A small swipe of his sword, and the harpy disintegrates.

Too easy.

Another two fly at him and he swipes another two times to take them out.

Such is the life of Haruto Takahashi. Or rather, his new one. His last life was spent mostly in front of a computer screen, snacking on chips high in sodium.

He still makes his way through Kralbed forest, having not even once picked up his pace from a slow walk. Despite the map and its great usefulness, Haruto had still gotten lost in the forest.

‘It’s hard to tell which direction is north in all these trees’.

Even with all the assistance the guild had given him in terms of information and gear, Haruto doesn’t blame himself, and instead blames Reina for not giving him a compass or other such tool to help him on his journey.

Since entering the forest he’s been wandering around aimlessly, trying to find his way out, and killing anything that moves. For him, the monsters were just experience points.

All he knew about this world was that it was his for the taking. Since being summoned from his home planet of Earth, all signs pointed to this single idea.

He was gifted in every form of raw power that the people of Aohan had a metric for. His mana was off the charts, his physical strength was freakish, and his intelligence was…

Well actually, it wasn’t anything remarkable.

He was most satisfied with the ease of his life, but if there was one thing that he hadn’t been given, other than an improved sense of humility and superior intelligence, it would be a proper way to gauge his own strength without having to rely on the “primitive” measuring techniques of the natives.

“This system is so vague. It doesn’t have a heads-up-display, I don’t know my skills, and it hasn’t talked even once since I got here. Does it really have the right to consider itself a system?” Haruto talks to himself, as if voicing his annoyances to empty air would help his state of affairs.

“This is so stupid. It’s almost like they expect me to play out my new life as a regular human”.

He swats at another harpy and it bursts into a cloud of feathers and blood. Haruto is surprised that it didn’t disintegrate this time.

“Must’ve not hit it hard enough”.

He keeps walking.

When Haruto was teleported over, he was given a small briefing by some god he wasn’t paying attention to. Basically, every time he killed a monster, he would receive a fraction of a blessing. Every time he killed enough monsters, the blessing would wash over his body and add even more raw strength to his ocean of resources. It would then reset. Very simple concept. It made for an extremely easy way to garner strength, given he had enough time to kill the required amount of monsters to become nearly unstoppable.

Most of the monsters that he had encountered thus far were of somewhat lower intelligence, and would just attack him if he drew close. Most of their attacks were slow and linear, so Haruto didn’t have much to worry about. The highest amount of combat-related decision making he had to think about was ‘hit monsters with sword’.

He was very poorly prepared for anything that could think, and even less prepared for beings that had technique.

Blissfully ignorant to this fact, he continued on his way through the forest, figuring that he would get out eventually.

________________

“Sir, we’ve just received word that an unusually strong and aggressive monster may have entered the Laughing Forest or any of its surrounding wood. Word from Kralbed says it killed a couple of strong adventurers before escaping”.

Standing in the Ochseid guild main office, a beautiful woman with neat brown hair reports to her boss. She wears it in a tight bun and is of a very stoic expression, trying to be as professional as possible. She’s dressed in a military-style navy blue uniform.

The man she’s talking to isn’t sitting at his desk, and is instead standing and looking at himself in the mirror he keeps in his office. The man is around 193 centimeters of lean muscle. He strikes a few poses, admires his sharp features, and then walks away from his reflection, still looking over his shoulder. He sports the same uniform as the woman, except he has a cool hat. Or at least he thinks it’s cool.

Despite his seemingly narcissistic behavior, there is a hint of mischief, as if he is mostly just messing around.

He walks over to his desk chair but doesn’t sit in it. Instead, he opts to lean forward onto it with his arms crossed over the top.

“Ah, yeah that’s great Janine”, he says, pretending he wasn’t paying attention.

“Sir, I would ask that you please take this seriously. These are people’s lives we’re talking about. I would like for this situation to receive some degree of respect”.

The man seems more annoyed than concerned. After a while of leaning in the same place, he stands up straight.

“We’ve had an undetermined amount of snow monsters knocking at our front door since forever now. We really have to deal with this, too?”

He looks out the window of his office on the fourth floor of the guild tower. It’s positioned in the northmost part of the town, so his view of the mountains is unblocked.

It’s a sea of pine up until the snow overtakes the trees, which then turns into a sloped, icy wasteland.

There’s a reason why the guild is the closest building to the wall that separates the city from the forest ahead.

Once anyone leaves the northern gates, it’s hunting territory, for both adventurers and monsters. The creatures here are no pushovers.

He hears the distant laughs of monsters most wicked.

His playful atmosphere leaves him, and with it his only coping mechanism.

“Please, just don’t let it be any worse than anything we have here.”

_____________________________

I sneeze.

After leaving the weapon store, I had gone to check the magic shop, but they just… didn’t sell stealth scrolls.

Most of their wares were magic amplifiers, and since my specialty is not of the magical variety, all of the items they had in stock were useless.

I asked the mage in charge of the store about this, and apparently it was just lucky that there was a mage in Kralbed whose expertise was invisibility magic. Each magic store is subject to the specialization of the mage that owns them, which should be obvious, but not something I had ever considered.

I ended up just buying an adventurer's backpack and leaving. I guess it's time to mix up the strategy a bit.

As I near the last building on the road, I’m met with a nostalgic sight. It’s almost the same guild from Kralbed, but with more floors and made of black concrete. I smile a bit, then push through the right double door.