The Latest Game Is Too Amazing

The region to the southwest of Maeldia is a meadow. From the look of it, it doesn’t seem likely that monsters will attack on their own. But if there was a different problem in its place…

…That would probably be the fact that Cornelia is in a bad mood. …But what’s wrong, did I do something? Maybe she doesn’t like that an outsider who joined in is keeping her from having fun playing with her friends.

The other two have no particular issues. If anything, they’re in a good mood. Especially Liam, he’s talking to me a lot. He’s pretty well-informed, telling me about the game’s setting where monsters have become more active due to the god of evil being revived, the orcs to the north of the city have attained a higher level of leadership and greater numbers than ever before and have become a problem, and because of that, they can’t do the harvesting for mid-level potions.

Leadership, huh. There might be a boss monster. The NPCs in this game have very advanced AIs, so it wouldn’t be odd if a monster had an advanced commander AI.

After that, we talk about everyday stuff, like our families and where we’re from. Apparently, Liam is from a family of farmers and has five younger siblings. I, on the other hand, am an only child, so I’m kind of jealous, but then he says that his family isn’t very well-off, so he left to work and send money back home. So Liam’s a working adult, huh? But the Valgear is pretty expensive, so he must be doing pretty well if he’s able to play it… Oh yeah, maybe he won the raffle like me.

But when I talk about my family – or rather, when the topic of my father comes up, Cornelia’s mood gets worse, so the conversation naturally comes to an end. I’m not sure why her mood got worse, but maybe she hates her father or something. But asking her about her family situation when we’ve only just met really would be too rude.

And so, as we continue walking, the mood feels precarious. I seriously don’t know how much longer I can take this. Can someone please break the ice here?

Emilia stops walking. Maybe we’ve reached our destination?

“Emili–” Liam calls out to her, but before he can finish, Emilia puts her finger to her mouth, signalling him to be quiet. Sensing the abnormality, Liam draws his sword, Cornelia readies her bow, and I ready my staff.

There’s nothing in the vicinity, and the meadow looks the same as ever. There’s no sign of any monsters. But when I stay silent and listen closely, I can faintly hear a strange rumbling noise. What the heck is that sound?

What do I do in a situation like this? …Oh yeah, I almost forgot. I display the map window, remembering that I’ve been thinking of using it for this. It’s my surprise attack countermeasure. When I fought the killer bees before, they attacked from behind, so I thought of a way to prevent surprise attacks by getting rid of my blind spots. When you enlarge the map’s scale in the map window, it displays nearby monsters and people with different colored marks. If I use this, I tell where a monster will attack from beforehand.

The map window displays allied party members by marking them in green. In addition, the enemy markers – orange for enemies that haven’t noticed us, and red for the ones that have – show six of them in red surrounding us.

“Everyone be careful! It’s giant moles!” Emilia calls out.

I’m not sure if it’s in response to her voice, but mounds of dirt pop up and start heading towards us. I promptly dodge it with a side step.

“Shi—!”

It seems that, since the enemy appeared from close by, Liam couldn’t dodge and his leg was hit. Judging by his HP bar, which was displayed along with the rest of the party’s HP and MP bars after I joined, it doesn’t look like he took much damage. Warriors have high physical defense, after all.

“Tch! You have some nerve!” Cornelia says, clicking her tongue, as she shoots an arrow at the dirt mound. But it just gets stuck in the ground, seemingly having no effect at all.

Giant moles are pretty troublesome enemies. They’re underground, so it’s difficult to attack them from here, and since they can aim for the feet and limit our movement, they can repeat the pattern of attacking and retreating. It’s plain, but it really is annoyingly effective.

Using Mana Bolt opens up holes in the ground, but doesn’t appear to have much of an effect against the underground moles. The giant moles are level 10, so it could just be that it’s not powerful enough.

A giant mole’s face is poking out of the ground a bit, and Emilia smashes its head open with her iron mace. Healer classes typically aren’t good at combat, but it’s only natural she’d be capable of that since she’s a high level player, the only one here who’s level 13. (Liam and Cornelia are level 8 and I’m level 6.) …Though, the defeated giant mole is gory, and the blood-covered mace swinging around is a bit scary.

What do we do about the rest? Drawing them closer to defeat them like Emilia did would be hard. Timing aside, I’m so weak that there’s a high risk that I’d die if I missed and it attacked me, considering the level difference. Mana Bolt can only make holes, and Cornelia’s attacks are obstructed by the ground.

…That’s it!

“Cornelia! Aim for it after my attack!”

I’m not sure if she understood my intentions, but there’s no time to check. Following the mole’s direction of movement, I fire a Mana Bolt just ahead of it as it rushes in to attack. As it hits the ground, the earth in that area is blasted open, and the giant mole becomes visible. Then, without a moment’s delay, Cornelia’s arrow pierces the giant mole.

It lets out a shriek. It couldn’t be taken down with a single attack, but since it has an arrow sticking out of it, it can’t burrow into the ground very well. Cornelia uses that opportunity to shoot multiple consecutive hits. We attack two more the same way, defeating them in succession.

The other moles are… One of them was defeated by Emilia again. The last one is– oh no, it’s approaching from the side!

“Chaos, it’s coming at you on your left!” Liam shouts.

“Spider Net!”

The threads don’t seem to make it underground, but the instant the giant mole’s face pops out, it gets tangled up in the net.

“Leave it to me, haaah!”

Liam’s longsword finishes off the slowed giant mole.

“Well, I let my guard down. Sorry,” Liam says apologetically as he scratches his head. But there’s probably nothing he could have done about it, since they showed up pretty much right next to us.

“Liam, I’ll heal you, so don’t move. Heal!”

Emilia’s hand emits a dim light. The light surrounds Liam and heals his leg wound.

“Thanks, Emilia. By the way, Chaos, what’re you doing?”

“Collecting materials from the giant moles.”

I put my hand on the giant mole corpses and collect them the same way I collect items. All of them disappear, and only blood is left behind.

When I first started, I thought items would drop automatically when I defeated monsters, but I didn’t know that I had to collect the corpse like this to collect items. Well, there was only a little bit written about this in the manual, so I can’t help that I overlooked it. The manual sure is massive. Because of that, I left behind quite a few forest wolves and lamented how unlucky I was that no items dropped, but considering that drops sell for pretty good money, that was really wasteful…

Anyway, the giant mole that Emilia took down is way too gory, since its head is all mashed up. This RPG is rated R (there was a warning for depictions of cruelty) but this might be a bit harsh for people who don’t have a tolerance for gore. I have a tolerance for it because my friend shows me gory pictures.

…Everyone looks kind of surprised though, I wonder what’s up with that. Maybe they don’t like gory stuff?

Cornelia wasn’t enthusiastic about this request.

She felt disgusted due to her sense of ethics which could also be called fastidiousness. On the other hand, she could understand the meaning of this request and why it would be necessary. Furthermore, although elves weren’t quite despised, it hadn’t been very easy to join a party since she was from one of the subraces in addition to being female, which was rare among adventurers. She was grateful that, in spite of this, she was allowed to join a party that was so easy to get along with, and for that reason, she had begrudgingly accepted the request. However, the fact that she was letting those emotions show on her face was entirely due to her immaturity.

The boy who had accepted the quest with them, Chaos, was an unremarkable-looking boy with black hair and eyes. His body seemed weak and unsuitable for fighting, but according to Havoc, he was a very talented rookie. But no matter how she looked at him, all she could see was some noble’s second or third son disguising himself as a commoner who knew nothing of hardship.

They introduced themselves to each other, and before they left, she directed her gaze towards him once more. His expression was a bit grim, as if he was enduring something.

Ah, maybe he realized… And on top of that, he seemed to be deliberately playing along with this farce. From his standpoint, he couldn’t openly tell that to the other members. Since she had to complete the request after she accepted it, she suppressed her feelings of guilt, merely stringing words together.

It had been decided in advance that Liam, who was close in age and the same gender as Chaos, would be the one to talk to him and collect information. Instead, Emilia and Cornelia observed him.

First, Liam tried sounding out how much local information Chaos knew about. The rumors about the god of evil’s revival and about the orcs were well-known all throughout Maeldia – no, throughout the whole kingdom. However, Chaos only nodded along, as if he was completely unaware of it. He wasn’t trying to get any information out of him, he was simply listening to the story, and that was it. Judging by his expression earlier, he didn’t seem particularly skilled with body language, so perhaps this was his genuine reaction.

Then, Liam started a conversation about their origins. Apparently, Chaos was from a region called Oosaka. She couldn’t manage to figure out where Oosaka was located, but it was probably a territory in a faraway foreign country. It seemed that he was a student there. He was probably a student from a school that trained mages. Even in this kingdom, there was a school like that in the capital, since the country wants to get its hands on excellent mages. But normally, only those such as noble children who were wealthy and had high status could attend. Those of low status wouldn’t be allowed into the school unless they were especially talented. If the boy had that much wealth, perhaps he had come all this way for magic training?

They also brought up their families. Apparently, he didn’t have any siblings. It seemed that his father’s occupation was known as a ‘salaryman’.

But what in the world was a salaryman? Since blood had a large impact on mages in most cases, it was easy for a child to become a mage if their parent was also a mage. Naturally, the reverse was also true.

Putting it all together, his father was a mage with enough wealth on hand to send his son to school. If he was a high ranking mage with a high salary, that would indicate that a salaryman was a position of very high status, such as a court mage.

Isn’t he a fine father, Cornelia thought jealously.

Her own father, on the other hand… When the face of her sleazy, careless womanizer of a father came to mind, she was filled with contempt. Learning of the difference between her father and Chaos’s, she ended up becoming miserable.

Feeling eyes on her, Cornelia suddenly came to her senses. Chaos and Liam stopped talking. It seemed that they realized she was in a bad mood. Faced with Liam’s reproaching gaze, she mentally apologized. ‘What the heck am I doing?’ she thought, falling into self-hatred for a time.

A little while later, Emilia noticed a monster’s presence. She should have noticed it sooner, since she had elf hearing superior to that of humans, but it seemed that the prior events had made her lose her ability to concentrate.

She readied her bow. The enemies appeared from underground. Giant moles – a somewhat troublesome opponent. Liam was unable to dodge and got wounded, and she unconsciously clicked her tongue, thinking, if only I’d noticed sooner. She released an arrow in revenge, but it had no effect.

Chaos also unleashed his spell. If she remembered correctly, she had seen that spell used before by an elven mage. It was a basic spell. In addition, it didn’t have much power and was unable to defeat the giant mole.

If she was being honest, that was a bit of a let-down. She had heard that he was a talented mage, so she had been expecting him to unleash a more impressive spell. Well, they were all rookies, so by that standard, it was undoubtedly strong, but maybe he had been overestimated.

The fight continued. She stopped all thoughts of investigation and considered what to do about the giant moles. Should she aim for the instant its face pops out after all?

“Cornelia! Aim for it after my attack!” Chaos called out, speaking to her for the first time since their introductions. Apparently, he had a plan.

Chaos fired his spell again. Up to this point, it was the same as before. It would have the same effect… or maybe not. The spell caused an explosion just ahead of the giant mole and exposed it. His magical control was incredible. So that’s it! Understanding what he meant, she immediately aimed for her target and shot at it. The situation was turned around in the blink of an eye.

In any case, he had excellent magic control and was able to instantly think of a way to put his allies to best use. Without a doubt, he was a fine adventurer. Although she did think he was amazing, she was also keenly aware of the difference between him and herself, feeling an intense frustration and a desire not to lose to him. He should have been a rookie just like her, but she sensed the difference between them in how he had calmly read the monster’s movement and how he had put his ideas and skills to proper use with such precision. His magic hadn’t exactly been a dramatic feat. Even though she couldn’t use magic, as long as she had her bow, her strength was on the same level as his. That should be more than enough for her to catch up to him. So, perhaps she should learn from his actions?

She probably wouldn’t do a very good job of fulfilling the request to monitor him due to succumbing to her feelings of guilt, but she could do it if it was to learn his technique by watching him. The negative emotions which had been gnawing at her until just now subsided a bit.

She looked at him with eyes full of respect and jealousy mixed together. It seemed that he was harvesting the monster for parts. She had definitely heard that his methods for collecting them were top class. I’ll watch and learn from this too, she thought as she stared at him in observation.

He touched a giant mole, and in an instant, the corpse disappeared.

“…What did you do?”

Liam, nice job asking that in a situation like this, she thought, half in awe and half in praise.

“Huh? I collected it?” Chaos responded as if it was obvious.

…Maybe that was storage magic…

Apparently, she had more to learn from him than she’d thought.