“You’re not the one who decides that. That’s me. Tell me everything about this black viper.”
“We don’t know much. Just that it comes into the village to eat first thing in the morning. It destroys a house, and after it eats everyone inside, it leaves. Then, if anyone tries to run, it eats them. If you make any noise, you end up the first thing it wants to eat.”
“In that case, I’ll head out to see the black viper.”
“This late at night?”
In about an hour, give or take, the sun would drop completely behind the horizon.
“I’m going because it’s late. If I find it and it turns into a battle, you can use me as a decoy and run away. You can run away as long as you have a horse, right?”
“No, I don’t think anyone would run anymore. Everyone believes they’ll be eaten if they run. And we don’t have enough horses for everyone in the village to get away.”
“Anyway, I’m going.”
“Miss, please be careful.”
I patted Kai’s head, jumped onto Kumayuru, and took off.
My bear detection picked up something a slight ways off. It would probably only take me a few minutes to get there at Kumayuru’s pace.
We ran through empty plains. The black viper we were looking for was sure to turn up soon. In the dim evening light, I made out a dark shape ahead; I thought it was a boulder until I noticed the heaped, winding coils, big around as a bus.
It was huge and apparently asleep. Well, I thought, victory comes to those who strike first.
I dismounted and recalled Kumayuru. When I looked back at the black viper, its head had perked up. Its eyes were fixed on me; its tongue flicked out, tasting the air. Seeing it awake, with the whole terrible mass of it in motion, I didn’t feel quite so tough anymore.
The viper whipped out, narrowing the distance between us in an instant. Before I could blink, its mouth took up my whole field of vision.
I leapt to the right. Its gigantic body grazed me as it went by. For a second I thought I was safe, but its body swept around for another pass. I immediately guarded with my white bear hand, but it sent me tumbling back along the ground.
For as far as it threw me, I expected to feel more of an impact. Maybe the suit soaked it up? The viper didn’t give me any time to speculate; it reared up to strike again.
I couldn’t jump out of its reach. I juked left and right, but even when I dodged it, its coils and tail would lash out at me two, three times in a row. When it moved, its body threw up a cloud of dust that stung my eyes and turned everything murky. It was coming up on full dark, too; it was hard to make out its black body against the night.
It reacted to sounds. Maybe coming in the evening was a mistake.
I blew away the cloud of dust with a wind spell.
I ran through my usual set of combat spells over the handful of times it stopped moving, but they just rolled off its scales. It was too big for a pit. Bear magic would be overdoing it; I thought I could defeat it if I used the fire bear, but since the hide seemed like it’d be useful for a lot of things, I wanted to avoid burning it if possible.
In the game, it didn’t matter how I defeated things; they’d still turn into items. In real life, if you burned something, you couldn’t put it back to the way it was. If you cut it with a sword, it’d be scratched. If you attacked with magic, you’d damage the materials.
Fire was off the table, and wind didn’t look any more promising. When I thought my air cutters drew blood, the wound would heal over in seconds.
If I can’t attack the outside, I thought, how about the insides?
I jumped back to buy myself some distance. The viper slithered after me. I wove from side to side, waiting for it to open its mouth. All it did was charge at me, and it hadn’t gone in for a bite since its first attack. It wouldn’t open its mouth if I stuck with this approach. Maybe it would if I jumped?
I kicked the ground and leapt up high. When I escaped up into the sky, the black viper opened its mouth wide and struck. In that moment, I conjured ten fire bears about the same size as one of my bear puppets.
The mini fire bears assembled into a clean rank and file in front of me. The black viper’s mouth approached in a straight line. It was like it was practically asking for me to loose the bears into its mouth. They burned its long tongue on the way down.
The viper writhed in pain, its body collapsing with a mighty thud.
Its body thrashed, shaking the ground, but after a while its movements weakened, and in the end, it stopped moving.
Just between you and me: there was a smell like prime barbecue that wafted out of its mouth.
“Is it over?”
Bear detection couldn’t pick up its signal. It was dead, all right.
You definitely couldn’t defeat a monster with normal magic once it got to this class. Did that mean I had to think up more convenient bear magic? If I kept things up like this, I’d end up burning up all the materials I wanted.
I stowed the viper’s body in bear storage. Mission complete. I took out Kumakyu and decided to head back to the village. Kai was standing around at the outskirts.
“What’re you doing in a place like this?”
“I was waiting for you.”
“For me?”
“Yeah, I was thinking if you ran back here, then I’d let myself get eaten first and give you time to escape,” he told me with firm, straightforward eyes. He probably wasn’t joking.
“Why?”
“You brought information on how to
