The false hero volume 2, p.15
The False Hero, Volume 2, page 15
“I tried my best to hide it. I was afraid of what would happen if others found out…”
“I know. Even though I was taught to fear the Forsaken, I couldn’t bring myself to tell the mistress. There’s no way someone as kind as you could be as dangerous as the church says.”
Alisha and Belle embrace, showing their deep feelings as companions who’ve relied on each other during the worst of times.
Edwin looks on in concern. “Never thought I’d feel bad for one of the Forsaken. What has the world come to?”
“That just goes to show how important it is to see the world for what it is, rather than listening to those in power who have a vested interest in controlling how you think.”
During our conversation, I’ve been keeping an eye on the mana of the other four men deeper in. They’ve gathered in one of the side rooms down the hall, preparing to ambush us as we walk by. I relay that information to the others after everyone calms down.
None of them are particularly high level, so they’re probably all worthless grunts to whichever group created this slime pit. Still, they’re bound to know something at least.
“Laya, paralyze the last one so we can interrogate him.”
“Mmm.”
I cancel the [Earth Wall] and take the lead as we make our way down the narrow pathway. I signal for the others to stop at a safe distance before waving Alisha forward with me. I don’t even try to hide the sound of my footsteps as the two of us approach the doorway.
As expected, a man leaps out just as we reach it and swings his sword at us. Of course, the only thing he hits is the shaft of my spear as I parry his attack.
Before he can recover, my spear blurs, taking him down. The man behind him attempts to attack while I focus on his ally. A sharp clang rings out as his sword impacts Alisha’s shield.
He attempts to retreat now that his advantage has vanished, but the [Ice Lance] that appears from the air around me imbeds itself deep in his chest. I hear the sound of his sword falling to the ground, along with the thump of his body.
The two remaining men step back and look at each other, as if considering their options. I thought they may begin to beg for their lives, but instead they charge, with desperation clearly visible in their eyes.
I evade a sword and kick its wielder, sending him hurtling into a nearby wall. Immediately after, I smack the hands of the other man with the butt of my spear as he slashes at me. His sword flies through the air before clanking harmlessly on the stone floor.
My spear vanishes, and I grab the disarmed man. I give him a solid push, and he topples over, collapsing at Alisha’s feet.
She looks down on the fallen man. “So many have suffered because of you. They lost friends and families, they lost homes and shops. People like you … people like you should just die!”
Her sword slices through the air and cuts into the man’s torso as he attempts to scramble away. There’s no hesitation this time, with her weapon tracing a complete arc through his body. Her sword ends with its tip pointing toward the ground, with droplets of blood steadily dripping from the blade onto the cold, stone floor.
I look at Alisha. There’s no sign of remorse or sadness. Rather, a look of satisfaction and excitement covers her face.
She really does enjoy it, doesn’t she? Such a nice, obedient girl, yet somewhere inside her is a predator.
The final man attempts to use our focus on his dead ally to his advantage. He grips his sword with both hands and puts his entire body weight behind his attack, slashing at me from overhead.
Even though you’re attacking in desperation, it still hurts to see you leave so many openings.
Rather than taking advantage of the various ways to counter his attack, I simply raise my hand, placing it in the path of his sword. The blade reaches me, and I feel it slice into my skin. The man looks at my hand and sees only a trickle of blood trace a path down my arm, despite putting everything he had into the attack.
“Don’t hurt Master!” Alisha yells, charging toward him.
“Stop, Alisha.” I didn’t use the power of the slave crest, yet she still halts her steps obediently.
Laya appears beside us, and the man falls as her [Shock] spell envelops him. I bind him using a length of rope I keep in my [Inventory]. When he recovers from the paralysis effect, he sits up, with a mixture of fear and hatred on his face.
“Seems you and your buddies have been quite busy down here breeding slimes,” I say as I stare into the man’s eyes. “I find it rather interesting. So much so that I’d like to know more, like who ordered it and why. How about it—feel like sharing?”
He eyes my spear, which I’ve slowly lowered to his throat while speaking. Despite the threat, he doesn’t open his mouth.
“Might have to soften him up a bit, lad,” Edwin says. “Maybe the girls should wait in the other room.”
“No,” I say without hesitation.
Even if he deserves it, there’s no way I can torture him into speaking. Nobody should have to suffer like that. Nobody.
“You sure? These kinds of things can get pretty messy…”
“That’s not what I meant. I’m saying we won’t need to go that far in the first place.”
The carrot and the stick. Or, put plainly, reward for good behavior and punishment for bad. This world is quick to dish out punishments, and severely lacking in rewards.
“I have a feeling we can come to an agreement,” I continue. “After all, you want to survive the night, don’t you?”
I can see a bit of hope flood his face at my comment, but it’s immediately replaced with despair.
“Even if I did, they’d kill me,” the man says grimly.
I expected as much. These types of organizations have to make examples of betrayers to keep the others in line.
I pull out a small pouch and toss it at the man’s feet. A handful of silver coins spill out from it as it hits the ground.
“You’ll get a head start on them, along with these coins to purchase supplies,” I pause as the man looks longingly at the pouch, perhaps weighing his options. “If they’ll kill you anyway, what’s the harm in trying?”
After a brief hesitation, he nods. The carrot was a success, but that doesn’t mean I have to always play nice. There are other ways to use the stick rather than physical pain.
I reach down and grab the man’s exposed forearm, clenching it tightly. I channel my mana into my hand—but not into a spell formation. The man’s face twitches from a short, but intense, heat at the area I’m grasping.
“If I find out you lied to me, I will hunt you down. The spell I’ve placed in you will let me track you no matter how far you run. Remember that.”
“R-right!”
According to the man, Geld is the one who had this slime pit constructed, as well as the one who cast the various spells within it, such as the [Trasform] spell on the entrance. Nothing too surprising there, but he does mention that the whole underground facility has been enchanted to prevent the slimes from dissolving the walls and doors, which explains the large enchantment I’ve been sensing around us.
He claims to not know why he built this slime pit but says that Geld doesn’t seem to want to destroy the city. After the initial surprise attack, all the following ones were defeated with minimal damage, yet he continues to order the same attack nearly on a regular schedule.
After obtaining a few more minor tidbits of information, I leave the bound man in the room with a promise to release him once we finish our business here.
Back in the corridor, we walk to the thick, iron door at the end of the path. Just beyond lies the source of that disgusting mana—the slimes. There are so many that I can’t even pick out individual creatures; it feels like one large, writhing mass of mana.
I place my hand on the door and concentrate on the enchantment flowing through it. I immediately recognize the spell formation as [Shimmering Shield], and the mana flowing within it feels familiar.
Ah, [Shimmering Shield] protects against magical attacks. I guess the slimes acid is considered magic, and the spell protects the enchanted objects from being dissolved by it.
Seems enchanting things with magic can lead to some interesting results. If only I could create spell-enchanted items…
There’s no need to take over the enchantment this time, so I leave it alone and turn toward the girls and Edwin behind me.
“Alright, here’s the plan. Laya, you prepare [Shock]. Belle, you channel [Fireball]. I’ll use [Maelstrom]. Once I open the door, we all release the spells into the center of the room. After that, I’ll shut the door and wait for our cooldowns to reset before we do it again.”
“What should I do, Master?”
“For now, just be ready to engage in case something goes wrong.”
Edwin shakes his head. “I feel useless. Sorry, lad, but I don’t have much combat experience.”
“It’s fine. There’re probably a couple hundred slimes in there, but they’re all weak and stupid. Wiping them out shouldn’t be a problem.”
In fact, I wish they were stronger. I’m still far from level 23, and the only way to gain experience now is to fight more powerful foes.
A thought occurs to me as I lament on the weakness of the enemies. I look to Edwin and see him standing in the back—out of our way and out of danger. Because he’s a craftsman, his level is relatively high: 12. However, without weapon skills and magic, he’s merely a stronger, tougher commoner.
From what I’ve seen firsthand, killing monsters provides vastly more experience points than crafting. Creating more powerful items or enchantments gives more experience than creating weak ones, so the better you become at crafting, the more experience you earn. However, even with that, leveling through crafting is extremely inefficient.
To top it off, craftsmen can only unlock higher tier crafting by leveling up. That means they’re forced to grind experience crafting weak items for years before reaching a high enough level to unlock more powerful crafting skills.
Although they seem to have picked up general knowledge through trial and error, nobody in this world truly understands the underlying mechanics behind how the skill and level system works, so they probably just assume that there’s no other way. However…
“Do you want to get stronger?” I ask Edwin.
“I do, but there are more important things right now, aren’t there?”
“Maybe, but I’d say making the leader of the resistance harder to kill is pretty important.”
Although that’s just a bonus to me. I’m more interested in seeing how many levels he’ll gain here. That’ll let me know whether or not [Heroic Growth], my Unique Skill that gives me and my party five times experience gain, affects allies outside my battle party.
“Well, I guess so. But how do you plan to do that before tomorrow?”
“We’ll be engaging in melee after we thin them out.” I pull a short sword out of my [Inventory] and toss it to Edwin. “You can use that to help us out. We’ll help secure you some easy kills.”
“Fine. I’m in.”
As soon as he announces his approval, I see a blinking exclamation point appear in the corner of my vision. I open my Status Screen and my eyes go wide when I see the notification.
I accept the request and Edwin’s name joins Laya and the others. I open his status and have full access to all of his information. I navigate to his crafting skills and see that he has [Enchanting] rank 3 and [Enchantment Up] rank 1. Those are the highest skill levels he can learn until level 15, where he unlocks the next rank for both skills.
Now that he’s in my party, he should definitely get the benefit of my Unique Skill, [Heroic Growth], which defeats half the purpose of having him join, but that’s trumped by my realization that I can add outsiders to my party simply by asking them to join me.
This is going to be very useful in the future when I want to power level someone.
With everyone ready, I return my attention to the slimes. I nod to Laya and Belle, who are squeezed beside me in the narrow hallway. Then, I open the door.
A pile of slimes immediately falls into the pathway. There are so many of them in the room that not only is the floor completely covered, but there are actually three or four layers of slimes stacked up on top of each other.
As planned, Laya releases [Shock], paralyzing the slimes nearest the door, preventing them from swarming over us. Then, Belle’s [Fireball] flies into the center of the room, followed quickly by my [Maelstrom].
The slimes that spilled out of the room are blocking the door from closing, so I release a [Crescent Wave] with my spear, which blows them away and back into the room. I close the door before any other slimes can crawl out.
From beyond the door, we can hear the [Maelstrom] still raging as it shreds the monsters within. I look at Edwin’s experience bar as the slimes continue to die and see it ticking up at a satisfying rate. He reaches level 13 in just that one round of spells. Meanwhile, my bar has barely moved at all, despite killing dozens of slimes.
I miss the days when my experience would go up like that.
We repeat our spellcasting combo several times and manage to thin out the room quite nicely. So, we move to the next phase: melee combat. The slime’s acidic bodies will quickly wear down any weapons used to attack them, so I equip Alisha and myself with disposable weapons before opening the door.
The gooey remains of dead slimes can be seen scattered all over the floor and walls, along with a slime pool near the back of the room where new slimes are being created. Now that I have time to [Scry] them, I notice these slimes are slightly stronger than the ones we fought in the forest.
Man, I’d really love to have a monster spawner like that sometime. They may be weak but having a reliable source of monsters would be great for when I want to level a new party member.
The remaining slimes slither out at a manageable pace, allowing me and Alisha to chop them up without getting swarmed. From time to time, I purposefully use the butt of the spear to toss a few slimes behind me. After Laya paralyzes them, Edwin finishes them off with his short sword.
It’s not really necessary for him to fight since he gains experience passively from my kills, but he will level faster if he participates in the battle, so it’s not useless. More importantly, he’d probably be very curious how he got noticeably stronger without killing any slimes.
Eventually, the slimes stop appearing, and after finishing off a few stragglers, the cleanup is complete. We walk to the source of the slimes and stare at the green goop bubbling within.
“Wanna do the honors?” I ask Belle.
“Um, sure,” she agrees hesitantly. “What do I do?”
“Just cast a [Fireball] into the pool and it’ll explode. We should probably stand back, though—don’t want to get covered in goop.”
After retreating to a safe distance, Belle blasts the slime spawner, and like last time, a shrill scream erupts from the pool as it dies.
“Satisfying,” Laya says with a smile.
“Agreed. I always get a feeling of accomplishment after completing a long questline like this.”
“Questline?” Belle asks.
“Forget it,” Laya says. “You won’t understand even if he explains.”
I shrug and begin to turn when I feel a slight rumble. As the ground shakes, bubbles once again appear in the slime pit. The bubbling intensifies and with a scream, a huge blob of slime erupts from within it.
Unlike the flat, pancake-like slimes we’ve fought until now, this one stands vertically, reaching the nearly thirty-foot-tall ceiling above. The acid oozing from its purple body drips to the floor below as it fully extracts itself from the destroyed pit.
Several massive, gooey tentacles stretch out from its body, moving erratically, as if in search of prey.
Of course, I use [Scry] on it as soon as it appears, so I know that it’s a level 24 Slime Lord.
Good. I was getting bored of all the weak monsters.
I can’t help but smile as the Slime Lord orients itself toward us, seemingly recognizing us as enemies.
“Alisha, protect Belle. This one’s too strong for you right now. Belle, don’t cast until Laya and I can draw its focus. Edwin, retreat to the hallway so you don’t get caught up in the fight.” I look to Laya. “Ready, partner?”
“Mmm.”
“Let’s go!” I dash toward the Slime Lord, a simple silvered-steel spear held in my hands. Laya matches me step for step, and we both release spells as we close in on our opponent.
Laya’s blades of wind slice into the creature the same moment my ball of fire explodes on its body. Bits of goo scatter the floor and walls around it as it whips its tentacles toward us.
“Pincer,” I say to Laya using [Mental Link]. She immediately circles to the Slime Lord’s right as I move to its left.
Fighting shoulder-to-shoulder makes it difficult for Laya and I to utilize our mid-range weapons effectively. We both need several feet of space around us clear of allies in order to maximize our weapon’s potential. On top of that, the Slime Lord is forced to split its tentacles to deal with us, making it easier to find openings to attack its body.
I slice a tentacle in two as it draws near, then another. After a third slice, I release an [Ice Lance] through an opening and watch as the spell imbeds itself into the Slime Lord’s body.
It immediately emits a high-pitched shriek, and the goo around the [Ice Lance]’s impact zone begins to harden.
Interesting…
The tentacles I chopped off squirm on the ground, making their way back to the main body. When they reach it, they melt back into the body, and new tentacles quickly grow to replace the missing ones.
Regeneration, huh? So that’s the kind of battle this is going to be.
“Laya, this monster’s regeneration will turn this into a battle of attrition. Any ideas?” As I speak to her, I’m leaping around the air, thinning out the tentacles to create another opening.
“It should have a core somewhere in its main body, similar to the normal slimes.” Laya’s also activated [Air Step], and I see her chain sickle lashing out with precision as she leaps around, intercepting one tentacle after another.
