That was Elf Girl. She knew ’cause of her Sensing Skill. Haruka-kun was controlling the very same Entanglement that had blown him to smithereens. Its huge outpouring of energy should’ve been too much for any one human body to handle…but Haruka-kun could use it. He weaponized it.
“It is, his body, doing it. He can move again. Took him, long time, too.”
“He puppets himself. He forces himself, move. Now is, second nature, to him.”
“His magic was, out of control. Hurt him. Now, with ease, he uses it.”
Was Haruka-kun getting weaker? I couldn’t tell. His “weak” version of strength baffled me. All I knew was that it looked painful. If that “strength” was no longer his, if it no longer hurt him, then I was happy. I didn’t care if it made him “weak.” I preferred him weak.
“Not weak enough that anything in the monster forest would give him trouble.”
“Yeah, yeah… Gosh. We’re never going to be able to beat him, are we?”
He was unpredictable. He was impossible. He was practically stationary, except for when he was falling all over the place and whipping his arms around every which way known to man. And he was so fast our eyes couldn’t keep up. We couldn’t tell what was happening. Images flickered past so fast our brains failed to register what our eyes were telling us. Like hell would we ever be able to counter that.
“He’s so good he disgusts me.”
“How? Literally how?! He’s not following any established fighting technique at all!”
“It’s like every weird, flailing movement has a purpose. It kinda reminds me of Oda-kun’s shtick.”
“Yeah, but the nerds don’t, like, mecha pilot themselves. Y’know what I mean?”
“If anything, this messy fighting style and instantaneous reaction time reminds me of the jocks.”
Haruka-kun aped all the movements normal people did by magical gorilla-gluing his broken body together. He went above and beyond like he’d never heard of the concepts of below or behind, and then he made himself even stronger by forcing his body to act out the muscle memory it had yet to acquire. He made the unnatural, natural. He made himself human in such a very, very inhuman way. No wonder he kept self-destructing.
“Let me get this straight. He…achieves the impossible by doing something even more impossible?”
“He put his own body back together wrong to turn himself into some kind of wonder warrior. Now he’s reverse engineering a correct body—and that’s just making the problem worse!”
His bizarre body led to even more bizarre brawling. Mind-breaking movements made for mind-breaking monster mauling. He’d min-maxed himself to the point where he broke logic altogether. And his flexibility! My god!
How long had he been up to this? We’d had no idea. We’d never noticed a thing. We hadn’t even realized that Haruka-kun had started falling apart the minute we were summoned into this universe! We’d failed to recognize his constant pain, his agony, the suffering that’d dogged his every wobbly step. We’d just never known—and we would never make that same mistake twice. Against all odds, Haruka-kun was still pushing himself, and we refused to let him outdo us!
“What was he thinking, hitting up the monster forest the moment he got home?”
“Technically speaking, he does live in the forest…”
“And so, the wild Haruka-kun returns to his lair.”
Haruka-kun’s weird manner of movement evolved, slowly but surely. As the minutes passed, it began to take on the form of something like a proper fighting style. Like a wraith, he flickered through the goblins in a series of fleeting afterimages and frenzied slashing. His wild wobbling began to solidify into sound footwork. He was still nowhere near the graceful, dancer-like Haruka-kun we had once known, a stranger compared to the lightning-fast martial arts master he had once been, but he was regaining what he’d lost. Bit by bit. Bit by slow, slow bit.
“He really is getting better.”
“Yeah. He lost everything…all his greedily acquired Skills, slapdash calculations to make them run, acquired interest, and everything.”
His weapon was a blitz of motion, even as his body crumbled to pieces with him still inhabiting it. He listed, he tilted, but he never fell outright. He swung and swung and swung—and let the motion swing and swing and swing him.
“Is it just me, or are we out of monsters?”
“The housewives already thinned out the population, sooo…”
“Seriously? Is this what monster stampedes look like these days?”
Tall piles of spellstones ringed Haruka-kun, signaling the end of his wild slashfest. Let the lecture begin!
“What the hell was that? Why did you take on so many monsters at once?”
“Oh, that? That was me sucking up all the magi in the surrounding area. Just for funsies, y’know? And monsters are attracted to magi, so I dragged in all the monsters like a magnet. That meant lots of goblins and kobolds for monster mashing time. Oh, and orcs. But not corks. Or sporks. So I didn’t do anything wrong? Yeah, ’cause kicking puppies is evil? So it’s a good thing I didn’t fight any borks. I would’ve had to hide behind the dungeon emperors! They’d back me up, right? Oh, you wouldn’t? But you’re my servants! Cowards! Well, you do have a point. People can get protective of their puppies… Compared to hurting innocent doggos, summoning monsters is practically a community service! Ergo, thus, henceforth, I’m innocent? And stuff?”
Haruka-kun had found a weird dungeon item, the “Magi Draining Bottle: Intelligence Amplification (mega). MP Conversion Rate Amplification (mega). Alchemy Boost (mega). Magi Absorption Storage. Magi Transmogrification. Magi Adaptation.” The first time he’d put it on, it’d turned the magi in the environment into mana, causing such an explosion of MP, it’d boiled his blood and just about killed him. So, naturally, Haruka-kun had popped it on again, because he never learned.
“I was literally in the middle of telling you not to do that because last time you did it, you nearly died! Why the bleepity-bleep did you do it again?! You are so guilty!”
“False accusations, Your Honor! I’m being framed! These accusations do not fit the facts; the ring may have fit my finger, but I’m not fit to be saddled with such unbefitting accusations from this fitful misfit of a prosecutor! She’s fit to be tied just because I fit a ring into my outfit! Her arguments do not ring true, and I refuse to be stringed along on such blustering, blithering attempts to bring me down!”
Oh, what was the point of getting mad at him? Why bother worrying about him at all? He already had the damn thing on before we could do anything about it! I was not going to step into the verbal ring with Haruka-kun over a—a ring—but that did not mean I had to put up with his jabbering! He was at fault! He was the—and I hated to say it—the erring party!
“Your little fit about fits aside, you and I are going to have a talk late—don’t put it on again! You know how dangerous it is! No! That does not mean slot it into another ring!”
“Yup, if you slotted together the universal theory of ‘If putting the ring on is the problem, why not just leave it on?’ and the innovative argument ‘If wearing the ring is the issue, why not slot it into another ring I’m already wearing?’ just like these two rings slot together, I’m not at fault? I’ve covered all my bases. You can approach the problem from every angle, and you’ll find my statement of innocence, backed by many a law, has nary a flaw. Which is all to say that my healing Skills were struggling to keep up ’cause of my lack of MP. Yeah, I’m recharging?”
He hit me with such a smug smirk I hit him with my morning star. Or tried, rather. It didn’t land. I swung it with such force the wind coming off the attack bowled him away and out of my reach. I recognized that fluttering, blows-bouncing-off technique, all right. That was Qing Qigong! Oh yes, and we knew what to do about that.
“Girls! All units, switch weapons! Deploy your anti-Qing Qigong gear! Aaand, fire!”
“Ja!”
Qing Qigong was a mythical martial arts ability wherein one made themselves so weightless that blows merely pushed the user along harmlessly, like so much force buffeting a leaf. Haruka-kun had lost all his martial arts mastery, but that didn’t matter when Qing Qigong had morphed into a Skill! The dungeon emperors had been kind enough to teach us how to counter it. All we had to do was not cause any updrafts—aka, prevent even the tiniest puffs of air from escaping.
“Agh! You still have the sickles and chains? Wagh! Ouch! Oof! You’re supposed to—argh—let the counterweight whip around! Not the sickle part! I’m terrified of being on the receiving end of one of those—argh—things; they’re so—ack!—hard to dodge! Who taught you this? The demon scythes? You bribed them with snacks until they taught you?! Well, I guess they’d be in a unique position to offer valuable forscythe… Aggh!”
“Heh heh! Try to run and get impaled! Sit there and take it like a good boy.”
“Waaagh! But I didn’t do anything! Not one itty-bitty thing! It’s the universe’s fault, not miiiiine!”
“Guilty, guilty, 100% guilty!”
Clonk!
SEX MONAD defeated! Now’s your chance! Find his weakness while he’s out cold!
Rustle, rustle.
“…Ohhh my god. Oh no. Um. Now his you-know-what is even…more…”
“Yeah… You don’t need to finish that sentence.”
Gulp.
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