Evil Avalon - Volume 2 - Chapter 1

Chapter 1: To the Tenth Floor - Part 1

“So the last skill the skeleton fired off was an antiair skill?” asked Kano.

“Yep,” I replied. “It’s an antiair skill used for counters that has a high chance of inflicting critical damage when used against opponents in midair.”

I’d blacked out after the intense fight against Volgemurt and slept for two hours. When I woke up, my immense hunger almost made me pass out again. Kano was carrying me on her back through the dungeon because I still didn’t have the strength to walk.

Ever since possessing Piggy’s body, I’d been working on a diet and found the pants I had worn when I joined the school felt a little loose at the waist. This glimpse of success had made me hopeful that I could reach eighty kilograms within six months... But after the short fight with the skeleton, I awoke with a remarkably thinner body. Being obese made it hard to remember how my body should look until I checked my arms and my waist, finding that I barely had any body fat. My clothes and armor also were baggy over my body.

I had maintained my decency with a belt, yet munching on my sister’s snacks to quell my insatiable hunger made that unnecessary as my pants became tight once more. My belly swelled with every bite, like a scene from a manga, and I was rapidly returning to my old plump self. Even though I wanted to stop, the hunger was too powerful to resist. What the hell was going on with my body?

Kano had changed too. Following the fight, her physical enhancements had reached the point where she could effortlessly lift boulders that weighed dozens of kilograms one-handed. Clearly, she’d gone up by more than just one or two levels.

Leveling up had also made her hyperactive. She was darting around, zigzagging every which way with me on her back. I wished she’d calm down and walk properly. After all, I didn’t want anyone to witness the surreal, embarrassing sight of a high school boy getting a piggyback ride from a tiny girl.

I wouldn’t have to worry if my legs were in working order, I thought.

I’d used Basic Appraisal on myself to see why I couldn’t move my legs properly after waking up, and I saw that I had reductions in my movement speed and maximum HP. These conditions were likely caused by my leg muscles repairing themselves imperfectly following repeated use of healing and strengthening magic, which had caused strain to my body. A few spots had gone numb or had no sensation.

For treatment, one of my options was getting healed at the Adventurers’ Guild to pay for expensive treatment. I could get the school’s Priests to look me over, but they’d definitely appraise me. Those choices would reveal I’d leveled up so much, and I didn’t want anyone to know that. With those options rejected, I’d decided on going to Granny’s Goods, a hidden shop on the tenth floor.

A falchion I’d taken after the fight hung from my waist. The skeleton had dropped this weapon along with a magic gem when defeated. We’d also helped ourselves to a pendant with an aqua blue jewel and a silver chain from the treasure chest in the lord’s room, which had opened by itself.

Both pieces of loot were likely magic items, so Basic Appraisal not displaying their properties meant they were probably mid-level items. However, loot guarded by undead monsters often included cursed items. That was why I kept the falchion in its sheath and the pendant in my rucksack. If any curses existed, they wouldn’t activate unless we equipped the items.

I was trying to get a grip on our current situation. The problem was that Kano was desperately curious about my fight with Volgemurt and had been shooting questions at me the whole journey.

“What was that last skill you used?” she asked excitedly. “It looked super powerful...”

“Oh, Blade of Agares?”

Blade of Agares was a skill from the expert Sword Saint job that worked with one-handed swords, whether using a single weapon or dual wielding. It was an incredible weapon skill because it required only a simple motion for Manual Activation, displayed few signs that it was about to be activated, and didn’t leave its user vulnerable afterward. Its most notable quality was that you could activate it without wielding a weapon. Although this reduced its power, it had become a popular choice for players that wanted to fight other players with a mix of martial arts and weapons.

I had a cheat that let me utilize weapon skills I’d learned in the game, even if most of them were useless for inflicting damage because my strength stat was abysmal and my weapons were too weak. Blade of Agares, however, dealt a fixed amount of damage in addition to the one that scaled on your strength stat, making it the one skill that I could use to attack enemies at my low level.

Activating an expert job skill at my level came at a cost. My body couldn’t handle the strain, and I’d entirely lost my right arm. I’d expected something like that might happen, though.

“Bro, you’ve gotta tell me,” said Kano. “How the hell did you fire off all those skills? And what was with the way you activated the strengthening skill at the beginning of the fight? And before we get to that, what was that strengthening skill anyway?”

Kano naturally had a lot of questions. So, I took a moment to plan my explanation.

“It’s a high-level technique to convert body fat into mana,” I explained. “You’re too inexperienced and have too little body fat to attempt it.”

“What sort of weird technique is that...?” muttered Kano. “And stop trying to sound like my master!”

The teacher at the martial arts school Kano had attended for the last six months had demanded his students call him master and acted like an elderly expert despite being young, which she found annoying. She’d also complained about his lame beard and sleeveless vests. Apparently, he was a high-level adventurer.

“I can explain everything, but only after you’re strong enough to protect yourself from other adventurers. Learning dungeon secrets can put you in danger,” I said.

“Ugh... Okay,” she relented.

She was being uncharacteristically compliant.

Some game knowledge was still too risky to tell her, though I might be better off teaching her how to use Manual Activation soon. She should have a means to protect herself in case anything unexpected happened or a dangerous game scenario got us in trouble outside the dungeon.

***

We continued chatting as we jogged down the seventh floor’s main street and reached the eighth floor after an hour.

The dungeon’s structures returned to a cave setting. But they were bigger than on previous maps, twenty to thirty meters wide and tall, not feeling too claustrophobic. The rest area at the floor’s entrance held even fewer amenities than on the seventh floor, with just a handful of benches and vending machines. It was like a rest stop in an empty rural village.

Kano lowered me, pointed at the toilets, and said, “Sit tight for a second. I just need to use the bathroom.”

I could walk around okay now, so she didn’t need to treat me like I couldn’t look after myself.

“I’ll be waiting by that vending machine,” I replied.

After she’d left, I slowly stood up, stretched my back, and carefully walked twenty meters to the vending machine to see how I fared. My legs didn’t hurt, but they still felt numb in a few spots. I looked at my calves, noticing my veins and muscles bulging through my skin. Even though I could still fight in this condition, my speed and reaction time would be much worse than usual. It would be best to avoid combat.

“That’s what I get for pushing myself too far,” I scolded myself. “Not that I had a choice.”

My right arm had regrown perfectly, even if the muscles and skin of my left arm had not done the same. Still, I was unnaturally hungry despite everything I’d eaten. I wasn’t sure whether my Glutton skill or the side effect of prolonged use of healing magic caused my insatiable hunger. Perhaps it was both.

I looked up at the old-style vending machine to distract myself.

It sells udon, I thought. Ridiculously expensive udon.

The udon was the cheap kind, just noodles with deep-fried tempura batter. Yet the price was almost a thousand yen. That was more expensive than I would’ve thought, even knowing that prices increased the farther down the dungeon you were.

I wanted to resist, but the temptation grew and made my stomach growl.

Who am I kidding? Just one won’t hurt, I mused. And before I knew it, I’d wolfed down several bowls.

When Kano returned from the bathroom, she looked at me with her head tilted to one side and remarked, “That’s strange. You’re almost back to your normal shape. What’s going on with your body?”

“I’ve...had a bit too much to eat,” I confessed. “Do you think you can still carry me?”

“I’ll give it a go, so hop on,” she responded.

I climbed onto her back.

“Oh, yeah, this is totally fine,” she said, galloping around the rest area with me on her back.

I wished she could rein it in a little because it was embarrassing. Though the eighth floor was less busy than the previous floors, we still got odd looks from the adventurers there.

“But is it safe to carry you all the way to the tenth floor?” asked Kano. “What about all the monsters?”

“We should be okay,” I said. “But maybe we should try fighting an eighth-floor monster to see how strong you are now.”

We’d need to pass through a room with a miniboss inside to get to the hidden store on the tenth floor. In the worst case, we might have to battle our way through. So, we’d be better off knowing how strong we had become before getting to that point. I wanted to learn how much we’d leveled up after the Volgemurt fight.

The eighth floor had four types of monsters: orc generals, giant bats, orc archers, and orc soldiers. Orc generals had a monster level of 9 and often had several orc soldiers and orc archers accompanying them. You needed to count how many enemies you were fighting at once if you encountered one.

Giant bats were pesky too. Although their attacks weren’t strong, they were exceptionally annoying to fight against if you had no long-range attacks because they could fly. You couldn’t just ignore them and move on either because they’d follow you relentlessly, forcing you to defeat them. I wished we had a long-range party member to help with raiding this floor, but we did have other options.

“The standard way to defeat them is to hit them with a counter the exact moment they attack you,” I explained.

“Cool... Ah! Up there! That’s gotta be a giant bat, right?”

While Kano was carrying me down the main street leading to the ninth floor, she spotted a fifty-centimeter-long creature clinging to the ceiling. A bat that big would probably have a wingspan of one and a half meters.

“It hasn’t seen us,” I said. “Maybe it’s sleeping?”

“In that case, I’ll chuck a rock at it,” said Kano.

We moved over to the spot right beneath the giant bat, where it was about twenty meters up. Kano got a pebble from the ground and flung it at the monster. The pebble whizzed through the air and struck a spot one meter away from the giant bat, exploding into pieces. From the force of the impact, I guessed Kano must’ve hurled the stone at about two hundred kilometers per hour.

The giant bat jumped to life at the sudden sound and buzzed as it scanned its surroundings. When it spotted us, it folded its wings in and plunged, aiming at my sister’s unguarded neck.

“Come and get it!” yelled Kano.

She readied her dagger to strike back.

Hmm, I thought.

The giant bat’s gliding speed was a hundred kilometers an hour, but I still saw its movements clearly. Kano could also do this because she skillfully grabbed it by its neck instead of slicing the beast when it attacked. The monster screeched and struggled in her grasp.

Kano leaned in to examine the bat more closely, likely expecting it to be cute. When faced with the sight of its ferocious face, she used her dagger to finish it without hesitation and turned it into a magic gem.

Yikes, Kano, I thought.

“It was really easy to follow what it was doing,” stated Kano. “Do you think that’s because I’ve leveled up?”

“Yep,” I replied. “In addition to your strength and mana, leveling up also increases your reaction speed and dynamic visual acuity.”

This fight proved that her dynamic visual acuity had a margin increase. She could probably take on multiple giant bats without breaking a sweat. But we’d need a bigger sample size to gauge how strong we had become.

In other words, we needed another fight.