<08:30:02

Day 203>

6:15:29:58>

<[Help will arrive in

1:15:29:58]>

Two days left.

Dully, I turn my face to a weird bulge trying to press up against a literal mound of snake corpses. It’s been doing that for a while now, and I think it’s the third gorgon. See, if you have more than one mid-boss but less than five, then you’ve gotta have three, and since nothing else has appeared in these past ten days or so, I’ve been anticipating the third gorgon this whole time. I bet her flesh will be even more tender than the first two. Heheh.

That said, although the number of snakes that spawn in have a cap, this cap isn’t affected by the number of snake corpses there are in the room. And since snake corpses don’t despawn, much like real life, all of the snakes I’ve been killing have started piling up. Like, literally. I couldn’t bother to eat them all, so now the room has filled up with snake corpses to the point where I’m sitting at the same level as the chandelier. Snakes are still spawning in, but as soon as they do they get crushed to death by the weight of tens of thousands of dead snakes. It’s a pretty weird situation, but until about half an hour ago, it gave me time to read.

Unfortunately, though, even though I’ve now made it through half the book, I still don’t get it. Bummer. Maybe I’m just an idiot? Who knows.

—Oh, a hand just popped out of the snake sea! Come on miss gorgon, I know you can do it!

“Paaah!” she gasps as she finally pulls herself out of the pile. The stuff below her midsection is still submerged in the serpentine ocean, but this is all I really need. Her face whips around. Oh, yeah, welcome to my crib. It’s kind of small, but I recently had it redecorated, so now it’s totally RED and cool. I don’t really have much of anything up here, but I do have this cool snake, and this other cool snake, and another cool snake, and… “Did—did you do this?”

I perk my eyebrow at her.

“S—sorry, dumb question, uh…” She pulls her lips tight. It takes her a moment or two to pull herself together, but once she does, she’s able to do that classical point-at-me-with-her-hand thing that these gorgons seem to love so much, and with as much grandeur as she can muster with only her upper body visible, she exclaims, “Challenger! For this crime against the God of Harvest, I will punish you with the most painful torment of petrification! Prepare yourself!”

I stare at her. She stares at me. I don’t even feel slightly tingly, so…

She wiggles her finger a little. “Um, you aren’t going to, like… Take out a shield or something?” I shake my head at her. “No? I mean, it’s fine if you want to use weapons, it just feels a little unfair if you’re bare-handed and I’m…” Also bare-handed? She shakes her head, making the little snakes around her neck wobble. “No, forget it. I, uh… Where was I?” Petrifying me? “Oh, yeah. Take this!”

She drills her eyes into me and I leap to my feet, ready for anything.

We stare at each other for a solid ten seconds.

Petrification Resistance Lv.10>

Petrification Protection Lv.1>

Oh, nice! About time, if you ask me.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Her brows pinch together. “Huh? That’s weird, you should at least feel a little creaky, um…” She bonks herself on the head like you do with an old piece of faulty machinery. “No, that wasn’t quite right…”

I grin. Slowly, I walk around her until I’m standing just behind her. She’s got a high level, so this probably won’t kill her. Hehe. While she’s still distracted trying to make her petrification gaze work, I claw up a gouge along her lower back and give her an instant slip of the disc.

“Eek—!” she squeals in pain. “Wh—what did you do to me? Why can’t I feel my legs?”

I circle around until I’m in front of her again, and then I sit down. She looks up at me, eyes trembling. I pull out the magic tome Moleman gave me and hold it up to her. “Do you know how to read?”

She blinks. “Uh, um…” Her eyes travel over the line on the front. “Yes, uh, how so?”

Great. Step one complete, haha!

I open the book to chapter three. “In that case,” I say, holding up the book to her, “you’re gonna help me study.”

“Study w—what?”

“How to make the magic happen. It’s very simple. There’s a step-by-step guide. See?” I point at the first page of chapter 3. “Read this, and then try it out, and then you tell me how it went and what it felt like.”

“You want me to learn magic?” she asks timidly. I nod at her. “But, magic is… It’s a God-given divine right. I’m just a gorgon, I can’t…”

“You have a petrification skill, right?” She doesn’t respond, but I can tell that I’m right on the mark. “Skills are given by the Gods. If you can use a skill, you can probably also use magic.”

“E—even then…”

I look at her. So it’s like that, huh? Heaving a sign, I make an exaggerated show of putting away the book. “We—ll, if you don’t want to learn magic, I guess there’s nothing I can do other than kill you and skin you and eat your flesh and use your minced brains to lure snakes. That sounds good to you too, right?”

Even though her skin is already WHITE, she still finds a way to blanch. “Um, uh… I—I want to learn magic. Yeah. P—please let me learn magic.”

I grin. “Glad to hear it.”

Timidly, she holds out her hands. “So, uh, the book…?”

I slap her hands away. “You think I’m giving you, a filthy snake-goblin, my precious book?” Her eyes tattle on the obviously incorrect answer she’s internally mustered to my rhetorical question. “The answer is: obviously not. So just settle in and I’ll read it aloud, and you follow every single step and word I say, okay? We’ve only got like two days to do this, so try to follow along as best as you can.”

“Uh, okay,” she mumbles back.

Since she didn’t seem entirely focused, I decided to just reiterate my point by piercing her with my eyes and saying, as clearly as I can, “If you even consider doing anything silly like trying to fight or whatever, I’ll kill you. Got it?” She doesn’t answer, so I helpfully repeat myself. “Got. It?”

“G—got it,” she says, her voice trembling.

I smile. “Great! In that case, let’s get into it, shall we?”

I start reading aloud. Since I’ve read the chapter several times over by this point, I know that it will take well over an hour to get through the entire thing. Probably even more than two hours since I’m reading it aloud, too. Regardless, she seems to be paying attention, and that’s all I’m really asking for. A few paragraphs in, she closes her eyes, and a look of deep concentration befalls her face. Okay, good.

I continue speaking. And after a while, a change seems to come over her. The concentration from before melts into a calmer sort of focus, with her facial expression softening considerably. She looks—dare I say—relaxed. I almost want to berate her for not working, but I can tell she’s listening closely. Heck, even the snakes have closed their eyes, and they shouldn’t even have eyelids to begin with!

As I reach the final step of the third chapter, I have seen her expression change several times, until at this point where she’s basically in a zen-like state. I almost want to stop talking to avoid the horrible truth of the situation, but my curiosity gets the better of me, and I continue. As my lips speak the final lines of the guide, her body changes. From her previously WHITE chest, a swirling colour starts to pulse out, spreading further and further with each beat of her heart, giving her pallid skin a standard, healthy, green hue. Thump, thump, thump, and the colour spreads, across her torso, through her arms, into the snakes on her neck, and all the way up to her head and the tips of her long ears.

Slowly, her eyes open. They’re a vivid orange. When she looks up at me, I can see them glimmer with enlightenment. Something bitter bubbles within the pit of my stomach.

“I—I can feel it!” she says excitedly. “Just as you said, deep in my chest, within the valves of my heart, I could feel the little rooms in there, and visualising it as a house of four rooms as the guide said really did help, and to then also think of the presences within there as a family… It felt weird, but I get it. I can feel the father, in the upper right valve, and the mother in the upper left, and the son in the lower right, and the daughter in the lower left. Their names were weird, but if you read them to me again, I’m sure I could remember them! The son was, was… Aort? Was that it? I’m sorry I can’t remember it, but…”

“What did it feel like?” I ask, slicing through her enthusiasm. I can feel my right hand curl into a fist.

She blinks at me before laughing a little. “What it felt like? Well, that’s a bit hard to describe, but…”

My hand flies out and carves a chunk out of her exposed throat.

Her mouth opens and closes and then opens again and her eyes are wide as her hand lifts, trembling, to touch the blood-puking gash in her throat. She pulls her hand back and it’s covered in RED. She looks back up at me again and she looks more confused than anything else as her mouth opens again, but no sound will come out, and all I can hear is her breath hissing out of her opened throat. The little snakes around her neck try to close the gash but they can’t, and after a few more seconds, her eyes turn misty and she slumps over.

<[Level Up]>

Strength has increased by 2.

Stamina has increased by 3.

Magic Power has increased by 1.

Dagger Nail has increased by 1.

Crush has increased by 1.

Corrosion Resistance has increased by 1.

Irritation Resistance has increased by 1.>