Having lost his younger sister Falin to the Red Dragon, Laios and his party were heading back into the Dungeon to revive her.

But when they opened their eyes, they found themselves in an unfamiliar land of sky, sun, and forest. Magic barely works here, and the spirits don't respond.

This was neither the Dungeon nor their own world — it was 'Terra.' And so the four travelers' culinary wanderings begin, in search of a way home.

The rule here is the same as in the Dungeon: live off the land. Which means catching and eating whatever unfamiliar monster is right in front of them. For Laios, who can't resist a monster, it's heaven. For Marcille, it's hell.

At first, Marcille grumbles that they must have been dragged into a living painting. It was half a joke — but looking back, she wasn't entirely wrong.

1. Originium bugs are delicious boiled

There's trouble from the very first encounter. What Marcille steps on, thinking it's a rock, turns out to be a swarm of Originium Bugs.

The heavily armored orc Big Bob turns out to be the farmer who raises these bugs. He washes the dangerous Originium Bugs five times over and masks their odor with herbs and chili, serving up a spicy stir-fry and grilled shells.

Even Marcille, who'd been waving her hands in refusal because it's a monster, caves after one bite. It's thanks to Senshi, who carefully redid a dish that had nearly been rushed and thrown together. Never cutting corners, even in the smallest steps — that's what Senshi says makes cooking so appealing.

Big Bob hands the lost travelers "Bob's Gourmet Guide" and tells them about a place full of odd folks — Rhodes Island. Seeing them enjoy his cooking so much had given him a real boost of confidence too.

Missing home is only natural, if you're human! I don't understand most of what you told me, but that part, at least, I get.

— Big Bob

By the way, if you raise Originium Bugs on barley husks, their shells grow a barley aroma, which can be brewed into beer. Feed them fruit, and their shells turn sweet enough for pancake batter. Every bit of Big Bob's culinary knowledge is solid gold.

2. The High Priest's medicinal brew (actually his bathwater)

The crocodile-headed Adakris they meet in the jungle are searching for the High Priest, who vanished in an explosion.

The conversation keeps going sideways. The Adakris call Senshi and Chilchuck 'Durin,' and have never heard of the sea or islands. No matter how much Marcille explains, all she gets back are looks that say 'is this person an idiot?' It just goes to show how far from home this land really is.

Meanwhile, Marcille causes an incident. She absentmindedly eats a berry that looks exactly like the raspberries Falin once gave her, and falls into a hallucination where all her companions look like the Red Dragon, sending her into a rampage.

Only the missing High Priest knows the cure. Senshi lures him out by boiling stew in a huge pot — apparently he loves a rowdy feast, so they all sing and dance together while they wait.

It turns out the plump bird was the High Priest all along. The stew was actually his bathwater, but its horrendous taste is exactly what snaps Marcille back to her senses. The High Priest vanishes, leaving only the cryptic words, "You're headed the right way."

3. The golden carrot and the broken Light

At a failing factory in Rim Billiton, the owner can't afford to serve the traditional dish 'golden carrot' at the farewell dinner.

Thanks to a D32 steel magic tool called 'Light,' given to her by the owner, Marcille is able to use magic even on Terra. But the flash spell ends up transforming the corrosive mucus of an acidic Originium Bug into a sweet-and-sour, golden liquid.

In the process, Marcille slowly grasps how magic works in this world — that spells which kept cutting out with just a Dungeon staff actually manifest properly once channeled through D32 steel.

The problem is that Light gets corroded by the acidic mucus and breaks. Senshi, saying "it just changed shape," turns it into a pot without a second thought, and Marcille sobs, "Goodbye, my Light..." But thanks to that sacrifice, the golden carrot gets finished without needing a single pure-gold Originium Bug.

Thanks to this, the owner picks his abandoned dream back up. He'd finally realized that something of his, which no one had ever appreciated, had made someone smile.

4. Eyes that see catastrophe

While searching for the priest of snow, the party meets Orc Cup, an unbothered Sami shaman apprentice. Reading the 'Will of Sami' carved into tree bark, he tells them to seek directions from a northern recluse — a cyclops.

In Sami's black forest, the party meets a grotesque hornbeast with a hollow void where its face should be — a creature corrupted by a demon. As the cliff collapses, Chilchuck falls, separated from the rest.

It's Arges who saves Chilchuck — a cyclops who foresees nothing but catastrophe. He says he saw an unusually large amount of 'death' in Chilchuck.

And the prophecy comes true. Laios, Marcille, and Senshi, having eaten the corrupted hornbeast's meat, lose their faces and, swallowed by the void, mutter, "Through the north gate, back home," over and over.

A chilling silence falls. But Chilchuck, without an ounce of fear, chases furiously after the three of them. Sure, they brought this on themselves — but they're still his companions.

In this forest, the party also meets Ceobe. This perpetually hungry Sami girl, who says she lives on Rhodes Island, tags right along, promising to guide them anywhere as long as she's fed properly. Unexpectedly, she becomes their guide back home.

5. The black slime inside the painting

The next stop is a village. A black slime called 'Muklyang,' which comes back to life no matter how many times it's killed, keeps attacking the village. Yet the villagers show no interest whatsoever in learning how to deal with it.

Laios spends days romping around with the Muklyang he's named Ayao, Xiaoqiao, and Touxian, even picking up their language. By the time the other three find him, he's already turned into a wild child, crawling on all fours and chatting with the Muklyang.

Then Laios realizes something: no habitat, no reproduction, no offspring — everything here just dies and comes back, over and over, a 'fake.' They're inside a painting.

The Muklyang were stray thoughts overflowing from the painting's owner. Senshi even makes jam and fruit wine from the vomit of a Muklyang fed and gotten drunk, and Marcille is horrified.

The village's guide, 'Lai,' is impressed by Laios's way of reading truth in the relationships between all things — how even the Muklyang in the painting each have their own origin and destination. Then the painting's owner, noticing his village had been thrown into chaos, swings his sword and hurls the four of them right out of the painting. Noisy, but it was its own kind of send-off.

6. The starving seaside village

Far away in Iberia, the Abyssal Hunter Skadi drops in like a shooting star to strike down a bishop. The four travelers drift into that dark seaside village, Salviento.

Salviento is a dead village, its senses numbed by long-term hunger. Senshi can't bear to watch its people swallowing rotten shellfish without a second thought.

A missionary from the sea church lures the party into a dangerous cave, urging them to become 'brothers.' His real intent was to kill them, but the cave turns out to be a storehouse of fresh ingredients, teeming with a giant kraken and its symbiotic creatures.

Realizing that mimics exist on Terra too, Chilchuck has one disguised as a box eat the missionary. Laios, eyes sparkling, declares that even a mimic "tastes better the more you chew it."

The four of them lay out a spread of assorted seafood and share it with the starving villagers. In this village that had gone numb, people gather and laugh together for the first time in a long while.

7. When a cornfield turns into a popcorn field

In a wasteland settlement, misunderstandings pile up. A runaway drone, settlers trying to protect their supplies, and even the Rhodes Island Operator Reian all get tangled together into a full-blown brawl.

Marcille lures the drone with a familiar shaped like Laios. Even the settlers are horrified by the sight of 'familiar Laios,' tongue lolling out, sprinting on all fours.

But the drone's bomb happens to land right in the settlers' cornfield, and the entire field pops into popcorn. Drawn by the smell, Ceobe shows up and buries herself in the mountain of popcorn.

What emerges from that mountain of popcorn is Ceobe, whom they'd parted ways with back in Sami. The Operator Reian, who's come to pick her up, takes Ceo along and heads for Rhodes Island. Only then do the travelers realize their destination is right around the corner.

The people who fought so fiercely by day sit around the same fire at night, sharing monster meat. As far as ways to make peace go, it's very much a Terra-meshi thing to do.

8. The Rhodes Island cafeteria

At last, standing on the edge of a cliff, they see it — an enormous structure of steel, a city and another dungeon all in one, a ship that runs across the land: Rhodes Island.

Mudrock, who greets the party, turns out to be Big Bob's friend. She tells them that Big Bob, who cooked those hard-shelled bugs so deliciously, had really gained his confidence from people enjoying his food — along with the tenacious story of his life, in and out of prison before finally opening a general store in Sami.

After the mischievous High Priest sends the party flying all over the place via elevator (payback, apparently, for boiling him alive in that Originium Bug stew), the perpetually hungry Ceobe goes berserk. Said to have a thousand heads, she's soothed and calmed down by Amiya, who eases her emotions and wins her over with popcorn.

And Rhodes Island turns out to be an absolute paradise for Laios — packed as it is with Operators of every race imaginable. He seriously mutters about whether Lupo lay eggs, or whether a child of a dog beastman and a cat beastman would come out half-and-half, making everyone slowly back away from him.

He gets an earful for trying to roast chestnuts over Skyfire's flames, and Senshi grabs the Doctor to nag them about eating properly. Regular routine, balanced meals, and moderate exercise! And with all the ingredients and memories gathered along the way, they lay out a huge spread of side dishes in the cafeteria.

Chilchuck, squeezed in among giants like Hellagur, SilverAsh, and Hoshiguma, tips back a drink and gets mistaken for a minor yet again, while Marcille and Beeswax hit it off swapping hair-care stories. Before anyone notices, the Delicious in Dungeon crew and the Rhodes Island family have blended together seamlessly.

Food is tied to memory. That's why eating the same dish again brings back the feeling of that moment.

— Senshi

Epilogue — Thanks for the meal

They still haven't found a way home. The Doctor and Kal'tsit agree to look into it over time, and Amiya invites the four of them to stay at Rhodes Island.

Ceobe is still hungry (well, she does have a thousand heads), and Big Bob, even after a stint in prison, has apparently started a new business in Sami. Wherever they are, everyone keeps living on, tenaciously.

Their journey through Terra became, in the end, a single dish. The Originium Bug stir-fry holds their first mentor, Big Bob; the stew holds the jungle's commotion; the golden carrot holds a factory that dared to dream again.

Looking back, what saved the four of them time and again in this unfamiliar world was Laios's endless love of monsters. That very eccentricity, which made everyone else recoil, became their way out at every moment of crisis.

Every time they taste that same aroma and flavor again, the people and the laughter of that moment will come rushing back — just like the day Marcille will finally revive Falin.

I'll have to tell her that on the way to save her, I met so many good people and made so many wonderful memories... I'm sure she'll be thrilled to hear it!

— Marcille