CH 27

4th day of the game life. 

It was a morning full of troubles from the very get-go, but Ina heard my screams and ran into the room, making the situation even more hectic.

“Eh? Souma-san, you have muscle pain? Then, please leave it to me! Massaging is my specialty!” (Ina)

Ina said happily as she sidled up to me.

I can’t run away because of the muscle pain.

“No, it is okay, it is okay. I don’t need it!” (Souma)

“You don’t need to worry! My mother praised me before saying: ‘You have been good at massages from way back. So good in fact that it is…lewd’.” (Ina)

“For someone on sickbed, that’s quite the frank mother you got there! I want it less now that I heard that!” (Souma)

This exchange that, depending on how you see it, you could take it as us flirting, was fortunately stopped by the innkeeper who was wondering what was happening with all the ruckus.

“Ah, muscle pain? Then, why aren’t you using a potion?” 

That one sentence ended it all.

I didn’t miss how Ina averted her face when the old man said that. 

(This girl knew!) (Souma)

The muscle pain was healed easily with a potion.

As thanks, I presented a shovel to the innkeeper and an ironclaw to Ina. 

I then headed off to the town after that.

“The muscle pain was healed, but I will take it easy checking the town and shopping for today. I won’t be doing anything special, so you are free to do anything by yoursel—” (Souma)

“I will come with you!” (Ina)

“…Is that so.” (Souma)

She said that with such force in the middle of my words that I lost the ability to say no.

Seeing Ina walking gleefully by my side, I felt complicated here. 

There’s two reasons why I am prioritizing making Ina stronger.

Just as I said before, I don’t want to be troubled by her anymore.

In other words, half the reason is because I want to make it so it is possible for me to leave at any time I want. 

Then, what’s the remaining half? When we do something together, I don’t want her to die.

I don’t have a grandiose ideal of wanting to protect all the people in the world, but I don’t have such thick nerves that would make me be okay when an acquaintance of mine were to die.

There’s no way I would want to carry the burden of having a person die because of me, and no matter how annoying someone may be, it is obviously better for them to be alive.

The ideal would be to live happily at a place away from me, but at the times when they are close to me, I would like to look after them so that they at least don’t die.

It may be half-assed, but those are currently my honest feelings.

(But there’s no need for that anymore…) (Souma)

There’s technically no concept of ‘party’ in Nekomimi Neko.

As I said before, it is a system where the monster exp is all taken away by the person who dealt the finishing blow, so it is pretty difficult to level up low level people in one go.

Because Ina has the Train special trait, she managed to level up all the way to 66, but that’s pretty much the peak.

Train Mode only activates when she is staying in place on a field around Lamurick. 

The underground dungeons are of course not in that category, and the highest level enemies around Lamurick are from the Cave of Trials.

Leveling to 75-76 would be decently easy, but as you pass the level of the enemies, the amount of exp you can get from those enemies gets lowered heavily. 

When that difference surpasses 5, the exp gets fatally bad.

Even if we were to use the Train, I doubt we will be able to raise it further than that. 

We would have to leave Lamurick to go to a higher level than that, but the Train of Ina can only activate around Lamurick.

Without Train Mode, she is truly just an adventurer.

In the first place, there’s no need for any more levels than that if you are going to be living in Lamurick.

(It really would be impossible to bring her with me…) (Souma)

I said I played solo almost the whole time in Nekomimi Neko, but that wasn’t the case in my first run.

I would actually have adventurers of the same level at first as comrades, and would progress while raising their levels evenly . 

At that time, I didn’t think of playing solo or changing my party members. 

You could say that was the time when I enjoyed playing Nekomimi Neko in the purest of forms, but that was the time when my comrades and I would die the most.

In this world where Save and Load don’t exist, a normal adventurer adventuring together with me in this world is plain suicidal.

(Then, that brings the question: who would not die even if they were to travel with me?) (Souma)

If it is at this stage of the game, a whole ton of characters would fall into that category.

Even if that’s not the case, there’s a lot of cheat class characters in this world who can become your comrade.

If I could bring those guys into my side, my adventures might advance smoothly from there on.

The highest level NPC in this game is the NPC, the Phantom Hero Alex.

A fearless level 200 hero that wears golden equipment and wields unparalleled swordsmanship.

His specs are so high I would think ‘isn’t it okay to make this guy the protagonist?’, but I unfortunately have not met him even when I was playing the game.

His mind apparently has nothing but the thought of ‘defeat the Demon Lord’, so he would immediately charge into the Demon Lord castle alone when the game starts, and would die before meeting the player.

Being brave and fearless can at times come and bite you in the ass.

He is famous for being as suicidal as the armored knights of the Cave of Trials, and you could say he is quite the rare character in a sense.

But it is actually a recommended character from a developer, and there’s apparently close to 10 special events related to him, but there’s obviously no one who has cleared them.

Good grief, that’s way too much of a phantom hero.

In game terms and in regular terms as well, I would like him to live, but it has already been 3 days since the game began.

If it is just like the game, he should have died a long time ago. So expecting him to do the job might be pointless.

Let’s think a bit more realistically here. 

When speaking of strong characters I can encounter around here, it would be the Helping Cheetah. 

It is a character that shows up every now and then for the people doing quests, and is famous as the strongest female adventurer in Nekomimi Neko.

The only one who would be slower if she were to use Step would be her, is the catchphrase that was born from how cheat-like her movement speed is. A katana user that got the wordplay of cheetah and cheater in her nickname.

She would sometimes show up to help you out clearing a quest once only, but you can officially make her your comrade if you do the chain events that begin from a 1-on-1 with her.

In both cases, she has fearsome movement speed and attack power to wipe out the enemies, but the evaluation of people when she becomes your ally is that of ‘questionable’.

She is so strong and so fast that she ends up finishing the enemies the whole time. Meaning that the players don’t get any exp at all.

Because of her background story, she won’t go with you to defeat the Demon Lord, but she is so strong that people say she might be able to defeat the Demon Lord by herself.

She is whimsical yet cold…is how she shows herself, but most of her personal events are super cliche love-comedy events, so her character breaks into pieces.

But well, if I tell you players of over level 300 have been killed dozens of times in order to see those super cliche love-comedy events, would you understand now just how strong she is?

Whichever the case, she is someone in this world that I don’t want to rely too much on.

Aside from those, there’s also: the Perverted Warrior Jane, Tea Enjoyer Raiden, the-one-that-must-not-be-named Hole Opener Rose Piercer. Those are all men that, if you exclude their mentality, are actually pretty promising.

But if you were to ask me if I want them as comrades, I don’t know… No, the last one isn’t an ‘I don’t know’, I vehemently don’t want to meet him.

As for other ones, there’s the option of aiming for the nobles that only appear in events.

From what I have seen in the game’s event battles, the king, queen, and princess of the Rihito Kingdom are all owners of cheat level powers. 

They are so strong you would go: You guys go defeat the Demon Lord, damn it.

They unfortunately don’t become your comrades in the game, and you can’t meet them aside from events, but it might be possible in this world depending on how I do it.

Well, I need to head to the capital for that at the very least, so that’s impossible as of this moment.

“Hmm.” (Souma)

I end up groaning.

Is it my imagination that the strength of the characters is proportional to how deranged they are? 

There’s no decent person coming to mind to the point that I end up understanding why I played solo.

(Speaking of proportional to their strength…) (Souma)

In terms of strength alone…there’s the Strongest Genius Idiot Mage Sazan who can enter in the candidates.

Well…only join the candidates, that is.

I feel like the name is self-explanatory, but just making them an ally would make your survival rate decrease by less than half and your deaths will go up by 5 times more. The strongest character that would make masochistic players cry with joy with that minus trait.

That said, they are the strongest mage candidate in terms of specs.

Their stats and their magic are stupidly high.

But that’s why there’s many deaths accompanying it. 

Their bad reputation is endless.

The AI is so polished in the bad sense of the word that you can only call it a bundle of malice from the developers. It made me recall the raging of the many players.

Their usual move is to use Concentrate, which doubles the power of the next spell cast, and would use a spell that has a high debuff chance. They would use weak attack spells that would end up waking up sleeping monsters. For some reason, there’s a high chance they would use debuff spells on enemies with low magic defense, and those kinds of enemies are mostly physical enemies, and their only debuff spell is Berserker, so they instead end up strengthening them. 

At times they would go ‘T-The seal in my right arm!’ and would make a gesture of restraining their rampaging right arm. You would think they are a hopeless chuunibyou, but the seal would really undo and the party would be wiped out. 

If monsters approach too close, they would use an explosion spell to protect themselves and die in the process. 

<TLN: Warning, this is a damn long specific rant about the character. Read if you are curious, but safe to skip. Just go down and search for the dividing line.>

Wears a weird mask, if they get hit they will shoot magic indiscriminately, would click their tongue if you heal them, they would definitely use a wide aoe fire spell if there are more than 2 monsters, they would use fire spells even for fire element monsters and recover their HP, they would try to use fire spells even inside the water and fail, they would try to use fire magic inside a forest and would turn it into a mountain fire state, and yet, when monsters weak to fire show up, they would use wind magic which they are not even good at. They would sometimes go ‘fufu’ and when you ask what it is, they would go ‘no, sorry, I just remembered something funny’. 

They would use long sniping spells to hit powerful inactive monsters to pointlessly switch them to battle state, is unpunctual, would attack monsters in counter stance and get countered, would immediately talk about rates. When we stay a long time without doing anything, they would enter standby mode and talk about themselves on their own, the topic changing every time, moreover, it is inconsistent. They would use their strongest spell regardless of enemy level, so they would overkill them. They would even overkill the HP of the drop items. Because they are using their strongest spell, their spell could not end even when the battle has ended, not only that, they would continue chanting and would slow progress. If you are not careful, your comrades can die from the activated spell after the battle is over. More enemies will be attracted because of the effects of the spell, and because they use their strongest spell no matter the level of the enemy, they would run out of MP, and despite them having paper armor, they would charge into the enemies when they run out of MP and die instantly. 

When they mess up, they will immediately push the blame on others; when they win, they will make a winning pose as if trying to show off you owe them. Has horrible table manners. Doesn’t like leaving the things they like for last. When going up mountains, they would come with hard to move attire. When they get bitten by bugs, they would bitch and cry. They would immediately want to take a break. I would have to carry them all the way down at the end. Would get all conceited when drunk, even when not drinking, they are drunk about themselves. Can’t speak to someone in the eyes, would blame their mask for not being able to do so. 

——-<It ends here.>——-

Because of them, my stiff shoulders and back pains have grown worse; because of them, there’s global warming. Even with all that, you can only obtain the strongest spell, Stardust Flare, from them, so you have to make them your comrade at least once. They are really really the worst.

You might think I am lying, but this is all true. 

As proof of this, I am already irritated right now, and even though I don’t have stiff shoulders or back pains, I am suffering from it now. <I actually also felt back pains from translating all that>

It surely must be because I remembered them.

(Compared to that…) (Souma)

I look at Ina by my side.

“Uhm, is something the matter?” (Ina)

I was a bit angry at her in the morning, but her trying to tease me using a massage as an excuse when I had muscle pains can be considered cute.

“Ina, you really are like an angel.” (Souma)

“Eh? Ueeeeh?!” (Ina)

I watched pleasantly over Ina, who was visibly getting flustered, and swore in my heart to take my time and choose my comrades carefully.