Chapter 13. You Have a Skill Too? (1)
Chapter 13. You Have a Skill Too? (1)
1
-Groooar!
The orc roared.
Maybe it wasn't even a roar—maybe it was just a brief growl. But to me, it sounded like an endless howl. A full fifty seconds! For nearly a minute, the orc's bellowing echoed in my ears.
"Guh, ugh...!"
Pain like my head was splitting open.
-Hey, focus the hell up.
In the infinitely slowed time, the guardian spirit barked.
-Don't get scared of trash mobs like orcs! Orcs are just stupidly strong. Their attack patterns are simple. If you can tell where they're going to strike, you can dodge easily, and you can counter too. They're fucking nothing.
"That's... easier said, than...!"
-Here it comes.
Whoosh!
The orc swung its club. No, it was swinging it. Slowly. The club was sluggish but certain as it came for my skull. If I stayed still, my head would be smashed in less than twenty seconds.
"Ah, fuck!"
I threw myself sideways with all my strength. But my body didn't follow my thoughts.
'So damn slow!'
Just one step. One step was all I needed to dodge the orc's strike, but that one step was too slow. It was suffocating. So suffocating I felt like my insides would burst.
I could clearly dodge it! I knew exactly where the attack was coming from!
-You can dodge it. Don't give up.
The guardian spirit said quietly.
-Focus your aura into your feet. Strengthen your leg power! Feel the flow pooled in your heart and send it to your right foot, now!
Damn it.
'For a ghost, his mouth sure runs fine!'
I'd felt aura for the first time in my life today. How the hell was I supposed to focus it into my legs? It really was easier said than done.
But... there was no other way. I had to try something. No matter how little fear of death I had, I didn't want my head popped open by an orc's club!
'Move!'
The flow in my heart. That thing, thinner than blood, felt somehow cool and clean. Like a clear mountain stream, maybe? I focused on that cool sensation and tried to send it toward my right leg.
Squirm.
My effort paid off a little—the aura wriggled in my heart—
-Harder than you thought, right?
It was hard.
-That's because your body doesn't have passages for aura to travel through yet. The roads aren't built! To put it in terms of your body right now, it's a footpath deep in the mountains. You have to pave it to highway level before anyone will say you actually know how to use aura.
"Huff, ugh...!"
Even while listening to the spirit ramble, I kept focusing on my right leg. If my heart was a clogged faucet, my right leg was a cup placed beneath it. One drop. One drop. From the broken faucet, aura trickled out in dribs and drabs.
-At least right now you can even feel aura because you took the elixir. Normally, not a chance. Tch. That young lady's hygiene is filthy, but her skill is the real deal.
Whish!
The club kicked up wind pressure. It had grazed past my body, dizzyingly close. Whoo! A small gust blew in the wake of the club. The wind struck my skin and scattered. Probably one second. No—if I'd been half a second slower, my whole body would've been crushed by that club strike.
"H-how...?"
My relief at dodging the orc's attack was short-lived.
"Did it... work...?"
The orc snorted, flaring its nostrils. It wasn't pleased. The fact that prey as weak-looking as me had dared to dodge its attack. The orc immediately raised its club again.
-Grrrrr!
This time, a horizontal swing meant to blow away my waist.
There was no time to rest.
I focused aura into my upper body.
-Hm? What happens if what?
"If the footpath... gets paved like a highway...!"
It was hard, as expected. The faucet in my heart was still completely clogged. There was no sign of water gushing out. My throat was burning with thirst, but the aura was at best a single drop trickling out.
'It galls me, but the spirit was right.'
A footpath overgrown with weeds, with not a soul in sight.
It was a fitting description for me right now.
And that's why I was curious.
If I could escape this level.
If I could break free.
"What happens... then?!"
-Heh.
The guardian spirit snickered.
-You. When you died to old man Marcus, your throat got cut without you doing a single thing, right?
That was right.
I recalled that scene—the crescent moon lying on its side in the night sky.
The spirit's words dug into my head.
-Think of that as exactly the level of a clean tree-lined avenue.
"......"
A tree-lined avenue.
A strike that beautiful was, at best, only at the level of a tree-lined avenue.
-Old man Marcus still has a long way to go himself. And you—well, no need to even say it. Zombie, I'm not grinding you down because my personality's garbage for no reason. I grind you down because you deserve to be ground down. Heh heh.
Grind.
I clenched my teeth.
-Hmm?
My stubborn pride kicked in.
"Hup...!"
I threw my upper body down. Whooosh! The orc's club passed through the empty air above my waist. It was close. I'd barely dodged the second attack right after the first.
And I had absolutely no intention of allowing a third attack.
-Oh ho?
I gathered strength in my knees.
-Look at this.
And focused aura into the soles of my feet. I didn't just gather it—I tried to bend it like a spring as much as I could. Five seconds, three seconds, one second. When I felt the aura had gathered, clumsy as it was, I leaped with everything I had.
I raised my sword.
The target was the orc's uvula!
-Groh?
The monster looked down at me, bewildered. I was reflected in its eyes, and the tip of my thrusting sword was reflected too. The sword reflected in its eyes grew larger and larger. A split-second gap. My sword pierced its uvula, and the orc's face twisted in agony.
-Kraaaaah!
Beneath the evening sky, a scream spread across the vast hunting ground.
Just when I thought, done—
-Don't let your guard down until the very end!
The spirit shouted.
-An orc's flesh is thick! Focus aura into the tip of your sword! No, that's too hard for you. Just pour it in like you're smashing it in!
I did exactly that.
-Kraaaaaah!
The orc's screams grew violent. I wrung out every last drop of aura flowing from my heart and smashed it all into the sword. With each drop of aura seeping into the blade's tip, the monster's screams grew more steeped in agony.
-Kroh, grah... grrrr...!
Splat!
Blood sprayed. The orc's blood, slow and sluggish, covered my face like slow motion. I didn't dodge. I didn't even blink. Rather, I struggled to load even one more drop of aura onto the blade.
"Die... already...!"
A very brief moment.
I felt it in my hand—the tip of the sword piercing through the orc's neck to the other side.
-Grrrrr... rrr...
The orc staggered.
Even the time it staggered was long. The orc slowly toppled backward. Thud! Since I never let go of the hilt, I toppled over along with the monster when it fell.
"Hah... ugh, ugh...! Hoo...!"
I looked down at the orc's corpse and breathed with difficulty.
Breathing wasn't the only difficult thing.
Throb. A beat later, searing pain swept through my entire body. My vision spun. Without exaggeration, it genuinely felt like my limbs were being torn apart.
"Ugh...?"
-Does it hurt? It hurts, right? Yeah. It's gonna hurt like hell.
The spirit flew around me, taunting.
-You used aura recklessly when you haven't even properly opened the passages yet. There's no way your frail body could handle it! Serves you right.
"You... bastard...!"
-Ah. Still, bending the aura like a spring at the very end was good. That was well done. I'll praise you for it. You should always use aura with creativity. People get this wrong a lot, but the smarter someone is, the better they fight.
I didn't care about any of that right now.
"Hah, huff...! Guh...!"
This pain!
The agony of bones crushing and blood vessels bursting. How to quell this searing pain was my only concern at the moment. Normally, pain dulls with time, but with the elixir stretching time endlessly, there was none of that. It just hurt. It kept hurting.
I really felt like I was going to die.
-Does it hurt like you're going to die?
"Can't you... tell by looking...?"
-Then if you actually die, it'll get better.
What?
-If you force aura through like that, a person normally ends up half-crippled. Potions can't fix it either. It's a permanent injury. So you just turned yourself into a cripple to kill one orc.
"Wha... what...?"
-I told you, zombie. If you didn't have your regression skill, I never would've recommended this training method. Old man Marcus takes the elixir too, but he just sits in meditation. He doesn't recklessly throw himself at monsters like you.
This damn ghost?
-But you die and come back, don't you? It's a total cheat! No matter how extreme the training method, your body stays fine. Man, I'm jealous. So jealous. If only I had a regression skill like you!
Wow.
How could someone be this infuriating?
Did this guy have a passive skill like [Taunting] or [Zero Manners]? Otherwise, there was no explaining why his personality was such garbage.
-Zombie, but if you kill yourself, your kill count goes up again, you know.
"So... what...?"
-No need to raise your kill count here for nothing. It'd be dangerous if you caught old man Marcus's eye.
Thud.
An ominous sound rang out majestically behind me. It was a sound I'd heard somewhere before, and it felt like I'd heard it not long ago. I turned around, and my ominous premonition was right. A monster that looked exactly like the orc I'd just taken down stood there, drooling.
"God... damn... it..."
The monster was the same, but my condition was not. As the spirit had certified, my body was currently half-crippled. My whole body was in so much pain I couldn't so much as twitch a finger.
-It's fine! There are hunters who go their whole lives without ever grasping aura, and you got a feel for it in one go thanks to the elixir. If you keep this pace, dying a hundred times should probably be enough? A journey of a thousand li starts with a single step—a hundred deaths start with one death.
The spirit grinned.
-Go, our zombie! First death, let's go!
At the same moment, the orc's club began to descend. Slow and sluggish. Aiming precisely at the crown of my head.
I looked up at the club closing in on my nose and opened my mouth.
"Go... to... hell... you... fuck... er..."
Smash!
Your nose breaking, then your skull shattering, then your brain bursting—in that order. Ever felt that before?
Probably not. Good for you. Because it feels like absolute shit.
If there was any consolation, it was that the moment my brain burst, I heard a voice.
[You have died.]
The world returned to normal.
To be precise, my sense of time returned.
'Hoo...'
A pitch-black space.
The place I lingered for a while after dying, before regressing.
In that place I'd grown somewhat accustomed to now... someone I didn't want to get accustomed to was floating around.
-Hm?
It was the guardian spirit.
-Whoa, what's this now?
'...It's the place I stay for a bit when I die. When I died to the Flame Emperor and the Sword Saint, I picked skill cards here. Well, I've been calling it the Netherworld for now.'
-Fucking fascinating.
The spirit whipped around, looking over the dark space.
-But zombie, why am I here too?
'How should I know? Probably because you're possessing me.'
I sighed.
'If I wait a little longer, a voice says I'll regress to 24 hours ago, and then I regress. Oh, right. I was also curious whether you'd regress with me or not...'
I was about to say "I'm curious" when—
[Skill conditions are met through death.]
[Randomly copying a skill from the monster Orc.]
'...Huh?'
-What?
The spirit and I both froze at the same time. We turned our heads and stared at each other. The spirit wore a dumbfounded expression, and my face probably wasn't much different.
[Forming a skill card.]
Two copper-colored cards rose up from the darkness.
I looked up at them and muttered blankly.
'...Monsters had skills too?'
And the spirit shouted.
-What the hell is this! That's totally broken!