by Yuu Tanaka
I continued resisting with Telekinesis and used Identify on the two goblins who were in my line of sight.
Name: Goblin
Race: Demon
LV: 1
HP: 17; Magic: 6; Strength: 8; Agility: 12
Skills: Club Mastery 1; Dig 2
Name: Goblin
Race: Demon
LV: 5
HP: 19; Magic: 4; Strength: 9; Agility: 10
Skills: Sword Mastery 1; Vigilance 1; Poison Resistance 1
I see. There were small differences even among members of the same race. I figured that’d be the case since they had different weapons between them, so they probably specialized in different things. The one trying to pull me out had finally tired and moved around to my front. I wasted no time in using Identify on him, too.
Name: Goblin Leader
Race: Demon
LV: 2
HP: 24; Magic: 11; Strength: 11; Agility: 13
Skills: Sword Mastery 1; Survivalist 1; Disassembly 2; Command 1
And here was their leader. Was his level lower than the rest because he had just evolved? Well, he was stronger than the other two, by about an inch. What do I do now? They didn’t look like they had any intention of leaving any time soon. The leader began smacking me, seeing that he wasn’t going to pull me out by conventional means. When I still refused to budge, he gave up and let another goblin have a go. The next goblin—who had been in my blind spot until just now—grabbed my hilt, grunted, then heaved with all his might. In turn, I resisted with all my might.
Upon seeing that brute force wasn’t going to be enough to claim his prize, the goblin leader took his flunky’s club and began trying to smash my pedestal. The logic was sound: He would destroy my pedestal, then claim me in the aftermath. However, all his bludgeoning barely left a dent in the pedestal. His face reddened in frustration, and now I wasn’t sure whether he was hammering my pedestal to claim me or simply vent. They were goblins, after all. They really are as dumb as they say.
The lead goblin struggled for a while before finally kicking the pedestal in frustration. Unfortunately, the pedestal proved to be much harder than he expected. He gripped his toes and began jumping up and down in pain, looking very comical as he did so. Heheh. Good job, idiot. The angry leader threw his club at the goblin who was in my blind spot. Come on, don’t take it out on your friends now. Just when I thought he was done, the green bastard turned around and hocked a loogie at me. I could feel the disgusting liquid trickle down my blade. Ew, gross! It’s sticking to me! But worse than that was the humiliation. All right, you want war? I’ll give you war. I was oddly itching to get in a fight.
I started with the one who was right in front of me. The goblin swordsman went up following his leader’s failed attempt at pulling me out. I calculated the exact moment he would begin heaving and stopped my Telekinesis then. He pulled me out that very instant. It was very easy for a goblin to pull me out now that I had stopped resisting. The sheer force the goblin put into the effort worked against him, as he lost his balance and fell right on his ass.
Hah, I got you now! I used Telekinesis to adjust the business end of my blade and cut right through the defenseless goblin’s throat in one swing that looked more like an accident than an assault. Surprisingly enough, my first kill didn’t disturb me. Instead, it excited me. In fact, I thought it was the obvious thing to do to a goblin who was right in front of me. Oh, no. Was I a cursed sword that hungered for blood and thirsted for souls? Well, too late to stop now. I may as well finish the job.
“Gya, gyago?”
The remaining goblins scurried to the side of their fallen comrade, unable to grasp what had happened. I slammed my body against the strongest goblin in the group (seeing that I was a sword, my body slam was roughly equivalent to a stab). The goblin leader barely had any time to react to my charge—after all, how could he expect a sword to move on its own?—and my blade pierced his belly, going straight through his back. All he did was look down at me in confusion before falling on the ground. Two left.
I didn’t feel an ounce of guilt as I killed the next goblin. Even as I cut him open, I didn’t feel the least bit disgusted. Maybe it was because I had the body of a sword now, but I didn’t feel any aversion to slashing through my enemies. In its place was an odd sense of fulfillment; I was doing my job as a sword after all. That must have satisfied me. I chased after the one who was trying to run away and he, too, went down in one swing. Only one remained now and he was quaking in his boots. I took care of him in no time.
Name: Goblin
Race: Demon
LV: 2
HP: 12; Magic: 9; Strength: 7; Agility: 10
Skills: Sword Mastery 1; Kobold Killer
Still, I was doing incredibly well. I may have taken them by surprise, but all of them had gone down in one hit. My attack power of 132 wasn’t just for show. I didn’t know how strong it really was, but it made quick work of those goblins. Then, something caught my eye.
Am I glowing right now? I emitted light on my third, maybe fourth, kill. I think I glowed on my second kill too, but I’d paid no attention to it then, thinking I was imagining things. I guess I hadn’t been, although I was pretty sure I didn’t glow when I killed my first goblin. I opened my stats to check if anything had changed.
Name: Unknown
Race: Intelligent Weapon
Attack: 132; MP: 166/200; Durability: 100/100
Evolution: [Rank 1; Crystals: 3/100; Skill Capacity: 10]
Skills: Identify 6; Self-Repair; Telekinesis; Telepathy; Status+; Recovery Rate+; Skill Sharing; Mage
Equipped Skills: None
Skill Bank: Dig 1; Disassembly 1; Sword Mastery 1; Club Mastery 1; Command 1; Survivalist 1; Kobold Killer
What’s this? It looked like I had gained some new items among my stats. The new description next to the Evolution menu specifically caught my eye: My Crystal count was at 3/100. Did that have anything to do with the three times I glowed earlier? And what of my Skill Capacity? I didn’t know what that one meant either, only that it had something to do with Skill Bank, which came after it. I figured that I only kept the skills of the goblins if I glowed after killing them, since I didn’t have Vigilance or Poison Resistance from my first victim. So, I absorbed the goblin’s skills? I picked Skill Bank and heard a voice that sounded like a Tutorial Guide.
You have ten slots remaining. Would you like to equip skills from your Skill Bank?
Of course I do. The skill selection window opened.
Equipped Skills: Dig 1; Disassembly 1; Sword Mastery 1; Club Mastery 1; Command 1; Survivalist 1; Kobold Killer 1
Skill Bank: None
Did that do it? I couldn’t tell. I especially couldn’t tell why I glowed some times and not others. Why didn’t I glow after my first kill? I had a feeling it was linked to the things called “Crystals.” They cropped up often in alternate universe light novels. From what I’d read, they were crystallizations of magic found within the bodies of monsters. If my assumptions were correct, it had something to do with the way I killed the first goblin. I’d killed him by cutting his throat, while finishing the rest off by stabbing them. That could be the difference.
I rushed over to the body of the first goblin and began stabbing his corpse with my blade. On my third stab, I found what I was looking for. I felt my blade pierce through something hard, and I glowed again. Something flowed through me and I felt an odd sense of satisfaction. It felt like eating your favorite food after being starved for days. As I thought, I absorbed crystals by cutting through them, and it seemed the goblins had theirs located in their stomach. I didn’t know if I had a hunger for crystals, but this could be why I’d felt an odd desire to fight them in the first place. I could have been reacting to the magic stones inside them. I’ll have to experiment later.
For now, I looked at my Crystal count. Like I thought, my Crystal counter was now at 4/100, and Vigilance and Poison Resistance had been added to my Skill Bank list. The Goblin Leade
r had Disassembly 2 and his flunky had Dig 2, but the skills I absorbed were both at Level 1. I guessed the levels had been reset after absorption. So how do I level these skills up? Was using them in battle enough? Would I need to keep absorbing more crystals? I would have to experiment with these too. For now, I would equip Vigilance and Poison Resistance.
These goblin corpses are annoying me, though.
Their corpses lay in front of my pedestal, which meant I would have to keep looking at this sorry mess if I didn’t do something about it. So I used Telekinesis and dragged their bodies out of the ruins. It left a trail of blood, but at least the corpses were out of sight now. I then put my newly obtained Dig skill to work and dug a hole for them. That’s pretty good, I thought to myself as my slim blade repurposed itself into a shovel and made quick work of the ground. Though, I couldn’t tell if that was thanks to the actual Dig skill or if Telekinesis was just that useful. It was one of the two, for sure. In any case, it was good for me to have a new goal while I waited for my User. I would go out and collect more skills, therefore making myself a stronger enchanted blade.
And so, I immediately set out on my hunt. I used Telekinesis to fly around the ruins and rested on the ground when I ran out of Mana. The plains were composed of flatlands for the most part, which was comforting because it meant I wasn’t going to lose sight of my home pedestal any time soon.
The first thing I ran into was a small rat with six legs.
Let’s Identify it real quick.
Name: Six-Legged Rat
Race: Animal
LV: 1
HP: 2; Magic: 0; Strength: 1; Agility: 7
Skills: None
Weak. Too weak. It didn’t even have any skills. It might yield some crystals, though. My crystal count was currently at 4/100. I might rank up if I collected 96 more crystals. Please die so that I may grow. I came down on the rat with a sudden swing and cut the rat clean in two. It was easier to hit than I thought, but I wasn’t glowing. Huh? What’s going on here? I jabbed the corpse a little for good measure but still remained unlit. Was I unable to absorb crystals with that swing? Curious, I cut open the rats’s body to investigate. It was such a grotesque sight that I counted myself lucky to have been born again as a sword since I didn’t have the facilities to get sick or nauseous. I dug around and found no trace of any crystals inside the rat. Oh, now I get it. When I identified the rat’s stats earlier, its race was listed as Animal. I supposed only monsters had them, since the animals on Earth didn’t have any magic crystals inside them, either.
I’ll look for a monster this time.
One was already walking into sight. A giant centipede, half a meter long, had come to scavenge on the dead rat.
Name: Giant Centipede
Race: Monster; Insect
LV: 4
HP: 18; Magic: 7; Strength 6; Agility: 14
Skills: Tremor Sense 1; Climb 1; Poison Fang
“Race: Monster.” That should do it. I opened the fight by stabbing it in the head, but it struggled and flailed, yellow liquid gushing from its mouth as its body slapped helplessly against the ground. I put it out of its misery by cutting it in half. Its upper and lower halves squirmed with a vigor that was unique to the insect kingdom until it finally ceased. Well, that was disgusting. But my slaughter of the centipede bore fruit when I stabbed the tip of my blade near its heart. I glowed, the satisfying feeling of crystal absorption coursing through me once again. I also absorbed its Tremor Sense, Climb, and Poison Fang, although it didn’t look like the bug had any fangs to me… I equipped Poison Fang, reducing my Mana by five points and covering my blade with a subtle film of liquid. It was probably poison, but I was just happy it worked. I tried equipping Climb and Tremor Sense but couldn’t.
You have reached the maximum amount of Skills you can equip.
It didn’t look like I could equip all the Skills I had acquired. I looked at my stats again under Evolution Rank to find that Gems was now at 5/100, and Skill Capacity was at ten. Skill Capacity had to refer to the number of skills I could equip. True enough, I did have all my previous skills equipped at the moment: Digging 1; Disassembly 1; Vigilance 1; Sword Mastery 1; Club Mastery 1; Command 1; Survivalist 1; Kobold Killer 1; Poison Resistance 1; and Poison Fang. I unequipped Club Mastery—it was the most useless of my current skills—and equipped Tremor Sense in its place.
I’ll go with this setup until I find a new skill.
In the list of other clearly useless skills I had: Command; Survivalist; and Climb. Hopefully I would get some more useful skills to replace these.
With that out of the way, I went back to my search. What I found next were two bowlegged, bipedal silhouettes which had the gaits of chimpanzees. Their green skin told me they were my old, ugly nemesis.
Goblins. And they have something in their hands.
I cast Identify on them and found they were little to no different from the goblins I had run into up to now. I was more interested, however, in the animal they were holding in their hands which looked like a large rat. I had never seen that one before.
Name: Poison Fang Rat
Race: Monster; Fanged Brute.
LV: 1
Status: Dead
HP: 0; Magic: 3; Strength: 4; Agility: 14
Skills: Vigilance 1
I’ll take it. I slowly inched to some nearby bushes so I wouldn’t be spotted. I was only a couple meters from them now, and I decided to start with the higher-level goblin.
Put ’em up! Your crystals or your life!
I promise you, I wasn’t overcome with bloodlust or anything of the sort. I just wanted to say that line at least once in my life was all. I stabbed one of the goblins in the back and he slumped dead without any resistance. When I noticed I was glowing, I immediately pulled myself out of him and came down on his dumbfounded companion. Two down. I also got the Throwing Weapons and Hunting skills for my trouble; I equipped myself with those immediately. Then I came to my newly-discovered monster, which made me tilt my head in confusion. Not that I had a head, of course.
Why does this Poison Fang Rat not have any skills other than Vigilance?
I expected it to have Poison Fang at least. Talk about false advertising. I pulled back the dead creature’s upper lip to expose its long canine. Yellow liquid was dripping from its tip. Was this venom?
Huh. What gives? The giant centipede had had Poison Fang in its skillset, but this “Poison Fang Rat” didn’t? I didn’t have enough clues to figure out why, so I decided to hunt some more monsters for more data. That was when my Tremor Sense and Hunting skills began reacting. The signal was weak, but I followed it by slowly circling to the other side of the bushes.
Name: Carrion Vulture
Race: Monster; Bird.
LV: 5
HP: 13; Magic: 5; Strength: 9; Agility: 15
Skills: Poison Resistance 1; Enhanced Digestion
A bird. It looked like it’d be incredibly alert, so it would be best to be careful. I hovered above the ground, taking care not to rustle any tall strands of grass, and ambushed it before it had a chance to fly away. I cut off its head and it fell limp to the ground.
Phew. Good thing I killed it before it flew off. That would’ve been annoying.
I stabbed its corpse a couple times before absorbing its crystal. I learned Enhanced Digestion, although, having no digestive tract to speak of, it was of no use to me. I had to respect the lack of discrimination my Evolution menu had for even bothering to learn this skill. I felt legitimate satisfaction when I absorbed its crystal, though. I had joked about having a hunger for crystals earlier, but it seemed it was true. I wanted more.
What shall I have next? I’d like to have something that has a new skill if possible.
I was looking for my next prey when I saw a strange shadow. It belonged to something that looked like a kite gliding through the sky. It wasn’t fast, but its movements were irregular, making it seem otherworldly. The thing looked like a green jellyfish that was drifting in the sk
y.
Name: Air Floater
Race: Monster; Plant
LV: 5
HP: 14; Magic: 10; Strength: 6; Agility: 4
Skills: Drain Magic 1; Hawkeye; Float
I was about ten meters away from it now, but it didn’t react to me and carried on drifting along. I guessed I could attack it, but I was careful in approaching it just in case it jumped on me. I aimed for the jellyfish’s head, which looked like a mushroom cap. It housed something that looked like an eye, which I assumed to be its core. When I was about two meters away from it, the Air Floater began showing signs of intelligence and lashed out its tentacles.
Ew, gross!
There were about ten of them and they came at me fast. The dark red appendages squirmed like a cross between a snake and a worm. They latched on to me as I was preoccupied with revulsion.
Is it draining my mana?
I could feel my mana being sucked away by its tentacles. The thing was as dangerous as it was gross. I was now solely focused on escaping its clutches. Fortunately, the tentacles weren’t very strong, and I was able to wiggle free and cut through them with little difficulty.
Phew, that was close.
I checked my stats and found that my mana had dropped by ten. Who knew what would have happened if it had kept on draining me? But now I knew how dangerous it was and that it had to die. I circled over its head and lunged at top speed. It launched its tentacles one last time but I cut them down along with its torso. Well, that was easy. I felt my blade strike against something hard and I glowed, proof I had destroyed the crystal which was its weak spot. The Air Floater lost its floatation capabilities without its Float skill and its dead body laid limp on the ground.
