Chapter 13 — Facing Such Danger, I Have No Choice but to Awaken My True Power!
“This is far too much!” Hanakawa shrieked, running as fast as his legs would carry him. With no special powers other than his healing magic, his physical abilities were only slightly better than an ordinary person’s, but he ran like his life depended on it. He was in the obstacle course at the Suudoria Academy’s training ground.
“I cannot imagine this will improve my abilities! After all, I am already at the level limit!” he complained, leaping over a pit and up a mound of dirt.
While it was true that physical training could strengthen his body, next to the power of the Gift he already possessed, any amount of improvement would amount to effectively nothing. In order to strengthen the Gift obtained through the Battle Song system, he needed to fight enemies and gain experience, but he had already reached the maximum level by doing that. In short, there was no way he could get any stronger.
“At the limit?! Who decided that?!” a woman in a military uniform shouted back at him from atop an elevated spot in the middle of the course. She was Ingrid, the one tasked with training Hanakawa. She was a second year student at Suudoria Academy and responsible for training the new recruits.
“Wh-Who?! The System did! The level limit of each race is determined by Battlesong itself! The only way to exceed it is to obtain the Limit Break skill—”
“Idiot! It’s only the limit because you think it is!”
“No, no, no! This is not an issue of nerve. If it is impossible, it is just impossible—”
“Do you really have time to be complaining?! Should I make our cute little puppy speed up?!”
An enormous, four-legged, three-headed creature was pursuing Hanakawa at a leisurely pace. It looked like a shark that had been given the legs of a dog to allow it to walk on land, but on either side of the shark’s head were a dog and cat head as well. There were signs of those heads having been sewn on rather than being natural. On top of all that, a number of writhing tentacles sprouted from the creature’s main body. It was about the height of a two-story building, looking down at Hanakawa from above.
“Only a single part of that is anything like a puppy! What mad scientist cobbled together this horrifying creature?! Is this the Seyla you were telling me about?!”
Before his training had begun, Hanakawa had been given a brief explanation of the situation in Belm. He had heard about the bizarre creature known as the Seyla and the war between the different factions populating the continent.
“This is a prototype weapon made by the Biology Department. It is not infected by the Seyla, so you can remain at ease.”
“Umm, you said you would not abandon me, correct? You realize that if I die, I cannot be dispatched to the battlefield!”
“I know full well that you are a healer. There is no way you will die so easily!”
“If something like that bites me, I’ll die long before I have a chance to heal!”
“Don’t worry. It’s been ordered not to bite you. It’ll just be cuddling you with its tentacles.”
“Nooooooo! No one wants to see a scene like that!!!”
Hanakawa sped up. Apparently, he still had some energy left. He was almost at the end of the course. If he went all out a little longer, he would be out of danger.
As he thought that, he suddenly felt like he was floating. At some point, the ground beneath his feet had vanished. Hanakawa sputtered as he struck the ground face first. The intense pain sent his mind whirling, but he couldn’t afford to lie around doing nothing. He hurriedly lifted himself up.
“Huh? What is this?” He was in a square space. It was about twenty meters across, the dirt walls about five meters high.
“It is a trap, and an arena!” Standing on the edge of that arena, Ingrid looked down at him.
Something dropped to the ground behind him, making the earth shake under his feet. Though he had no need to check, Hanakawa turned to look anyway. The three-headed monster was looming over him.
“Merely being chased doesn’t produce enough of a sense of danger. So we came up with the dash-fight-dash model. It’s a kind of interval training.”
“Is this not far too cruel?!”
“Of course this is just another obstacle in the course. All you have to do is cross the finish line. But are you comfortable turning your back on that creature while you climb?”
In other words, he would need to defeat or otherwise fend off the monster in order to create an opportunity to escape.
“Ha ha ha. You say that, but you already told me it would not bite me, so I imagine it will treat me with some level of restraint...” Hanakawa shuffled backwards, staring at the monster.
The world in front of him became a blur. It took him a moment to realize what had happened. After feeling a burning sensation in his stomach, spinning through the air, striking the wall, and then finally falling to the ground, he realized he had been attacked.
“So, no restraint at all. The only mercy is that it will not bite...”
Hanakawa had been split in two. One strike from the creature’s tentacles had cleanly bisected him. An ordinary human would have been killed instantly or at least totally incapacitated by such an injury, but bearers of the Gift wouldn’t die that easily. As long as they were still conscious, they could hold on long enough to save themselves.
“F-Full Heal...” Hanakawa’s stomach began to regenerate. Flesh swelled out of the wound, reconstructing his torso and legs. Being level ninety-nine, his Healing Magic wasn’t just for show. He could heal any injury less than instant death without a problem.
“That does not really solve my issue, though...” If those tentacles moved faster than he could see, there was no way he could escape the arena. He couldn’t regenerate an entire half of his body that many times. If he kept getting attacked, he would reach his limit before long.
With his lower half now naked, he looked up at the monster, which leaped onto his dismembered lower half.
“Ugh...I cannot say I appreciate watching my own body being consumed like this...” As he stared at the grisly sight in disgust, he noticed something was off. The monster was ignoring him, obsessed with devouring the half of his body he had left behind.
“Umm! Is this not against the rules?! You said it was ordered not to bite me!”
“It’s not biting you, is it?”
“Ah, of course.” Knowing full well there was no use in arguing, Hanakawa backed down. For now, the monster was obsessed with its meal, so he decided to take the chance to head for the finish line.
He began climbing the dirt wall. It was solid and firm, so with the various depressions and handholds scattered across it, it was surprisingly easy to climb. Once he reached the top, the finish line was right in front of him.
“First Year Student Hanakawa, you’re outside the bounds of the course.”
“Excuse me?”
At some point, Ingrid had appeared in front of him and fired a bolt of light. The bolt struck him in the shoulder, throwing him backwards to land at the bottom of the arena. He was face to face with the monster once again.
“Wh-What are you doing?!” Hanakawa whined while healing his shoulder. Sure, climbing up the wall had technically taken him outside the course for a brief time. But he figured he could drop back in immediately so it wouldn’t be an issue.
“Just like I said. But more importantly, did you think it would be that easy to clear this course? Did you forget we are doing this training to help you overcome your limit?! What meaning is there to a course with no obstacles?!”
“This is absurd! If all you wish is to torment me, then—”
Though he began to argue, he was cut off by a growl coming from behind him. The monster had finished its meal and was now staring directly at him. While it was impossible to read any emotion in the shark’s eyes, Hanakawa figured it viewed him as its next meal. He doubted it would be satisfied with what little it had just eaten. It seemed to have forgotten its orders not to bite him and was intent on eating the rest of him.
“Gah! Facing such danger, I have no choice but to awaken my true power! Rrrraaaaaaagh!” Desperate, Hanakawa roared at the top of his lungs. He then opened the System window, checking to see if anything had changed. But his level was still ninety-nine and his class was still Healer. His stats and skills remained the same. “Of course things would not be so easy! Guts and spirit are hardly enough to overcome the limits of the System!”
In short, he had no choice but to find a solution to the current situation with the powers he already had. Hanakawa pointed a finger at the monster. Though he was a Healer, it wasn’t like he had no way of fighting. He could shoot magic from his finger with the strength of a small pistol. That would hardly be enough to harm such a massive creature, but he could hope that in response to the danger in front of him, his magic would exhibit an uncharacteristically explosive power.
At the very least, there was no harm in trying. Attacks with magic were basically guaranteed to hit once a target was selected. Looking at the monster, there were seven targets he could select. The main body, the right head, the left head, and each of its legs.
“Aha, so that is the solution. If I strike the Lorenzini ampullae in the shark’s nose, things may go well! Take this! Soul Bleed!”
A bullet of light fired from his finger and bounced off the monster’s nose harmlessly before disappearing.
“It just bounced off?! Even if I used the absolute weakest technique, shouldn’t it have blown off the creature’s head so I can say a line like, ‘Wow, that monster sure was fragile’ like some sort of idiot protagonist?! No, in this situation, perhaps one of my items could come in handy! Why didn’t I think of that?! Surely something like a hero’s—wait, why can I not open my item box?!”
“You can’t use tools while training. Obviously, we blocked that ability,” Ingrid explained from outside the arena as Hanakawa panicked.
“Is that even something you can do?!”
“Now, see what you can do with your own body!”
“I have already run out of options here!”
Hanakawa looked at the monster. It hadn’t attacked yet, possibly because it was conflicted. It wanted to leap forward and devour him, but wasn’t allowed to bite. If it attacked with the tentacles, it would make him smaller, and it wanted to eat him whole, if possible. Even so, it wouldn’t stay paralyzed with indecision for long, and if things didn’t move ahead, Ingrid would likely get tired of waiting and intervene to push things along.
Urgh...my attacks do nothing to it...
Trying to think of another way he could fight back, he realized that something was strange about his last attempt. His magic didn’t have the ability to target individual body parts. Yet when he had used it, it had given him seven options to target. Hanakawa had spent a great deal of time in this world, but it was the first time he had seen a creature like this. Before now, no matter how large the enemy was, he couldn’t target individual body parts.
“Hmm. In other words, though it appears to be a single creature, is it actually an assembly of seven individuals?”
Looking closely, the connections that held it together were pretty sloppy. It looked like they had been haphazardly joined together.
No...there is no way it could be that easy...
Thinking of something reckless, he immediately wanted to give up. There was no guarantee it would work. But it was slightly better than turning and running or charging blindly towards it. That was the best he could say about his plan. With no other ideas, he decided to bet on the one option he could think of. If he was going to get eaten anyway, it was better to try and resist.
Keeping an eye on the monster, he moved around to its side. The creature didn’t respond to his movement. It had heads on its right and left. Its field of view was so wide, it didn’t need to turn to keep an eye on him.
Hanakawa kept going until he was facing the dog’s head, then he ran forward. The tentacles didn’t move. Just as he had predicted, it made no effort to stop its food from running straight at it. The dog head waited in front of him.
Hanakawa lunged forward. “Auto Heal!”
With this spell, his wounds would heal automatically. It was a convenient power, but the effect had an extremely limited duration, and it had a fixed cooldown before he could use it again, so it wasn’t something he could regularly employ. Unless he knew an attack was coming ahead of time, it was useless.
Just as he reached the dog head, he leaped to the left. Dodging the dog’s bite, he would use that opening to attack. At least, that was his plan, but it didn’t go as well as he’d hoped. The dog’s jaws easily took off his right arm.
Hanakawa shrieked at the momentary pain before his dismembered arm was regenerated by Auto Heal. This was exactly what he had expected. If his head had been crushed and he died instantly, things wouldn’t have gone so well, but losing an arm wasn’t a problem. He reached out a hand and placed it on the head of the now satisfied dog, currently distracted by its snack.
“Full Heal!”
Hanakawa unleashed the strongest variant of his healing magic, which for some reason had been split up into different levels. The monster immediately began to change. The shark’s body began to swell.
Hanakawa’s idea had been simple. If this creature was some sort of Frankenstein chimera, healing one of the animals back to its original condition would cause the rest of the creature to fall apart.
It seemed he had hit the nail on the head as the creature gasped in pain. The dog’s body regenerated within the body of the shark. Hanakawa then proceeded to heal the other parts of the monster. By the time he had run out of magical energy, the beast had turned into a complex mass of mixed animals. It wasn’t dead, but it wasn’t able to move anymore.
Hanakawa took the chance to climb up the dirt wall. Making it out of the arena, he made sure to emerge in the middle of the course this time. Forcing his exhausted body forward, he somehow made it across the finish line, where he promptly collapsed. Though it had taken an absurd amount of effort, he had somehow made it through his first day of training.
As Hanakawa lay face down on the ground, struggling to catch his breath, Ingrid stepped up beside him.
“Looks like your level didn’t increase. I guess training like this is too soft to get you through the level cap.”
“L-Like, I said, humans cannot...go past...level ninety-nine...” Hanakawa moaned as he gasped for breath.
“Whatever. The prototype weapon is useless now, so we’ll call it a day. Be glad I’m such a kind senior.”
A strange cry erupted from Hanakawa’s mouth. He had dreamed of a bright and exciting life after being teleported here, but that dream had been thoroughly shattered. At this rate, he was likely to die the next day.
He began to think of how he could escape his situation.
No Comments Yet
Post a new comment
Register or Login