the young elf nearly idolized her, Aiz noticed none of it.
As the golden-haired girl cocked her head to the side curiously, a gleeful voice from off to the side drew her attention, and she turned.
Her eyes moved across the green leaves, countless trees, and blue crystals surrounding the wide pool she was currently occupying.
And in the middle of all that, she saw her companions—the other girls of Loki Familia—similarly disrobed and enjoying their time in the bath.
“Ha-ha! It feels amazing!!” Tiona squealed in delight as she pulled her head out from under a small waterfall dribbling down from a crack in the rocks. She proceeded to shake her drenched head, spraying water all over her nearby sister, who responded with an angry bark.
“What are you—a dog?! Stop that!!”
The two girls showed no modesty, baring to the world their robust tanned skin, slender waists, and ample chests. Their bodies had a different sort of elegance from Aiz’s, but every celch of them was salaciously Amazonian
.
“You’re all so wonderfully…put together. Makes a girl shy,” Leene mumbled to herself.
Next to her, Aki was busy washing the slender tail protruding from her backside. “You’ve got a plenty fine pair yourself there, Leene!” she replied with a twist of her hips.
“It’s…it’s only because I’ve put on some weight!” Leene’s face reddened instantly. The girl’s long hair, normally done up in braids, flowed down the length of her back as she brought both arms up to hide her chest.
Aki just shrugged. The velvet-haired, velvet-furred catgirl boasted very shapely breasts herself.
“Good gravy! Seems to me like Loki Familia’s a bunch of babes! Guess that’s to be expected with a deity like yours, though, huh?” the half-dwarf woman, Tsubaki, mused aloud to herself as she meditated beneath the ten-meder-plus waterfall in the middle of the pool. Wiping her dark bangs away from her eye, she rose to her feet before heading toward the group, ever-present eye patch over her left eye.
Beads of water turned into tiny streamlets that worked their way across her olive skin, trickling enticingly down the nape of her neck and into the deep valley of her chest. Though normally restrained by a single sheet of cloth, her breasts were shapely enough to rival even Tione’s.
The Hephaistos Familia smith let her eyes rove over the multiracial group of radiant women.
“Bet this’d be hard for the menfolk to resist. What would ya do if they came a-peekin’, huh? Alicia? Narfi?” Tsubaki asked the two beautiful blondes, elf and human respectively.
“Punish them. And if their peeking just so happened to grant them an eyeful of Lady Riveria? They’d wish they’d never been born.”
“Ah-ha-ha…I suppose you could say that even if they wanted to peek, they wouldn’t have a chance.”
The two second-tiers who had participated in the fifty-ninth-floor raid together with Aiz and the others fired a glance toward the pool’s perimeter, where another set of female familia members stood vigilant with arrows and swords poised. The guards were fully prepared to administer an absolutely merciless whooping to anyone who dared trespass on these sacred grounds of femininity—monsters and men alike.
Thanks mostly to the fact that their patron deity was a female Casanova, there were decidedly more women than men in Loki Familia. Even including the leaders of the familia, a comparison of pure attack power undoubtedly favored the women’s side.
This, in turn, led to feelings of inadequacy among the men of Loki Familia, surrounded as they were by this bevy of able-bodied women.
The elf and human pair waved appreciatively at their lookouts—they’d be trading places soon enough, and then it would be their turn to keep watch. The group of demi-humans responded with their own smiles.
The sight of so many young women stripped of their garments and armor was enough to make even the flowers blush.
It was moments like these that allowed them to let their hair down, even deep within the Dungeon’s depths.
“Ahh, the eighteenth floor really is the best!” Tiona sighed leisurely as she floated on her back among the bluish glow of the surrounding forest. “Beautiful crystals and clear-blue water!”
Aiz couldn’t help but mentally agree with the other girl.
While it was easy finding a place to wash in the Dungeon’s various safety points—like the one on the fiftieth floor—it was just as easy to find a flowing pool or river to cleanse one’s skin. That being said, this particular pool on the eighteenth floor was in a league of its own.
A brook of pure crystalline water cascaded down from deep within the floor’s recesses. Cleaner and clearer than any river on the surface, it was an ideal spot for quenching thirst and soothing the bodies of humans and monsters alike. Even its name, the Under Resort, was in no way an overstatement.
“…”
Yes, this was the eighteenth floor.
Where Aiz and the others had stopped for a moment of respite after their incredible battle within the Dungeon’s depths.
Their expedition to the unexplored frontier—the fifty-ninth floor—had come to an end, and it had been six days since they’d left their base camp on the fiftieth floor.
By all rights, they should have continued straight through to the surface, skipping this paradise entirely, so what were they doing there?
With the chattering of her peers and Lefiya’s continued red-faced sputtering in her ears, Aiz turned her eyes up toward the giant, encompassing dome of the forest, letting her thoughts drift to the events that had led them there.
CHAPTER 1
PASSAGE AND THE PRESENT
Seven days prior, Aiz and the rest of the familia had descended to the fifty-ninth floor—the unexplored frontier—in an effort to increase their floor count.
What awaited them on that floor, however, was the unknown—a mutated floor of dense, junglelike trees and an abominable fiend called the “corrupted spirit.”
It was a half-spirit, half-monster hybrid known as a demi-spirit.
Colossal in size and even capable of magic, it had attacked the party together with its legion of monsters, and upon its defeat, Aiz and the others had left immediately for their camp back on the fiftieth floor, where the remainder of their group awaited. Their rest there had been momentary at best, and soon they were on the move again, leaving behind the base camp.
The expedition party had hastily gotten ready to leave at Finn’s prompt orders. The top-tier adventurers, exhausted as they were from their advance to the depths, had been shifted to the front, and the other familia members who’d been protecting the camp had been put in charge of all strenuous fighting en route. Not wanting to subject their bedraggled elites to any more unnecessary strain, they (along with Raul and the other supporters) had approached the task with gusto and given Aiz and the other top-tiers a chance to rest their weary bodies despite the long march ahead. And so they’d continued toward the surface, making good progress as they’d put floor after floor behind them.
However—
The Dungeon had not been so kind as to allow their triumphant return, nor did it ever when gallant adventurers headed back to the surface with their spoils of war after besting the bowels of its massive labyrinth.
“Was that a…scream?”
“You think someone’s in trouble?”
They were on the lower floors when they heard it.
About halfway through their trek to the surface.
The long trail of people that made up their party was currently in the middle of a wide passageway. Aiz, Bete, and the other top-tiers at the front perked their ears up toward the back of the company, where, indeed, multiple screams could be heard.
“—Finn! Hasten the troops!”
The next shout came from the back of the line—the old soldier dwarf picking up the tail end of their formation. “We’ve got poison vermis on our hands here!” Gareth roared.
Almost instantaneously, they saw their companions making a mad rush toward them, followed by a swarm of maggot-like monsters.
Of all the poison-inflicting monsters in the Dungeon, poison vermis were the most dangerous. The toxin they spewed from their mouths and secreted from their pores was powerful enough to afflict even upper-class adventurers, who had strong status resistances. Though their attack power itself was decidedly low, the small beasts had a tendency to spring forth from carcasses in droves, much like actual maggots, garnering them the nickname “poison graveyards.”
This time was no exception. In fact, the teeming throng making a beeline for Loki Familia was so dense with wriggling maggots, not even Aiz and the other top-tiers could believe their eyes.
“S-so many! Is it a mass spawn?!”
“At a time like this…?! We’re in trouble!”
Mass spawns were just another one of the Dungeon’s Irregulars.
As everyone in the party ran while supporting those among them unable to fight, the stampeding mass of more than a hundred poisonous maggot monsters crawled, writhed, and scrambled
its way toward them, covering the walls and ceiling like a larval invasion. Aiz and the others swallowed their feelings of revulsion and immediately rushed to their companions’ aid.
Aiz with her Airiel and Bete with his Airiel-infused Frosvirt joined Gareth and his giant shield to stave off the incoming poisonous spray while Tiona and Tione hurriedly dragged anyone suffering from purple lesions back to safety. Riveria attempted to seal off the tunnel with her freezing magic, but the vermis simply went around. More and more of them were squirming out of countless side passages before regrouping, just as strong.
“Th-there’s no end to them!” Lefiya’s face paled at the sight as she began Concurrent Casting from within the party’s center.
It was a monster party—a floor-wide bout of continuous spawning as opposed to a single large-scale spawn. And what’s more, the monster involved was the poison vermis, known for its tendency to move in swarms, which only exacerbated the situation.
Loki Familia’s adventurers had already exhausted their supplies and their strength, both physical and mental, every reserve, during their demanding expedition. This random encounter was hard to bear. Even the flames of the few magic swords they had remaining were too little, too late.
Aiz and the other top-tiers wasted no time transitioning from the offensive to withdrawal once their companions were safe.
“Finn! We’re losin’ ’em! Rakuta and the others need help right now!!”
“Captain, do you think we should head back to the safety point…?”
Tiona and Tione called respectively, carting a boy-girl pair of hume bunnies who were currently groaning in pain.
“We don’t know the scope of this Irregular! If poison vermis are spawning on the lower floors, too, we’ll be trapped there!” Finn shouted back in between spear thrusts at the front of the party, brushing aside their comments. “Even if we did manage to hole ourselves up there, the time it would take launching a counteroffensive would leave us no chance to heal the injured properly!” he added as he took out a particularly large monster blocking their path.
To make matters worse, they didn’t have a single antidote left.
“We’ll head to the eighteenth floor! Everyone, double-time! Carry those who can’t walk if you have to!”
Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? On the Side: Sword Oratoria, Vol. 5 Page 1
