Chapter 61 – Cohabitation (3)
“Chain Lightning!”
Whenever Merim’s mouth changes, the tip of the cane is Pazik, Pajik. The bluish mass of light, which gradually coalesced with a sound, quickly shot out towards the goblin horde with the characteristic tearing sound of electricity bursting.
It was impossible for the goblins, huddled together to intimidate the intruder, to avoid it. The one who was struck by lightning shuddered with shock as the electric current pierced his body.
Pajijijijik!!
The lightning that scattered around the wobbling guy spread out to the goblins nearby and began to support them as a group while connected like a chain.
The five goblins, who couldn’t even scream and were electric roasted, collapsed to the ground, giving off a golden smell.
“Wind Cutter!”
Unfortunately, the magic fired at the goblins didn’t end there. An invisible blade with a sharp sound of cracking wind is approaching the goblin. It is the work of Loxia.
Shah! The blade of wind that neatly slashed the target goblin’s head, cut off the arm of the guy next to him, and then slashed the chest of another guy next to him.
Goblins, monsters of a low level, were not the kind that had anti-magic abilities, so they were helplessly defeated by magic.
Thus, the horde of twenty-one goblins just a few seconds ago was quickly reduced to fifteen, including the one whose arm had been blown off.
“Kirik! Kiriri! Kirieek!!”
A high-ranking goblin entity that appears to be their leader, the only one holding a lump of metal. Hobgoblin raised his rusty sword high and ordered to charge at the enemies behind him.
Six of his own people were killed before the battle even started, but their morale was not broken in the slightest. But the big problem is that it is more like ignorance than bravery.
In the goblin mindset, the dead are stupid and weak.
Like their short stature, goblins possess child-level intelligence, and the only basis for judging the difference between their fighting power and their enemies is their numbers.
Only four enemies, compared to that, the remaining people are fifteen. If you take care of the two human females who are doing strange magic behind the scenes, you can taste human meat to your heart’s content. In particular, the meat of young females cannot be eaten because it has an excellent soft taste. The goblins are already salivating.
“Kiruru, Kiraki Geek!”
Hobgoblin split his forces in two and ordered the five, including himself, to deal with the approaching female alone, while the rest of his men dealt with the three in the rear.
Judging by the appearance of Marill, who gallantly runs away with her single body, she judges that she is the leader of her enemies. Likewise, as the leader of the pack, she chose to deal with him along with his men.
The four subordinate goblins, moving in perfect order, surrounded Marill in a circle and attacked at once. Clubs and stone spears emitting wind-slicing noises from different directions aimed at her body.
The power and speed of wielding a weapon are noticeably slower than that of a human.
Marill, who had been constantly trained by Roden, effectively evaded her attack from behind with fluid movements like flowing water, then stepped forward and swung her sword diagonally. Chew! Her blood splattered with the feeling of grinding her bones.
As she jumped to aim for her head, the goblin’s head whirled around and swung her club, taking the final flight of her life as she splattered her blood in the air. Her body, a goblin that had lost her head, twitched like a worm, then sprawled across her floor, bleeding riotously from her neck.
“Haaaaap!”
Afterwards, Marill cuts the spear aiming at the abdomen from the front, and loses her weapon and strikes down the top of the goblin, which has become full of loopholes, with a buckler.
Fuck! His head was hollowed out in the shape of Buckler, both of his eyes popped out and his nose blood gushed out and his breath stopped.
Swinging her sword and shield again with her unstoppable stance, Marill took down the other two goblins with a similar flow as before. Now all that’s left is the Hobgoblin holding the sword.
“Kiriruk! Kick! Kiririki!”
The Hobgoblin, far from being brave, tried to call back the men he had just sent to his rear. However, what was in his gaze was only the figures of his subordinates who had long since become cold corpses and the other three humans leisurely looking around.
Will you fight to the end or run away? Faced with a crossroads between the two, Hobgoblin naturally chose to escape.
It was natural. Even the superiority in numbers, which was the only advantage, collapsed in vain, and the Hobgoblin’s fighting spirit completely collapsed.
He is not intelligent enough to be called smart, but he has the wisdom to recognize that he will surely die if he fights alone like this. The Hobgoblin was very right in choosing to run away, even if it took a few seconds to prolong his life.
“Where are you running away!”
It was running pretty fast, but not at a speed that I couldn’t possibly chase after. As Marill immediately tries to track down the Hobgoblin, she calls out as Roden, who has come close at some point, puts her hand on her shoulder.
“Good work, Marill. That’s enough. He’s taking a breather with the kids because I’ll finish it.”
“Ah… Yes.”
Passing Marill, who nodded her head like her docile lamb, and her blazing speed to close the distance to her Hobgoblin, Roden swung her sword from above her and down her lightly.
Hobgoblin’s body, which had been running for a while, collapsed on either side of her while maintaining her running form. In the cross section of the guy, which was neatly cut vertically, his brain, intestines, and blood gushed out and stained the bush red.
I can’t even get scrap metal for this…
Roden, who glanced at the rusty sword she was clutching at the microscopically wriggling corpse of the Hobgoblin, trampled it on and broke her clean.
It’s a piece of iron that has no value to them, but to the goblins it’s worth a lot. To eliminate the possibility of them retrieving the weapon. Disposed of in advance.
Roden cut off the hobgoblin’s right ear in a deft move she repeated several times during her adventures and returned to her party. Her twin sister was cutting off the right ear from the corpses of the goblins strewn about, and Loxia was examining the tent.
Speaking of results, there was nothing that could be made money. Their belongings and the contents of the tent were useless junk, worm-infested meat, and leftover tree nuts.
“Umm~ I didn’t expect it anyway, but these guys don’t have anything else to bring except their ears.”
“Unlike the goblins located near ruins or villages, the goblins in the forest can barely afford equipment made of wood and leather, so it can’t be helped.”
The twin sisters, who couldn’t hide their regretful feelings, spat out a word to each other, and for the same reason that Roden had broken her rusty sword, they smashed the goblin’s tent to pieces and burned it.
“You all worked hard!”
As the atmosphere was about to end, Roxia, who was helping clean up next to her, spoke with a strong voice to the party for their hard work.
“It must have been very difficult for Roxia to follow you all this way. You worked hard. Was the monster subjugation worth trying today?”
“Yes! I was a bit nervous, but I was able to use magic without any hesitation because I was sure that her uncle would protect her.”
Loxia looks young on the outside, but when she was living in the slums, she was busy moving here and there to make a living every day, and because she had a past where she walked all the way to the evacuation route, walking around the woods all day was nothing. Unexpectedly, he is an adventurer.
Come to think of it, was I the same age as this kid when I was first brought to this world and became an adventurer? If the me of those days and her present Roxy had met on an equal footing, what would have happened to us…
After briefly imagining her improbable home, Roden slowly approached Marill, who was chatting with her sister.
“Every single movement I taught him is being applied well in real life. There is plenty of potential for improvement in the future.”
“Ahaha… Thanks for the compliment. She owes it all to having a good teacher.”
Anyway, since her quota has been met, the subjugation request that her twin sister received from the guild has been successfully completed. After taking a short break, Roden’s party turned around to get out of the forest.
* * *
“… Wait a minute guys, I’ll be right back.”
Way back from the forest. Finding something in the distance, Roden ran toward it, telling her companions to wait a moment.
As Roden expected, there were green slimes swaying like waves. The guy was eating the corpse of the goblin that Merim had just defeated.
It seems common in some popular media to introduce slimes as monsters that can easily be hunted by beginners…
Amorphous creatures that can melt anything they come into contact with can’t be a formidable enemy.
Tolerable objects can be corroded, so in order to perform continuous physical attacks, you must use a special weapon that can withstand the slime’s acid, or use mana or aura to protect your weapon.
Generally, I tend to hunt them with attacks using property magic, but… Anyway, the slime in this world is a monster with a fairly high level of difficulty.
If you’re careless in a place like a ruin or a cave and you accidentally overwhelm the slime attached to the ceiling, most of the creatures will die with the terrible pain of melting their heads first.
There was a time when I unknowingly attacked a slime and lost my weapon meaninglessly, so other adventurers treated me like an idiot all day long. Thinking about it now makes me feel ashamed.
Roden slowly approached the slime while killing his presence while recalling the past. He didn’t budge because he was digesting the goblin.
“Sigh…!”
To prevent damage to the weapon, Roden put an aura on the surface of the sword and quickly thrust the sword out. Fu-wook! The dimly visible core of the slime was quickly and accurately destroyed.
Roden didn’t stop there, removing the slowly disintegrating slime from the goblin’s corpse and placing it in a pot he had taken out of his inventory earlier. Before long, what had been slime became a mere mass of slime.
If it had been alive, the pot would have been corroded, but the slime’s acidity is considerably weakened the moment it dies, so there is no big problem. He closed the lid on the pot of slime, put it back in his inventory, and returned to the group with a satisfied look on his face.
Roden told them that he had come to take care of her errands for a while, and she started to leave the forest again.
* * *
Roden, who returned home without any problems before dark, broke up with the twin sisters who headed to the guild to collect the reward money and Loxia, who followed them amicably, saying that he wanted to see them report on their mission, until the three women returned. I was left alone at home for a while.
The timing is good in many ways. Heading straight to the kitchen, Roden took out a pot of slime she had just brought in, poured a bottle of her vodka into it, rinsed it lightly, and tossed it with a few pinches of salt and sugar.
Before long, the slime became so viscous that it would not overflow onto the floor even if held in mid-air.
Roden packed it all in a pot, went outside, to the drying rack to be exact, and spread her slime out in the sun, like hanging out her laundry.
It is one of the manufacturing processes that I learned as a bonus when studying in the Eastern Continent in the past. In fact, slime is quite popular as a high-end food ingredient in the Orient, and if you thinly slice the dried slime as it is, it transforms into noodles with an excellent twisty texture.
Roden returned home with a proud expression on her face after finishing her work, looking forward to the night that would come shortly after looking at the large new bed she had prepared this morning.
… At this size, even three people can comfortably roll around.
