Volume 2 - CH 5

Monster evolution technique. It was a skill I couldn’t use up till now, but right now it was seriously going nuts.

I gave names to the remaining three, all female goblins. Since they all seemed to like fruits, they picked parts of their names from ‘momon’, ‘orangie’, and ‘grapen’ to get Momorin, Oranrin, and Graprin.

They were pretty names for girls to have. I was more concerned with Darkle though. Why was he causing monster evolution technique to react? According to appraisal he was now eligible to evolve.

“Hey, Darkle you got a moment?”

“W, what? Are you displeased with my name?”

“No, nothing to do with that but, do you know anything about monster evolution?”

“…Oh yeah. You know how sometimes there’s a single monster in a group of identical monsters that’s more powerful?”

“Ah, yeah. A unique monster, right?” For example, there’s sometimes a monsters who’s a lot stronger within a group of goblins.

“Actually, all the goblins here have all evolved, or else were born as something like a unique monster. So you could say I know a bit about it.”

“…Is that right.” They certainly do seem to have the uniqueness of unique monsters. “You seem like you are able to evolve right now yourself, Darkle.”

“Eh? R, really? …B, but isn’t evolution something that takes place in the heat of battle? It’s definitely not something that I can do myself at will.” …Is that how it works. But right now I can see an evolution button displayed above Darkle’s status. …I guess I can evolve him by pressing this button?

“Looks like I can trigger your evolution for you… Should I give it a try?”

“…R, really!” Darkle looked at me in surprise. Not just him either, the other goblins were also looking over in surprise.

“Yeah, looks like it. Mind if I give it a try?” I’d leave it alone if they don’t like it. But Darkle started nodding his head.

“Please! If you can do it go right ahead! I want to get stronger now more than ever!!” Right after he said this, I immediately pressed the evolution button.

“…How is it?”

“…Hmm? Well, I don’t feel any-” While darkle was trying to speak, he suddenly put his arm to his chest and let out a deep breath. “Guh…! This feeling…! I feel the same as I did when I evolved long ago!”

Darkle’s body began emitting a light. I kind of wanted to press the cancel button since his voice sounded like he was in a lot of pain, but I couldn’t find such a button.

Eventually Darkle let out a war cry like voice, and then along with the light it began to quiet down.

Once the light dimmed down there was a Darkle one size bigger than before. His features were a lot more dashing than when he was a goblin. Now he looked a lot more like a human.

“…You’re, Darkle right?”

“Yeah… It’s me.” Darkle grasped his right hand tightly into a fist. Then he punched into the air. “I can win! As I am now, I won’t lose against any opponent!”

As Darkle shouted I checked his status.

I’ll start from his name. Before this evolution there was a +1 next to it. Evolving has turned that to a +2.

I guess that’s a counter for how many times they’ve evolved. His status got a lot higher. All his stats have gone up at lease 30 from before his evolution.

So this is evolution. Darkle bowed his head to me. “Thank you, Crest. The way we are now we probably wouldn’t even lose to a poison snake!!”

“…Nice. In that case should we head out to hunt one now?”

“Yeah! Let’s go everyone!!”

““““““Yeah!”””””” All the goblins punched their fists into the air. Then with Darkle in the lead, we moved out.

〇

We headed north from the village. That was seemed to be where you could find poison snakes. We ended up fighting things like giant scissors and mountain kongs on the way.

I could easily tell how much the goblins had improved from naming them based those fights. They were were barely managing when I first met them, but now they were able to fight with ease.

Personally, I was able to get some gacha points really easily so I can’t complain at all. That’s it for our warmup.

We continued on further north to the area with poison snakes.

“We should be able to find poison snakes from here on. Don’t lower your guard.” The other goblins nodded to Darkle’s words.

“There’s one thing I’d like to ask you first. Could you tell me how things went down when the goblin queen got poisoned? Could you figure out what its attacks were?”

“Its poison attack is probably its bite. It bit our goblin queen once. After that, her face went pale, and it was all we could do to escape back to the village where she has been sleeping until now.”

“I see…” In that case we should stay back so it can’t bite us. “You mentioned that they were a pretty strong monster. Although things were fine in the fights on the way here, let’s make sure we’re totally prepared for this.”

“…Yeah, alright.”

“How about we set up a trap around here and lead a poison snake back to fight it?” Darkle nodded to my suggestion.

“But what should we do for the trap? Could we dig a pitfall? That would probably take quite a lot of time-”

“A pitfall trap, huh. I can make one of those right away.” I showed them some of my earth magic. The goblin’s eyes went wide when I dug a huge hole.

“A hole that large in an instant!?”

“Yeah, is this big enough?”

“…A little bit deeper might be better. It’s pretty big.”

…You’re kidding. The holes about two metres deep right now though. After digging it to be about three metres deep I covered the top of it with earth magic. “That’s it for the pitfall trap. …Rufina, think you could lead a poison snake back here?”

“Aroo!” Right after I gave Rufina a chin scratch she set out.

“Now we just have to wait for a poison snake.”

“…Y, yeah. But, what should we do about after it falls into the pit? Our weapons don’t have enough reach right now.”

“We’ll use some spears. …I’ve got some magic iron ore for it anyway.” That’s why I wanted to make a pitfall trap. I used smithing technique to make some spears from the iron magic ore I’d picked up. “How’s that? Think you can use these?”

“Well we don’t really have any practice with spears but… we shouldn’t have any problem poking it from the top of the hole.” The other goblins nodded in agreeance with Darkle. That’s all for our preparations. Now we just have to wait for Rufina.