"Ohhh! So, brother, you finally decided to sell fruit juice bottles this time around?"

Ollie asked this while comfortably seated on his husband’s lap and sipping milk as though he hadn’t been shrieking for dear life earlier.

Honestly, it was impressive.

Then again, perhaps that was simply the power of their extraordinarily elegant cows. Faced with milk and cookies, even the most frazzled nerves eventually surrendered. At the very least, the blonde currently looked far calmer than the person who’d nearly convinced himself they’d accidentally incinerated ages (not) of work.

Meanwhile, Luca, who had rushed over the moment the final vending item was loaded and hadn’t even bothered checking the transaction results first, answered almost entirely on reflex.

"Yes! One of the five listings was an assorted pack of twelve juice bottles!" he said excitedly. "That way each pack can contain all the flavors we usually carry for our purees and pulps!"

Then the little mechanic paused.

Blinking once, he suddenly remembered why he’d rushed back in the first place.

"Ah! No, wait!"

Luca immediately grabbed his brother’s shoulders.

"Brother, how are you? Are you hurt anywhere?"

The question was asked with complete sincerity.

Before Ollie could properly answer, Luca had already begun inspecting him.

He checked his hands.

Counted his fingers.

Looked him over for injuries.

At one point, he even seemed concerned about whether stress had caused the blonde to lose weight in the last few hours.

Ollie, meanwhile, cooperated as though this was perfectly normal.

He raised both arms.

Turned his head from side to side.

And even widened his eyes when Luca checked his pupils.

Fortunately, everything appeared normal.

Even his hair antenna remained standing proudly.

"I’m okay, brother!" Ollie reassured him. "Just really surprised!"

The blonde even puffed out his chest proudly while saying it.

Nearby, Kyle watched the exchange with the sort of expression only someone who had witnessed the earlier panic attack could make.

Because when he’d found Ollie, his little star had looked very far from okay.

Still, what was the point of bringing that up now when it wouldn’t particularly look believable to anyone?

"I’m so glad!" Luca visibly relaxed. "I was worried something terrible had happened to you!"

"...The moment we heard, we wanted to come back immediately. But we were still in the middle of the transaction, and we didn’t know what would happen if we pulled out before it was finished. I’m sorry we couldn’t get here sooner."

The dungeon owner wanted to apologize profusely, thinking about how his brother must have felt after that scare.

"No, no! It’s good that you finished that first," Ollie immediately replied. "There’s nothing to apologize for."

The blonde nodded sagely.

"Besides, I’d really rather you not take your eyes off an open dungeon gate when we still don’t know everything about the bridge."

Honestly, that was fair.

"And really, you could’ve stayed there longer."

"Huh?"

"Auntie Cece just went into the workshop and said nobody’s allowed inside yet."

"What? Why?"

The blonde, who took a moment to slurp up more milk, wiggled to adjust and sat up straighter.

Then he reenacted the expression the dwarf had been wearing when she heard about the toasted mecha.

Or at least attempted to.

The result looked considerably less intimidating than the original.

She said, "I’m going inside. You lot just guard the door and make sure no one else goes in. I’m settling things with that blasted thing myself, once and for all! If I don’t, I swear it’ll shave decades off my life!"

"..."

"..."

"Oh! And she also ended it with, ’for her peace of mind!’ before storming in there."

Luca blinked.

The little mechanic wasn’t entirely sure what that meant.

Nor was he particularly certain what Auntie Cece intended to contend with.

Last he’d heard, the mecha had already burned.

Or at least that was Ollie’s assessment.

Still, if she wanted to be left alone with it for a while, there was probably a reason.

So instead of arguing, Luca settled into a chair and waited.

While waiting, however, his thoughts inevitably drifted elsewhere.

Toward the bridge.

Toward the vending listings.

Toward whether anyone would actually purchase the things they’d put up for sale this time around.

It was admittedly a bit of a gamble.

Not a particularly expensive one since most of the products had already existed in their Online Store, but a gamble nonetheless, since how could he be certain that they’d be interested in things like bottled milk or packed lunches?

__

See, they had a few constraints this time around.

The first one being that they couldn’t just quite sell the same things because of supply issues. They had just been fortunate about getting a sudden windfall of honey, but at the moment, that was something they still needed to wait for.

Next, and probably even more important, was that they still had no idea who they were selling to, nor did they have any idea what their feedback on the goods was.

Who was to say they would want to purchase again when they may simply have purchased the first time around because the whole thing sounded quite novel?

Everyone else said that couldn’t possibly be the case, and Luca appreciated how highly they thought of the items they sold after tasting them for themselves, but food was something rather subjective, and it wouldn’t be fair to assume that they would all have the same tastes, right?

So this time around, Luca, who agreed with everyone else that they really ought to stick with edible items rather than sell weapons or other offensive and defensive equipment until they had more information, decided to sell ready-to-eat items in bundles for the additional CP.

Since what they offered last time had mostly been sweet, he wondered if the additional savory items would be received just as well.

He hoped they would since they really worked hard on those.

And umm... they probably would, just as soon as everyone could figure out what exactly they were supposed to do with those oddly shaped containers?