by Okina Baba
Inside the house is a large circular desk, creating a conference room of sorts.
As soon as we sit as instructed, elven waiters carry food to our table.
“These are elf dishes, but they should suit the human palate, too.”
At Potimas’s words, I take a bite of the food.
It’s lightly seasoned and vegetable focused, but that only serves to highlight the quality of the ingredients.
In fact, it’s delicious.
Exhausted from our journey, our party eats without speaking.
“You seem to have enjoyed it. Good.”
Seeing that we’ve finished eating, Potimas speaks again.
“We have prepared quarters for you. I shall ensure that you can go about your business there until the imperial army arrives.”
They seem very well prepared.
Almost as if he already knew we were coming.
Which he probably did, I suppose.
I don’t know how he got that information, but it’s the only explanation that makes sense.
Otherwise, how would they prepare living quarters and just the right amount of food for humans with such perfect timing?
And yet, we were greeted so harshly when we first arrived.
Did the information not reach the teleport-point guards, or was that just an act?
Either way, I can’t figure out Potimas’s intentions.
All I know is that he seems very shady.
Maybe that’s why I can’t help but distrust Potimas’s next proposal.
“Additionally, I’m sure you would like to see the other reincarnations, no? The hour is late. I shall arrange for you to meet them tomorrow.”
WATER SPIDER
I’ve been drifting on the waves for a few days now.
My body is finally back to normal.
Man, I certainly had my work cut out for me.
I got attacked by water wyrms, attacked by water dragons…
Seriously, that was no laughing matter.
Getting attacked by a bunch of water wyrms wasn’t an issue at first.
I mean, it wasn’t ideal, but I managed to deal with them even in head-only form, so we’ll call it even.
Yep. Turns out I actually got by pretty well without a body.
Alone, my head could still use magic, making this situation sort of like one of those tower-defense games where you have to shoot down the enemy before they get too close.
Occasionally a few persistent buggers broke through, but I used my Telekinesis skill to move myself away.
In short, I was managing all right.
That just goes to show that wyrm-class monsters aren’t even a threat to me anymore.
Some of the upper-level ones had stats averaging more than 2,000, but I still beat them without even having a body.
Talk about using your head!
It definitely helped that my go-to weapons, the Dark Magic spells, were just as powerful when used underwater.
The water didn’t dampen or slow them down at all. Maybe it was because of the fantasy-like nature of the Dark attribute.
I mean, Fire definitely wouldn’t have worked, and if I’d used Lightning or something, I would’ve just zapped myself, too.
The water wyrms did have Wyrm Scales, but the difference in our stats was so great that they might as well have been wearing paper armor.
Since my magic attack power exceeds 10,000, I guess it’s no surprise that their measly 2,000-and-under defense wouldn’t stand a chance.
Anyway, I was able to deal with the constant onslaught of water wyrms easily enough.
But then that water dragon showed up.
Listen, I was as surprised as you are.
I mean, seriously.
A goddamn dragon isn’t supposed to spawn as naturally as if it were some ordinary mob.
It looked kinda like a plesiosaur and seemed pretty strong at that, but when I Appraised it, I was still taken aback by its power.
I suppose the silver lining was that it was still a fair amount weaker than Araba.
Using Telekinesis to move my head away, I fired at the water dragon with magic as it chased me.
This little game of chase went on for what felt like hours, until I finally managed to beat it.
Lucky for me, it was the physical-based meathead type.
It wasn’t fast enough to catch up to me, either, and its magic wasn’t all that, so I didn’t die even when it grazed me a few times.
Though if it had made a direct hit, I probably would’ve been knocked out and ended up as fish food.
Who knows how long it would’ve taken for me to recover again?
All’s well that ends well.
Anyway, thanks to the experience I got for killing the water dragon, I leveled up.
You couldn’t really call it molting, since I didn’t have a body to shed skin from, but the usual level-up recovery situation did make my body grow back.
I can only imagine how gross it would’ve looked to any witnesses as my body grew from the stump of my head.
But even leveling up wasn’t enough to fully regrow my body. I got only about half my torso back before it stopped.
From there, I spent several more days fending off those stupid water wyrms while using Healing Magic to fix the rest of my body.
I could’ve done without the occasional bonus water dragon, by the way.
Unlike the first one, I just ran away from these ones.
I mean, these guys were on the same level as the earth dragon Araba.
How was I supposed to deal with something like that when I was still regrowing my damn body?
Besides, I could float, but I couldn’t dive.
Since my opponents could move around in the water freely, I was at a huge disadvantage. It made no sense to try to take them on.
Turned out there was a Swim skill. If I acquired that, I thought maybe I’d be able to dive down.
But if I tried to pick it up, probably because of my lack of aptitude or whatever, it would cost a huge amount of skill points.
I didn’t want to waste the points, so I gave up on that and decided to just run away from water dragons instead.
Even now that my body’s fully recovered, taking on a water dragon sounds like a huge pain. Instead, I’ve just been fleeing from them.
Bwa-ha-ha! Kneel before the power of my full-speed escape!
With my incredible speed stat and the trump card known as Teleport, fleeing from the likes of a water dragon is a piece of cake!
Although I’m trying not to use that too often, since the last thing I want is to teleport right into the Demon Lord’s waiting hands.
That’s why I’m still floating around on the ocean.
According to the map function Professor Wisdom gave me, the waves carried me pretty far away from the Great Elroe Labyrinth, but I’m still keeping the same degree of distance from the shore.
Right now, I’m thinking about riding the waves farther away from the Great Elroe Labyrinth, then eventually making land somewhere or other.
I think I’ve lost the Demon Lord by now, and if she’s gonna look for me, she’ll probably check in or around the Great Elroe Labyrinth.
If I get far away from there, I’ll run less risk of being found.
If I keep out of her sight, make land somewhere far away, and keep increasing the places I can flee to via Teleport, even that crazy Demon Lord shouldn’t be able to catch me.
Even with her insane teleportation-like speed, it’s not like she’s actually teleporting.
Sound-barrier-breaking speed or no, it still takes time to cover that much land, so I’d like to think that I could use that time to use Teleport and get away.
The main reason I can’t necessarily escape her yet is that I don’t have enough options for Teleport destinations.
The only places I can teleport to right now are inside the Great Elroe Labyrinth or a limited range of the surrounding area.
The Great Elroe Labyrinth is Mother’s
territory, and outside it, my options are extremely limited.
Within that small range, the Demon Lord could easily track me.
So if I extend my teleport range outside where she can track me, I should eventually be able to lose her completely.
Putting it that way, I think the ocean is actually a pretty good escape option, too.
Even the Demon Lord probably wouldn’t think to check some random part of the ocean.
Although I guess you can’t exactly call it safe when there are water dragons here.
After drifting around for a few more days, I finally came up on land again.
Man, I’ve never been happier to feel ground under my feet in my life.
Floating on the ocean was getting pretty uncomfortable.
Part of the reason I came up on land was that I got fed up with that, but there was also the minor detail of the water dragons beginning to attack me in swarms.
I mean, you guys are a pretty powerful class of monsters, right?
Are you even allowed to form cliques?
Like, I can’t even swim underwater, you know? I’m basically a spider-shaped buoy.
So yeah, I decided I was done with that and escaped onto the land.
Fighting a single dragon is enough of a pain. I definitely don’t wanna mess around with a whole group.
Being on land has its own threat in the form of the Demon Lord, but since she doesn’t seem to have found me yet, I should be fine.
I’ve got to worry about the more imminent threat.
Namely, the buttload of water dragons that have locked on to me. Even now that I’m on land, they’re still sticking their heads out of the water to glare at me.
I can practically hear them yelling, And don’t come back!
I guess that’s the end of my watery adventures in relative safety from the Demon Lord.
From here on out, looks like it’s land or bust for me.
The Demon Lord could have spies anywhere, which means I’d better try to avoid being spotted as much as possible.
My first goal is to find a river.
Why, you ask?
Well, if you spend a lot of time in the ocean, you end up soaking in seawater, y’know?
And seawater really clings to you.
I have the Odorless skill at least. That helps with the ocean smell, but I’ve still got crusty salt all over me.
Nobody likes being crusty.
Oh right, Odorless is a skill I got when I maxed out Silence.
Just as the name implies, it reduces my scent. The higher the skill level, the less I smell.
Pretty good skill for an assassin, right?
Although it could come in handy in everyday life for some people, too.
Thanks to that, I don’t have to worry about getting smelly.
Not that this body really produces a lot of odor in the first place.
Anyway, I’m gonna go look for a river or pond or whatever to wash up.
I’m careful to minimize my presence as I move, though not so much that I drive myself crazy worrying about it.
Even when I was super-weak, I was stealthy enough to sneak around the den of monsters known as the Great Elroe Labyrinth pretty well. Now that all my skills have gotten even higher, my stealth has gotten even…worse, actually.
Because come to think of it, I got that stupid Intimidation skill and the Fearbringer title, which pretty much cancel out all that by announcing my presence to everyone nearby.
No matter how much I hone my stealth skills now, the best I can hope for is to cancel out the double-fear effect.
Frankly, whether I’m sneaky or not, there’s only so much I can do to keep from being found.
Meaning there’s no point in being super-extra-careful.
If someone spots me, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.
Just like in the labyrinth, monsters and stuff tend to sense my presence and run away before I even get near them.
To the point where it sometimes even causes a mass exodus.
I think that might just be their animal instincts or whatever, not something that’s affected by stats.
Even weak monsters like frogs were able to sense me coming, after all.
If anything, the weak monsters might have even sharper instincts about it.
Assuming I keep traveling on land, I think I’ll eventually cause a mass migration of all the monsters in the area.
In the labyrinth, that effect almost resulted in my running out of food.
But right now, I’m more worried about it helping the Demon Lord find me.
She probably…no, definitely would.
If a huge monster stampede appears out of nowhere, there’s no way that demon lord won’t notice.
Even if she can’t specifically detect my presence, all she’d have to do is look for the center of the disturbance to figure it out.
And once she does, she’ll definitely come find me.
At which point I’ll be killed on the spot.
Hmm. That puts me on a pretty short time limit.
I have to expand my range somehow before she spots me, then start teleporting around to keep my whereabouts hidden again.
As I contemplate these things in my wanderings, I find the river I was hoping for.
My body feels so gross and sticky at this point that I just dive right in without thinking.
I plunge underwater for just a moment before popping back up to the surface.
I create some thread, easily weave it into a cloth, and use it to wipe myself down.
I didn’t pay too much attention when I got dirty back in the labyrinth, but if I have the option of keeping clean, I’m definitely going to take it.
Washing off in running water is nice, but what I’d really like is a nice hot bath.
I don’t know if there’s even such a thing in this world, but still.
If not, maybe I could at least find a hot spring?
Once this whole thing with Mother and the Demon Lord is settled somehow, I’m definitely going to look for one right away.
No, I guess finding delicious food comes before that.
After I went to all the trouble of getting out of the Great Elroe Labyrinth, I haven’t found a single tasty thing to eat!
This is a serious problem!
That’s all Mother and the Demon Lord’s fault, too!
They’ve totally ruined my dreams of a happy-go-lucky outside life!
I mean, I wanted to make it outside for so long, and now that I’m finally here, what do I get? A super-stressful life on the run!
It’s just not fair.
Based on my original schedule, I should be enjoying a nice, relaxing sightseeing trip by now.
Scenic forest and mountain views!
Nope, Mother blew those away with a breath attack.
How about a nice trip to the ocean?
Sorry, it’s peak water dragon season.
It’s not fair; it’s just not fair!
Why does the threat of imminent death follow me wherever I go?!
Not to mention that if I stop for a minute, the Demon Lord might catch up to me.
How am I supposed to relax with all that going on?!
At any rate, I have to do something about the Demon Lord and Mother if I want to survive at all, not to mention live happily from here on out.
I activate Wisdom to check the Demon Lord’s current location.
Heh-heh-heh. That’s right. You think I’m just going to sit by and let myself be killed?
If I successfully Appraise a target, I can use Professor Wisdom’s marking function.
That allows me to check the location and Appraisal information of anything I’ve Appraised once, even if it’s far away.
Combined with Wisdom’s map function, I can find out at a glance where the Demon Lord is.
As a bonus, when I use this feature, my map expands to include wherever the target is currently located.
I can’t actually teleport to those places unless I�
��ve been there in person, though.
So it looks like I still have to travel around myself to increase my number of potential Teleport destinations.
Just as I suspected, it looks like the Demon Lord has figured out that I’m still alive because my Parallel Minds haven’t stopped attacking Mother.
It seems as though she went back to where she blew me away, and she looked around to figure out where I went.
And now she’s traveling over the ocean.
Man, even Sherlock Holmes would be jealous of those tracking skills.
How did she figure out so quickly that I was in the ocean?
I guess maybe it’s a good thing that the water dragons chased me onto land.
Luckily, it seems like at least she doesn’t know where exactly in the ocean I was, meaning she’s just scouring the whole thing right now.
Scary.
I think I know how a criminal feels when they’re being chased down by a great detective.
But if she’s on the ocean, maybe this is a good opportunity for me.
Couldn’t I go work on reducing Mother’s number of minions while she’s too far away to return to the Great Elroe Labyrinth immediately?
I don’t know how much bigger her army got while I was drifting around like dead seaweed, but even if she laid some new eggs, I doubt they’ve grown enough to be a threat yet.
With my current strength, she’d need arch taratects or higher if she wants to put a scratch on me.
Even greater taratects would be a bit of a pain in large enough numbers.
But the biggest threat of all her minions is still that puppet spider.
I mean, I can say with confidence that I can beat an arch taratect one-on-one now.
I have a definite advantage over them, no doubt.
My stats and skills are a cut above, aside from the arch’s physical stats, after all.
But that’s not the case with the puppet spider.
After encountering it and escaping quite a few times, I’ve been slowly figuring out that thing’s nature.
First, it’s a spider, but it’s also not really a spider.
It’s a human-shaped doll, like a mannequin, with a spider about the size of a fist in the center.
The spider has thread throughout the mannequin’s core and uses Thread Control to make the thing move.
Although it’s a spider, it fights more like a human by nature.
