In the days that followed, Letishi found a new source of amusement: using [Projection Perception] to tune in punctually every day and watch the battles of the one it suspected to be the prophesied person.
What interested it most wasn't Jhin's bizarre, wildly varied ways of attacking, but rather the inexhaustible life force within him. Although the [Projection Perception] magic, due to the distance involved, gave a somewhat distorted read on its target, Jhin had more than once pulled out a little knife that seemed brimming with life force and used it to heal himself.
At first Letishi wondered whether this human carried the blood of a berserker—deciding mid-battle that his wounds weren't severe enough and beginning to self-harm, actually stabbing himself with a knife. But then, in the images, the wounds on Jhin's body began to knit shut at astonishing speed, and it understood: this was a tool used for healing.
Watching him grow more energized the longer he fought, and finally seeing him don a suit of jet-black armor, grip a light sword in one hand and an elemental sword in the other, and charge straight at his opponent, Letishi came to a realization—that little knife was absolutely not a mere tool, but a kind of magic imbued with life force. Yet this person was clearly human, without the faintest trace of elven mixed blood.
Where on earth did he get so much life force, squandering it as if it cost nothing?
Holding onto this question, Letishi continued to observe Jhin's battle. His opponent was one it knew well—one of the monsters it had ordered its underling to arrange to be sent over: the Demon-Flame Four-Armed Gorilla.
The Demon-Flame Four-Armed Gorilla, a lord-tier monster, was skilled in earth-element magic. Its body was mighty and its four arms could cast four spells at once. Its weaknesses were clumsy movement and a quick temper.
Recalling the relevant information Kyaru had explained earlier in his mind, Jhin leaped high into the air. Before he could reach the position he wanted, four massive boulders appeared out of thin air and surrounded him at the center. If he didn't get out quickly, he would without a doubt be crushed into a meat pancake.
There was no fluctuation of mana—how had it done that?
With no time to ponder, Jhin raised a hand and cleaved apart the boulder above him with a single stroke of his sword, while a flash suddenly burst from his left hand—
[Refraction Blinding] temporarily robbed the Demon-Flame Four-Armed Gorilla of its sight. It roared, flailing its arms about wildly to guard against a sneak attack.
Seizing the opportunity, Jhin whipped out a rocket launcher, aimed at its head, and pulled the trigger. A golden laser shot from the barrel like a long spear, wreathed in countless tiny but lethal wind blades.
A monster's innate sense for danger instantly turned the Demon-Flame Four-Armed Gorilla from panic to calm. Its four arms, sheathed in heavy rock gauntlets, overlapped together to shield its head, blocking the laser cannon's assault just in time.
The penetrating power of the twin wind-and-lightning elemental laser cannon clearly exceeded its imagination. In a single instant, the two frontmost arms, gauntlets and all, were bored straight through, and pain—like tens of thousands of carnivorous ants gnawing at flesh—surged into its brain.
"Aooo aooo aooo!!!"
A furious roar laced with agony erupted from the Demon-Flame Four-Armed Gorilla's mouth, its gaping jaws revealing two pairs of sharp fangs. To be toyed with and even wounded like this as an overlord-tier monster—it swore in its heart that it would grind this little bug to dust.
"Yo, you're screaming so happily—want another round?" Jhin's mocking voice rang out right beside its ear.
When did this bug get next to me?
The Demon-Flame Four-Armed Gorilla forced back the stinging pain, opened its eyes, and turned its head toward the source of the voice. Its right arm swung a step ahead of its gaze, but grabbed only a small, round little thing.
"Boom!"
A fire-and-earth twin-element grenade blasted out a cloud of fine, powdery smoke that enveloped both man and monster. When a gust of wind blew the smoke apart, the black battle-armor stood beside the corpse of the Demon-Flame Four-Armed Gorilla. A huge gap had appeared at its waist, nearly splitting its body in two, the flesh looking as though it had been devoured by something.
"I say... this should count as the last opponent for today, right? If I keep going, I'm going to die of an empty stomach."
Jhin looked up and asked the Red Dragon sitting quietly atop the mountain peak. With the spot where he now stood as the center, the edge of a roughly five-kilometer radius was packed with lord-tier monsters and mutant monsters of every kind, forming a ring that surrounded both him and Kyaru.
"Of course... as agreed, you may choose whatever special ingredients you like."
As the Red Dragon's words fell, a group of wyvern subspecies came bearing a large bundle of ingredients and delivered it before Jhin.
About three days ago, Jhin and Kyaru had been eating hotpot and singing songs when they were suddenly cornered by this Red Dragon and countless lord-tier monsters.
It kept going on about some martial arts tournament, then set those monsters on Jhin in a relay of endless battles, nearly making him boil over with rage.
Whose martial arts tournament is a relay gauntlet? That's called a defense-of-the-arena match, all right? Since when does a lone human take on lord-tier monsters back-to-back—it's unfair, rematch!
For the moment Jhin really had no way to safely leave with Kyaru under the Red Dragon's watchful gaze, so he had no choice but to go along with its terms for now. Although it had been utterly unreasonable at first, this Red Dragon was surprisingly easy to talk to—it had even agreed to something like providing him special ingredients whenever he won.
Since he'd planned to hone himself anyway, and now someone was offering free sparring partners on top of special ingredients, why wouldn't Jhin go along with it? So every time he won the day's relay gauntlet, he'd eat his fill and haul off a huge pile of special ingredients.
Once he even brought a finished dish to the Red Dragon, trying to bribe it with fine food. Unfortunately, though it looked deeply tempted, for some reason it merely accepted it without eating, then turned around and had the wyvern subspecies carry it away.
It left Jhin muttering to himself: Could this Red Dragon actually be a female dragon? Its voice doesn't sound like it, though—why won't it eat in front of others, having it shipped back to eat instead?
Naturally, he had no idea that the mouthwatering delicacy had been delivered to Letishi.
Since the boss hadn't eaten first, how could it, as an underling, dare to eat in front of the boss?
Mistakenly believing it disliked such food, Jhin never again offered the Red Dragon anything to eat, which left it occasionally shooting him a couple of very secret, resentful glances.
Don't you have any sense, human? After you deliver the boss's portion, give me one too!
"Interesting... whatever killed that dumb gorilla was definitely no ordinary weapon. Just what exactly is it that I've been overlooking..." Letishi narrowed its eyes and scanned over Jhin as he ate in the images.
His rate of growth was astonishing—so fast that every time Letishi woke, it thought it had accidentally slept away another few years.
His attack movements were no longer wasteful, and he could quickly adapt to monsters' varied methods of attack, no longer suffering losses out of insufficient understanding. If the earlier Jhin had been, in its eyes, a gem waiting to be polished,
then now, Letishi considered him a naturally perfect gem—one that needed only an external force to shatter the outermost shell of stone to release a brilliance all its own.
If he kept growing at this rate, he really could pose a threat to me—though that would probably still take another five or six hundred years. And who knows whether humans even live that long.
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