by Okina Baba
Talk about a dangerous skill.
But wait!
All you have to do is use that dangerous skill through a weapon!
If I put the Rot attribute on a weapon, it won’t cause any damage to my body!
And maybe because it’s not a living thing, the weapon doesn’t even take damage, either.
In other words, I can now use that vicious Rot Attack without any risk at all!
Sure, the Parallel Minds can use Rot Attack, too, but they’re still just spiders.
That means they can’t hold weapons.
If they use Rot Attack, like I said before, they’ll damage themselves, too.
I can use Rot Attack as much as I want with zero risk, but they can’t use it without being prepared to pay the price.
This makes a huge difference.
Since our stats are roughly the same, if I want to do big damage with a single attack, I’ll have to use a really powerful move.
And most of my really powerful moves are magic-related.
Any major spell requires a decent amount of time to prepare, even when using the Height of Occultism skill I have.
Which means that if the Parallel Minds want to cause serious damage to me, they’ll have to spend a while preparing a spell first.
I, on the other hand, just have to wave my Rot Attack–infused scythe, which of course doesn’t take any prep time at all!
This advantage will more than make up for the difference in numbers between us!
Seven to go!
“That scythe is bad news!”
“It’s Rot Attack! Don’t let her get too close!”
Ugh! I knew they would figure it out.
Realizing how powerful my scythe is with Rot Attack, the other Parallel Minds quickly move to get away from me.
In the meantime, they keep flinging magic down on me like hail.
I follow hot on their heels, but our stats are the same, which means our speed is, too.
I can keep up, but I can’t catch up to them.
At this rate, they’ll just keep shooting at me as I chase after them.
Damn. This isn’t looking good.
The pair who’s been preparing spells this whole time is getting ready to use Abyss Magic.
Um, excuse me.
How are you gonna use soul-destroying magic against me, your main body?!
I’ll die, you know?
If that hits me, I’ll die!
Are you actually totally okay with that?!
But I doubt they’d listen to me if I said all that out loud.
I mean, I’m the one who started trying to kill them first.
By now, they must see me as nothing more than an enemy.
It’s too late to stop them with words.
I can only rely on force now.
But how exactly?
Frankly, the situation’s not looking good.
I’ve been using Divine Dragon Barrier and Antimagic Evil Eye to try to hinder their magic, but they’re just canceling them out by using identical skills.
Same goes for Sealing Evil Eye.
I guess now we know that Evil Eyes can cancel each other out.
It’s precisely because our stats and skills are the same that having more numbers puts them in a way better position.
My main advantages are my human half and the fact that it allows me to use Rot Attack with my scythe, but that doesn’t matter if I can’t get close to them.
Isn’t there any skill I can use to stop their Abyss Magic?
Should I activate Antimagic Evil Eye in all my eyes?
Ah, wait a second. I might have ten eyes if you include my human half, but those guys have seven times eight eyes altogether!
The extra pair of eyes on my human body doesn’t matter one bit when there’s a boatload more on their side!
So Sealing Evil Eye won’t work, either. In fact, even if they didn’t cancel it out, I don’t know if it would have much effect.
Sealing Evil Eye renders a skill temporarily useless, but that seal is treated as a status condition.
It won’t work on a target with Status Condition Nullification.
If only I could stop them from using a skill, I would seal Abyss Magic!
…Hmm?
Prevent them from using a skill?
Wait, don’t I have a way of doing literally that?
An idea hits me, so I test it out right away.
““Huh?!””
All the Parallel Minds exclaim in confusion.
As soon as I hear that, I know my experiment was a success.
And I know I’ve won.
My victory is now so assured that I feel silly for panicking before.
Now I could win this fight while picking my nose.
I mean, I’m not going to, but still. That’s how easy this’ll be.
Talk about certain victory.
You can’t blame the Parallel Minds for being surprised.
After all, they can’t use magic anymore.
The Abyss Magic they were preparing has been totally canceled out, too, leaving all their plans in shambles.
And I’m not naive enough or nice enough to just stand around while they’re confused.
Immediately, I’m on top of them, aiming my scythe at one of their heads.
The Parallel Mind gets impaled instantly, leaving its body twitching.
Another one comes back to its senses and starts to shoot some thread at me, but nothing comes out.
“Why?!”
Drawing my giant scythe back, I swing it at another Parallel Mind.
This time, though, it manages to dodge my attack, and all of them quickly move away from me.
Still, now they’re down to six.
The body I did stab turns to dust as a result of the Rot Attack.
The other Parallel Minds have managed to move out of my range, but they’re milling around, clearly unsure how to attack me.
“What did you do?” one of them asks, as if unable to bear not knowing any longer.
But I don’t answer.
I just silently ready my scythe.
What I did is simple.
I turned off my skills.
As you might know, skills can be turned on and off.
Long ago, when the earth dragon Araba realized it’d been defeated, it turned off its skills so I could finish it off.
That was the first time I realized you could turn skills on and off.
No, I guess I already figured you could do that, but I’d pretty much forgotten, since there didn’t seem to be any point in doing so.
I mean, turning skills off has zero benefits.
Obviously, if you turn off a skill, you can’t use it anymore.
That’s it. Nothing special happens.
It doesn’t make your other skills level up faster, or conserve energy, or anything like that.
Frankly, there’s usually no reason to ever turn off skills.
But in this case, that little function turns out to be my ultimate saving grace.
After all, my opponents are copies of me at the end of the day.
As my Parallel Minds, their power is really my power.
All that strength, including their skills and stats, is borrowed from the real me, the main body.
So what happens if I, the main body, turn off those skills?
The answer rests with the confused Parallel Minds before me, unable to use magic or thread.
Without Height of Occultism, they can’t use magic.
And turning off the Divine Thread Weaving skill deactivates their skills.
I also turned off the Evil Eye skills, their resistance skills, and most other skills, too.
Even Immortality.
If I’m killed right now, I’ll be dead for good.
And the same applies to the Parallel Minds.
Really, though, they’re just parts of me that happened to gain their own bodies.
If they die, they’ll just return to me again.
As it stands, the three Parallel Minds I’ve killed have already come back to me and are yelling annoyingly inside my head.
Ideally, I could just turn off the Parallel Minds skill and be done with it, but of course it wouldn’t be that easy.
I wasn’t able to turn off the Parallel Minds skill, maybe because they’re in their own bodies right now.
Still, that’s not really a big deal.
These guys have no way of winning anymore.
They can’t turn the skills back on, because it was me, the main body, who turned them off in the first place.
When all’s said and done, they’re copies of the original: me.
They can’t override the main body’s commands.
Originally, Parallel Minds is a skill that divides your consciousness into copies, none of which is any better or worse than the other.
The Parallel Minds and I are supposed to be the same exact being.
At least, that’s how it used to be.
Once they absorbed Mother, my Parallel Minds changed.
From that moment on, they were no longer “me” anymore.
They’re their own separate beings who just happen to resemble me.
But I’m still in control of my own power.
Their skills and stats are all borrowed.
This bunch of fakers thinks they can go around using my power for whatever they want?
Not happening.
Giant scythe in hand, I break into a run.
The Parallel Minds scatter, flying in all directions.
I set my sights on one of them and swing my scythe.
My target dodges a few times but can’t keep it up forever against my equally matched stats; soon my scythe grazes a leg, which is enough to cut it off with ease.
With its movements hindered by the loss of one leg, the rest is in the bag.
I skewer its head, just like the Parallel Mind I killed before.
As I finish that one off, another Parallel Mind tries to attack me from behind.
Its scythe-leg comes down on the back of my human half.
But it’s no use!
The dress I made with Divine Thread Weaving catches the Parallel Mind’s scythe.
It can’t block it completely, of course, so the scythe manages to cut through and reach my skin, but it barely leaves a scratch.
Hardly any damage at all.
The Parallel Mind, clearly panicked by how little effect its attack had, tries to withdraw.
Think again, pal!
I swing my scythe around, the blade cutting through the Parallel Mind behind me.
Just like that, the Parallel Mind’s body is cut in half in midair.
Four to go.
Without their skills, the Parallel Minds are just a bunch of small spider monsters with high stats.
Their only attack options are biting with their fangs or slicing with their front legs.
And without skills like Cutting Enhancement, even those don’t amount to much.
They can’t inflict a fatal wound on me when I have the same stats.
On top of that, I can turn their skills off whenever I want.
If they decide to self-destruct and use a Rot Attack, I can just turn off that skill, rendering their attempt into a normal physical attack.
I have nothing to fear from them.
Of the four remaining Parallel Minds, three of them attack me at once.
One goes for my human neck, one for my spider head, and the last follows shortly after the first two.
I’m sure the fourth one is going to try something once I dodge the first two attacks.
I know exactly what you guys are thinking.
Because I’m thinking the same thing.
Guess I’ll do something they don’t expect.
When the first one aims its scythe at my neck, I catch it with my human half’s mouth.
When the second one aims its scythe at my spider head, I block it with my spider half’s scythes.
The third one, surprised by this turn of events, tries to hit the brakes, so I ruthlessly swing my scythe at it.
Unable to stop in time, the Parallel Mind’s head runs straight into my scythe.
At the same time, the first attacker uses the scythe that’s not in my mouth to stab at my head.
Kshhh. It goes in straight between my eyebrows.
Yeah, no waaay was I gonna be able to dodge that one.
The scythe threatens to pierce right through my skull and hit my brain, but I’m not letting that happen.
I grab the scythe with my free hand and yank it out with all my strength.
Now this poor Parallel Mind has one of its scythes trapped in my mouth and the other in my hand. There’s nowhere to run.
I swing my scythe with one hand to complete the execution.
Two more to go.
But in the meantime, the one who was locked scythe to scythe with my spider body has retreated.
On top of that, it’s trying to run away.
Fair enough. I guess most people would run if they realized their chances were this hopeless.
Anyone would run. Even me. In fact, it’s because I would run that this one’s running.
The other one who didn’t attack me already tried to run, too, but it looks like the puppet spiders actually blocked that one’s escape route.
Huh. Guess I’ll leave them to it, then.
Which means I’m free to go after the other one.
Our stats are the same, so I won’t be able to catch up to it by running.
That means it won’t be able to lose me, either, but I’d rather not just play chase forever.
So I turn on a single skill.
Repellent Evil Eye, activate!
I unleash a gravity attack on the fleeing Parallel Mind.
It doesn’t really do any damage, but that’s not my goal anyway. I’m just trying to slow it down.
As long as extra gravity is slowing it down, I’ll catch up soon enough.
Our base speed is the same, after all.
“J-just kill me! Wait, on second thought, please don’t kill me!”
No, I’m definitely gonna kill you.
“Huh?! Seriously, cut it out! Why are you stopping us?! What’s wrong with you, main body?! Killing everybody would make things so much easier! Plus, it’s the fastest way to save this world, so isn’t that the most logical course of action? Why would you get in the way of that?! It doesn’t make sense!”
Like I said, you guys are the ones who don’t make sense.
Seriously, why would you come to such an extreme conclusion?
The effects of absorbing Mother must’ve given them some seriously weird ideas.
Admittedly, I do partly understand what they’re saying.
If you think about how the system works, killing tons of humans really is the fastest way to save this world.
But eradicating humans to do so is totally missing the point.
My guess is that this is something Mother wanted to do but couldn’t, so they’ve inherited her will.
Ugh, so annoying.
For now, I just cut down the Parallel Mind who’s shrieking in front of me.
The Rot attribute turns its body to dust.
At the same time, the Parallel Mind itself returns to me, shrieking all the while.
Ughhh, so loud.
Now there’s a total of eight Parallel Minds clamoring around in my head.
The last remaining one is locked in an intense battle with the puppet spiders some distance away.
It’s one against four, and the Parallel Mind has no skills.
Even so, it’s putting up a pretty good fight.
I guess its stats are relatively high compared to the puppet spiders’, huh?
If anything, the puppet spiders must be pretty strong to be holding their own against such a big stat difference.
My magical modifications have made them pretty strong.
At this point, I’ve more or less rebuilt from scratch the
doll bodies that serve as their outer shell.
Honestly, there’s not a trace left of how they originally looked.
You can barely tell they’re not human anymore, and my Divine Thread Weaving skill has made their bodies stronger, too.
I’ve hidden four of their six arms as a sort of gimmick; they’re normally stashed away inside the doll bodies, making them look that much more human.
Right now, of course, they have their hidden arms out, since they’re fighting seriously and all.
They were already really strong monsters, with stats averaging over 10,000, but my modding has made them even stronger.
…Kinda weird, huh?
They’re subordinates of the Demon Lord, which should make them potential enemies to me.
Why in the world am I making them stronger?
Yeah, it’s a little strange.
But however strong they might be now, they still can’t beat the Parallel Mind.
Its stats are the same as mine, after all.
I already know for a fact that the puppet spiders’ weapons don’t work on me.
So if the Parallel Mind has the same stats as I do, their weapons won’t work on it, either.
Even with its skills sealed, its stats are plenty high enough to defeat the puppet spiders.
That’s right! Even if I make them a little bit stronger, the puppet spiders still won’t be able to beat me, so it’s fine.
Yeah, let’s go with that.
Anyway, I better step in before the puppet spiders get hurt.
The Parallel Mind is so busy dealing with them that I can easily attack it from behind.
KO! Winner: me!
The final Parallel Mind’s body scatters into dust, and it returns to my head.
The puppet spiders must’ve been having a pretty tough time, because as soon as they see that, they all flop to the ground.
Good work, ladies.
With the Parallel Minds taken care of, I can turn my skills back on.
Now I just have to decide what to do with this ridiculously huge army of spiders.
Looking around, it’s all spiders as far as the eye can see.
It sort of reminds me of the hellish sibling war I first saw when I was born in this world.
Pretty traumatic, to be honest.
What am I gonna do about these guys, though?
The fastest way would be to finish ’em all off with some massive Area-of-Effect Magic, but I would feel a little bit bad about that.
I mean, they were only acting on the Parallel Minds’ orders. They’re really just babies with no will of their own.