Chapter 9.2
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Translator: Reflet
Editor: Weasalopes
「Hiroshi-san！？」
「I’m okay！」
Lopping off the fat root that had pierced his chest, Hiroshi yelled out in response to Artiem as he forcibly removed the rest of it. Even though he appeared as if he were seriously injured, Hiroshi hadn’t suffered any serious damage.
In actuality, having strong resistance also meant that important organs such as intestines and eyeballs were just as tough as the rest of the body. Now, that didn’t mean that Hiroshi was excused from the fatal injury of having his head chopped off. However, the majority of these animals had the same weakness, that being their damage output severely fluctuated depending on the player’s resistance. A good example of this can be seen from when Hiroshi was attacked by the assassin: she couldn’t even cut an inch of his neck off.
Now, of course there were plenty of exceptions to this. The most notorious of these were certain varieties of dragons and their rage modes, which enabled them to strike through any defense as if it were that of a normal organism. Therefore if one of said dragons were to pierce him deeply through, he would die in a single hit. Plus it was quite common to have creatures who would be severely weakened by cutting off their brittle horns or creatures who would become immobile by lopping off the base of their frail tails, which either way would not lead directly to death but was fatal nonetheless. However, thankfully, the humanoid variety was quite normal and had no weaknesses that would remain weaknesses as long as they became stronger.
Now, when it came to mental weaknesses that were unconquerable, races with a certain amount of intelligence and individuality encountered this issue too many times to count. Hiroshi’s gynophobia would also enter into this category. Although this didn’t change the fact that he was physically tough, it was still a burden.
At any rate, the evil ent’s attacks certainly succeeded in damaging Hiroshi, but given his energy and defense, it was far from enough to put an end to him. Still, the wound looked realistic enough to make the wrong assumption.
「It sure as heck doesn’t LOOK okay！」
「I mean sure it hurts, but it still ain’t doin’ much.」
Hiroshi responded quite calmly to Artiem’s shriek, activating Minor Heal three times to fully recover. Honestly, the wound would have healed in a minute’s time if he had left it be, but he couldn’t risk having the same kind of attack polishing off his health right after that.
The mechanism of evil ent attacks was quite simple. He had simply taken the type of attack that nullified any defensive enhancements from magic or throwaway items, which was to be expected from many bosses of this variety. Judging from the sensation, it seemed that there was also a type of attack that nullified natural resistance defense to a certain degree as well, which was quite rare. Judging the opponent’s offense and the damage from earlier, it had probably ignored about 25% of Hiroshi’s raw defense. At that point in time, the effects of Fortress had just worn out, so Hiroshi had taken an unprecedented amount of damage.
Normally a suitable cost would accompany an attack like that, but in the case of this boss and their sturdy mass, it wasn’t realistic to try and force them to unleash attacks with bad cost performance to slow them down. It wouldn’t be out of the question for the ent to be directly drawing energy from the earth, in which case their stamina would be infinite.
「So y’know, if they let out an attack like that…」
Anticipating his enemy’s next attack, Hiroshi got a firmer grip on his pole axe, crouching down and carefully shuffling over to where they were. Of course, he made sure to recast Fortress and overlap Outface with yet another Outface.
「It basically means……」
One of the roots began groaning as it launched the same attack at Artiem. Seeing everything unfold, Hiroshi cleared away one attack with his axe and blocked another with his body. Seeing as he was able to halt the enemy with his outer body surface, it seemed that they could not ignore personal enhancement skills like Fortress that boosted one’s defense. Apparently, this time around, the amplified defense gained from Fortress far overmatched the ent’s capacity to nullify defense. As a result, it could not damage Hiroshi like it did earlier.
Incidentally, if we were to numerically display the damage from earlier, the attack took off slightly more than 2% of Hiroshi’s max hp. Considering how Makoto had the same amount of HP as Hiroshi and still would have lost about 30% of her HP to an attack like that, it was easy to tell just how overpowered Hiroshi’s defense was.
Needless to say, if Artiem were hit, she wouldn’t last a second, and Tatsuya or Haruna would take enough damage to where they would be on the brink of death. The reason why they wouldn’t be quite dead was because their max HP itself was high. To elaborate further, the only one who would still retain a decent amount of defense after an attack like that was Hiroshi, and that was about it. With 25% of their physical defense shaved off, Makoto and Haruna would essentially be the same.
Given that the enemy had not used such a major attack in succession like this until now, Hiroshi could only assume one thing:
「This dude’s panicking！」
「Huh？」
Everyone doubted their ears. They couldn’t think of any basis to say that their opponent was panicking.
「Why do you think that？」
「Simple really. Methinks we got some reinforcements headed our way.」
「You mean Haruna-san and the others？」
「Well yeah, who else?」
Gracefully striking down an attack aimed at Artiem, Hiroshi analyzed the current situation. Still, he wasn’t so free that he could confirm this. He didn’t know that the others were just nearby, but he did know that a considerable amount of time had passed since the battle began. It wasn’t out of the question for either Makoto’s group or Haruna’s group to arrive any second.
「So all we gotta do is stake it out till reinforcements arrive or push ’em into a corner and victory is ours, y’all！」
As Hiroshi stepped out, multiple branches and roots frantically tried to pierce Hiroshi. Yes, this only served to prove Hiroshi’s point, but it wasn’t like the ent could stop doing this in this situation.
「How’s yer body holdin’ up？」
「Not my best, but I’m still able to fight just fine.」
「Then it’s time we launch a counterattack.」
Hiroshi called out to Artiem as he saw her stand up cautiously. After she nodded at him, Artiem pulled the bow that Hiroshi had given her back to its limit. It was ill-suited for tree-type monsters, but it was better than nothing.
「Where ya lookin’, ya big oaf！」
Hiroshi activated Outface several times with gusto in order to prevent the ent from targeting Artiem. Realizing that it was pointless to target anyone other than Hiroshi, the roots and branches aimed at Artiem focused once again on Hiroshi. Hiroshi continued to shuffle forward even after taking all of those attacks.
「Keep it comin’, Treebeard！」
Hiroshi roared with Outface as he blocked, bodied, and lopped through every dense attack. By this point, all of their attacks just felt like they were caressing him, no matter how many times they struck. This evil ent may have created this dungeon with extreme bloodlust, but in the end, its attacks were only ever direct, easy-to-spot maneuvers. This was far from the potent malice displayed by human beings from time to time.
The real messed up way of handling enemies was to push them into a situation where self-destruction was unavoidable, all without laying a finger on them. Even something as simple as exaggerating a small matter, conveying it to everyone else in order to instill malice in them, and isolating them from society was fairly tame in comparison to what some humans were capable of. In that sense, this dungeon hadn’t even reached the threshold of manipulation, so no matter how evil it seemed to be, it was nothing particularly alarming.
To Hiroshi, who had experienced indescribable malice from people who were rotten to the bone, there was nothing special about evil ents. In general he was a faint of heart loser and coward who jumped at every little thing, but Hiroshi actually wasn’t all that scared of physical pain. He was more scared of when he was unsure of what the enemy was planning and how much damage he would receive- essentially, uncertainty of how badly wounded he would be. As someone who teetered on the brink of death on account of something as innocent as a chocolate, additionally suffering through unfair societal punishment, it was probably to be expected that he would overestimate potential casualties.
So in that sense, now that the evil ent had already shown itself and the max amount of damage it could inflict, it was no longer anything to fear. The scariest thing as of this moment was the prospect of something fatal happening to Artiem under their care and the subsequent anger of the elves. Nothing was worse than imagining the expressions of stifled fury on the elves’ faces.
So even if he risked his heart being punctured, Hiroshi refused to let Artiem get any further grazes. In order to ensure this, he would have to cut down all the moving timber he saw.
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