I spent another day clearing B9 of Nihonium.
Miasma-spewing zombie dragons stood silently in the middle of the dungeon. Unlike previous monsters, they didn’t do much before you attacked them, but their enormous size and miasma combined to create an awe-inspiring presence in the middle of this quiet dungeon.
I braced myself and attacked one.
“Mgh!”
Before I could, though, I realized something and stopped.
“Groooaaar!”
The immobile zombie dragon seized this opportunity to attack. It opened its massive mouth, glistening with fluids, and chomped down at me.
“Kh!” I jumped away, but its neck continued to stretch, and it managed to latch onto me. Fangs sunk into flesh and squeezed with all their might, causing my body to creak. “Rgh… Gaaaaah!” I took a deep breath and put all of my strength into my arms and legs, resisting its bite strength.
After a sharp crack, I managed to stretch out my arms and legs, shaking off the dragon zombie’s bite. I then landed and jumped again to properly put distance between us.
I looked again.
There was no mistaking it; I hadn’t attacked yet, but the number above the zombie dragon’s head was 2 now.
“You can’t possibly mean…”
To confirm my suspicions, I ran away from the monster.
After shaking it off, I came face-to-face with another. This one had a 4.
I didn’t attack; instead, I looked for another one.
I ran all around, looking for the numbers on their heads.
They were all different. The number wasn’t set at 3, but instead varied in a range from 2 to 5.
After realizing the meaning and implications of this, I grumbled in complaint, “This’ll be hard to farm…”
The most important thing about farming was to make a plan of action. A good farming plan was simple, routine, and consistent, but that would be difficult under these conditions.
“Well, no. I can just make a plan that always kills in two actions.”
With that, I thought to myself, Oh, I know. I’d thought that it might be difficult, but variance meant nothing if I always thought in terms of the minimum number, even when offered a lenient number of five.
Two moves… Well, the first thing I did─fusing blue flame rounds─would work. Okay, let’s try it.
I whipped out two guns and loaded a blue flame round in either. Ready to fight a dragon, I stepped forth─but there was a problem.
“There are ones, too?!”
The very first thing I ran into happened to have a 1 over its head.
My plans had been thwarted in no time. I couldn’t use the eternal flame rounds like this.
I tried fusing them just in case. After making the flame, I lured the dragon into it, but it dealt no damage whatsoever. Indeed, they were invincible when they hit 0.
Come to think of it…
“Repetition!”
I fired my ultimate farming magic at the dragon, but even that failed.
Despite being my ultimate spell, it was still something that had originally existed in this world. That meant it had to follow the rules of this world. Zombie dragons were invincible when their counter hit 0, so Repetition would not work.
That made sense; I couldn’t use it during magic storms, after all.
My hypothesis had been proven correct, though not in a way I’d like. It brought me down a little.
I had no way to defeat a zombie dragon whose counter was at 0, so I ran away from that one. I could try to resume farming, but it would be haphazard and inefficient.
In that case, let’s cut our losses and start investigating again.
I circled B9 without attacking anything, just counting the numbers on zombie dragon heads for an hour.
The counters ranged from 1 to 5 in all cases. Three was the most common, while the others were about equal in rarity among themselves.
There were no others.
In other words, if I wanted to farm mindlessly, I’d need a way to kill them in one attack. Zombie dragons were pretty strong. If I wanted to kill them in one attack, then…
“It’s gotta be Repetition,” I muttered with a sigh.
I tried casting Repetition on zombie dragons of every flavor. All of them went down in one Repetition. Naturally; it worked on every number that wasn’t 0. That meant that I could use it to farm stably without a care in the world.
But man, I don’t like it…
Repetition farming was the easiest and fastest way to defeat any enemy, but that was exactly why I didn’t want to use it. I wanted to avoid being that lazy and mindless so that I could properly use my powers when the going got tough.
“Now what…”
I tried firing various bullets at them without worrying about whether they went down. Normal bullets, freeze rounds, flame rounds, lightning rounds, restraining rounds, homing rounds, trash rounds, slicing rounds, threefold rounds. And since they were undead, I tried recovery rounds just in case.
I used every single one, but none of them did the trick.
The same went for acceleration rounds; even if I attacked while accelerated, their counters went down instantly, so there was no point.
I didn’t bother trying fusion rounds; those were two attacks, so if the counter started at 1, they were useless.
Was there no other way? I looked through all of my items apart from the special bullets, mentally checking each one’s effects.
“…Oh?”
Among my items, I found something nostalgic. Something that I’d only ever used once.
I held it in my hands and thought, Yeah. This might work.
With it in hand, I stood before a zombie dragon. Its counter was at 2.
Perfect.
“Testing time. Just to save time, I’ll bring it down to 1,” I muttered and fired an acceleration round at the zombie dragon. Indeed, though the acceleration round sped up the one it was fired at, I’d used it at the enemy instead of myself.
The instant its counter went from 2 to 1─
“Urgh!”
It had disappeared. A heavy impact struck me. The dragon had accelerated and attacked me at speeds I couldn’t even see.
I was battered in no time, but since I was guarding, my SS-rank HP and vitality withstood it.
I continued to endure the storm of attacks. Eventually, its attacks suddenly came to an end. The dragon disappeared, and a dexterity seed fell before me.
“Woohoo!” I pumped a fist again. Just as planned.
I looked at the item I’d brought here: the High-Guts Slime’s drop. When equipped, it reflected damage taken to the attacker.
It had been gathering dust due to how slowly it killed enemies, but it had helped this time.
The zombie dragon’s counter only reduced when I attacked; it didn’t count counters. I’d used an acceleration round just because I wanted to see the results quickly, but this was all I really needed to kill zombie dragons with a counter of 1.
It would take time, yes, but I was satisfied to know that I could defeat zombie dragons at 1 without relying on Repetition.
But I wasn’t done yet.
“Keep thinking. Keep improving.”
For once in a long time, this endeavor had proven quite satisfying.