Slave Harem in the Labyrinth of the Other World (LN)

Volume 5 - Ch 2.12

Sherry asked the most important question here, and Roxanne gave her the answer in the plainest voice possible.

Twenty Poison Needles? That is quite a lot. Not to mention that the possibility of us getting found out and attacked in the meantime is definitely going to be high.

Yes, definitely, but that is something that should be expected. All you would have to do then is to continue throwing Poison Needles at the monster while avoiding all of its attacks.

Continue throwing the Poison Needles while avoiding the attacks of a Golem-type monster from up close and personal? Again, I feel like this is something that no one else beside Roxanne would be able to pull off, since she has her godly dodging abilities and all that.

Well, poisoning such an enemy would be fine and all, but after you poisoned it, what were you doing next?

That is also quite simple. I would continue to avoid and dodge its attacks until it would have collapsed due to the accumulation of all the poison damage.

You you just dodged? You did not try to attack it in any other way, only avoiding its attacks the entire time?

Yes, Because Non-R.E.M Golem is one of the few opponents against which my attacks were not working at all, and if I would have been hit with even one of its attacks, it would have definitely resulted in my instantaneous death. In the worst-case scenario anyway.

Worst-case scenario? And what would the best-case scenario be?

You would survive the direct hit of the Non-R.E.M Golems fist and not die instantly, but the impact would likely be so strong that it would shatter most or all of the bones in your body, thus resulting in your death soon after, or perhaps the pressure of the air would crush your internal organs into a bloody paste. That is why I was always super desperate to dodge every single one of its attacks, because I knew that if I do not do it, it would be all over for me. But on the bright side, fighting against Non-R.E.M Golem takes way less time than it did with the NT Ant, because the poison really helped in bringing things up to speed.

I do not know about you guys, but somehow, Roxannes words did not convince me or relieve my worries. At first I thought that she was kidding and was only telling us all of that in order to illustrate how powerful of an item Poison Needles can really be, but the serious expression that she had on her face the entire time told me that she was not kidding at all, and that she meant every last word that she spoke.

Could this be the source of Roxannes godlike dodging abilities? It has to be. If she was doing something like that ever since she was a young kid who was playingin such a way, then it would not be all that strange for her body to retain the habits and muscle memory from those times, allowing her to utilize the moves that she learned through trial and error..

No, something is telling me that it actually might have been the other way around. She was probably able to playin such a way exactly because she had that kind of evasive power since a very early age. Did her power to perform evasions and dodges increased because of that kind of play, or was it possible for her to play around in such a way precisely because of that evasion power? What came first here, the egg, or the chicken? Evasive power, or its refinement through frequent battles against the monsters that Roxanne was playing with?

However, whatever the case may be here, it remains a fact that when I first met Roxanne, her Level was actually not that high. Maybe it is because the Level of the monsters found in the overworld is Lv.1, meaning that the value of EXP that can be gained from them is really small? Or maybe there is a rule that states that you cannot gain EXP for killing an enemy through the passive means such as poison, and it has to be done with your own hands in order to actually count? But those are just a few out of the many more questions that I actually have for Roxanne.

Roxanne? Were. Were you the only one who was playingin such a way, or were other kids doing the same?

I tried to invite them to play with me like that on occasion, but every time I did that it always ended up in them being scared, and the adults were very angry at me and they would give me quite the earfuls on top of forbidding me to ever play with other children in such a dangerous way.

Yeah, they had every right to be angry at you like that, because such a dangerous thing as throwing Poison Needles at Golems is definitely not something that I would call a good way for little kids to play.

But knowing that she was unable to rope other kids into playing such dangerous games together with her also made me kind of relieved, because at least now I am absolutely sure that there are no more people with Roxannes level of dodging incoming attacks. I mean, imagine if pretty much everyone of her friends from back there learned to do exactly the same thing that she does, simply by the virtue of hanging around with her and copying her movements when the monsters would start attacking them. It would definitely be a sight to behold, but the one that would also be pretty disturbing at that.

When I glanced back at Sherry to see how she was doing, I noticed that her shoulders were trembling, and that she was literally in tears. Yes, Sherry. There is nothing shameful in crying. I know perfectly well how you are feeling right now. I placed my hand on Sherrys shoulder, which was trembling like a small leaf in the wind, and then we both called out to Roxanne, because there is something that we absolutely have to say to her, and she needs to hear it from us.

Roxanne.

Miss Roxanne.

Yes? What is it, master? Sherry?

We are glad your family stopped you. Please, do not do that ever again.

Telling her that right now was like doing her a kindness, because it will be much better for her to hear something like that form us than from a complete stranger or the figures of authority if she ever tried to introduce children to the methods of playingthat would place them in danger.

Now that we have started exploring the ninth floor of Quratars Labyrinth in earnest, we discovered that most of the groups of enemies that we have encountered so far were either just NT Ants, monsters native to the ninth floor of his Labyrinth, or Needlewoods from the previous floor, or combinations of these two, which was a pretty weird and unusual combination, since Needlewoods are resistant to Water Magic while NT Ants are weak to Water Magic, which made it somewhat difficult for me to adjust my spells and change them on the fly whenever I had to switch to a different target.

Up until now I did not really have to pay attention to those things and aside from testing the other types of magic out I was pretty much using either Fireballor Fire Stormall the time, so needless to say, the flow of the battles is not as smooth as I would have liked it to be, but if there is one good thing to be taken from such a setup, then it would be the thing that, at least in my opinion, it is good that NT Ants are the monsters from the ninth floor that have a weakness that I can exploit.

If it was the other way around and the Needlewoods were the monsters from the ninth floor instead of eighth, then it would have been much harder. But now, when we are facing a group of three NT Ants and one Needlewood, I can quickly get rid of the ants with Water Magic and then finish the remaining Needlewood without any issues or fear of getting myself poisoned in case I would focus on it too much and allowed the NT Ants to get close to me.

The situation was also the same with the other configuration of three Needlewoods and one NT Ant, but in that case Water Magic is substituted for Fire Magic, which I use to dispose of the Needlewoods with Fire Storms.