The next morning I was sent up to the nest while Kel and Grey watched from a little ways off. Kel would snipe with her arrows in case I ran into danger and Grey would try to draw aggro in the same case. The Spartans would throw their young into the wild out of love; my companions would do so because they’re dicks. Fast forward to that afternoon and I’m still fighting monsters, if you could call running around like a headless chicken fighting. Despite the intimidating size and protruding tusks of the corons, I didn’t have much trouble handling one or two of them due to their straightforward attacks. The coron would dive straight at me if it was in the air, or it would waddle forward and snap at me with its tusks if it was on the ground. Both of these could be handled by either rolling forward or to the side and then plunging my sword into their heart, or more often giving them cuts to their flanks or wings as I lacked the strength to pierce even the thinner fur and muscle in their necks. My most effective strategy developed about three hours in when I discovered I could use my spatial movement to go up at an angle by jumping. I used that to get on the coron’s backs and aim for the weak spot at the base of their skulls. The biggest problem was the rock slimes. The little bastards were basically slightly flexible boulders that only knew how to headbutt, which means I couldn’t cut them at all and fire barely did any damage. But if you think that being slow made them a non-issue then I invite you to imagine this. You are in a knife fight with a flying bear, sounds tricky right? Well that fight is taking place in a field with maybe twenty angry fucking goats that keep hitting you when you try to dodge the fucking mafia-bear. Sound like a problem? IT GETS BETTER. The fucking GOATS blend into the fucking GROUND. So you wanna dodge behind a little outcropping to avoid losing your face? Surprise! That outcropping was actually a goat that had decided to not do shit all goddamn day till you decided it was an actual boulder at which point it decides it would like to have a makeout session with your fucking SKULL. Now you have a headache and the mafia-bears have called their mafia-bear friends. Conclusion? Corons and rock slimes suck. Now where were we? Oh yes, I’d just been tackled by a slime right into the path of an angry coron.

“Dodge it!!” I immediately dodge right just in time to see another two corons furiously waddling towards me.

“No left!” I go left instead.

“There you go! Now! The wing! The wing!” My roll to the left side of the coron has brought it’s right wing directly into my range. Rather than lop it off I grabed the bony part and swung onto the coron’s back only to be immediately assaulted by a watermelon-sized rock slime that had already been using the coron as a ride.

“Ah! Now! Use fire smash!” Fire smash was a move dubbed by Kel after watching me improvise it where I cover the handle of my sword in mana then, by pinching the blade with my hands, make a makeshift fire hammer. I naturally complied with Kel’s instructions and slammed the flaming guard of my sword into the slime, scoring a beautiful two-base run as the slime connected with the side of the nearest coron’s head. Dousing the handle and spinning my sword I place the tip at the base of my ride’s skull.

“Ha HA! I am a coron slaying legend!!” I shout while raising the sword... only to be thrown cartwheeling through the air. In between the brief flashes of sky and ground I see arrows fly into a corons’ eyes and my swords flying off above me. Wait, swords? Right at that moment I felt an unbearable fire searing my shoulder. One glance to the left showed me blood painting the air crimson, licking up from the stump of my shoulder. Eh? My arm? No no no no no. FUCK. What hit me? FUCK. FUCKFUCKFUCK. My gaze wildly swang around as I slammed into the hard earth. The pain barely registered as I glared at a cloud somewhere above me. I noticed black at the edges of my vision.

FUcking. Am I gonna die? What the fuck? I just started. I even had stats fucking shit I could use MAGIC. Fuck fuck I don’t wanna. Magic, wait they can heal me with magic right? I strain my eyes up to try to catch a glimpse of those useless bastards. I can see them running on the ground upside down towards me.

“Fuck” I croak weakly before the black covers my vision.

FIVE MINUTES EARLIER

“Dodge it!! No left! There you go! Now! The wing! The wing!”

“Ah! Now! Use fire smash!” Grey and I were sitting behind some boulders and covering the noob. We decided (mostly me cause I’m the noob’s sensei) that the best way for him to git gud fast was to practice in actual combat. Rock slimes and corons are perfect. Admittedly corons are fucking terrifying but they’re actually pretty slow and I’d accepted a request to thin the herd a little so they wouldn’t attack nearby settlements to find food. Win-win. All Grey and I had to do was kill the ones in the main group and let one or two through to fight the noob. I have to admit, he may have shit stats in magic but he’s pretty good. That fire smash was fucking siiiiiick. “Ten points Daniel-san.”

“What?” Grey pulled his sword out of a dead coron (*cough*) and looked over at me.

“I said the noob is pretty good! You’d think he practiced or something.”

“Yeah he’s not half bad, I have to give him credit for mounting one on his first try.” Grey shaded his eyes and looked over at where the noob was standing, ready to stab the coron in the back of the head. I glanced over too grinning at how well training was going. Suddenly I spotted movement above him.

“FUCK. MOVE!” I whipped my bow up and wrenched the string back to my ear. Too late my arrow blinded the coron that had been hiding in the sun. I watched, horrified, as the noob barrel-rolled violently through the air, a pinwheel of red spinning around him. By the time the corons noticed him fall Grey and I were already sprinting towards him.

“Grey! Cover me while I stop the bleeding! And grab his arm!”

“Got it!” Grey angled off to the collect the runaway limb while I bolted towards noob, vaulting over strewn rocks and boulders in my path. Gathering strength in my legs, I leapt over a particularly big-ass boulder in front of me. Suddenly my heart jumped to my throat and the world blurred before snapping to black.

“Unnnhhh…” I forced my eyes open and raised my head. “Gah!” A stabbing pain immediately threatened to put me back out. “HEAL.” I shook my head a bit to clear the dizziness then leap back into a run, or tried to. Halfway into my jump my leg jerked and I slammed back into the ground. “OW FUCKING..” I leveled my gaze behind me to find my leg underneath the fattest fucking fat-ass rockslime probably on this entire fucking mountain. This thing probably fucking ate one the corons then had a hill for dessert. “FIREBALL!” I wrenched on my leg as the thing burned, quickly popping it free.

“KEL! SHOOT IT DOWN!” I whipped my head up at the shout to find Grey halfway across the hill pointing toward where noob fell. I quickly followed his finger. There noob was, dangling lifelessly from the jaws of the coron he’d been about to kill. The fucker was trying to take off. With a flick I fit an arrow to my bow and drew, aiming at the beast’s eye. The grinding crunch of shifting stone and a sharp impact from my back threw my aim, the arrow sailing uselessly off into the air. This fucking jackass was still alive. Without turning I grabbed another arrow and simultaneously raised my other hand. “Stone spike.” A column of stone thrust from the earth into the offender behind me, launching him from the face of the mountain. I sighted down the arrow at the coron who now had its back to me and was flying towards the mountain’s peak. I fired. The arrow buried itself into the corons back, piercing one of its two hearts. It didn’t fall. Fuck. I glanced over to see Grey sprint forwards and unleash a wind blade in the direction of the beast, but it was already too far off. He grimaced then walked over to me.

“Kel.”

“Yeah.” We both knew. With a wound like that and no healing, he was already dead. All that was left was to collect the body and burn the fuckers that took my first Daniel-san. Never piss off Mr. Miyagi you fucking chickens.

{Author Note}: If you couldn’t tell, when the world blurred for Kel ealier she was jumping over a ‘boulder’ and it was actually a slime that tripped her.

END OF CHAPTER UHH.. FOUR?