by Okina Baba
Splut! Splut! Splut!
Cut it out already! Blech! It got me again!
Crap, at this rate I’m gonna get my ass handed to me!
All right! I have no choice but to bust out my special attack!
Splut! Splut! Splut!
I’m not gonna keep falling for the same attack over and over, buddy! It’s obvious by now that you can only fire three of those at a time! Don’t underestimate the observation and evasive abilities of the gamer they once called Skanda! I’m gonna evade your spit attacks!
I lunge at the frog with my claws at the ready!
Crap, it dodged like I figured it would—wait, it just jumped! It’s trying to hit me with its tongue!
Smack! Owww!
There must’ve been acid on that tongue, too—the spot where it touched me is burning!
Ohhh, geez. This is a serious injury.
If I have an HP gauge, I’m probably getting into the red by now.
One more hit, and I’ll be in serious trouble.
Luckily, that isn’t going to happen. The winner has already been decided.
Because my thread was waiting where the frog was about to land.
The trick is simple.
I just laid my silk along the dungeon floor as I dodged the spit attacks.
I seem to have a habit of unconsciously leaving it on the ground as I move anyway.
So this time, I used that to my advantage.
All I did was add some stickiness to the thread trail behind me.
Then, I just had to lure the frog over to that area.
I did so by carefully controlling the speed and angle of my claw attack to send it leaping in the right direction.
I wasn’t expecting it to counterattack in midair, but…
…as soon as it lands, the frog gets caught in my thread.
Doggedly, I jump in to wind more threads around it.
Then I finish it off with my poison bite!
Within moments of receiving my venom, the frog draws its last breath.
Another skill level went up.
That should make my next frog battle a little easier.
Honestly, if I didn’t already have the Acid Resistance skill, the damage I took might’ve been too much for me to survive.
Yeesh, that was close. My body is in a sorry state now.
Two spit attacks and one smack from that tongue were enough to put me on the verge of death.
The tongue attack was especially bad. The area where it touched me is concave now, and the impact busted several of my legs.
I wasn’t even underprepared this time.
I had kind of figured that if a spider fought another monster head-on without a web, the chances of the spider winning would probably be pretty low.
Still, I think somewhere in the back of my mind was the naive confidence that it would work out somehow or other.
To be honest, it was a lot harder than I thought.
My first real battle was a decidedly narrow victory.
Anyway, with this major injury, I can’t move very well anymore.
I have to make a simple home here and focus on nursing my wounds for now.
The “simple home” is really just a basic little nest.
I leave the dead frog alone for later and start spinning a web.
Ugh. Every time I move, a wave of severe pain streaks through my body.
Oh? A new skill? Sure enough, the pain has subsided a little.
It still really freaking hurts, though.
But either way, this is definitely a good skill to have.
As long as I keep surviving, the skill level will probably go up naturally, so that will be a big help.
Whew. Finally, my temporary home is finished. Now I can catch my breath.
If another monster attacks me right now, I’ll be toast.
Oh well. Since I worked so hard to bring this prey down, I might as well eat it.
Yep. Experiencing my first real battle made me realize it all over again.
I’m soooooo weak!
I don’t think it’s just me; I get the feeling that small lesser taratects aren’t that powerful as a species overall.
Well, I guess it is a “lesser” species, after all. It stands to reason that I’d have low attack power and brittle defense. My speed seems decent, at least, but it still wasn’t enough to dodge that spit attack barrage the first few times.
So stats-wise, I can’t even outpace a frog.
The only reason I’ve been able to beat monsters without a problem so far is that I had the advantage of my spiderweb traps. Obviously, fighting head-on is not my forte. Now I really understand how much I’ve been depending on my home.
Anyway, this has made one thing clear: I’m not cut out for direct confrontations.
In a face-to-face fight, I’d go so far as to say that everything comes down to whether I can restrain my opponent with my threads or not. In theory, I could just give them a poison bite, but with my lousy stats, I’d probably get smacked down before I could even reach them.
So I’ll have to use my speed to confuse my opponent and then create an opening or set a trap like I did this time to catch it in my silk threads.
Seems like this is gonna be my go-to strategy. Unless I build a trap in advance and lead them to it?
In that case, frogs might be a troublesome opponent for me.
After all, they seemed to favor a “fixed turret” strategy where they stay in one place and attack from a distance.
They don’t move without a reason, so they won’t be likely to jump into my trap on their own.
Sigh.
So many challenges. Now I know my weak points—or rather, I’ve realized that I have nothing but weak points.
But I can’t just give up.
If all I want to do is keep surviving, I could just make a new home.
But that isn’t good enough.
Since I’ve decided I want to live with pride, I can’t depend on that cop-out strategy.
For now, though, I need to rest.
How long is this injury going to take to heal? In fact, will it even heal on its own at all?
Well, whatever. Today has been exhausting. I’m well overdue for some sleep to hopefully recover a bit.
So, on that note, good night.
Zzz. Hmm? Oh man, it feels like I fainted.
In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what happened.
Ugh, my body still hurts. I guess a wound that bad isn’t gonna heal in one night.
Yawn… Ow, ow! When I try going through my usual stretching routine, sharp pain runs through my broken legs.
Oof, my two middle right legs are in particularly bad shape. It feels like they might tear right off if I’m not careful.
I’m getting really worried about whether this is going to heal after all.
Boing, boing. Hmm?
One of the threads of my web is vibrating. There’s a monster caught in my little nest!
Usually I would wake up the instant I felt something catch, but it seems like it’s been going on for a while. I must have been sleeping more heavily than I thought.
That’s probably due to all the damage I’ve taken, too.
Aw, man. Those petrifying lizards are tough. Guess I caught another pain in the butt.
What should I do now?
Since basilisks have that petrifying gaze, my web trap won’t save me from turning to stone with a little eye contact. In my current injured state, taking a hit from a petrification attack seems ill-advised.
But I don’t want to pass up on captured prey, either…
Zwoop.
Oh crap, our eyes met.
Nngah! The ends of my feet got petrified! Ugh, fine then! Clearly I have no choice.
Chomp!
Thanks to my Petrification Resistance, I’m turning to stone very slowly.
However, losing mobility in my front legs is gonna be a big problem. It could get really hard to walk if I’m not careful.
Please let this thing die before my leggy bits get frozen!
Apparently somebody heard my plea, because the basilisk runs out of energy when my legs are about halfway petrified.
Mm-hmm, looks like I can still walk, albeit clumsily.
Oh? Whoa! What godly timing!
Okay, okay. The fact that two of my skills leveled up is pretty sweet.
But that isn’t even the best part!
My carapace falls away from my body. I’m molting.
Yes, it’s one of the benefits of leveling up: full recovery via molting!
I wasn’t sure whether the giant dent in my body would heal, but it’s been restored perfectly.
Yahoo! Thanks a lot, basilisk! Also, I’m gonna eat you now!
So, without even trying, I’ve succeeded in fully healing my wounds.
Now I’m ready for another go at exploring the labyrinth!
SKILLS
My eyes were glued to the book in front of me.
“What do you think? Impressive, is it not?”
Katia, the duke’s daughter who used to be Kanata, grinned at me smugly.
Since the day of the Appraisal Ceremony, she had started coming to visit me often.
At first I called her Kanata, but that felt unnatural for both of us, so she told me to use her current name instead. Karnatia, or Katia for short.
But Katia still called me Shun.
Since my current name was Schlain, Shun didn’t sound too unusual as a nickname, so Katia insisted on doing it.
Personally, I didn’t mind, but it was annoying that other people assumed things about our relationship, since we called each other by nicknames.
We really were close, of course, but Katia was a girl now.
Because of that, some people got the wrong idea.
Leading the way on that front was my sister, Sue.
Whenever Katia came over to hang out, Sue would seethe and glower at us for a while, then stubbornly take up a position between us.
Every time this happened, Katia could barely suppress her snickering.
I know I aimed to be an ideal brother and all, but how did it end up like this…?
Recently, I had the feeling that she was even envious of Fei.
Getting jealous over your own brother is bad enough, but even over a pet? Really?
At that moment, Fei was sitting in my lap, gazing with great interest at the book I was holding.
She was so clever that I sometimes found myself wondering if she understood the language here.
But of course, I had no way of knowing whether that was the case, and even if it was, I seriously doubted she’d be able to read on top of that.
“It’s a skill encyclopedia belonging to the house of the duke, you see. This one has much more information than the ones you’d find on the streets.”
The book contained detailed explanations of currently known skills.
It covered their effects, of course, but it also included the conditions required to learn and improve each one.
It was like a strategy guide.
Incidentally, Katia’s manner of speaking in the native language here was very different from her Japanese.
Compared to her manly inflection in Japanese, she’d been brought up to speak the country’s language in a register befitting an aristocratic young lady.
Since I knew who she’d been in her former life, the contrast threw me off at first, but I was used to it by now.
We only spoke in Japanese when we were alone, after all, and Sue was usually around whenever we hung out, so I encountered the ladylike side more often, anyway.
“Yeah, this is amazing. Couldn’t you get as many skills as you want with this?”
“I’m afraid not. Your time is limited, after all. I believe it would be more prudent to choose which skills are of the highest priority and spend time on them accordingly.”
I flipped through the pages eagerly.
Some skills I already knew, while others I didn’t.
When I saw unfamiliar abilities with impressive-sounding effects, I couldn’t help but stop and read more about them.
“You and Sue already have all the basic status skills, do you not? In that case, you ought to improve those as soon as possible.”
Basic status skills were just the ones that increased your stats, like life, magic, strength, and so on.
“Those evolve at skill level ten, you know. The effect becomes much larger, and each time you level up from then on, your stats will increase by a significantly higher amount. We won’t be fighting any monsters for a while yet, so we’re still level one. If we acquire those skills now, it’ll pay off in incredible stat bonuses when we level up.”
We were all still level 1.
You could only level up by killing living things, monsters or otherwise.
We didn’t even have permission to go outside, never mind fight monsters, so we had yet to level up at all.
Still, our stats gradually increased as we grew and trained.
However, the changes weren’t nearly as dramatic as they probably would be with a level-up.
“Ideally, I’d prefer to evolve the skills twice before leveling up, but that’s almost certainly too much to hope for.”
There were various benefits to a skill reaching level 10: The skill might evolve, or you might gain other subskills. But the higher the skill level, the more proficiency was required to raise it further, so getting a skill to level 10 was pretty tough.
“If you evolve the skills as far as Fortitude, Stronghold, Skanda, and such, the way your stats go up will alter as well. Reaching that point is ideal. But at the very least, we ought to reach the preliminary stages of those skills.”
“Makes sense. I’m surprised there aren’t any skills that improve your ability to earn EXP or proficiency, though.”
In RPGs, you could sometimes find super-rare items and such that did that, but I guess not so much with skills.
“Indeed. But did you notice anything else unusual?”
“Yeah.”
Having looked through all the skills in the encyclopedia, I knew what Katia was getting at.
Sue had been peering over my shoulder at the book, too, but she didn’t seem to have noticed.
She appeared perplexed, not to mention irritated that Katia and I understood each other.
“There aren’t any item-production skills.”
“Yeah, if anything, they all seem to be specifically for combat.”
Yes, while there were enough skills to fill an entire book, not a single one of them was for production or any other noncombat usage.
There were a handful that seemed potentially useful for production, but all of these were only secondary effects of combat skills.
With such a huge number of skills, it was bizarre that they were all so heavily biased toward one purpose.
Katia and I probably only noticed this because we used to play games back in Japan.
The people of this world probably just assumed that was what skills were for.
“It’s like this whole world is based around combat.” My own muttered observation scared me a little.
A world where you can’t level up without killing things.
Skills that all revolve a
round battle.
Really, it was as if this world was encouraging its inhabitants to fight.
“Not many people know about this yet, but I’ve heard the Demon Lord’s army is rapidly expanding its ranks and armaments.”
“Then that means…”
“We may be called upon to battle someday. So until then, we should try to become as strong as we can.”
The only response I could muster to Katia’s grave words was a silent nod.
Fei was shifting uneasily in my lap, so I patted her head to reassure her.
BONUS STAGE?
My wounds from that frog healed up nicely when I leveled up, so my exploration has resumed.
Before long, I find my first prey of the day. Now, this is a monster I’ve never seen before.
It has tons of legs, like a centipede.
Well, might as well Appraise it first.
Hmm? Failed? Aw, man, it doesn’t show the level.
So Appraisal can fail, then. I didn’t know that.
Not like it makes much of a difference at the moment, anyway.
The frog I fought earlier noticed me, but this centipede hasn’t.
This is my chance for a real surprise attack!
Speedily yet stealthily, I sneak up behind my opponent.
Swish, swish, swish… Hello there, time to die!
My ambush is perfectly successful.
In fact, my victory is so complete that it’s almost anticlimactic.
I completely bind the creature with my thread. Then, I drive my venomous fangs into it to finish the job.
The centipede looks unappetizing, and sure enough, eating it is totally gross.
On top of that, it must have a weird poison or something, because I feel kinda sick after eating it.
My body has gone weirdly stiff.
Man, since being reincarnated as a spider, I haven’t eaten a single meal that could be considered tasty by any stretch of the imagination.
I know it’s a luxury, but I really want to eat delicious food again.
Ahh… I wonder if there’s any cup ramen lying around somewhere…
Probably not, huh. Giving up on that, I continue my exploration.
Oh, my Appraisal skill finally leveled up.
Recently, I’ve stopped feeling quite so sick from Appraising a bunch of things at once, so that’s nice.