Day 121
AFTERNOON
The sole way to wound my soul? Misleading names.
A FRONTIER DUNGEON
55TH FLOOR
UNABLE TO JOIN IN the fight against the dungeon king, I sat on the sidelines and watched. For, you see, I had lost—and all by one careless move. Now I was forced to stay well in the back, immobile and guarded by my trustworthy Slime, with little else to do but observe Sleeping Beauty’s attempt to solo the boss.
“Curses! If I only I hadn’t been so stupid. If only I hadn’t lost that match of rock-paper-scissors! Don’t you start moping, Slimey. You lost just as much as I did, but you were never supposed to be on the front lines to begin with.”
Jiggle jiggle?
The cyclops leveled a powerful blow at Sleeping Beauty, which she turned with a deft flick of her halberd. The rotation carried the blade to the beast, slashing it—again and again and again! She was using a three-part staff whirlwind attack! No one would ever believe the legends of the Theocracy’s saint again. If she could lop a cyclops’s tree trunk of an arm clean off, she was no saint—unless she’d learned about sainthood from a cut-echism!
“No, a cute little ‘tee-hee-hee!’ does not absolve you of violent murder.”
Wiggle wiggle.
The creature was over four meters tall—that meant over four meters of mammoth muscle shuddering when the beast roared and fixed Sleeping Beauty in its one-eyed stare.
“Ham it up, big guy. We all know the giraffes had you beat in the height department. Yeah, and the hippos’ mouths could open wider?”
Boing boing.
“Not to mention I thought the flies were scarier.”
Bobble bobble.
“Hey, you know I’m no good with bugs!”
The cyclops stomped the ground so hard it shook. It bellowed, producing an air-splitting cacophony, and raised one mighty limb only to have it sheared off with a merciless blow. The halberd sliced through flesh, shattered bones. In short, this big, beefy, brawny beast had had the upper hand against Sleeping Beauty in everything from levels to leg muscles, but she knocked it to the ground and made it cry for its mommy. So much for the level 55 Strength Cyclops. And it wasn’t just another musclehead—it had magical strength boosters, too.
“Fighting with magical strength boosters… Ha! Rookie mistake. Sleeping Beauty may look like she couldn’t hurt a fly, but she’s a dangerous dame with a damn good body to match! You may think you could snap her waist like a twig, but one shake of those hips and she’ll lay you to waste. And I’d lay he—nope, I wasn’t saying anything! Get back to it, champ!”
Sleeping Beauty was a champion of double-tasking—defeating the boss with uncommon flair and browbeating her boss with an unwelcome glare.
“The cyclops’s moves are too easy to predict when you can see the magic pooling in its arms. Sleeping Beauty, in turn, packs down all her magic into a tight, compact point of magical charge, and then slaps the hit right back into the cyclops’s face! Also take careful note of her tight, compact waist and the slapping of her beautiful pale thi—hey! I’m not lewdposting on main this time! I’m just narrating advice?”
“To whom? The enemy?!”
Sleeping Beauty crushed my teenage dignity with just about as much force as she destroyed the cyclops. All that nonstop, minute, high-speed jiggling was next-level powerful—although the cyclops didn’t seem to agree? I guess it didn’t have the eye for eroticism I did.
The cyclops had the edge on Sleeping Beauty in terms of level and sheer brawn, but muscles meant nothing if they weren’t utilized correctly. It flailed around like an untrained brute, simply wasting energy. The cyclops turned Herculean strength to Hercu-lame strength. It was no match for all the strength contained in that tiny, sexy, body with its perfect physical and masterful magic control.
For the finishing blow, Sleeping Beauty wound all her magic and qi into a spiral, then shot it all at once for total devastation. God, and the way it shook her butt… Devasstating indeed.
“See, cyclops, you have the aim down. Your problem is your timing. See how Sleeping Beauty does it? She matches her attacks to the rhythm of her huffing and puffing.”
Huff, huff, puff.
The Lamaze method tempered her qi, turning her delightfully slender body—brimming with magic and youth in all the right places—into an even bigger threat.
Once her lianqi mixed with her ample magic reserves, she used her fine-grained control to begin the process of turning it all into pure power. It still required some prep time, but against slow enemies, silk-reeling force—chansijin—was the best counterattack tai chi had in its large arsenal. The spiraling, Lamaze-enhanced mound of magic slammed into the cyclops’s club, yanked it out of the creature’s arm, and then hurtled onward to tear off the cyclops’s other arm and smash its bones to dust.
“The cyclops’s Revival Skill is working with all its might to keep up, but Sleeping Beauty has too much might to counter! You can’t beat a Saint in her own territory of healing spells!”
Bobble bobble.
Sleeping Beauty had trained under the prestigious tutelage of Miss Armor Rep, Dancer Girl, and Slimey. They had each equipped her with hyperpowerful techniques, and the girls in my class taught her how to deploy each one in her arsenal depending on what the situation demanded. For her final training, she’d squared off against the demon scythes—which was puzzling, because somehow the only one to come out of that match injured was me? I hadn’t been able to beat Sleeping Beauty since back before she hit level 10. Of course, back then I was too messed up to move. I was in no state to fight a dungeon emperor. Now, though, things were different. Once she and I were battle ready, a dungeon king in a mid-sized dungeon like this wouldn’t present a problem for either of us.