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Volume 11 Chapter 1 Part 5

My head is free from wordly and worthless thoughts, I am staying intensely focused without focusing on any object in particular as I try to imagine the unimaginable in my mind’s eye.

Fight. Just fight. Only fight. Fight hard. Don’t think about anything else, and then…

*PAT!*

… I have been awoken by a gentle pat on my shoulder.

It would seem that I have been the one who has fallen asleep.

There are two possible explanation for why that happened: either I I was so single-mindedly focused on fighting that I actually lost consciousness before I knew it, or the more probable one that a Beep Sheep used its Skill on me and that’s why I have fallen asleep.

Beep Sheep’s Skill is really terrifying.

「What about the monsters?」

I asked at the moment that my consciousness snapped back to reality, and Miria confirmed it for me in the next moment.

「This was, the last one, desu.」

She said while slashing Beep Sheep. Does that mean that every other enemy has been petrified by her? No. Since Miria has already stopped attacking, does that mean that she petrified the last one, or did she literally annihilated all of them?

As far as I can see, there are no more moving monsters around us. The girls must have cleaned all of them up while I was sleeping.

「I see. Thank you for your hard work as well, Vesta.」

I also thanked Vesta who was standing right behind me holding a Warning Stick. I guess that means that Vesta must have been the one who actually woke me up from my sleep.

Vigilance is most certainly one of the things than can make a person awake.

I was put to sleep by a monster, and when I woke up, the battle was over, which proves that It’s actually not good to try to concentrate too much without thinking about anything.

I can’t even say that the order of awakening is wrong. However, waking up is definitely refreshing.

You can wake up feeling refreshed, and it seems that if you hit it with a Warning Stick, people can be woken up quite easily.
As expected, should it be said that it’s such a good Warning Stick because it was made by Sherry, or should it be said that it’s natural because it’s a weapon item? Personally, I like to believe that it is so good because it is a masterpiece that has been painstakingly created by a Master Smith.

Now that I know that it is legitimately effective, I really want every member of my Party to carry it with them at all times.

Well, I might also be feeling like that because I have been sleeping for so little, because I have a feeling that if I have been asleep for longer, then I would still end up waking up feeling half-asleep even after being awoken by a Warning Stick.

Beep Sheep make it pretty easy to fall asleep, and after that, you can be easily awoken feeling refreshed by someone using a Warning Stick on you, so I feel like that might actually be a pretty coveted sleeping method for the people who have trouble sleeping…. It’s just too bad that such a thing can never become possible due to the fact that the monsters simply cannot be tamed to obey human orders.

Such a waste of a perfect business opportunity.

While occasionally fighting against the Beep Sheep, we repeated the Boss battles against the Floor Bosses of the 37th and 38th floors by going back and forth between these two floors.

During those brief battles, no one of us got put into sleep by the Beep Sheep again, so we continued to fight without having any more opportunities to use the Warning Stick, by which I mean that I myself never got to use the Warning Stick on anyone else.

I think that the thing that is mostly to blame for is the fact that I am essentially in the rearguard the entire time, which means that even if I do get put to sleep by the Beep Sheep Skill, I won’t be the first one to be attacked by monsters focused on fighting the members of the vanguard, but that also means that the members of the vanguard won’t be able to wake me up immediately after I fall asleep.

The obvious solution to that problem is to become a member of the vanguard myself. That way, even if I do end up falling asleep, the other members of the vanguard will be able to wake me up immediately, even if the monsters are going to be nearby, whereas if I kept on being in the vanguard, waking me up would be postponed in favor of waking the other members of the vanguard up.

That is the reason for why no one else was asleep when I was woken up. The reason for why I was woken up the last was exactly because I was in the rearguard away from the vanguard, and not because the girls decided that waking me up as fast as possible was not necessary… or at least I think so.

It’s not like they think that anything can be done as long as Miria is there. I hope.

In fact, it is quite so.

No, no. The monsters that Miria petrified were destroyed by me with my magic and Durandal, which means that I am very much needed here in order for our battle strategy to be effective

After the battle is over, though, that’s another story entirely.

Moreover, since MP can also be recovered at that time, I won’t be able to use Durandal to help the Party Members in the vanguard, and in consequence, that’s going to keep me further and further away from waking them with Warning Sticks in case they were ever put to sleep

Well, it’s not like I can help it in any way, since this is my way of ensuring that I can fight in a stable manner.

However, it’s nice to be able to fight stably, but if that keeps up, we’ll have to move up one floor each day, exactly like Roxanne wanted, and that’s not something that I want to do.

The battle time will be extended smoothly just by being able to fight stably.
This is going to be painful.

Until now, thanks to all the grinding and levelling that we’ve been doing, even when enemies attacked us, we were able to somehow mitigate their own increasing strength.

I also got the new Job, Jobless for myself and managed to level it up nicely, thanks to which both the magnitude of the damage received and the length of the battle time wasn’t growing as much as it could have.

Maybe that’s why Roxanne continues pushing us forward so much?
Roxanne-sensei, I would like you to avoid projecting your own values and expectations upon others, and understand that while things might be too easy for you, they’re growing difficult for the rest of us.

I wonder what will happen if six of these things appear at once.

「This attack is mainly magical, so it’s good.」

Sherry provided another one of her analyses.

「Petrification from Miria’s sword does not have to activate all the time, but when it doesn’t, battles do tend to get more problematic.」

That’s right. It’s that much more problematic for us when her attacks do not trigger petrification. It goes a little something like this:

Miria’s attack doesn’t proc petrification –> petrification doesn’t turn enemies into stone -> enemy numbers don’t decrease

It is a very troublesome situation when it happens.

It’s also getting harder to level up my Jobs as fast as I could do that before, and that makes things harder for us as well, since we’re not getting stronger literally every day anymore.

In that case, the enemy will receive the effect of becoming stronger.

Moreover, I wonder if we’ll be able to reach the 44th floor soon by going up at our current pace with our current strength?

「Un, the difficulty of the battles went us as expected, but the current enemies are just fast and nothing else besides that.」

After going up the floors day after day, when we hit the 40th floor, our opponents were Rapid Rabbits: fast, troublesome enemies, since their speed makes it that much harder for Miria’s petrification to proc.

「Even if the number of enemies doesn’t decrease, it’s not that big of a problem.」

「It would be good if Miria was able to deal with enemies other than Rapid Rabbits as well.

「Let’s do it, desu!」

「I think we are going to be alright.」

Battles are numbers, Roxane. After all, Sherry is the only reliable one of the entire bunch as usual. Her opinions are always so reasonable.

「That’s right, Miria should focus on reducing the number of different monsters as much as possible.」