17. No Dating Experience. Neither of Them
[—Lux Mea—]
A gauntlet forged from the horns of an honorable Uma warrior, tempered in the blood of goblins who died unjustly, and crafted by an unknown blacksmith with the power of love.
Wow, this is embarrassing.
I had almost never seen an item description like this in the game before. Seeing such a description pop up gave me a strange feeling.
It was probably because the person who made it was Pai, and I had watched the entire process from right beside her.
Still! This is embarrassing!
It felt completely different from successfully romancing a character in a dating simulation game. Instead of feeling accomplished, I was so embarrassed and flustered that I didn’t know where to look.
No, wait. I shouldn’t jump to conclusions yet.
It literally says “the power of love,” but even that club I made just for fun had a description saying it was made with the power of madness.
Maybe Pai had also awakened some kind of mental power.
If that power was love, then the description of Lux Mea made perfect sense.
Wait…
When did Pai realize that she was in love?
Huh?
Nothing in my entire life had ever gone this smoothly.
There was no way an opportunity like this could really happen to me!
Right. It was probably just my imagination.
After all, inside this game, I had absolutely no connection with any NPC other than Pai…
Well, to be honest, I didn’t have any meaningful relationships in real life either.
Anyway!
Pai probably had acquaintances outside the Maze Forest. Maybe she had fallen madly in love with one of them and awakened the power of love before ever meeting me.
That’s probably what happened.
“Huh? Why is she treating me so nicely?”
“Why does she want to be friends with me?”
“Wait… could it be?”
“Could it really—?”
“Ah! I can’t take this anymore! I’m confessing!”
“Oh… It wasn’t that?”
Should I just die…?
I knew this pattern very well.
I had never experienced it myself because I was too timid and terrible at dealing with strangers, but I’d seen and heard about it plenty of times.
You had to be careful.
It usually ended with:
“Let’s just stay friends…”
But in reality, the relationship would completely fall apart, and you wouldn’t even remain friends. You’d just become strangers.
And look at my face!
My face was scary enough to make every monster I encountered tremble in fear.
What woman in the world would look at this face and actually fall for me?!
“Are you crying?”
“N-No! I’m not crying!”
“It really looks like you’re crying.”
“Sniff…!”
“…This is seriously weird. You ripped their guts out and killed them, and now you’re suddenly crying?”
Whew…!
Of course!
There was no way a girl who spoke so coldly would like me!
Hehe… I almost misunderstood things there…
Hehe!
Better erase these useless thoughts and get back to work!
“…Phew. But what are these?”
[Modak: Every creature in this forest seems to be made by combining several different plants and animals. It’s disgusting.]
He was right.
The creatures I’d just hunted were about the size of a human. They had fish-like bodies with crayfish arms attached to them.
The arms looked like they would taste good steamed, while the body would probably be delicious grilled.
The blue back probably meant it tasted something like mackerel.
“They’re called Kallak. Apparently, they used to be fish, but the breath of the ancient witch surrounding the Maze Forest cursed them and twisted their bodies into this form.”
[Hayang: To put it simply, they evolved in a bizarre way because of some kind of special energy, similar to radiation.]
“Ah!”
Hayang always gave explanations that somehow went straight into my head, probably because we were mentally connected.
I had no idea how Hayang knew things even I didn’t, but whatever.
It’s a game.
“Do you understand?”
“Yeah.”
I hadn’t expected these bizarre creatures to appear so soon after the goblins disappeared, but apparently this was normal in the Maze Forest.
The goblins and wolves had looked exactly like what I expected them to look like.
But thinking that I would continue encountering creatures whose identities I couldn’t even recognize was troublesome.
If something looked obviously powerful, like One-Horn, that was one thing.
But this was a game.
There could easily be monsters created as some kind of developer joke that looked incredibly weak but were secretly the strongest beings in the entire world.
And this Maze Forest was exactly the kind of place where having several monsters like that wouldn’t be strange at all.
It made me uncomfortable.
I had one month of testing time left in game time.
According to Pai, if we could walk straight toward the center of the Maze Forest without any interruptions, it would take about a week.
But the closer we got to the center, the stronger the monsters would become.
The monster groups would also become more densely packed.
According to her, the center would probably be a terrifying hellscape.
That old man… Did he really think I could accomplish this?
No wonder the reward was so ridiculously huge…
If I had leveled up from my fight with One-Horn, that would have been one thing.
But since I had basically lost that battle, I hadn’t gained much experience.
More importantly, I still didn’t know how important levels actually were in this game.
In novels, you sometimes saw characters defeating enemies despite being much lower level.
Maybe this game had something similar?
Especially since there was this mysterious ability called mental power that the system didn’t properly explain.
There was certainly a possibility.
After all, based purely on my stats, I shouldn’t have been able to win my previous battle.
Yet I had somehow endured through Madness and Indomitable Will and won.
The fact that I could still deal damage even against enemies much higher level than me was good for now.
But once I became stronger, it could become a problem.
If the game had terrible balance like that, people would call it a trash game, gradually forget about it, and eventually it would disappear into gaming history despite the developers desperately trying to save it.
