Volume 7 - CH 4.07

「Meteor Crash」 is an area of effect magic attack, which means that instead of attacking just a single enemy, it targets all of the enemies that are going to be standing within its effective range, so if I were to use it in a trap room that would be filled to the brim with monsters, they all would probably end up getting massacred in a matter of seconds. This is going to be especially good for me since I want to let out all of the frustrations that I have build up while trekking through the fourteenth floor of Haruba’s Labyrinth while getting myself bored to death.

 

While heading deeper inside the twelfth floor of Bode’s Labyrinth, I fight against the monsters that we were encountering by casting 「Meteor Crash」at them. Even though I told Roxanne that we are going to be focusing on the exploration rather than fighting monsters, we were encountering large groups of monsters is big rooms anyway, but 「Meteor Crash」was making a remarkably short work of them. Even though using 「Sand Storm」was also a valid option of fighting against the Mabreams, I didn’t do that. In fact, right now I am not using ordinary magic at all, killing everything within my line of sight with my Bonus Spell instead. And when my MP is dropping dangerously low, I jut go and switch back to Durandal so that I could get back all of the MP that I have lost in a matter of just a few battles.

This is the Labyrinth, a place where pretty much anything can happen if you’re not going to be careful enough with your own actions. I might never know if one of the enemies that’s going to pop up sooner or later is not going to be resistant to my 「Meteor Crash」, meaning that I will not be able to kill them with one or two 「Meteor Crashes」. In case of such an emergency, I should have enough MP saved up to be able to use other types of magic and Spells.

As it is always is with the world, it turns out that when you start actively searching for something, you’ll not be able to find it. That is the case with the entrance to the room with an especially large amount of monsters in it on this floor. We switched ourselves into exploration mode for the express purpose of finding it as soon as possible, but for a good while it just continued to elude us.

But nevertheless, we never allowed it to get us down, and so we continued our search, until we have eventually found it.

The door to the next room before us opened, and once we set foot in the small room, we noticed a large amount of fish-type monsters right there in the middle of it.

 

It’s a big catch. It’s a great catch. Just thinking about how much EXP and Drop Items we are going to get from those guys is enough to make me excited.

Oh yeah, it’s fishing time, baby, so let us dive right into this school of fish in order to catch them all!

Unfortunately, there are no seagulls here to set up the proper mood of fishing at the seaside, but it’s nothing that we can do anything about, so there’s no use complaining about it at all. And besides, if there were seagulls here, then I think their cries would be distracting us from focusing on the battle properly.

Just as I planned, I will try to take all of the monsters out with a single Spell, so as soon as we got close enough to the monsters, and then I invoked 「Meteor Crash」…..

But when I did that, I immediately felt as if something was horribly, horribly wrong.

All of a sudden, I felt as if all of my MP has gone up and disappeared without a trace. But that was not all. Along with my MP, it also felt as if something else has left my body, leaving me in a state in which I felt as if my entire being has been engulfed by a deep, heavy, sticky darkness.

I-I’m sorry! How could I have been this stupid? How could I have been this foolish to think that I could dispose of so many enemies with a single Spell alone?!

 

I had no idea that I was this incompetent! I had no idea my abilities were so lacking that I would fail to predict that trying to invoke 「Meteor Crash」right now would result in me draining all of my MP for naught?!

I was stupid enough to forget one crucial detail about area of effect magic: that the amount of MP that the Spell is going to consume increases proportionally to the number of monsters that it is being used against. Or…. Is it really like that? I don’t know. Right now I am in a state in which I might have as well believed that what was happening to me right now was just this world purposefully screwing with me because of how good things have been going for me recently.

Maybe it’s because I have been using Bonus Spells much more often than the regular Spells lately? Maybe this is the world’s way of showing me that Bonus Spells and Bonus Skills are something that is not natural in this world, and that is why the world is not going to tolerate anyone who uses them to further their own, selfish ends?

Yes, this world must be set against me precisely because of that. I tried to cheat like Hayashi Shiro, and as a punishment for that, I now feel down and depressed because I have made a mistake.

Who is Hayashi Shiro and what does he have to do with anything that is currently happening to me, you ask? Well, it’s actually a Japanese trick of sorts, to be exact. A trick that states that when a person doesn’t know how they should write the kanji for depression, they should just write the kanji for Hayashi Shiro, because they supposedly look the same. Not that I know if that is actually true or not, because I never had to actually use that trick before.

 

「As expected of master, you were amazing as always!」

「All those monsters were wiped out in one attack!」

「Amazing, desu!」

 

The monsters all seem to be dead, but honestly,  I can’t even hear what the girls are saying all that clearly, because all of that stress that I have managed to get rid off while we were powertripping through the Mabreams has now come back to hit me like a truck.

This is just my goddamn luck. All that I wanted to do was to release the stress and get rid of the boredom that I was feeling, but my plans have backfired against me spectacularly, and now I only feel depressed as shit.

 

 

 

In order to fix my sorry state of being, I opened my Item Box, took out a handful of Strengthening Pills and swallowed them all at once.

With them, my MP has now been sufficiently recovered, allowing me to get back on my feet.

Who would have thought that there was going to be such a tremendous drawback to using area of effect magic against too many opponents? I feel like I have just learned a valuable but pretty painful lesson. Up until now I was only fighting against groups of up to four monsters, so I just didn’t notice the increasing amount of MP consumption when there was more than four enemies, and I honestly feel like I cannot even be held accountable for that, since I have been trying to avoid trap rooms at all costs ever since I stumbled onto that one when I was still only by myself.

If there was just one or two more monsters than usual, then I feel like it would also not make that much of a difference, but in this room here, there was not just one or two more enemies. This room was literally brimming with them, but on the flipside, so many enemies means that the potential amount of Drop Items that they have left behind was going to be huge as well, and when I gazed at the ground, I saw that it totally was.

 

However, it wasn’t only drops from Mabreams. Since the enemies native to the eleventh floor of Bode’s Labyrinth were Needlewoods, the Drop Items that were now on the floor and for the taking included some branches and leaves as well.

And there was also a crapton of White fish from the defeated Mabreams as well. And that wasn’t the end of the surprises, because when I wanted to start collecting all of that, Miria suddenly came up to me with something in tow.