“Kenta-kun, you're about to break me.”

“Just keep going.”

“I can't, I can't anymore.”

“Don't dare to stop now! We're almost done!”

“No, my body aches so much, I need a rest.”

“Shut up and grit your teeth.” I'm also doing my best, dammit!

“Kenta, Ara, you can do it!”

“This is so humiliating.”

“Shut up, peanut gallery!”

To fool anyone who might follow us, Kyou-san started with spreading rumors, then we walked down the mercenary path. Now we're changing direction, Ara-san jumps from one patch of grass to the next with Kyou-san on her back, while I carry Rine cross-country. During our grinding in the Spirit Swamps, I learned the [Trackless]-skill, pretty self-explanatory. It's not perfect and using it costs SP, depending on the underground, the weight I'm carrying and so on. The rule of thumb is: The bigger and clearer the tracks I would leave, the more SP.

Contrary, Ara-san doesn't leave tracks on plants, as they start to bend back after she’s trod on them. It's something every alfr can do. Therefore, we made a wrong track first and now we're using these techniques to switch to the old path before we're too deep into that canyon.

The Redstone Canyon is rightfully named, as the rocks here are actually red, instead of a reddish brown or other deviations. There are some bushes and patches of grass here, but it's rocks and dirt for the most part.

Ara-san and I hear people talking from afar, so I point at a rock so we can hide behind it. Too bad that carrying Rine isn't enough to include her into my [Camouflage]-skill. Yet we're fast enough to see a group of mercenaries leisurely talking to each other. They're more attentive than their behavior suggests, yet they don't go the extra mile of scouting behind every rock.

Good for them that we aren’t raiders.

I listen into their conversation, nothing of interest. After they pass us, we continue our exercise. There, this is the first marker for the old route. It really looks not well-tended, yet there is a warning for monsters painted on it. “We'll continue this for half an hour or until we face the first monsters.”

“Kenta-kun, how about looking for some monsters?”

That slacker! “Just do it.”

“Ken,” Kyou-san grunts at me: “Being carried the whole time is also hard on us.”

“Phew... OK, let's make ten minutes. Fast.” I want to get as deep into the canyon as possible. “Rine, keep your eyes open.” I start running, I feel how this is taxing, Rine isn't that light because she's as tall as me and wears armor and a sword, a lump of metal. Yet my body complies with my mind, as it's very abusable since I'm a hero.

Ara-san starts huffing and puffing next to me, as she's not used to actually working hard. Still, her body continues, it's totally a mind-thing for her.

Well, even abusing a hero's body has its limits. There is always the [Worn Out]-condition to consider, a total shut-down that makes it impossible to move properly until some rest. I hope that hurrying it now won't bite us back later, but I'm sure that being careless will definitely do. Still, it might be too much for her, as she needs to jump between patches of vegetation with Kyou-san on her back.

The more we advance on this path, the more rocks take over the landscape, making it harder for Ara-san to continue this, as she still leaves tracks in the dirt. “OK Ara-san, let's stop. Rine?” The princess jumps from my back. Her face looks a bit reddish, not like she's embarrassed or something like that. “Everything OK?”

“Ah, I feel a bit light-headed.” She grins, she grins so wide. Did she have fun being carried around!?

On the other hand, Kyou-san sighs while stretching a bit. “My legs are sore.”

“Small price to pay,” I say while checking Ara-san who also stretches her limbs.

Then the alfr-girl does something dangerous: “Momo, if you would thin down, your body-weight might not cause your legs to compress.

Ah, Kyou-san smiles. “If you weren't that skinny, your bones wouldn't pinch off my blood vessels.”

Ara-san, stop it. “The body of an alfr doesn't create fat in that magnitude.” Her ears are twisting a bit, I guess she suspects something. This would explain why Ara-san shifted her weight as well, ready to jump back.

“How about an experiment? I mean, I have all the classes I need to find out how to cultivate a fat alfr after all.” A surprise attack!

“An experiment...” Ara-san has almost been triggered.

“It's to see whether the hero-system also includes a dieting function.”

The sparkle of Ara-san's eyes tells me that she has just been bought. Whenever there is research to be done about heroes, Ara-san will comply.

...seriously though? A fat alfr? I can't even imagine how that would look like. Also sounds like a hassle: “You know that you would need to carry all your body-weight around, right?”

This weighs Ara-san two base desires against each other: Researching heroes and being a sloth. “Hm...” She's deep in thought. “Considering my eating habits from the time I stayed in Aroahenn and the fact that Kenta-kun's whole hero-body has removed unnecessary fat, I tend to believe that the effort to put on weight is currently not worth the time.” Translation is: Gaining weight might be too much work and the reward is moving a heavier body which is also more work.

“*sigh*” I can see how Kyou-san is tired of the conversation and is dropping it. “Let's just move.”

“Yes!” Rine also seems to be eager to move on her own.

“OK, I'll go ahead, scouting.” I start increasing my pace, separating from the girls. The rock formations become higher and tighter, leading down several paths. I look for the markers, and I soon start to worry for our future as the one I find is already broken off.

I kneel before it, looking at the breakage. This is old, the wood is smooth and the color is dark. Signs of rotting, but I think that the marker was broken by force. Most likely a monster.

I feel the presence of the girls behind me, [Spouse-Location] still works. I collect some pebbles and put them to a line, showing that I'm going farther ahead. I look at the sky, there are no animals there, so [Share Senses] won't work.

My ears are picking up some sounds. Monsters? We're now in their territory, so it's probable. Still, there is also the wind that moves through the ravines to consider. Now that I think about it, this strange hissing might be just that.

Hm... can I climb that crag? One of my usually less useful skills is [Mountain-climber], which decreases the amount of SP spent on climbing and moving on mountains while also improving my climbing technique. It's actually pretty nice, but it only works in rocky terrain though this canyon seems to count.

After some rather skillful free-climbing, I'm finally at the top, still huffing, yet not really exhausted. I see more crags, I hadn't noticed that we were that deep. Or is it more like the land rises here? Nonetheless, being up here isn't that helpful in terms of navigation. I just hope that if I follow the path from up here, I will at least see more.

I take my first step and I don't like how it feels. Under my boots I feel a slight shift, my [Perception]-ability applies to all of my senses, including the sense of touch. This may be not safe to treat. “Phew...” and I made the effort to climb up...

Still above, I look at the path. I don't know how probable a rock slide might be or how much it'll move—I'm not a geologist after all—I try the next best thing: Guessing while using my imagination. Now I climb down again and throw a firebomb on the top of the cliff while running into the other direction.

A small blast, yet aside from a bit of rock, nothing comes down. Firebombs might be too weak or too ephemeral. Well, let's stick to the middle of the path for starters. Still strange to be in a situation where rock firmness is a life-saving detail.

The inconsistencies of the hero-system don't help either. I would feel much better if I knew how much damage a rock slide would inflict me, yet nature doesn't have stats... At least I'm 90% sure that's also the case in this world.

There! Tracks. I use my [Track]-skill to highlight them, giving me a much easier time to decide... rodent! Meldorn and Oro'hekk taught me to discern all kinds of tracks, and while it’s hard to recall them, I still can recognize most after seeing them. Maybe due to being Rank 23 in the [Survival]-ability?

Nonetheless, this spells trouble. A single print is half as tall as I am! Still... why is the weight distribution off? It's mostly centered around the palm and the way the prints are slurred... is it walking backwards!? Why only to this point though? Nothing special is here!

Ah, there are more tracks. Claws and three toes, reptilian I guess, lots of them, yet much smaller than the others. So a giant rodent against a bunch of reptiles? Wait, this rock... it smells bitterly and is slightly off-color...

If my theory is correct, then the tracks furthest to our direction are the deepest as this is where it had to brace itself... yes, so this is a rodent which has moved backwards until all the reptiles were in the target area for something like a poison-AoE. Most likely ate the corpses whole.

I can't figure out what kind of monsters the reptiles are, but most likely some sort of pack hunter that doesn’t bother to move to the other paths. Given their size, they could hide behind every larger rock. On the other hand, the rodent is a pain in the ass in its own right, as I don't know how its poison works. Maybe it's a toxic gas? This would be a pain. How does it get into the blood-stream? Inhalation? Skin-contact? Is it strong enough to kill or paralyze—or whatever it does—a human?

What a pain. Well, I'll go a bit further. I want to give the girls a warning though, so I take some new pebbles and make a circle. It's the symbol to wait. We have only limited paper and parchment, so I like to use them sparingly until we can buy more.

So, now time to go a bit further. This might be the territory of that rodent, so I use my array of [Stealth]-skills: [Hide Smell], [Sneak], and [Trackless] while being prepared to use [Camouflage] as well, though my red armor fits nicely in this surrounding. I also use [Pitch] and [Wild Eyes] in addition to [Track] for more intel.

Too bad there is almost no plant-life for my hiding, as [Mask of Wildlife] needs, well, wildlife, to work properly. Yet the lack of plants makes it much easier to discern other life-forms as there are less spirits that distracts my [Wild Eyes].

OK, let's stop here. I don't like what I see, it has to be those reptiles as I sense a bunch of spirits hidden in cracks, under and behind rocks, even lying on top of the cliffs around here. All of the spirits are eerily identical, so they might be some kind of swarm, just like the swamp rats. Yet the reptiles don't appear to be connected via [Synchronize] which is a relief, as that spell connects critters' spirits with each other, giving a boost to each other in terms of [Spirit Magic]. Well, logical speaking, these monsters don't have a reason to have [Spirit Magic] in the first place, this is just a bad terrain for it with its lack of flora.

So they use most likely smell for communication, just like ants. Maybe even brainwaves. Well, there is no way I'll walk into that trap that's ready to spring. I guess they didn't notice me so far and are just lying in wait in general, like a crocodile that's capable of waiting motionless for hours.

I return back to the point I set the wait-marker, I'm still earlier than the girls. “Phew...” Don't want to waste time, so I just walk back. After some minutes, they're in sight, I wave at them which causes them to pick up some speed. “There is an ambush further down the path.”

Kyou-san sighs: “What kind of ambush?”

“I don't know, but I suspect reptilian monsters. I couldn't see them, just sense their spirits and there are tracks of them. Plus something nasty.” I report what I interpret into the tracks while making sure that they know it's just my assumptions.

Now we're at our typical problem: Safety vs. XP. While it would be safer to find a way around this encounter, we should also amass XP. Especially since the swamps we've been more than willing to go the extra mile to become stronger, yet fighting sheer numbers is bad for three reasons.

First, our line of defense isn't worth shit as there will be so many monsters. A bunch will distract Rine and me and the rest will be able to easily jump at Kyou-san and Ara-san.

Second, dealing with many at once is a messy pain. I only have two eyes and two arms, and I'm not Rine, so I can't hack my way through them so easily that it becomes a one on one several times instead of all against me. It's even worse for Kyou-san and Ara-san.

Third, we have AoEs but there isn't really a chokepoint there, so we’ll need a lot of them at the same time to be efficient and this will drain resources, SP, MP, consumables.

If we add in the fact that we don't know anything about these monsters, fighting them is a bad choice. Yet there is an undeniable argument I had to address: “We can't really circumvent them. We may climb the cliff, but when I was on one, I had a bad feeling. I think it's not stable enough for our weight, and there are also monsters on top of it at that point, so fighting might cause us to make that rock slide hap-” Suddenly, I have a brainwave. “Ara-san, time to work.”

“Please no.”

After discussing my plan, we head to the ambush-site. The moment we're here, I point in its direction and Ara-san begins chanting. Each syllable is like a small spell which changes the environment until a big bubble of water appears in the air: “[Tidal Wave]!” She ends with the name of her spell and the water crashes down, her target the rock wall. Under the pressure of the water the rock begins to crumble and slide, yet it's not over yet: “[Second Flood]!” This is her new spell, a water-based spell that allows her to reuse a water-spell she just cast, though in a weaker form. It costs as much MP, yet it doesn't cost any time, so the water of the first [Tidal Wave] forms a new bubble which crashes onto the wall of the other side, causing it to collapse as well.

Rine steps forward as the monsters that survived by being in the middle of the path emerge. “[Crescent Moon]!” Her blade cuts through three quail-like beasts with lizard feet, long, snake-like tongues, and claws on the strangely formed wings.

So much for reptilians, huh? I'm kinda disappointed. Yet those feathers are strange, they look sharp. Well: “[Quadruple Shot]!” My arrows pierces some more, I guess they don't even know if they want to attack or retreat, as the whole swarm is in disarray.

Yet, with the rocks falling down, we have created that chokepoint. Ara-san is preparing a new [Tidal Wave] while Rine and I decimate the numbers with our skills and Kyou-san has her herbs ready to delay them if needed.

In less than a minute, the quail-monsters are either dead or fled. I nod approvingly. This was a good run, though we never really figured what their deal was. Total domination. I check my status... urgh, bad XP-ratio. I mean, the rockslide Ara-san caused brought her the XP and the ring divided them among all of us, yet it's more efficient to hunt other monsters. I mean, twenty of them are about one rockinger. “They're not worth the effort.” Maybe I'm just spoiled after surviving the Spirit Swamps. “The rockslide was good though. Enough space to walk in the middle.”