Tondemo Skill De Isekai Hourou Meshi

Chapter 141-145

Ch 141 — Water Assault

The next morning after eating breakfast we started off, heading through the forest in the direction of the level's boss area. To keep the Gluttonous Trio from bickering I imposed the same rota as the day before, they would fight the monsters we encountered in order starting with Fer then Dora-chan then Sui and back to Fer and so on.

The first monster we ran into after we left Fer's Barrier was a Murder Grizzly like the one Dora-chan defeated so gorily yesterday then a group of Giant Killer Mantises, thirty strong this time followed by a Giant Centipede like the one Sui-chan had defeated in a single hit back in Ishtam forest, only bigger. Next up was a bunch of about fifty Wild Apes, B-rank monsters. There were other creatures, moths and birds and such that were defeated in passing as we progressed rapidly through the forest but the only monsters populating the 26th level worthy of mention were generally of A-rank and B-rank. Even monsters of that level were easily dealt with by my contracted monsters, of course. Fer spent much of the journey muttering about 'small fry'...

The high-ranking monsters dropped items quite often once they had been defeated and I spent a lot of time collecting those drops and packing them away in my Item Box. I didn't bother trying to keep track of them figuring I could sort them out once we had cleared the dungeon and we were safely back on the surface in Doran. It didn't seem like my Item Box had any real limit to what it could hold, after all. It was still going to be a pain though... While I was thinking about trivial things like that, Fer stopped abruptly.

"There's a Killer Hornet nest up ahead..." he announced. Is a Killer Hornet a monster like a regular hornet, or something worse? If Fer was being this cautious I guessed 'something worse' was the correct answer.

"Ah, Killer Hornets? I'm not good at fighting that kind of monster." Dora-chan said with some distaste. "There's always a lot of them and they can fly about as well as I can." That was quite an admission from the Pixie Dragon who was always boasting of his flying ability. If Dora-chan said something like that then it sounded like the Killer Hornets would be a problem for him to deal with. But Fer could handle them, right?

"Sure I can." Fer agreed with some reluctance. "I don't think they're strong individually but they keep buzzing around and it's hard to aim at them, like Pixie Dragons." Dora-chan gave Fer a Look which the Fenris monster totally ignored. "Knocking them down one by one, it's annoying..."

Well, if they had a nest up ahead then it was likely there'd be a lot of Killer Hornets to fight all at once and I could see why Dora-chan and Fer would be less willing to just charge in and deal with them. Their fighting styles and magic attacks worked best against large individual monsters or small groups of such monsters that didn't dodge around a lot. How many Killer Hornets would there be, I wondered — dozens, or maybe hundreds?

"Well, we can start with the normal way to deal with a nest of these guys." Dora-chan said.

"Yes." Fer agreed. "We attack and destroy the nest first then get rid of the Killer Hornets outside the nest after. That way they don't get any reinforcements."

That sounded sensible, kill all the Hornets still inside the nest before they can get out. If we attacked the Killer Hornets outside the nest first then the ones inside would come out and we'd have to fight them as well. Get rid of the ones inside the nest somehow and it becomes easier.

I asked Fer where the nest was. He led us to a gap in the trees where we could see the nest up ahead, a bulbous structure about the size of a wagon attached to the base of a particularly large tree. Some Killer Hornets, coloured yellow and black like wasps but 30cm in length were buzzing around the nest on patrol. We wouldn't be able to sneak up any closer without being detected by the guards, Fer said at which point all the Killer Hornets inside would come out and attack us.