DEMON LORD ATTACK
DEMON LORD ATTACK
The waves rock me gently as I float.
Scorching sun.
Blue sea.
It’s enough to make anyone want to swim, so I figured I’d give it a try.
Unfortunately, as it turns out, my spider body is structured in a way that it can only float on top of the water.
So since I can’t swim properly, I’m just floating on the surface.
Not exactly sure what I was expecting.
I mean, I might as well be sitting on a pool float.
If I really try, I can dive a little bit.
But as soon as I lose focus for a second, I pop right back up to the surface.
You can’t really call that swimming.
But in my old life, my incredible form in the water would’ve put mermaids to shame!
…Sorry, that was a blatant lie.
I could barely even pull off a dead man’s float.
Don’t underestimate my laziness!
I don’t even remember swimming properly in a pool, never mind the ocean!
Blue sky, blue sea.
And now my heart is blue, too.
No waaay.
On top of that, as I’m floating on the water, something attacks me.
It’s a water wyrm, which looks sort of like a huge shark.
I beat it at its own game, of course, so now the area around me is an ocean of blood.
And that blood must have attracted other sharks, because now there are a bunch of fins circling around me in the water.
Ugh, what a pain. I blow them all up with magic, making the ocean of blood even bigger.
Man, what am I doing?
I came here to relax a little, to take my mind off the brutal attacks I’ve been launching on the spider army.
But now I’m just massacring water wyrms instead.
Am I bloodthirsty or what?
I mean, Spider vs Shark sounds like a B movie at best.
How did taking a nice beach break turn into another emotionally exhausting waste of time?
No, I guess I can’t say that. The sharks were pretty strong, so I got a delicious amount of EXP.
I even went up a level.
Still, at this point, going up a single level doesn’t mean much.
I can’t even come close to the puppet spider, never mind Mother.
In terms of magic alone, I could probably go head-to-head with the puppet spider, but in every other stat, it’s way stronger than I am.
The gap in our physical stats is particularly devastating, aside from maybe speed.
What should I do?
Finally, a signal!
Wha—?!
Geez, that scared me!
Sorry to interrupt, real me, but you’ve gotta run for it!
Huh?
It’s been a long time since I’ve heard from Parallel Mind former magic brain number one. And now it’s suddenly telling me to run?
I look around, but I don’t see Mother anywhere.
No sign of the puppet spider, either. In fact, I don’t see any monsters at all.
Do I really have to run? I’m not sensing any danger.
No time to explain! Okay, maybe just a little. Basically, the worst monstrosity ever is heading toward you right now!
No! We got it all wrong. We thought Mother was the strongest, but she’s not. There’s something even worse than her!
Wait, what?
I don’t get it.
Something even stronger than Mother?
How could that possibly exist?
It does. And it’s heading your way right now!
It’s hard to believe this out of nowhere, but if I can communicate with my Parallel Minds again, that must mean Mother restored the link between us to figure out where I am.
She must have done that for a reason.
Besides, I’m the one giving myself this information.
If I can’t believe myself, who can I believe?
In any case, I’d better run for now.
But my decision comes too late.
Or perhaps it was impossible to run from the very beginning.
“****!”
An explosion.
And a voice that somehow comes through the noise clearly.
As everything erupts into chaos, the calm part of my mind tries to analyze what happened.
Something just appeared here.
It didn’t even teleport. It was just that fast.
The explosive sound was the impact of its arrival.
There was nothing in my range of vision just seconds ago, and now something arrived from outside that range so quickly that it caused a powerful shock wave.
Unbelievable speed.
It appeared right in front of my eyes, so fast that it could easily have leaped straight from the pages of a battle manga.
Yes, right in front of me.
The powerful shock has damaged my body significantly, as if a meteor had landed right next to me.
But the enemy who just appeared is so far out of the ordinary that I have no choice but to ignore that damage.
That’s what happens at first.
However, I try it again, this time adding the power of Wisdom to my Appraisal.
After a bit of resistance, I can feel it break through, and my Appraisal succeeds.
| <Origin taratect | LV 139 | Name: Ariel |
|---|---|---|
| Status: | HP: 90,098/90,098 (green) +99,999 (details) SP: 89,862/89,862 (yellow) (details) Average Offensive Ability: 90,021 (details) Average Magical Ability: 87,504 (details) Average Speed Ability: 89,518 (details) |
MP: 87,655/87,655 (blue) +99,999 (details) : 89,856/89,856 (red) +99,567 (details) Average Defensive Ability: 89,997 (details) Average Resistance Ability: 87,489 (details) |
I’ll be honest. I would have been better off not knowing.
This being with the Demon Lord title.
The girl who appeared before me was a demon lord and the strongest spider of all.
“******, *******!”
This monstrosity in the shape of a young girl speaks to me rather affably.
But of course, I don’t know the language of this world.
So I have no idea what the Demon Lord is saying.
“***********, ****************?”
She’s asking me something.
I can tell that much by her tone, but I don’t understand the question itself.
Anyway, I have to show some kind of reaction, if only to buy time.
I tilt my head, point at my mouth, then wave cautiously.
Hopefully, this will convey that I can’t understand what she’s saying.
It doesn’t look like she’s going to attack me right away.
The fact that she’s trying to communicate is proof of that. Or so I thought.
“***. ***************.”
But apparently she didn’t like my reaction.
The Demon Lord’s stance changes very plainly.
From that of someone chatting to that of someone ready to attack.
Teleport? I won’t make it in time.
If I could’ve bought a little more time with conversation, it might’ve been a different story, but now I’m going to be killed before I can complete the rune.
There’s no point even trying to fight back.
Her stats overshadow even Mother’s.
And almost all of her crazy-long list of skills is maxed out.
Not to mention that resistance.
How could I possibly win when most attacks won’t even work?
I don’t stand a chance.
“***, ***********, ****.”
The Demon Lord waves an arm.
That’s it. Just like that, my body is smashed into splinters.
The main body went down.
At my words, the other Parallel Minds fly into a panic.
Don’t worry. I don’t know what kind of trick she used, but since we haven’t disappeared, that means she’s not dead yet… I think.
To be honest, I don’t really know myself why we haven’t disappeared.
That’s why I had no choice but to be so vague.
It’s not entirely impossible that the main body really is dead, and we just happened to stay alive because we’re half cut off from it.
Does that mean we’re just souls without a body now?
In that case, we could disappear at any moment.
We have no way of knowing how the system will respond to such an unusual situation, but I doubt that ghosts exist in this world.
What should we do?
This all started right after we lost contact with the main body.
We were concerned about what was going on with our body, but aside from occasionally checking on the status of our connection, all we could do was keep waging our spiritual battle against Mother.
The battle was going pretty well.
Things were starting to turn in our favor, and though it may have just been my imagination, I got the sense that we were getting stronger as we consumed Mother’s spiritual body.
That hypothesis was probably correct.
Mother’s spirit body is essentially her soul.
And it would be no exaggeration to say that the power of stats, skills, and so on in this world is actually the power of the soul.
By eating her soul, not only did we reduce her power, we also absorbed it for ourselves.
Thanks to that, the more time passed, the more we started to gain the upper hand.
But of course, Mother wasn’t just going to take that lying down.
I was the first one to sense it.
Mother was making contact with something.
Just like our contact with the main body, she was using a skill’s connection to communicate with someone.
I didn’t know who it was.
But as soon as I noticed it, I felt an indescribable uneasiness.
And soon, my fears were realized.
I looked through Mother’s eyes and saw that girl.
The second I laid eyes on her, even without Appraisal, I could tell for certain that she was a truly monstrous foe.
Or maybe that conviction came from memories in the portion of Mother’s soul that I’d eaten.
Either way, I knew this girl was more powerful even than Mother.
Then, Mother restored the connection with our main body to figure out where it was.
And now, we’re back to the present.
I think I had the right idea warning the main body.
However, our opponent was just too far out of the norm.
How could I have guessed that she could imitate Teleport just by running?
I knew she was beastly, but this went far beyond my wildest imagination.
I couldn’t even run away from that thing, never mind fight it.
You could say it was inevitable for my main body to be destroyed.
In that moment, I was prepared for death.
But for some reason, we’re not dead yet.
I don’t know whether our body is alive or not, but I have no choice but to hope that it is.
And if our body is still alive, then our job here hasn’t changed.
Actually, it’s just gotten more urgent.
Listen up, everyone.
I gather the other Parallel Minds to tell them my plan.
We’re going to beat Mother. And then we’re going to beat her ruler.
All we can do is keep up our spiritual attack.
Since we’re soul fragments, we’re protected by Heresy Nullification, which cancels out any attacks that directly affect the soul.
Thus, we should be able to beat a far more powerful spiritual opponent.
Even if that opponent is heads and shoulders above us.
Or heads and spiders, I guess.
We don’t know when our main body will recover or if it’ll even recover at all. But that’s why we have to do whatever we can!
Not one of the other Parallel Minds objects to my proposal.