Defense specialized. Pretending not to see.

Apologies for the delay.

Finally calmed down.

We’ll try again.

Several hours had passed since Maple began her actions, saturating the entire room with poison.

The Venom Capsule, guarded by the predator and slimes, had grown swiftly—now too large to be contained.

The predator, having fulfilled its purpose, was returned. Up to this point, everything had gone as Maple had intended.

And just as she claimed, persistence was her strength. The room was nearly buried in poison, yet the expected result was not achieved.

“Doesn’t seem to be working… ugh…”

Yet the twins, enveloped entirely in poison, continued to wield sword, lance, and flame without pause.

Maple watches them closely. No slowing in their movements. No change at all.

The target of the attacks shifted from Maple to the slime as time passed.

The slime, fortunate or unfortunate, possessed resistance to poison and remained under Maple’s control.

It had become the target of the twins, having been reduced to nothing but wreckage by their barrage of weapons.

The twins’ attacks were drawn into the room-filling Venom Capsules and never reached the slime.

The twins’ attacks were too weak to break through the slime’s durability, which had increased to the limit of the Venom Capsules.

Maple now faced a situation where she could not be defeated, yet could not defeat her opponent.

“Hmm… what to do… attacks keep missing… would hitting from very close work?”

Maple moved, parting the poison, upward and diagonally, testing the idea.

The room is saturated with poison. Maple floats as if swimming through air.

“Just in case… let’s try to block escape routes!”

From her inventory, Maple pulls out several talismans and scatters them haphazardly across the poisoned sea.

“Maybe the exorcism talismans won’t interfere… probably not.”

She continues, placing useless items as obstacles—scattered, numerous, chaotic. Finally, she stretches a slime to its limit, wrapping the space around the twins in multiple layers.

“Alright! Excuse me then.”

Maple manipulates the slime, creating an opening, and slips inside.

She remains still, the dagger inches from the abdomen of one twin.

“Please, hit—【Poison Dragon (Hydra)】!”

The globule of poison, released as a prayer, surges through the room already near its saturation point.

Of course, Maple’s surroundings were likewise churned in circles.

After a time, Maple began to glance around, her eyes slightly unfocused.

— Seemed to have avoided it? Where… ah! I—there?

Before Maple, the twin figures lay still—impaled through a slime barely clinging to life, their bodies embedded with the items Maple had scattered across them, completely halted.

“Hmm…?”

Maple, too, could not help but sense that something was amiss.

“D-damn you, are you alright?”

Maple’s unease made her reach out, poking at the twins’ feet with her fingers. The twins began speaking abruptly.

Caught you—

Caught you, then.

"Then playtime is over."

Light gathered around the twins, intensifying its glow.

"Let's play again soon."

The twins vanished with a soft sound.

Maple could do nothing but watch, her expression unreadable.

"Ah! Right, that's true—there was no HP gauge... so we don't defeat them. Hmm, a chest? That's new."

It was the same as before, when they met the snail—this opponent required a solution beyond attack.

Maple, who had been fuming over being trapped repeatedly, had overlooked this detail.

"But..."

Before approaching the chest, Maple stepped down onto the ground.

When she released the Venom Capsule, countless items and low-rank materials scattered across the earth.

"This was a mistake... I need to get back quickly!"

Maple left the materials behind, tossed the chest's contents into her inventory without checking, and fled.

And behind it all.

Several days later, the administrators made their corrections.

"Maple! It's fine to be an anomaly, but anomalies are not allowed!"

"Inside a slime...?"

"Mostly the slime's fault!! Why did you put something like that in a random trap?!"

"Even without attack confirmation, you can't slip through if it's blocked."

"If that hadn't been there, we could've broken the capsule too..."

"Calm down. Adjust the ghost twins' warp... The slime can stay mostly as-is. As a trap, it's fine. It can't be reproduced anyway."

Thus, voices passed between them.

In the end, a brief maintenance window was enacted, and it was reported that the slime area and certain bosses had been adjusted.