Okano The Unwanted Undead Adventurer: Volume 9

1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-1-7183-2116-8
Verlag: J-Novel Club
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, Band 9, 250 Seiten

Reihe: The Unwanted Undead Adventurer

With the help of Lorraine, Isaac, Laura, and the rest of his companions, Rentt defeats the vampire Shumini after he attacks Maalt. However, in order to take control of the new dungeon, Rentt has to turn Rina into a vampire and make her his familiar.

Both Rentt and Rina have leveled up, so Isaac suggests they try out their newfound abilities. He also offers to teach them about a vampire's most notable skill: Division. Not everything goes as expected though, because while they were supposed to transform into a bat, Rina transforms into a cat and Rentt into a...tree?

Meanwhile, people are flocking to Maalt to study the newly formed dungeon. Not to be left out, Rentt and his companions set out on their next adventure to explore the dungeon's secrets!

Fighting powerful monsters, solving countless mysteries, and becoming stronger! The adventures of Rentt, the undead adventurer who aims to become a Mithril-class adventurer, continues in this thrilling ninth volume!

Autoren/Hrsg.

Okano, Yu

Weitere Mitwirkende

Jaian

Akimoto, Noboru

Leseproben

“This is closer to arson than it is to ignition,” I mumbled as I watched the pillar of flame burn in front of me.

I was a bit worried that the hedge maze might catch fire, but it only smoldered when the flames neared it. Was it because the plants were alive and wet, or was it something else? Given the scale of the flames, I was pretty sure even a living tree would combust. Perhaps the hedge maze had special properties that kept it from burning.

Once the flames had subsided, the three of them approached. Wide-eyed, Rina said, “I can’t use a spell that powerful! You know that, right?”

“You seem to be operating under a misunderstanding,” Lorraine explained. “That was Aliumage, a basic life magic spell. As long as they have enough mana to activate magic, anyone should be able to use it. There’s no reason you couldn’t cast it, Rina.”

Rina and Lorraine had apparently had plenty of time to get acquainted while I was asleep. They seemed pretty comfortable with each other. Evidently, Lorraine felt she’d gained a little sister and a lab rat, while Rina felt she’d gained a big sister and a delicious morsel. That sounded pretty creepy, but if they were fine with it, it was probably okay.

While I was thinking that over, Rina looked at Lorraine in shock. “Wait, that was life magic? I mean, that’s the incantation he used, but are life spells supposed to be so strong they burn down an entire house like that one just did?”

“Life magic spells have very limited effects, but they don’t require a lot of mana. They’re only useful for things like mundane chores around the house. Well, the term is an imprecise phrase in common parlance. There’s a more technical academic name for them, but since only scholars use it, let’s set that aside for now. At any rate, by that definition, Rentt’s spell was life magic but not actually life magic.”

“Just as I thought,” I murmured.

The snack and the lab rat looked at me like I’d grown two heads. They were being a little mean, in my opinion.

I was only joking about the whole snack and rat thing. Although, I figured Rina would feed on Lorraine at some point, and Lorraine would absolutely experiment on Rina. At any rate, we needed to continue our evaluation.

?????

I could tell my mana had increased quite a bit. Still, there were plenty of people who had a lot more mana than I did. But compared to when I was alive, I was now about as strong as 150 Rentts. Well, that was just a guess.

In terms of class, I was probably on par with an average Gold-class adventurer. However, I still wasn’t that good with magic, so I was pretty sure I’d lose to a Bronze-class mage in an actual fight. I was okay with that as long as I took into account overall ability.

“Rina, you don’t need to compare yourself to Rentt,” Lorraine said. “He’s odd in all sorts of ways. You can’t include him in the sample set, because as an outlier, he throws off the average.”

I guess I wasn’t suitable for comparison, but she could’ve been a little more tactful about it. Then again, this was nothing new either.

I was aware that I had always been a bit of an oddball, even before I became undead. For example, I hadn’t been all that strong, but I did possess spirit, mana, divinity. And I had been fixated on solo adventuring despite my weaknesses.

Ordinarily, most adventurers at the level I’d been before I died would have given up and gone looking for a new job. Or they would have teamed up with other adventurers, working jobs appropriate to their level until they’d saved enough to become an innkeeper or a merchant. That was an average adventurer’s life.

All the people I used to be friends with who never really blossomed as adventurers all ended up going that route in the end. Sometimes I wondered how they were doing. Not many stuck around Maalt. Adventurers were really just wanderers with a need to roam; few put down roots in their hometowns.

I was getting off topic, though.

“Still, I’m also a lesser vampire, or something like one, so aren’t I also an outlier like Rentt?” Rina asked Lorraine.

Rina seemed surprisingly calm about all this. Or maybe it wasn’t that surprising. Even when she first met me, she’d been surprised and a little shy at first, but once she accepted who and what I was, she hadn’t hesitated to help me. When I’d said I couldn’t go home because of my appearance, Rina had kept insisting it was possible. When it came to optimism, she was always far more upbeat and forward-looking than I was.

Lorraine thought for a moment and nodded. “That’s certainly possible given that Rentt gave you some of his blood. That’s something we can confirm through testing. Which reminds me... It’s a bit late to ask now, but aren’t you shocked or surprised that you’re now a vampire, Rina? You seem awfully nonchalant about the whole thing. You didn’t panic when Isaac described you as a lesser vampire. At the time, you hadn’t had time to process it. But that’s certainly not the case anymore, is it?”

“Oh. You know, when you put it that way, you’re right,” Rina replied. “I guess normally I’d be a little more confused. But I already knew Rentt. Good people are still good even if they become monsters. Besides, it seems like my emotions are a little more subdued now.”

“Ah, so you’d already processed that shock because you met Rentt as a ghoul. I believe Rentt mentioned something about his emotions becoming less pronounced when he became undead. Is this a common occurrence, Isaac?”

“Yes,” Isaac confirmed. “Given that I was born a vampire, I haven’t experienced it myself. However, it does appear to occur when a human becomes a vampire. It’s not as though they lose all emotions or anything of the sort, though. A gentleman I knew who’d become a vampire described it to me. You do become calmer, and you think more rationally.”

“I thought Rentt and Rina were rare examples,” Lorraine remarked. “There are still humans who become vampires?”

“As my mistress noted, sometimes a vampire will create a partner by turning a human. However, it’s not a common occurrence as far as I’m aware. Modern vampires mostly choose partners from among other vampires. There are some that couple with humans for a lark, but even in those cases, it’s rare that they’ll turn them.”

That meant vampires could have children with other vampires. I didn’t know anything about vampires creating a partner, but every so often I’d hear rumors of that sort of ‘play.’ Most of the time, the rumors about half-vampire, half-human children—dampirs—were outright lies or a misunderstanding.

In rural villages, sometimes people would be mistakenly labeled as a dampir and ostracized for it. However, it almost always turned out that they weren’t actually dampirs, but people who had a special magic eye that they couldn’t control, or people who had too much mana and were unconsciously manifesting magic around them. Real dampirs were probably about as rare as Mithril-class adventurers. I’d never seen one. But there were countless monsters I’d never seen before in person.

These fake dampir reports tended to gather a lot of attention, so I usually went out of my way to investigate them for spending money. I usually found something useful like someone with a magic eye or someone with too much mana. I didn’t want to do anything creepy like using them as sacrifices or transplanting their magic eye into me. I did it because it was useful for mages looking for apprentices or knightly orders and armies looking for promising recruits. In the end, very few really had those unique abilities.

?????

“I’d certainly like to ask more about vampires and their ecology,” Lorraine said, “but I suppose that can wait. At any rate, it’s safe to assume that Rina’s nonchalance stems from a combination of the effects of becoming a vampire and the fact that she’s already familiar with people who have turned into monsters. I’m glad she’s not the sort to fall into a blind panic.”

Rina tilted her head. “What would you have done if I had panicked?”

“If you would’ve listened to reason, I’d have sat you down and talked to you about it until you understood. You’ve suddenly become a vampire; a little panic or confusion would be natural. But if it seemed like you might start declaring you’ve become a vampire...”

“And if I had done that?”

“I might’ve had to eliminate you. You would have been a threat. I would have had no choice.”

Lorraine had said this casually, as though she was stating the obvious. That made her words all the more unnerving. It wasn’t that she was heartless. She just tempered her emotions with rationality. If she only had two choices, she’d immediately choose the more important outcome and discard the alternative.

In this case, it would’ve been a choice between Rina and me. It wasn’t that she saw Rina as a nuisance, but if she had no other choice, she’d eliminate her.

I was really glad that Rina was such a positive person. When I thought about it, most people would have reacted a bit more negatively to Lorraine’s words. Rina’s sensibilities, however, were a bit different from normal. Perhaps it was due to the fact that her emotions were a bit more subdued now as a vampire.

In a perfectly...