The Villainous Noble Tried His Hardest to Break the Original Storyline, and Now the Heroines Are Acting Weird - 19

Chapter 19

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Close-quarters combat required focusing more on how to land my magic on the enemy. Besides, I didn’t intend to make the sword my main weapon. I wanted to fight using a katana.

Why? Because it looked cool.

Anyway, I’d gathered a decent number of magic stones by now. Maybe it was about time I learned blacksmithing magic. I could also use my game knowledge to get gear from this world, but the strongest equipment was the Hero’s Sword, and I couldn’t use that.

In that case, if I could craft something from the weapons available in Final Quest, that would probably be stronger. In Final Quest, there were weapons you could craft using only magic stones. It was worth a try.

The Goddess was a bit of a klutz, so I figured there was a good chance I’d be able to make something. I thought I heard a voice go, 『Hm?』but I ignored it and kept hunting goblins.

I reached the deepest part of the labyrinth and defeated the Goblin Leader boss, effectively conquering the dungeon. Even after defeating the boss, the dungeon itself didn’t disappear. On the way back, I walked toward the exit, hunting more goblins as I went.

『It’s been quite a while since you’ve been reincarnated into this world, but wow… Your schedule is really tight…』

『You think so?』

『I mean, you’ve been doing something every single day with barely any breaks.』

『Back when I was working in an office, I was moving around even more every day.』

『Ugh…You were totally in a black company… 』

That said, I kind of thought the Goddess’s job was pretty black too. She was constantly looking after me—which, sure, was her own fault—but even while talking to me, she was always working on some paperwork. If her slow pace was only because she wasn’t very efficient, I could’ve let it slide, but that didn’t seem to be the case.

Maybe she had turned into a burnout case from overwork. For all I knew, the previous person had also gotten fed up from overwork, made some mistake, and used a resignation service to flee the job. Anyway, the reason I was pushing myself with such a brutal schedule was to save my little sister.

If I didn’t finish the main game by the time I turned twenty, the Hero Hunts would start popping up everywhere, and children would be slaughtered. If things got to that point, my little sister would definitely be affected…

Not to mention, she’d have to live her life in hiding. That kind of life would be horribly restrictive. The game had glossed over that part, but in reality, it would mean not even being able to sleep properly every night. I couldn’t allow my little sister to go through something like that.

This game was supposed to be hard enough that even a single wrong choice could lead to death. I needed to finish training by the time I turned seventeen, then either defeat the Demon Lords or negotiate peace between them and humanity, and finally take down the Great Demon Lord before I turned twenty to reach a happy ending.

It was a perfect plan. Honestly, though, from here on out the pace of leveling would slow down, and I was worried about how strong I could get. There was a real chance I wouldn’t be able to crush the Demon Lord with the overwhelming force I’d hoped for.

Well, even so… I think it was pretty clear who was responsible for putting me in this desperate situation to begin with.

『…G-Good luck.』

TheGoddess—the root of the problem—left me with only those words. Well, from my perspective, I was actually kind of enjoying this challenge. This was like a self-imposed restriction run, so it wasn’t all bad.

…If only my family and the fates of the heroes didn’t depend on it.

While I was living the same kind of life, several months passed. My level had reached 21, but it still felt like it hadn’t gone up much.

As expected, the experience point grind wasn’t very efficient. Normally, healing-based leveling only worked well if you had an ally with massive HP to heal repeatedly… I’d used the skill points I’d earned to learn the spells High Heal and Cure, so I figured I could now be called a mid-tier magic user without issue.

From the perspective of people in this world, I was probably already a monster beyond even high-tier mages. Cure healed various status ailments, while High Heal restored more HP than the standard Heal spell.

Then, with my remaining skill points, I learned blacksmithing magic, and immediately activated it. Using a large number of magic stones from my item box as materials, I tried crafting a weapon. It was the most basic of basic weapons—made using only magic stones.

The question was whether I could actually make it…

I was anxious, but after my MP was consumed and I checked the item box, I found a weapon labeled “Katana.”

Whoa, it works.

…It was probably somewhere around low-to-mid tier in the katana category. By Final Quest standards, it wasn’t a particularly powerful weapon, but in this world, it was likely a top-class weapon. The quality of the magic stones might be different, but since they were considered the same type of stone from a game mechanics standpoint, I figured it might work—and it did.

That was probably thanks to the Goddess.

『…T-The fact that you were able to make it isn’t because of a mistake in my settings, okay?』

『Really now?』

『P-Probably…』

How suspicious. She was probably frantically double-checking the settings right about now.

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