To love a sword

Chapter 28: Accident Part 3 + Bonus Part 3

Beta read by Shigiya, FabledLife and Paragon of Awesomeness.

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-Verdun Mountains-

“What is he?”

Looking in from an outside perspective, not much had occurred since they left that buggy village filled with erroneous NPCs.

With Ren being the sole casualty, who ‘nobly sacrificed’ himself to calm the frantic villagers, they were able to continue their journey towards the main quest, which consisted of saving the princess from the “oh-so-terrifying” demon lord. Their current party consisted of capable individuals, mostly mages, and three support classes all in the form of a bunny girl, a florist, and a chef. It wasn't balanced at all, to say the least; they still needed a healer, a tank, and a melee DPS.

That was how a normal party should be composed, and it would be just enough to clear the obstacles that lay in front of them. Yet, this belief had been completely thrown into the gutters when faced with the sight before them. 

A loud thud echoed in the surrounding fields.

An Earth Bear, a rather common monster regularly spawned in dense forest-like areas, fell flat on its stomach in front of them. Momo gritted her teeth, she had been prepared to ensnare it in a vine trap, thus letting Mikan and her sister deal most of the damage through powerful spells and a wave of summoned undead, with some assistance from Golden Darkness, as her class allowed her to buff allies via cheers. 

The gathered experience points would then be shared by everyone in their party thanks to her ability as a leader, and hopefully impress Emiya. Yet, she couldn’t even start uttering the first syllable of her spell when the projectile came from behind her and pierced the monster's eye, taking out only a small sliver of its health, but it was still enough to stagger it. 

This was followed by an onslaught of chef knives that rained down, all aimed at vital spots and causing the bear to suffer from the bleeding status effect. The monster desperately tried to crush its opponent who just jumped around, dodging the attacks so casually as if he had precognition. The entire time he kept grabbing more knives from his inventory before stabbing the creature again and again till the bear resembled a porcupine more than anything else. Even its original brown color of its fur was no longer visible under all the steel and blood. 

This was the first time she felt pity for a creature in this game. It was just a mob, but still…

In the end, the Earth Bear failed to react in time before another volley of santoku blades struck its other eye, depleting the little amount of health it had left. 

[+30 XP!]

She stared blankly at the prompt from the game that appeared in front of her, seeing the bar growing ever so consistently, quickly causing her to level up.

"Level six, this is interesting. Which stats should I invest in again? I am a chef so, hm, let's go for intelligence, it should increase the yield from gathering certain plants." She heard the anomaly speak, gazing passively at his status screen while scratching his chin. 

He gathered some of the knives from the corpse and placed them in a satchel around his waist, filled to the brim with countless chef knives he had bought from a passing merchant. These were some of the few bladed weapons he was allowed to wield, given his class’ restrictions, which excluded swords, daggers, spears and so on which were only usable for dedicated melee classes. 

This ‘weapon’, which should have served little to no purpose in combat — perhaps doing a bit more damage than the trowel currently equipped by Rito — had now managed to kill a monster like the Earth Bear.