I Was Reborn as a Daddy in Another World

Descent - Part 4

Val awoke just as the sun was setting. He was laid out on top of the unfurled sleeping bag, and a small fire was burning gently just far enough away that he could still feel its warmth.

"You've got a lot of potions in here."

He turned his head at the sound of Katya's voice, a softer tone than he'd heard her use before now. One of his potion bottles lay empty between them, and she was crouched next to his open pack.

"Which is lucky," she concluded.

Val turned his head back and looked up at the sky. He had a dull ache in his torso, but his body appeared undamaged, almost entirely healed of the myriad wounds that the butterswine had dealt him. The ribs that had shattered and the arm he was sure had broken were now little more than bruised thanks to the overload of healing potions that filled his pack.

Val wondered if he would ever get used to this world, before reminding himself that, all going to plan, he wouldn't be here long enough to achieve that.

Katya cleared her throat, loud enough to let Val know that it carried some subtext, but he didn't look over. The sky was pink and streaked with clouds, almost identical to the sunsets in his own world, and ran his eyes across it imagining, briefly, that he was laying in the grass at the park by his house on a Sunday afternoon, listening to Teddy run around causing a ruckus with the other kids from the neighbourhood.

Katya cleared her throat again.

"Do you need a lozenge?" he asked, a little too curt.

A beat of silence, then -

"What's a lozenge?"

Val couldn't help but laugh. Only a few barks of amusement flew out of him before he clutched his ribs, doubled over by the dull, tender ache in his ribs transforming into a sharp pang of discomfort.

"Ow," he grunted, "Oh, that hurt."

"Good," Katya admonished him, "You deserved that."

"Yeah, I did," he managed to grumble out, sitting up and turning towards her.

They looked at each other over the crackling fire.

"I think in future," Katya offered, "I'll do the fighting, and you can hang back and toss potions."

Val nodded.

The fight with the butterswine had shaken him. Katya had described the monsters as "very weak", but even with his magic-imbued weapons and high-level armour, just two of them had almost ended his descent into the labyrinth. He was going to have to be even more cautious than he initially thought, it seemed direct combat was simply not an option for a 'Daddy'.

"Agreed."

"But," Katya interjected, "You got one of them, and it looks like we lucked out with the drops."

She reached to her side and picked up an enormous pile of butterswine meat, resting on a number of large wax-treated linen sheets she'd retrieved from Val's pack.

Val's mouth dropped open. The equivalent of two entire sides of pork, shoulder to tail, neatly butchered into, at least it looked to Val, a comparable analog of a basic set of primal cuts from a butcher in his world. He ignored for the moment that Katya was easily lifting what must've been a hundred kilos of pork, instead focusing on the glossy pink meat with striations of rich, white fat. Thankfully, the way monsters dropped items in this world meant neither of them had to know how to break down an entire pig in order to separate and store the various cuts.

"Wow," he uttered, deeply appreciative, "That is a lot of pork."

"Butterpork," she corrected him.

"Of course."