“Huh?! I only had 120 Points!”
“I had 150 Points. Was there really that much of a difference between Haruka and me in terms of human worth...?”
“Dude, I have it worse than you! She has almost double what I do!”
It’s true that her grades were better than mine, and she beat me in the looks department as well. On top of that, she was good at sports and very sociable too. But still, this reality check via numbers is kind of depressing...
“W-Well, these points are just the biased opinion of that evil god!” Haruka exclaimed. “It doesn’t mean you two are worth less than me as human beings or anything like that!”
“My worth as a human being...” I muttered.
“Almost half...” Tomoya muttered.
Haruka tried to cheer us up when she saw our depressed reactions, but her words were the final nail in the coffin. Tomoya looks like he could vanish at any moment right now.
“D-Don’t worry about it! You can just level up your skills!” Haruka insisted. “Okay, Nao, you’re up next!”
She seemed to have realized her poor choice of words, and she slapped my back to cue me, no doubt so we could change the subject.
“A-All right, these are my skills.”
I didn’t like the way Haruka was trying to get me to hurry along, but I still decided to do what she told me and list my skills.
Help Guide, Weapon Proficiency: Spears, Magic Aptitude: Time
Level 2 Spearmanship, Level 1 Evasion, Level 2 Robust
Level 1 Hawk’s Eye, Level 1 Stealth, Level 1 Scout
Level 2 Third Eye, Level 1 Traps and Snares 101, Level 2 Time Magic
Level 1 Fire Magic
I thought I’d come up with a pretty good skill build, but I’m not so confident anymore after seeing Haruka’s skills. I want to believe that mine is decent, and that Haruka’s build is just much better. Mine is decent compared to my classmates’, right? I hope so. I had more skills than Tomoya did, but we had more or less the same number of Points to work with if I didn’t include the cost of the Help Guide.
“Hm, so you chose a skill build for a center position in battle?” said Haruka. “I guess that matches what I thought you would get.”
“Wait, really? Did you both plan out your skill build?” Tomoya asked.
“Of course,” Haruka replied. “You’re the type to charge in brainlessly, Tomoya, and I was fairly sure Nao would end up being a jack of all trades but master of none, so I grabbed support skills to balance things out.”
Ack! I mean, you guessed right, but I wish you could’ve at least described me as, like, “capable of fighting on the frontline if needed” and had just left out that “master of none” part. I couldn’t really complain, though, since I wasn’t really thinking that thoroughly when I chose my skills.
“Well, we ended up with a frontline, center, and backline fighter, so things worked out well. Okay, now let’s hurry and find a town.”
“Oh yeah, Haruka, you chose a skill called General Knowledge, right?” I asked. “Did that skill tell you a reason for hurrying?”
“The skill said that this area isn’t that dangerous...as long as we’re near a town.”
“So you’re saying that it’s dangerous to be far away from town?”
“Yes, but even if we’re near a town, something like a wild boar could easily kill us,” said Haruka. “We do have new skills, but we should test them out in a safe place before we use them in combat.”
“Oh yeah, even in our old world, I remember occasionally seeing news about people who died after being mauled by boars,” I said.
“Did you two know that when cats mean business, people are no match for them?” said Tomoya. “Well, at least, that’s what I heard.”
What Tomoya said actually made some sense. He has a point, since it’s quite hard to catch a cat that’s running away. Anyway, even though we did have skills, we were completely unarmed. Our clothes looked like they probably fit this world, at the very least.
“Enough talking. Let’s get going!” said Haruka. “You have the Hawk’s Eye skill, right, Nao? Do you see a town anywhere?”
I looked around again with Hawk’s Eye, but I saw only the same grassy plains and forest I had before. There were no signs of a town anywhere. The farthest thing I could see was a mountain. Wait, is that a road?
“I didn’t see a town, but I saw a road in that direction.”
“You didn’t see a town? Oh well, at least there’s a road we can follow,” said Haruka. “Let’s aim for that road for now.”
“Roger,” said Tomoya.
We walked for about ten minutes in the direction I’d pointed out. When we reached the road, it turned out to be about three meters wide. It was just a simple road of packed soil, slightly elevated, but that clearly meant it was man-made.
“Yeah, this is definitely a highway,” said Haruka. She looked around to her left and right before asking us, “Now we need to decide which way to go from here—any preferences?”
I had no idea at all. “I don’t see any signs of a town in either direction,” I replied. “Maybe I could make something out from a higher vantage point, but there are no trees nearby.”
The plains we were walking through looked mostly flat all the way to the horizon. Oh yeah, speaking of the horizon, it seems like it should be far away, but it actually isn’t. It wouldn’t even be five kilometers back on Earth. The distance depends on the size of the planet, so maybe it’s different here.