Golden Experience

Chapter 19: “The Strongest Monster: The Ant”

Before Blanc went back out into the cavern, she wanted to make sure she knew how to cast magic. She wanted to be ready to fire some off at a moment’s notice, so she would be a lot more cautious while walking around this time. She couldn’t tell the difference between the walls, so she just picked one and followed it. Blanc wanted to go in the opposite direction from the first time, but all she did was go in the opposite direction of where she was looking when she respawned, so she didn’t actually know if this was the way she really wanted to go or not.

She progressed a lot more slowly, taking much more time than before. When she finally hit a fork in the road—

“The tunnel from before— Ah, wait, last time the tunnel was on the left, but this time it’s on the right…”

If she had accidentally ended up going the same way as last time, then the tunnel should be on the same side as it was before. But if she had gone in the opposite direction, and the tunnel was on the opposite side, that would mean that based on the way she was facing now, the ant colony should be on the right half of the cave.

“…So I should keep going into the left half.”

Doing her best not to look into the side tunnel, Blanc chose the left fork. But as soon as she got close to the tunnel, a familiar foul smell tickled her nose.

“Ah.”

Acid poured over her from the side. She lost all feeling in her body, and, unable to stay standing, she clattered down into a sitting position. Even more acid rained down on her head, and Blanc’s vision went dark.

<<One hour until automatic resurrection. Would you like to respawn immediately?>>

Even though she did her best to avoid the ant nest, if she were to encounter an ant, she had been prepared to blast it instantly. She never imagined that she could die immediately from a surprise attack, though.

“Those ants are really bloodthirsty, huh…”

Now that it had come to this, she should just aggressively dive into their nest and kill them all, otherwise she’d never get out of here. Having made that determination, Blanc psyched herself up as she accepted the system respawn.

“…Huh?”

There was an ant right in front of her. A monster was suddenly at her original spawn point. Apparently that could happen. However, Blanc was done being caught off guard. She instantly switched gears and cast her first magic spell.

“It’s just an ant…! All right, [Flare Arrow]!”

Right after she shouted the activation keyword, an arrow made of fire materialized right before her eyes and flew straight at the ant she targeted. The arrow pierced through the ant’s head, then conflagrated its entire body. Once the fire burned itself out, only the ant’s abdomen remained.

“Magic… is hella awesome… I burned one of those super strong ants to cinders with just one attack…”

The ashes smelled kind of weird, but Blanc approached them to survey the remains.

“I thought there would be uh… ‘drops’?… or whatever, monster materials, but maybe that spell was overkill… But wow, this smell. It’s the same as the smell as from grilling dried squid. Man, there might be no pain in this game, but it sure just shits out trauma…”

For the time being, Blanc decided to just store the ant’s abdomen in her inventory. The acid that had melted her twice should be in that part. No reason to throw it away if it could turn out to be useful later.

In any case, she discovered an effective method of fighting ants. Shoot [Flare Arrows] from outside the range of their acid. As long as she had MP, it should work. “Kill them before they kill me” was the attitude she adopted.

The current question was where to go from here. No matter which way she went, the ant nest would be connected. Although since she did plan to actually kill all the ants, then it didn’t matter which way she picked. Blanc decided to stop worrying too much about it. She just picked a direction randomly and started walking.

Before long, she spotted a tunnel to the left. She approached it cautiously, then nervously peeked inside. There were no ants. So now, Blanc was conflicted. Since the coast was clear right now, she wanted to keep going. But these bastards had already killed her twice. She wasn’t sure if she should just let that pass. When she had respawned the second time, she thought about proactively going into the tunnel and wiping them all out. If instead she ignored them and continued on, she couldn’t be sure that she wouldn’t run into the nest again later. She might even start jumping at shadows.

Blanc decided to take the tunnel. The same one as the first time, except this time she would be on her guard while she crawled.

She should be coming up on a chamber soon. She was thinking about what magic she should use when she saw a bunch of ants waiting at the entrance to the room.

“Ah, crap…”

Her only option was to retreat. However, she couldn’t turn around in this cramped tunnel. As she kept her eyes on the ants in front of her, she slowly began to crawl backward. Clonk. Her bony rear hit something hard. She gingerly turned her neck to look behind her. What her butt had hit was an ant’s head.

“Well obviously! What else could it have been?!”

<<One hour until automatic resurrection. Would you like to respawn immediately?>>

<<You have lost XP.>>

It was an ambush. So they could do that too. Now that she thought about it, the AI person from the tutorial did say something about the system seeing players, NPCs, and monsters as the same. The monster AI was probably learning and developing countermeasures. She was dying in the same general area over and over, so they came up with strategies to deal with that.

She should probably just forget about the tunnel. In the first place, when she respawned the first time, she did consider that it was an area that required her to be stronger to go in. That was what she had originally thought, unrelated to the ants. Obviously, if she encountered any anyway, that was another story. She had to kill or be killed.

How many times had she accepted the respawn now? And of course, an ant was already waiting there right before her eyes.

“I knew this would happen! [Flare Arrow]!”

However, that wasn’t the only ant here.

“I thought this might happen! [Flare Arrow]! Huh?! I can’t cast it! Why not?! Ah, there’s a cooldown.”

<<One hour until automatic resurrection. Would you like to respawn immediately?>>

<<You have lost XP.>>

“Uuuuugh… Isn’t this game just way too hard…? What am I supposed to do…?”

This time, Blanc decided not to respawn right away and started looking into how to cast magic spells in succession. She needed to wait an hour to respawn anyway, so it should be fine to do some research in the meantime.

Blanc opened up the game’s official social networking site. It had a “bulletin board system,” which was pretty rare these days. She didn’t know what the term meant, though. Probably a board where things were bulletined or something. She looked for “threads” on the bulletin board that were about magic. Some were started by players who did a lot of testing, and those threads got a lot of replies. She searched for ones that explained “continuous casting.”

According to a player who went by the weird moniker “nameless elf,” you can’t use the same spell multiple times in a row, but you can cast a different spell right away. However, if you do, the first spell’s cooldown will be paused until the second spell has cooled down. In other words, if you cast a [Flare Arrow] followed by [Ice Bullet], where each spell had a cooldown of five seconds, [Flare Arrow] couldn’t be used again until ten seconds after the original [Flare Arrow] had been cast, it seemed. How confusing.

“But well, I guess I get it. Since I learned six different kinds of magic, that means I could cast up to six spells in a row.”

Some of her spells trees didn’t include any offensive magic, but she was still capable of an attack barrage of five. She was starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel now. If she coordinated her cooldowns correctly, and she tried to fight a group of ants while running away, she probably wouldn’t die immediately. Even if this plan didn’t work, she had already lost the XP for killing the one ant to the death penalty. She had nothing left to lose.

“All riiight! I’ll give it a try! A penta-cast!”

She was psyching herself up out loud, but in her head she was still calmly working out the order for casting each spell and the timing and such while preparing to accept the respawn.

<<The current spawn point is within another character’s personal area. You cannot spawn here. You do not have any other valid spawn points. You will spawn at a random location within the starting spawn zone.>>

“Huh? Eh?”

Blanc had been staring at the word “respawn” for so long that she started to experience Gestaltzerfall. Once she could see again, she looked around but didn’t recognize the area. It was certainly some kind of cave, but it was much more spacious than the place where she had been respawning all this time.

“Where is this…?”

She didn’t actually know where the first cave was anyway, but she did at least recognize that this was a different cave. She could tell the color of the rock face was different, among other things.

“Or more like, how did my spawn point end up in someone else’s area…?”