As expected, my hypothesis was correct—I grew a little stronger with each defeated foe. After that initial battle, I encountered and swiftly defeated a number of other skeletons. Each time, that strange light would rise from their body, making its way inside me.
With each absorbed light, I felt stronger and faster. It was not just a mental illusion of sorts; my movements had become markedly faster and stronger. Even my spirit art attacks had their offensive power increased. While I had struggled to push my blade through the enemy’s skull during my first encounter, I could now send my opponent’s bones flying if I put my backbone into it, crushing them in the process.
Perhaps the time had come for me to move on to bigger prey, like slimes. I had certainly become strong enough to at least entertain such thoughts.
Although slimes were somewhat weak, just like basic skeleton monsters were, their indeterminate shapes and jelly-like bodies were qualities to not be underestimated. Due to these traits, physical attacks did not work too well on them, so the easiest way to defeat slimes was to attack them with spells of some sort.
With that being said, however, it was inaccurate to say that slimes were invulnerable to everything but magic; it was still very much possible to defeat them with physical attacks.
There were two ways to go about doing this. First, one could crush the slime’s core, which was a crystalline organ in the interior of the slime. If that object were destroyed, the slime would simply dissolve and die, leaving only magic crystals in its wake. But that was much easier said than done. A slime’s core was not stationary, as it often moved around inside its fluid-like body. Certain degrees of technique and finesse were required to damage it with a sword or spear. Such skills were commonly found in adventurers past the middle-Bronze-class level. On that note, I was a lower-Bronze-class adventurer, so I obviously could do nothing of the sort.
The other method was somewhat messy, as one could simply scatter the gelatinous parts of the jelly around with blunt force impacts, eventually reaching the core before the slime could regenerate, thus destroying it. As this was an extremely simple method, even I was capable of executing it. It did, however, require a certain amount of execution time.
The gelatinous nature of a slime meant that it could reform even if scattered, starting with the largest piece. In order to prevent that from happening, either a relatively forceful blow, or a series of rapid blows, had to be applied. In my case, I chose a single, powerful spirit art reinforced attack. It was all I had.
Basically, I was only able to hunt one slime a day in my previous life. I was incredibly weak—
Well, I was a lower-Bronze-class adventurer after all. To make matters worse, I often traveled alone, as opposed to joining a party with others.
Slimes were simple monsters that could be easily dispatched even if the sole member of the party had some small degree of magical aptitude. One did not need to be a great mage to take out slimes, as a single fireball or earthen arrow would do the trick. If anything, few adventurers chose to utilize the time-consuming, inefficient method I was now forced to use.
In exchange, I was able to hunt lower-tier monsters, such as skeletons or goblins, in relatively large numbers. This resulted in respectable earnings for a lower-Bronze-class adventurer such as myself. Though in my current form, I might even give my archnemesis, the slime, a run for its proverbial money.
Having at last gotten used to my skeletal body, I was able to deliver blows of considerable force, even without utilizing spirit arts. Surely that would be enough to scatter the gelatinous body of a slime.
It was time to give my new skills a spin. I set off for an area in Moon’s Reflection that was well-known to be inhabited by my archenemy. Although I had already defeated one on my way into the uncharted territories of the dungeon, significant time had passed for a re-pop to occur, according to my assumptions. Of course, it was quite possible that another adventurer could have gotten to the slime before I did.
After exploring dungeons for such extensive amounts of time, one eventually develops a biological sense of time within its walls, which is handy for keeping track of time when surveying. In highly-populated dungeons, the smell of blood and metal would often fill the air, in addition to vibrations caused by combat that could be felt in the floor and walls. In my case, I had spent most of my time exploring this particular dungeon, and as such, I had a relatively good grasp of its scope of time. Thanks to that, I could even determine which areas of the dungeon would experience high adventurer traffic during specific times of the day.
As such, I determined that there were no adventurers known to frequent this dungeon around this period of time. This wasn’t the only dungeon around the town of Maalt after all. There was another, bigger one close by, apparently called the New Moon Dungeon.
Many parts of that dungeon remained unexplored, with multiple areas and floors only partially mapped out. As a result, most adventurers in Maalt headed toward New Moon. Those who had instead opted to frequent Moon’s Reflection were either stubborn or solo adventurers who could not find a party to explore the depths of New Moon.
For the record, I was of the latter group. Although I had originally wanted to explore the New Moon Dungeon instead, it was populated by a vast number of monsters, including those that attacked adventurers in packs. A lower-Bronze-class adventurer wandering into that dungeon alone would be no better than a death sentence. Barring those times when I had been invited at the last minute to fill a slot in someone else’s party, I greatly preferred hunting in the Water Moon Dungeon instead.
Thinking back on it, it was a relatively lonely life.
There were many reasons as to why I adventured alone, but the main reason was simple: no other adventurers wanted to be in a party with me. After all, I had been stuck as a lower-Bronze-class for roughly ten years. Even the most untalented adventurers would rise to middle- or upper-Bronze-class level in that lengthy span of time.
—That was evidently not the case for me.
Even so, I was not completely isolated; I was occasionally invited to join other parties. However, as I wanted to become a Mithril-class adventurer of my own ability, the nature of my dream prevented me from joining the parties of other adventurers quite often. In addition, my long stagnation in the adventurer ranks had apparently earned me the name of “The Thousand-year Bronze-class,” and as a result, even the occasional party invitations had eventually dried up.
It’s a sad tale, so let us leave that be for now. More importantly, I still had to hunt myself a slime.
Shelving those thoughts, I continued moving forward and was soon greeted by the sight of a slowly-moving, almost transparent monster of jelly.
—It was unmistakably a slime.
Drawing my sword, I slowly crept up upon my archnemesis, the very same kind of slime that I had hunted these past ten years.