The Bizarre Food Craze (3)
Pale skin, stark white hair, and mad crimson eyes—all wrapped up in the innocent appearance of a cute young girl?
Run for your damn life.
And if you couldn't figure out the sheer lethal danger from just that?
Then your only remaining option was to die.
“Grrr?”
“Slurp.”
Even with a gaping hole where her heart used to be, the girl looked down at the four-horned stag with glistening eyes.
“Graaaagh! Gack.”
And just like that, the beast was no more.
There was no fierce struggle. No desperate clash.
“Waaah, this is deer. Splendid protein...”
Hauling the mutant beast—now dismantled into butchered chunks that could only be described as "st" and "ag," or whatever vague meat remained of what used to be a deer—the girl simply turned and wandered away into the distance.
“Whoa... Note to self: never, ever mess with her.”
Her raw physical defense was low enough that a single antler thrust from the stag punched straight through her torso. But when you were outright immortal, defense stats didn't mean a damn thing. It made stat sheets entirely irrelevant.
I realized almost by reflex that the mysterious girl was none other than Vampire Till I Die. Actually, even if I tried not to know, it was impossible to miss.
Vampire Till I Die: Demonic beast deer, this is truly processed! Will orange badge also have a taste?
Judddak☆: Um.
Judddak☆: No thanks, eat up.
Full-Health Elf: Eeeeek!
She had posted photographic proof right there in the chat. Still, since the incident wrapped up without any major casualties, all's well that ends well.
“Can't have a gallery without gallums, after all.”
And perhaps thanks to Godjukheup's unintentional rescue, users on the board finally began whispering about her—a topic that had been strictly taboo until now.
More than that, her constant lamenting about how everyone ignored her posts vanished entirely.
Got bored staying locked in the castle, this was a fine toy.
Hope can go out again next time.
1. Marketplace rotisserie chicken
2. Blood-flavored tomato juice
3. Annoying, but hunt demonic beasts
Hungry. But annoying.
Current mood is very similar to jott (shit).
Even with these nonsensical, machine-translated shitposts...
Upvotes rolled in, and people even occasionally dared to leave comments!
Of course, it never progressed much further than that.
Meanwhile, I was observing all of this through the system interface while slurping down the slime noodles Full-Health Elf had traded me earlier.
“Honestly, pretty tasty.”
Naturally, a humble bowl of banquet noodles from back home would blow it completely out of the water. Perhaps the people in this world just had an absurdly low bar for culinary standards. The mere fact that standard canned tuna was treated like five-star gourmet dining said everything that needed to be said.
I was happily slurping slime noodles and browsing popular posts, basking in how neatly everything had resolved, when—
“Wait, what?”
An ominous post popped up.
Of course, a storm of angry rebuttals bombarded the post. Yet the author didn't back down in the slightest.
It was an undeniable cold shower of reality.
“Is he right?”
I, too, had completely let my guard down the second the mutant stag collapsed. That post snapped me right out of my complacency. Sure, things had ended safely this time, but what about the next? And the time after that? If I kept stumbling in confusion every time an emergency struck, the Otherworld Destruction Gallery would inevitably degenerate into a dead board.
“Hell no. Do you have any idea what I went through to become Head Mod?!”
Naturally, the post was promptly reported as trolling and deleted, but I immediately dove into the store's weapon category.
“I need something to prep for worst-case scenarios.”
And right there, I found what I was looking for.
An overpowered, modern lethal weapon that even a middle schooler's pocket money could easily afford. There was just one problem.
“Just how tough are these things, anyway?”
The only demonic beast I had encountered in person was that small salamander. Having zero grasp of this other world's monster ecosystem, a sudden creeping dread washed over me. I mean, if you looked at modern fantasy web novels back on Earth, conventional military hardware was always rendered completely useless against magical beasts, wasn't it?
“Don't tell me this world has one of those arbitrary rules where only mana-awakened individuals can harm monsters?”
A sudden spike of panic seized me. In times like this, asking the gallery was the fastest route.
Just kidding.
Seriously though, why the hell is that mutant deer so ridiculously strong?
Got paranoid and prepared a weapon, but dunno if it can actually take down a demonic beast;
It's roughly an explosive attack.
“I'm dead serious though.”
And that was just a standard high-explosive grenade. There were countless types of grenades out there; this was merely one of the most basic models.
“Alright, I get how strong you guys think it is.”
So a high-explosive grenade was on par with an Archmage around here, was it? Guess it was time to let this fantasy civilization taste the terrifying might of modern technology. I was wondering when I'd get the chance to test it out—not that I had to wait long.
A prime test subject had practically delivered itself to my doorstep.
El-Ladh, the ancestral forest of the elves. Even during the Great War, they had secluded themselves deep within the woods to keep casualties to an absolute minimum, but those peaceful days were long gone.
“Lady Eliana! Another Wave has appeared!”
“What? How could...”
At the elf knight's frantic report, Eliana's face contorted. Another Wave breaking out so soon after the mutant stag? Still, if that was all it was, they could manage. As grueling as it might be, mobilizing their army should allow them to suppress it eventually. At least, that would have been true for a normal Wave.
“GRAAAWR!”
What descended upon El-Ladh was none other than a Bone Dragon.
Completely out of place in this verdant forest, this was no native beast of El-Ladh. It had undoubtedly crawled out from the eastern perimeter near the Outside—the epicenter of the Great War—and made its way all the way here.
The elf sentries defending the kingdom's perimeter trembled violently. As a long-lived race, there was no way they wouldn't recognize that beast. Long before the outbreak of the Great War, that very monster had slaughtered countless elves before vanishing into obscurity.
“Lady Eliana! What should we do?!”
Eliana opened the gallery. Sure enough, the board was spinning at breakneck speed as elves flooded it with verified sighting posts.
Even the elves couldn't maintain their composure. And above all else, there was one fatal problem.
“We have no way to stop that thing.”
They lacked weapons. They had no blades capable of cleaving through those steel-hard bones—in fact, they lacked even basic weapons. Lacking blacksmithing arts, elves had historically purchased all their armaments from humans. But ever since the Great War, the supply chain had completely dried up. All they had left were wooden arrows and magic.
“GRAAAAWWWWR!”
“Do not let it breach inner El-Ladh! Loose!”
Snapped back to their senses by Eliana's command, the elves drew their bowstrings in unison. Every single one of them was an elite archer and knight.
Thwip! Shweeek!
Slender arms drew heavy bowstrings with unfathomable strength. Each arrow was a lethal, unavoidable strike.
Clang.
Yet that lethality applied strictly to humanoid combatants. Against a behemoth of that scale, the arrows failed to leave so much as a scratch.
“I-It's not working!”
“Lady Eliana! We need to retreat and fetch other weapons!”
Desperate shrieks and futile attacks chaotically filled the air. Right then, massive fireballs rained down upon the elves' heads.
“Aaaagh!”
“It's burning!!”
Even as the magically inclined elves stepped forward, their barriers were vastly inadequate against the sweeping inferno. Yet retreating to bring back weapons wasn't an option either.
Because no one will lend us a single blade.
The elves knew it all too well. They knew the sheer depth of hatred directed at their kind across the gallery. Part of it was treated like an internet meme, but at least half of the forum users genuinely loathed and despised elves with every fiber of their being. After all, it was an undeniable historical fact that the alliance had crumbled during the Great War due to elven isolationism.
It was also the very reason why Eliana—Full-Health Elf—loathed her own kin.
I told them to wake up and open our borders dozens of times...
No matter how much she urged them to engage with the outside world, the stubborn elders turned a deaf ear, and now look at where it had brought them.
“Lady Eliana, look out!!”
An elven archer shoved Eliana aside.
“Aaaaargh!”
Taking the fireball meant for Eliana, the archer rolled across the scorched earth, screaming in agony as flames devoured their arm.
“No!”
Eliana caught the fallen elf and leaped to safety, but she couldn't retreat any farther. All she could see were her kin burning and dying around her.
Just as despair began to cloud Eliana's eyes—
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