Chapter 1354 It’s Like Chasing, It’s Like Following, It’s Like Running Away Part 1

The demerit of the Arcana card being reversed is that the Recast Time on my skills is actually quadrupled. And while I have found out in actual combat situation that this is a serious injury to my overall build, it is not actually an injury that could be considered as fatal…… At least that’s my honest opinion.

Certainly, the fact that a skill can only be used once per battle must be resolved immediately and without delay, but that does not mean that the skill itself cannot be used. There are also raw stats that I was able to increase thanks to the Status Points through level-up process, unique skills and items, raid encounters, encounters with Extraordinary Monsters and all the other things like that.

The good news is that even if I don’t have the skills to use at any given time or situation, I can physically push the triceratops away to the extent that you can actually play around with it and don’t risk my own death in the process.

「Yeah……」

「Would you like to have something repaired real quick?」

「Huh? O-Oh, yeah. Since you are offering and it’s free, then I don’t see the reason why not. It’s not like I’m going to lose anything from it.」

But I wonder…… No, I don’t think that this is about it. I feel like there is something more to my underperforming. There is something really strange about it as of late. It’s not something directly physical issue, but rather something that is there, and it’s really distracting…… Maybe it’s because I have not been getting enough of sleep as of late?

「Hueh……?」

「I have finished repairing it. I know it’s not a mass produced weapon or anything of the sort, but the more I see it, the more I want to take it apart and examine it from every possible direction…… How can I make a blade that causes burn damage just by being too close to it? I must know!」

「Nhh, ahh, thanks a lot.」

Alright, Aradval Rebuild’s durability is back to maximum, so I can go to town with it once more. Now let’s just move on.

Basically, what we are doing right about now is the strategy devised by the player base for the sole purpose of traversing the Sea of Trees area. If I were alone in here I would have just popped some of my skills and used them in tandem with Critical Speed to traverse this area in no time at all. But since right now I am in the larger party, it is safer to just stick to the ground and go through this area like you would normally do.

However, no matter what kind of strategy you are following, there is one thing that is common for all of them: if you see a Tri-Headed Tyrannosaurus Rex-like monster, you haul ass. No matter of its color. No matter of your own level and equipment. You just haul ass out of there as fast as possible. Not that I can blame anyone for doing just that.

「For the time being, it seems that we are in luck. It seems that Dracarus Dinocerberus is not anywhere nearby, isn’t it? It wouldn’t be such a peaceful trek through the Sea of Trees area if the red variety was to come our way completely out of the blue. Especially if it was the Red one……」

「Recently, I’ have heard that the number of Black ones seems to be on the increase. But apparently bumping into one of those is mostly Luck based, so there is no real way of actually confirming that.」

「Black Tyranno, huh……? Ahh, could it be that it has something to do with the Extraordinary Monsters?」

While both Imron and Natsu-san are having a conversation that goes a little bit like this, I cannot help it but to think that they might actually jinx this whole situation if they keep on bringing it up over and over again.

As far as I can tell, it seems that Drakarus Dinocerbersu is a strong individual with resistance to all kinds of attacks, but since I know only the “Scarlet” version of it, which is tough enough to simply refuse to die no matter what you do to it, I can only imagine that its Extraordinary version is only going to be even more ridiculous than that. But they just keep on talking about it as if it was nothing special…… You guys, do you even realize what you are doing? It is the type of boss character whose absolute HP stands above all other monsters, and even if it had only ten percent of it left, it is still more than a dozen of Player’s max HP pool combined. Do you even realize just how absolutely horrifying this is?

If you’re not careful around the beast like that, it will smash you flat and tear you to shreds in an instant. In terms of resilience, it is resilient enough to withstand even a full frontal assault of a Heroic Weapon, so even someone like Pencilgton and her Armor Penetrating Holy Lance might have been grinded into minced meat before long. But oddly enough, this is not even the work of a ridiculously high Vitality stat. It’s just that its HP and natural defenses are so huge that even after attacking it for a while without stopping you wouldn’t be able to see its HP bar diminish all that much. It would seem to me that it is something akin to a Cheat-level boss, one that was created by the excited development team and then implemented into the game without proof-checking, so that they had no idea just how OP and absurd it is going to be in real combat situation. Or at the very least that’s my take on it. I might be wrong here, but I think that I might actually be onto something here.

「Let’s go through the forest as quickly as possible, at least until we manage to get into the swamp area. There should not be any monster of this caliber around there, right? Or at the very least not that we know about it.」

「Once we get there we should be relatively safe for sure, but…… I don’t know about dangerous monsters. There might be some of them out there, and there might not be.」

Most probably, this Sea of Trees area is the place where at the current moment Dracarus Dinocerberus reigns supreme because of its sheer power, resilience and numbers. So they are the top dog of the local food chain. And if you were to add its Etraordinary version into the mix, the one that reemerges over time even when its defeated, that would be a total and complete overkill. Without a shadow of a doubt. Even one of those things would be more than enough, and apparently there is a whole pack of those things around here! That’s just plain old scary!

Not to mention the other causes for concern, like those weird fist cyclopes. True, I have only seen them during my battle against the Great Red Devourer, but…… Maybe they are just another type of a Raid Monster? But be that as it may, its plow was still powerful enough to wound my Brother Tyranno there…… No, not just wounded. I am sure that this one blow managed to erase the ninety nine percent of its humongous HP bar, which is scary enough on its own. One blow to be as powerful as that? As long as the Raid Monster is active in earnest, it is highly possible that the Cyclopes are also in the forest somewhere at this point in time. It is highly possible that they are inside of the Sea of Trees right as we speak.