DAY 120
EARLY MORNING
Ah, senseless girl-driven violence… How I’ve missed you.
THE MONSTER FOREST
ON THE FRONTIER
OH, ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Haruka-kun nearly got himself killed again? Twice, in fact! And it wasn’t even a last-ditch effort to save himself in an emergency. No, Haruka-kun simply conceived of a new way to defeat an otherwise unbeatable dungeon king, and Haruka-kun being Haruka-kun, he simply had to try it. And then he nearly blew himself up.
That was near-death experience number one. Near-death experience number two came when Haruka-kun found a ring, didn’t check it if it was safe to wear, put it on, and almost self-destructed. Did he learn nothing from his close brush with death in the Theocracy’s ultimate dungeon?! Did he not care how he left the dungeon emperors crying?
“What was he thinking?!”
“Nothing. That’s the problem.”
Not again. Not Haruka-kun, the jobless self-styled human being with the very unhumanlike ability to destroy and reassemble his body from scratch, putting himself out of action once more.
“…Weirdly, he looks better than when we last saw him this morning.”
“Yeah. He was walking all funny before…”
“Seriously? He nearly died and came back better?”
He was technically immobile, but technicalities never stopped him. He moved with ease, automatically, in such a fluid fashion I couldn’t see any sign of him struggling to control himself.
But outside of a few martial arts moves he had learned, Haruka-kun couldn’t do much. He had lost all of his fancy Skills and fighting techniques.
“He’s like the little mermaid—a foolish, tragic tale of a love that could never be, wherein the titular character trades her voice to walk on land, only to lose everything in the end.”
His body moved however he told it to. Which, y’know, bodies tended to do. The trade-off was everything else. All the techniques Haruka-kun had fought for, had struggled for, had defied his levels for, were gone. All the abilities that he had taught himself in this world of rampant monsters… Ka-poof.
He was less frail now, true. He had exceptionally high defense for someone at level 28, but level 28 was level 28. He was on par with the average level 50 adventurer, tops. That meant nothing in dungeons. Level 50 adventurers could never reach the bottom floors of dungeons.
Haruka-kun had won back his speed, but none of his go-to high-speed techniques. His magic was stronger, but this strength made it uncontrollable. His Skills caused strange, inexplicable phenomena, like disappearing on the spot.
“Haruka-kun doesn’t talk about it, so we shouldn’t either.”
All he did anymore was drill—drill in radio calisthenics, drill in stretches, drill his still-inexperienced wuxingquan, drill slow-motion tai chi. Drill, drill, drill. That’s all he ever did. Everything was gone, and he had to start over from square one. Build it all back up. Teach himself from the top.
“He’d never complain. It’d break Faleria’s heart.”
So…what was he doing gadding off in the monster forest?! His stats weren’t high enough for that. He couldn’t equip proper weapons. He didn’t have any good monster-fighting techniques. Had he lost his mind?
“This is like a repeat of when he rescued Angelica-san and Nefertiri-san. His body was falling apart all around him, and the whole time, he acted like nothing was wrong.”
The monster forest was where it’d all begun for Haruka-kun. Here was where he had learned to fight, back when he was living in a cave and duking it out with tough monsters day after day. That was back before he’d had his autoattack powers, bizarre buffs, and weird autospell cheat Skills—back when he was just an ordinary teenage boy at level 1. Back when he was just Haruka-kun. And here was where he’d saved us, where he’d taught us how to fight, where we’d gained our very first levels. Here.
“Hey! Before we go on a trip down memory lane, we should find Haruka-kun before he, like, explodes himself.”
We discovered him facing down a pack of level 7 goblins. Goblins under level 10 were slow, squishy creatures. They didn’t have any fancy Skills. A level 28 person without Skills of their own, fighting carefully, could handle these foes with relative ease. Well…assuming it was one goblin versus one able-bodied human.
“He shouldn’t be so calm. It’s just not rational.”
“He shouldn’t be smiling. He shouldn’t act like goblins are a piece of cake.”
The goblins converged on Haruka-kun. I lunged, ready to fly to his rescue, but the dungeon emperors grabbed me and held me back. The very same people who’d taught me how to fight were standing back and watching while Haruka-kun struggled along with no fighting skill of his own.
“You know him. He’s stubborn like that.”
“No kidding. He’s always been this way. Always weak and always…well, strong.”
The scene that played out before us could have been a carbon copy of the first goblin massacre all those months ago. Haruka-kun was a flickering shadow of black, a stationary pillar, a smiling menace. His right hand was a blur of motion, and then next thing we knew, the goblins exploded in a mist of blood and guts.
“Yuck!”
Then his left hand followed suit. It moved so fast it left afterimages in his wake, all shivering and blurring like a fire on the cusp of going out. Goblins fell like flies. Haruka-kun whisked from one to the next, ever the picture of composure. We peered closer.
“…Wait a minute. His speed stat is only 800-something.”
“That low? He shouldn’t be flickering in and out of sight with those kinds of stats.”
“His arms shouldn’t be moving too fast for our eyes to keep up!”
“Forget my eyes. My brain can’t keep up.”
One moment, his arm was there. The next, it was not. It was beyond human comprehension. Was he using Life or Death on his arms alone?
“He’s awfully strong for someone so weak.”
“Pretty quick for someone so slow.”
It should have been impossible, theoretically speaking. Life or Death was a highspeed sword attack powered by a conglomeration of physical prowess, magic, and Skills. It was an explosion of one’s whole strength manifested in one perfect, lightning-fast strike. One’s whole strength, mind you. That meant using one’s whole body. Not just the arms!
“His fighting is awful, and yet…it’s working?!”
“He’s all over the place, but he’s so good we can’t even track him!”
We just had to laugh. How could we not? Here was a black-cloaked figure who looked like he couldn’t hurt a fly, swatting down monsters in the most outlandish way possible. Worse, he kept tripping and bowling into monsters so fast he obliterated them on the spot. It made us laugh so hard we cried.
That’s what Haruka-kun had looked like way back when—y’know, back when we had given up all hope. He’d pulled out tricks we’d never seen before, magicked up powerful martial arts from god-knows-where, and displayed the fanciest footwork this side of a ballet studio. All of those things were gone, and yet this overwhelming, inexplicable strength remained. Our savior, our ridiculous and incomprehensible Haruka-kun, ladies and gentlemen: the man with the catch phrase “If at first you don’t succeed, die, die again.”
“Call it throwback Thursday, ’cause Haruka-kun’s back to his old ways.”
“Yeah, unless…?”
Haruka-kun stamped around like a man with two left feet. He wobbled with every step like it was a fight to keep his balance. But compared to before, I saw improvement. He dipped and swerved around the battlefield in a way that would have put his once-fluid footwork to shame. His frantic arm movements flung him about every which way. His own flickering movements made him drift so hard he listed and leaned. Yet, perversely, it only fed into the momentum of his arms. He was, rationality be damned, chaining it all together into a coherent attack.
“Talk about being more than the sum of one’s parts!”
“He’s literally not even dodging.”
It wasn’t even one move. One move did not a Haruka-kun fighting style make. This was an unorganized mishmash of wobbling, swerving, and flailing melded together into one seamless swordfight.
“Yup. That’s Haruka-kun’s old ways in a nutshell.”
“You know what they say. It never hurts to have a firm grasp on the basics.”
The dungeon emperors smiled wearily; they were just as done with Haruka-kun’s antics as the rest of us. It was nice to see a smile on those often-worried faces. They were concerned about Haruka-kun at the best of times, and this was hardly Haruka-kun’s shining hour. Yet, paradoxically, their worry had faded like a weight off their shoulders. This familiar scene couldn’t help but endow us all with a sense of relief.
“It never hurts him. It hurts the goblins plenty.”
“Yeah, well—goblin genocide is synonymous with the basics in Haruka-kun’s book. Just let him have it.”
This was where it had all begun. This was where Haruka-kun had first unlocked his baffling powers and begun decimating the local monster population. Watching him now was like reliving our first days in this world all over again—with a bit more tripping, admittedly.
“I don’t think the speed of his flailing can be attributed purely to his speed stat.”
“His ability to harmonize with his magic is so elegant. He’s cloaking himself in magic to the point where it moves with him as one unit.”