“He is not your food.” Shinji made it clear.
“Now I know who ate my food. You! I was looking for a cockroach but you ate it.” Toad began accusing him, “Whenever new people come to this house, I get less food to eat.”
“Where’s the dungeon?”
“A little down from here. I had climbed here to eat rats but they aren’t here as well. I have no strength to move from here so I was waiting for the cockroach to come. I am sure they now travel from these cracks.”
“Okay. Eat this son monster then. I have no problem with it now.”
“Never!” Toad smirked, “Papa Monster will kill me if I do so. How about I eat you instead?”
_
The Housekeeper took Fujimoto to a place where snoring was barely audible.
Passage felt much colder than anywhere else in the entire house. Housekeeper was walking behind Fujimoto with his hand reaching to the dagger’s hilt on his back.
Fujimoto rolled his eyeballs up and saw a big glowing crack on the ceiling.
“Why are these cracks here?” Fujimoto said, looking back at Housekeeper.
Housekeeper postponed the idea of stabbing him for a while.
“It happened one day all of a sudden.” Housekeeper tried making his voice casual.
“Voices. They are fainter here.” Fujimoto’s heart was beating.
“Maybe one monster got awake.”
“Or we are heading to the wrong direction –”
Something thumped hard on ceiling. The sound echoed inside the passage. Sound resembling to stomping came from the crack.
And this time, the crack was beginning to expand with each impact.
“You won’t be able to eat me.” Smirked Shinji.
The toad had smile of his own till his long tongue flew out towards his direction.
In a second, Shinji was tied by the sticky tongue. When the toad began pulling him towards his sharp teeth, Shinji drew his sword out and pointed it towards the toad.
His sword jammed between its eyes with Shinji still holding it. The toad’s eyes turned pitch black and the strength in its tongue perished.
Shinji pulled his sword from its skull with great effort. As the sword came out, many tadpoles shot out of the dead toad’s mouth.
Tadpoles, as big as his head, were wriggling around his body. Then he felt sharp pain on his neck.
They had teeth.
Brushing off sticky tadpoles from his body, he ran towards the crack for an escape. Tadpoles kept biting his exposed skin regardless. And those who had not yet made to his body were crawling towards him from floor.
Shinji kicked the crack several times until it glowed.
Using his sword as a shaving razor, he cleared tadpoles off his body and hoping the crack would take him to wherever the rats had escaped to, he jumped inside the crack.
The leap took him to a dry place with some tadpoles still dangling from his clothes.
After getting rid of those, Shinji realized how stinking the place was. Berserk rats ran around to feast on dropped tadpoles.
To his fortune, rats were regular sized.
So rats had learned to use the crack. Thought Shinji. But he didn’t know how those rodents had learned to live with the horrible smell around them.
The entire place smelled of rotten excreta. Mushiness under his soles made him discover he was stepping on a big pile of turd.
His lungs couldn’t take it anymore so Shinji went on puking on his own feet. But it wasn’t very relieving. He feared he would vomit out his intestines when air started coming out of his stomach.
He did a burp in the end.
It sounded nothing like a simple burp but more like a frog calling its mate.
