It's a theme that comes up again and again in folklore around the world: if you give aid to a mystical creature, animal, or person, they will return the favor. From old women shunned by the first two of three questing princes to household pets mistreated by child-eating witches, there's no shortage of proof that being kind is always the way to go if you find yourself living in a fairy tale. Since that could reasonably be said of Bell Cranel, whose world of gods walking among the people expanded into the talking animal realm with the introduction of the Xenos, it's a good thing he was the third prince in that scenario, because if he hadn't met Marie, this could have been a very different story. (And it's a good thing for Bell's overworked sense of embarrassment that she's apparently been watching The Little Mermaid and made her own seashell bra to preserve his modesty.)

As you may have guessed, Marie is the mermaid Bell encountered at the end of last week, and luckily for him, she's not the sailor-drowning type. Whether that's strictly because she's a Xeno is up for debate, because she does have the ability to use her singing to control other, weaker monsters, so it's reasonably to assume that she could use that power on humans as well. Her voice certainly is beautiful enough to support that theory; she sings to lead Bell to her after she's swum to a safer part of the falls, and there very well could have been a mesmeric element of his following the sound.

But mostly Marie is just happy to make a new friend, maybe even happier than Bell is to be saved. She tells him that while she knows Rei and the rest of the Xenos, they've all left her behind as they've gone up to higher levels, and it's clear that she's feeling a little lonely. When she reaches a point where she can't swim any higher, she's sad, because that means that she's about to lose Bell's companionship as well.

While he may not have been considering that when he yanks her out of the water—he really didn't want her to get eaten by the monster pursuing them—it's a true act of kindness on his part. Whether he knows it or not, Bell's giving Marie exactly what she's dreamed of, and since her lifeblood has impressive healing powers, that's a good move on his part in the strictly mercenary sense too. And given that one of the potential origins for our modern mermaids is an ancient Assyrian goddess named Atargatis (or Dea Syria in Latin), there's real potential for this to be very helpful to Bell outside the Dungeon as well.

But far more concerning than Marie's bare breasts is the escalation of the threat posed by the Moss Huge. The party was alarmed by Dormul's report that the lost adventurer he was searching for was found in a safe zone, strangled by vines and hidden under rocks. That means that the Moss Huge not only can attack in presumed safe areas, but he also knows enough to try to hide his victims, lest the humans catch on to what he's up to. Around the same time we see him go to a stash of adventurers' packs he's got in a small cave and pull out a towel, which he seems to use to whip the blue crabs into a frenzy, creating a pass parade to trap Hestia Familia's party.

That once again demonstrates an advanced use of tactics such as we've only seen adventurers and the Xenos use, which draws a very fine line between “enhanced species” and “Xenos”—the only two differences to the untrained eye appear to be that the Xenos can speak and are friendly to humans… and there's no guarantee that the former really is just a Xeno trait. Given that I would swear that the Moss Huge looks exhausted and sad when he goes for the towel in his cavern, I think this is worth keeping in the back of your mind as the series progresses.

Aisha may finally be convinced of the worthiness of Bell's party and familia members, but that doesn't mean that anyone's in the clear just yet. Carrying Marie isn't likely to really slow Bell down in his race to rejoin the group, and Haruhime's about to unleash her secret weapon, but things are still not looking good for our heroes. It's going to take a combination of luck, skill, and timing to get out of this mess, and we'll just have to hope that Bell's status as the third fairy tale prince can help them with all three.

Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? IV is currently streaming on HIDIVE.

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