24th Day Evening Omui Town
When we pulled out of the dungeon and approached the town, five guys in ragged clothes were standing at the entrance staring in our direction. I tensed up for a second, but then
"Kakizaki-kun? …Why are you all so ragged… Haru-kun is not with you…"
"Ah! Class rep!" """"Sorry for being idiots!"""""
The five ragged guys were Kakizaki-kun and the others. They were the five muscle-brained sports-type idiots that Haru-kun had mentioned going to check on.
Black hair, black eyes, clothes in tatters. They had apparently been caught by the gatekeeper because no one could understand what they were saying. They looked so exhausted they barely had the strength to move.
They had run all the way from the cave without stopping. In their ragged state, without sleeping a wink, gnawing on stamina mushrooms the whole time, they had kept running nonstop to get here.
One was missing an arm on his light armor, another had a huge hole in his stomach, another was missing everything below the knees. Their legs, arms, torsos, and heads were all in terrible shape with almost nothing left intact anywhere.
Their bodies had probably been healed, but their equipment could not be fixed.
If that was the case, they had been through that kind of ordeal. They had held back the enemy in the forest even while getting torn to pieces, all for our sake. They had been on the verge of death. That was why Haru-kun had wanted to go back. We had stopped him. And they had almost been killed. They had been dying. That was why Haru-kun had left. And Kakizaki-kun and the others had come all this way in their broken bodies to tell us. They had almost been killed, almost died, gone through something that was basically death...
And Haru-kun is there.
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It was the worst story. Some of the girls were crying just from hearing it. It was a development we had never even imagined. If that was the case, maybe it was only natural that Haru-kun left us behind.
Even if we followed him, we would die right away. Even now that we have raised our levels.
We had thought the ones targeting us were the group known as the fake delinquents, the Katsuyama-kun crew.
We figured the other guys had just gone crazy and could not be trusted, but we thought we could still reconcile with them.
We thought the problem was having to fight and kill each other.
That was why we had doubts.
Was there really a need for Haru-kun to take the risk?
Could we not handle it somehow?
If we had the resolve to kill and just did not hesitate, we thought we could do it too.
We were naive. If we had gone in with that attitude, we would have been killed instantly.
But that was completely beside the point. We probably could not even fight. It was the worst situation.
We still do not understand why Haru-kun went.
It is already hopeless. That is the kind of story it is.
"That thing is a monster."
"Was it Katsuyama? That trash? While we were fighting, that guy got killed from behind. Then all six of us got wiped out."
"Yeah, and then the guy started using the illusions that Katsuyama had been using."
That is skill theft. Kill and steal. Why?
"Even without that, nothing hits no matter what we do. Even with five of us attacking together."
"Magic does not work either. What are we supposed to do about that thing?"
"Plus we get paralyzed, blinded, poisoned. If we had not had the mushrooms we would have died."
"He is supposed to be a magic user, but he was using a spear too."
"After he killed Katsuyama and the others, he started using a sword as well."
"His attack skills are different every time, so we cannot read them."
"No matter how much we run or dodge, it still hits. It makes no sense."
We cannot fight an opponent like that. Kakizaki-kun and the others are at Lv 43. Their base abilities are already superhuman, and they have abnormal intuition. They have super acceleration, limit break, one-hit kill, seventeen-slash combo… Their cheats are at the strongest level. In close combat they should be invincible. Yet they were completely overpowered and forced to retreat without being able to do anything. The other guys were a full wipe of twelve people. All of them had cheats, yet they were one-sidedly crushed by a single person.
No matter how much we hear, it does not make sense. We cannot understand the content. What we did understand is that he can steal skills, inflict status abnormalities, direct close combat does not work, magic does not work either, and attacks cannot be avoided.
There is no way such abilities should exist, yet Haru-kun, who has no abilities, was doing similar things. At the very least we have never seen him take a hit. He says he will die if he gets hit, yet he never does. He has no attack power but takes enemies down in one strike. Both of them make no sense. There is no way to fight them. They seem like something completely different. That is why we were left behind. Because it is a completely different kind of fight.
And Haru-kun's last words were to tell us "Sorry for being idiots"... That was it.