Chapter 16- Take Responsibility Bro
"Fuckin’—cough—dust," Yuuta grumbled, waving a tired hand in front of his face.
The dusty trail was a nightmare. Every step felt like walking barefoot across broken glass, and for a frog with three stubby green toes? It was even worse. Sharp little pebbles dug into the soft pads of his feet, each stab a personal insult from the canyon itself. Every few meters he’d let out another hiss of pain, followed by more complaints and a few creative curses about how this whole place was trying to murder him one rock shard at a time.
With one arm flailing to clear the air in front of his wide frog eyes and the other rubbing a bruised thigh, Yuuta trudged forward through the thick haze, stopping only when he recognized the broken slope where he’d blasted himself out with a Lightning Bolt earlier.
The site looked rougher than he remembered.
Scorched black from the spell impact, the cratered slope was surrounded by jagged rubble and smoldering debris. This was the eye of the storm, the core of where his desperate last stand had happened. The bunker—or more accurately, the shit-tier dirt hole he called a bunker—was now just a collapsed ditch with a few smoking rocks leaning over it like tombstones.
Yuuta scratched the back of his head and muttered, "Alright... If the XP balls didn’t get vaporized, they should be around here somewhere..."
He scanned the uneven ground, eyes narrowed in concentration. Each mound of rubble could be hiding glowing orbs of golden experience—or just more disappointment and sliced fingers. But if he had to bet, the XP was close. Real close.
"Okay," he said, positioning himself over a patch of particularly charred ground, "this feels right. Probably some pork-chopped bastard is under here."
Reluctantly, he dropped to his knees and began to dig.
And immediately regretted it.
"Ffffffuck!" Yuuta cursed, yanking his hand back as a razor-like rock sliced into one of his fingers. Blood oozed from the wound, and a small shard of stone embedded itself in the webbing between two digits.