Diary of a Middle-Aged Sage's Carefree Life in Another World: Volume 2 (eBook)

Kotobuki Yasukiyo (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024
250 Seiten
J-Novel Club (Verlag)
978-1-7183-7386-0 (ISBN)

Infos

Zelos is back in the Far-Flung Green Depths-but at least he's not alone this time. Celestina, Zweit, and a squad of knights have joined him for a training camp, looking to get some combat experience against the deadly monsters that lurk the forest. Their levels are already skyrocketing, but things are getting tougher by the day. Will they all make it out alive? And will they be the same people when they return?

Not that leaving the forest will be the end of their worries: more dangers await them outside, as does a certain girl with whom Zelos might have more in common than the two of them first expect. And of course, with the training of his students coming to an end, Zelos is set to face another enemy that no amount of magic can vanquish: the looming specter of unemployment...

Textauszug

“Are you seriously saying the damn thing’s not gonna attack us? It’s got two heads! And weren’t these things able to use magic?!”

“Well, they might attack you a bit, but my spell here has another effect: it lowers the target’s defense. Give it everything you’ve got and you should be able to beat it!”

Silence.

“Oh, I forgot to mention—this spell’s pretty powerful, but it doesn’t work for that long. So you should probably start attacking now if you don’t want it to break out and come for you, ’kay?”

“What the hell are you doing?!” Again, the whole party was dumbfounded.

At this point, however, they had no choice. Reluctantly, almost in tears, they drew their weapons and approached the chimera.

All they could feel was sheer life-threatening danger—and yet they had been left with no option but to go at it with their swords if they wanted to survive. Their will to live overpowering their fear, they swung at the chimera—knowing that it could break free and attack them at any moment—and gradually, bit by bit, wore its health down.

Given the state they were in, however, the group’s attacks lacked any sense of control or cohesion. It looked like they were simply flailing their swords about in a mad frenzy.

From an outsider’s perspective, it seemed almost like one-sided mob violence. But chimeras were spiteful by nature; if the group didn’t kill it here, it’d chase after them with a vengeance the second it was able. In the worst-case scenario, it could even chase them all the way back to the Magic Kingdom of Solistia.

Once, a noble had come into this forest, tried to defeat a chimera, and failed. And that same chimera had ultimately followed the noble back to their own territory and killed a considerable number of people.

If that happened again now—if this chimera did manage to make it into the Magic Kingdom of Solistia—there was only a small handful of mercenaries who’d be capable of defeating it.

But one way or another, the group’s frantic attacks finally brought the chimera’s life to an end. All in all, it took approximately forty minutes—and perhaps because of that, the party, who had been swinging their swords the whole time, was mentally drained. While each individual’s attacks had been weak, attacking as a group had allowed them to gradually build up damage on the chimera. Physically restrained and prevented from using its mana, the chimera had made for an easy target, and ultimately, they’d been able to defeat it without any real problem. Apart from, of course, the mental distress...

It wasn’t just the knights: Celestina and Zweit were left pale from the experience as well. But you couldn’t blame them—it was the first time they’d faced such a high-level monster. It was an enemy that, in normal circumstances, would’ve simply ended both of their lives in a flash.

Now that they were done, everyone was starting to look over their experience gains. “Ha ha ha... I’m Level 43 now. And I was only Level 24 just a moment ago...”

“Me too! Aha, aha ha ha... I dunno why, but I don’t feel happy about it at all...”

“My body hurts. I wonder if it’s a side effect of leveling up so quickly?”

“My skills have leveled up too! Aha ha ha...just how strong was that damn chimera?!”

“Whoa—I’m up to Level 62 now...!”

“And I’m...not far off Level 50!”

Still, not a single one of them was truly excited about their victory. There was no room for that in their minds; they were still practically paralyzed by their lingering terror of the chimera.

Zelos, who had merely sat back and watched the chimera’s HP go down, had ended up calculating that each individual attack was only doing somewhere around 2 to 15 damage. It seemed like this particular chimera had specialized in defense, making it more durable than you’d usually expect of something its level.

While the effects of Zelos’s Dark Chainbind spell had reduced the chimera’s defense and taken its mana away, it seemed likely to him that the monster had had some sort of resistance skill, which had allowed it to resist the effects somewhat. What was more, it had apparently had a special ability that let it recover its HP—though that had been largely meaningless in the face of the mob violence it had been up against.

Though it was difficult to overcome Zelos’s magic, it was by no means impossible. With the right special ability, it was entirely possible to resist his binding magic—though given that the monster had ultimately been defeated anyway, its resistance doing little more than prolonging its death, it was difficult to say whether the thing had been lucky or unlucky in that regard.

“Well, then, time to dismantle it. Can someone give me a hand?”

“Hang on just a second, you!” Another flurry of voices—angry ones this time, from the knights directed toward Zelos, who was about to start dismantling the body as if nothing out of the ordinary had just happened.

They’d been forced to fight an enemy that they knew they’d usually have no chance against. And now that it was over, all that fear was changing into anger—anger that they now channeled squarely toward Zelos, the man who’d created the situation that forced them to fight in the first place.

“Why’d you have to make us fight against a monstrosity like that? What would you have done if we’d died?!”

“Were you trying to kill us?! Couldn’t you have at least talked to us about it first?!”

“Oh? Did one of you die while I wasn’t looking?”

“That’s not the point! What I’m saying is, what if your binding magic had worn off before we’d beaten it?!”

“Did it, though?”

The knights paused for a moment. And then... “Wait a second.” It looked like they were starting to realize something.

Zelos had told them earlier that the spell could wear off at any moment. In reality, however, it had kept the chimera bound right up until its death—and only now were the knights starting to realize how strange that was.

“M-Mr. Zelos... Don’t tell me you lied to us? Surely not, right...?”

“Well... I mean, I do feel kind of bad about it. The truth is, though, you’re all too weak right now. If you come up against a strong enemy, all you can do is run away. And the thing is, that’s fine if you’re in a situation where you can run away—but if you’re not, then your only option is to fight. Which would absolutely be the death of you, as you are now. So I figured, well, I should probably help you level up to give you a better chance of survival.”

“Wh-Why did you have to do something like that to us, though...? If you’d just told us—even given us a basic idea—then...”

“I thought that if you got used to just relying on the strongest one in the group, you’d let your guards down, and end up not knowing what to do if you actually had to fight against a strong monster. It’s not like I’m always going to be with you—plus, if you don’t prepare yourself to go up against strong enemies, there’s no way you’ll be able to stay alive in this forest. The depths of this place are home to monsters far worse than chimeras, after all...”

Zelos was easily the strongest one in the group. For the knights, however, his presence was like a guarantee of safety. And if they came to rely on him too much, they could end up making the wrong decisions when eventually their lives really were at risk.

In other words, the sense of security from knowing someone strong was by their side could make them subconsciously assume they were safe—and make some kind of slipup. If he waited too long to teach them that lesson, it could be too late.

“Oh, so you were doing it to help train us...?”

“Your skills can be leveled up later, but for now, it’s important to get your own personal levels up as much as you can. You can’t let your guard down in this forest, after all—in more ways than one...”

“So you’re saying the security of having you around could actually make us weaker, Mr. Zelos? I suppose that does make sense...”

As they were now, the knights were nothing more than a hindrance to Zelos. The only solution to that was to make all of them stronger. It was also essential to train up their combat skills—which made it important for Zelos to simply restrain the monster and let the others be the ones to fight it.

Monsters in the Far-Flung Green Depths were of extremely high levels, and the area where the group was training now was nothing compared to the innermost depths of the forest. If the trainees were having difficulties here, they’d stand no chance farther in.

The orcs from the previous day had been fairly low level, which was fortunate. But in an environment like this, enemies above Level 100 could appear out of nowhere with ease. There was even a considerable chance of the group running into a monster of Level 500 or above.

If you looked at it from another angle, though, that meant it was incredibly easy for the party to level up by fighting those monsters—and so Zelos had reached the conclusion that, Well, I’m already here to level up my two students, so what’s...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 20.3.2024
• Reihe/Serie: The Diary of a Middle-Aged Sage's Carefree Life in Another World
• Illustrationen: Kotobuki Yasukiyo
• Übersetzer: Kotobuki Yasukiyo
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Fantasy / Science Fiction ► Fantasy
• Schlagworte: gamer hero • harem gamelit • Isekai • Light Novel • LitRPG • older protagonist • overpowered main character
• ISBN-10: 1-7183-7386-4 / 1718373864
• ISBN-13: 978-1-7183-7386-0 / 9781718373860