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TL: ALT
Chapter 43 – Day 42 of Living in the Demonic Land
The next morning, after breakfast, everyone got moving.
Cher and Hel made kilns. They needed containers. Cher was recruited by Hel as a simple laborer.
Jennifer was in charge of cleaning and making baskets. Cleaning is a way to prevent illness, and you can never have enough baskets for gathering. Jennifer looked like a skilled artisan as she made the baskets. She complained that she needed more bamboo.
Sylvia and I hunted monsters. The goal was to secure meat and train Sylvia.
“P-p-please train me!”
I was washing my face in the swamp before breakfast when Sylvia bowed down and asked me to train her.
“I-I-I’m not dexterous enough to do anything, and I’m not good at cooking. The only thing I can do is get stronger and hunt monsters.”
“Even if you say ‘strong,’ I’m not strong enough to teach people. Is something like survival skills in a demonic land okay?”
“I-i-it doesn’t matter! Please teach me!”
“Okay, okay. Don’t come too close dressed like that.”
When you are confronted with a single piece of cloth, you can’t refuse.
“S-s-sorry!”
The shaved-headed Sylvia had run back to the cave when she finally realized her appearance. She had probably been thinking about her own worth in life in her bed all this time.
“A former noble who became a slave. I guess she needs to change. “
I muttered as I watched Sylvia’s back as she ran away.
A few hours later.
Slash! Slash!
Sylvia attacked the wild bear with her iron sword. However, the thick fur prevented her from delivering a fatal blow.
“There’s no point in doing the same thing over and over again.”
The moment Sylvia swung her sword again, the wild bear hit her on the head.
“Ouch, that hurts!”
Leaving Sylvia, who had fainted, I stuck a knife into Wild Bear’s nose.
Wild Bear did not flinch and attacked me with both paws, trying to tear me apart. I pulled the knife out of its nose and cut off both of its right paws. I jumped to the right to avoid its attack.
The wild bear, with blood dripping from its nose and right front paw, opened its mouth wide and breathed heavily.
The weapons of beast-type monsters are their claws or their mouths. The theory of fighting monsters is to attack their bodies while being careful. Sylvia also fought this way. However, if you find that your attacks are ineffective, you must think of another method immediately, or you will be killed.
If you can identify their weak points and attack them from the closest distance, and even if you can’t, if you can take away one of their weapons, you’ve done well. After that, if you run away while throwing stones, it will die by itself. The wild bear looked like it was suffering, so I used a knife to chop off its head.
Maybe Sylvia is not able to change tactics or recognize weak points.
Maybe it’s because she’s a former noble, but she’s stuck to the fighting style she learned.
I woke Sylvia up by making her sniff some smelling salts.
“You should try to survive a little longer. This is not a training ground for swordsmanship.”
“I-I-I don’t know what else to do. I-I-I want to change!”
She said, looking straight ahead.
“While you’re dismantling it, why don’t you take a good look at where the Wild Bear’s weak points are?”
With that, I handed the knife to Sylvia. She seemed to know how to dismantle it, and she took out the magic stone, threw away the unnecessary internal organs, and removed the fur from the meat.
“W-w-where did you learn how to fight?”
Sylvia asked as she cut the meat.
“No, I never learned. I just took a class at the Adventurers’ Guild. I learned everything when I lived in the demonic land. First of all, fighting monsters when you encounter them is tedious, isn’t it? I think the number of times I’ve killed monsters by setting traps for them is higher.”
“B-b-but you know how to fight, don’t you?”
“I watch them carefully. When you get used to them, you can predict what they’ll do. You know, even though bones bend on the inside, they don’t bend on the outside, right?”
As I said this, I showed her the disjointed elbows and knees of the wild bear.
“Running to a place where you won’t be attacked is one way to fight, right? I think it’s important to master what you’ve been taught, but at the same time, it’s good to explore your own way of doing things while observing the monsters in front of you, don’t you think?”
“O-o-observation… T-t-that’s also true.”
We wrapped the meat in bamboo leaves, collected the fur, the magic stone, and the liver that could be used for medicine, and returned to the cave.
It seemed that Hel and Cher had not finished building the oven, and Jennifer was baking bread.
“If you burn it, Chel will be angry.”
“That’s a big responsibility. How was it?”
I handed Jennifer the meat.
“Sylvia is good at butchering. Let’s eat the good parts for lunch.”
Jennifer took the meat and looked at Sylvia, who had a dejected look on her face.
“Don’t worry, I’m not used to this demonic land either.”
When Sylvia heard this, she said, “T-t-thank you,” and went to the swamp to sharpen her iron sword. I guess she was taught to take good care of her tools. That’s good.
Bread and wild bear steak for lunch today.
Hel and Cher also returned, attracted by the smell.
Cher was tired from eating bread with all her heart.
“Will the kiln be ready?”
I asked Hel.
“It will take a while. Oh, I made the recovery potion for this week.”
Hel handed me a bottle of recovery potion.
“I see. I’ll have to keep a book.”
“I also made a basket for gathering fruit. It’ll take a little longer to make the bigger one.”
Jennifer said, showing me a basket that could be held under her arm.
“Shall we go out and collect fruit this afternoon?”
I looked at Sylvia, who was biting into a steak, and she nodded silently.
“Can I go too?”
Jennifer raised her hand.
“Okay, then Jennifer can come too. You two should get used to the demonic land a little more.”
The three of us decided to go out and gather fruit in the afternoon.
We didn’t know much about the fruits that could be eaten in the demonic land, so it was better to have more people to test them for poison.
After lunch, I was getting ready to take a nap when Cher tapped me on the shoulder.
“What?”
“When the kiln is finished, I want an oven.”
“An oven?”
“Yes, I thought of it when I was making the kiln.”
“Are you going to cook? You can do it if you want.”
“Help me. I think it’ll make good bread.”
“You really like bread. All right, we’ll make an oven when the kiln is ready.”
“We don’t even grow wheat in demonic land!”
Cher clenched her fist.
“Don’t forget to make a boat, too.”
“Mm.”
As usual, this illegal immigrant doesn’t seem to want to go back to demon country.
After taking a nap, I went into the forest with Jennifer and Silvia.
“After you pick the fruit, make sure you do a patch test by putting it on your skin.”
“Eh?”
Sylvia looked at me in surprise.
“These are fruits from the demonic land. Even the fruits you see in the city might be poisonous or extremely astringent.”
“I-I-I see!”
Sylvia nodded vigorously.
“The fruits in the open are eaten by golden bats and forest rats. Let’s go a little deeper.”
A cam fruit bit my shoulder. Anyway, I plucked it from the branch and placed it in my basket.
“I hope the fruit is this easy to see.”
As we went a little deeper into the forest, it got darker under the branches and leaves, and it was hard to tell the difference between the fruit and the monsters’ droppings.
“I-I-I didn’t expect this job to be so dangerous.”
“Let’s try not to pick anything that’s on the ground.”
After that, my eyes gradually got used to the darkness, and I started looking for the fruits. However, the moment I touched them, they exploded and scattered their seeds, or they began to rot within seconds of being picked, or they showered me with spores because they were disguised as mushrooms.
“There don’t seem to be any edible fruits.”
Gyoeeee!
An imp shouted nearby.
“If there are monsters nearby, there must be some fruits that can be eaten.”
As I approached the sound, I found a tree with many berries, like raspberries. A palm-sized imp was eating the berries while making a noise.
“O-o-observation…”
Sylvia kept a certain distance from the imp and watched it.
Jennifer quickly picked a few of the berries. I decided to do a patch test first before picking any.
The berries were black, red, and even blue.
I squeezed the juice from each one and applied it to my arm. Immediately the area where I applied the blue berry juice began to burn. Perhaps the more ripe the berries are, the less poisonous they become.
As I was washing my arm with water, Jennifer stuck out her tongue and said, “Aaaaaahh!”
“No, that’s why I told you to do a patch test, right?”
“Aaaaaahh!”
“Look, even the imps don’t touch the blue ones.”
“O-o-observation is important.”
Sylvia had also said that.
“Aaaaaahh!”
Jennifer washed her mouth with water, but until we returned to the cave, she kept saying “Aaaaaahh!” and drooling and suffering.
By the way, the red berries were quite sour, while the black ones were sweet. We called them “poison berries.” Leaving Jennifer, who was useless, behind, Sylvia and I lost track of time and continued to gather the black and red berries.
By the time we had gathered a basket full of poison berries and returned to the cave, it was already evening.
“My mouth still feels a little tingly.”
Jennifer said and fell asleep immediately.
Sylvia put the berries in a pan and cooked them over the campfire.
“Are you making jam?”
Cher asked Sylvia. It seems she intends to spread it on bread in the morning.
“How’s the kiln coming?”
“It’s going well. I think it’ll take about three days.”
After dinner, Cher decided to use magic in a sparring match for this week. As expected, she was on a different level than me, so I couldn’t win with magic, but I managed to distract her with speed and feints, aiming for hard-to-dodge places like the chest and waist.
“M-m-me too!”
Sylvia joined in.
In the end, Hel was stirring the jam in the pot.
The sweet aroma drifted around, and a two-meter Big Moth and a Hell Beetle came over, but they weren’t any match for Cher and me, whose bodies were already warm.
Sylvia dismantled them and said she was going to use the usable parts to make weapons and armor.
“This is amazing. You can make weapons and armor?”
“N-n-no, I’ve always thought about making them, but I’ve never made any.”
Sylvia looked down in embarrassment.
“Well, you have lots of materials, so why don’t you try to make some things? You can even pay the rent with them.”
“I-I-I understand! I’ll try!”
From that point on, Sylvia became the demonic land’s weapons dealer.
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