kscans

Chapter 9 - The Bounty of the Mountains (Part 2)

I panicked at first, but looking back, its charge was slow enough that I could dodge it with plenty of room to spare. Observing it calmly, I did not feel that much of a threat. Now that it had lost sight of me and was wandering around, couldn’t I just take the billhook knife from my waist, slash its neck, and be done with it?

I tried approaching the boar with Stealth still active... and it remained unaware. In that case, I should take a chance...

I closed the distance in a do-or-die attempt and slit its throat. The boar thrashed about for a while before it finally stopped moving. I checked with Appraisal and Perception, and it seemed to be well and truly dead. I had won my first-ever battle... and I was calmer than I expected. This must mean...

"...Luckily, it seems this one was a low-level individual. Even I could take it down without much trouble..."

That was wrong.

A Mudderboar was a monster equivalent to C-rank for adventurers. The one Yuri had defeated seemed to be a young individual, but even so, it was not something a newly reincarnated seven-year-old could defeat alone. This was solely due to the fact that the god had boosted Yuri’s stats to an absurd degree when reincarnating him into this world, but Yuri had no way of noticing. There were several reasons for this.

First, as mentioned before, the greatest culprit was the line in the god’s letter that said, "...I have given you additional abilities that are minimally necessary to survive there..." After reading this, Yuri had come to believe that "my abilities are at the minimum level for survival here." The god had intended it to mean a level where he could "at a minimum survive" even if he fought the strongest monster in the area, so their interpretations were worlds apart.

Second, it was a feature of this world’s Appraisal that the danger rank of monsters and wild beasts was not displayed. The danger rank was something decided by the people living in a particular area, and evaluations could differ from place to place, so it could not be considered universal knowledge. This was understandable, but it did nothing to correct Yuri’s misunderstanding.

Third, because the god’s letter had been so thorough, and because Appraisal and Rural Life Guide were so competent, Yuri never felt the need to open the help files and investigate for himself. If there had been a lot of unknown information, he might have tried to learn more by fiddling with his skills, eventually discovering the existence of the help files. However, because he lacked that motivation, Yuri would continue on without even realizing that such a thing as a help file existed.

In any case...

"But... it’s pretty big. This should solve my protein needs for a while. ...I was wondering what to do when I couldn’t hunt small birds anymore..."

That’s right. At first, Yuri had considered small birds as a source of protein. He planned to use the old, unusable seed grain as bait to lure them in and capture them with traps. In fact, he had actually scattered the bait and attracted the small birds.

...That plan went awry after he heard the birds’ chirping.

‘grass seeds’

‘a little old’

‘but there’s a lot’

‘yep, edible’

Yuri couldn’t believe his ears when he heard the small birds’ chatter, and he blurted out, "You’re talking?!" But it seemed his words were not in human language, but in bird language. The slightly surprised birds then properly addressed Yuri.

‘human? you understand words?’

‘you gave us grass seeds?’

‘Ah... yeah, I had some extra... so I’m sharing...’

That was a lie.

He had scattered the old seed grain that he had no intention of eating as bait to catch and eat the birds that came to it. But... faced with the birds themselves, Yuri’s nerves were not steely enough to say such a thing.

‘oh, thanks’

‘we’ll have some’

‘Ah... go ahead.’

He could not bring himself to eat a creature he could hold a friendly conversation with, so Yuri had abandoned the hunt. But he had been racking his brain as to why this had happened... and then it hit him. Language (Mastery). That had to be the cause. He had thought it was convenient to be able to communicate with any tribe... but he never imagined there would be a pitfall like this.

He could not bring himself to hunt something he could talk to. He wondered if he could eat fish or insects, since he probably could not communicate with them, or if he should give up and live on plant matter alone... and that was when the monster that he "could not communicate with" appeared. Faced with an opponent that rejected dialogue and attacked without question, Yuri had no reason to hesitate to hunt it.