Delicious in Dungeon Volume 2: 05/09/19

Delicious in Dungeon Volume 2 by Ryoko Kui takes a closer look at what it takes to be a successful questing party in this sunken city turned dungeon.

To drive this fact home brutally fast, the book begins with a questing party buying supplies for their foray into the dungeon. They are putting their packing emphasis on food because they don't want to have to go back up to the surface and they are afraid of going hungry.

The very next scene is our main characters examining their bodies. They had been killed by bugs that pretend to be loot. The same bugs end up being a tasty source of protein when cooked right. Had they been more observant they could have survived and saved money on foodstuffs.

Another thing our heroes learn (and help with) is the growing of vegetables in the dungeon. Now a dark, buried maze of rooms doesn't seem like the place to grow greens but they grow just fine when planted on the backs of golems. Yup. Think magical, enchanted, semi-aware moving Chia Pets.

Although this manga series is Japanese, it fits into the road narrative spectrum as many Japanese stories do. I am counting this book as one of those outliers.

By this second volume, the questers have come together as an ersatz family. As they are now working as a cohesive unit (as demonstrated by their ability to survive and thrive in the dungeon), we can call them a family (33).

The dungeon is tied up in the history of the area and is the remains of a buried castle. Later on in this volume, there is a side quest to find food by way of living paintings. These paintings take the traveler into key points of history of the castle when it was a castle and not the cursed upside thing it is in the present. The paintings, the ghosts, and the other cursed objects tied to the time before makes this journey one through uhoria (CC).

Finally there is the method or route of travel. The many traps, the blind alleys, the unexpected secret rooms, takes the route through a maze (CC). The danger is demonstrated through the death of the party at the beginning of the book and later by the capture of the protagonists by orcs.

Put all together, this second volume is a family going through uhoria by way of a maze.

Five stars

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