Dimension wave volume 5, p.1
Dimension Wave: Volume 5, page 1
Table of Contents
Cover
Color Illustrations
Prologue: Of Boats and Bobs
Chapter 1: Assist Combo
Chapter 2: Frog Karaage
Chapter 3: Fossils
Chapter 4: Fossil Cleaning
Chapter 5: Donations
Chapter 6: Fishing Guild
Chapter 7: The Public Square
Chapter 8: Fixed Notions
Chapter 9: Gibier Burgers
Chapter 10: Hunting Ground Go-Around
Chapter 11: Dark Salmon
Chapter 12: Ancient Dark Lord Lizardman
Chapter 13: Race Quest
Epilogue: A Missing Merchant
Bonus Textless Illustrations
About J-Novel Club
Copyright
Prologue: Of Boats and Bobs
The day after the Demon Lord’s invasion. As the sun rose and the morning mist lingered in the air, we set off into the wetlands. Despite how that may sound, it wasn’t all a complete slog thanks to the wooden bridges that spanned various places.
“Last night, I searched for all the quests we could accept in town,” Shouko said. “There are quests to defeat fifty Giant Purple Toads and fifty Big Brown Slugs, both of which I assume inhabit these wetlands. There is also one requiring us to defeat five unidentified large monsters said to dwell here.”
“Boss monsters, I daresay,” Yamikage surmised.
Tsumugi added, “It looks like there’s a mine here too.”
“Yeah,” I said, “there was one in the last place too. We’d better go and check if the materials we can get here are any different.”
“Hey, I like quests as much as the next guy, but blatant fetch quests don’t really do it for me,” muttered L’Arc.
“Right? I’d love to do something a little more interesting,” said Therese.
It was all rather uninteresting for quest lovers like L’Arc and Therese. That probably explained why they kept trying to stick to me—seeing as I always seemed to find the strange ones.
“We might as well hunt some other monsters while we’re at it,” I concluded.
“Oh, but there was a perfect one for you, little lady. You should go have some fun with it.”
“Did you find something interesting?”
“There was a guy saying he wanted someone to go fish up ten whitespotted char.”
“Char, huh.”
What did char look like again...? I thought over it for a moment. It wasn’t like I was actually a fisherman in real life. I knew all the common ones by heart, but sometimes I couldn’t remember which fish was which by name alone.
“I daresay,” said Yamikage, “that’s just what you wanted, milord, since you were so adamant on catching salmon.”
“Why’s that?”
“Whitespotted char are part of the Salmonidae family, I daresay.”
Oh, so in short, they’re related to the salmon I’ve been searching for!
“If I am remembering right, I daresay they put up a good fight,” she went on. “They’re apparently popular in sport fishing.”
Yamikage was surprisingly knowledgeable, even when it came to fish I knew barely anything about.
“I daresay I’ve eaten one before. Compared to salmon, it was a tad watery.”
Hmm...that’s good to know.
“So you already found your first lead on that salmon, huh?”
“It’s just in the same family, but it’s a start.”
On a sidenote, while preparing salmon as sashimi or something raw like that, it’s highly recommended to properly handle it for parasites. Fortunately, Dimension Wave didn’t seem to have parasites or anything of the sort, but if you went out of your way to take proper precautions anyway, the success rate of a dish still went up. You couldn’t just slice up any fish, plate it, and call it sashimi. There was more to it than that.
“Aight, I’ll do my best to fish up some whitespotted char. I’ll catch a whole bunch and whip up some char meunière. How’s that sound?”
“Sounds like a gourmand’s dream. I’m counting on you, Therese.”
“Yeah, yeah. It’s a shame we don’t have any alcohol to go with it.”
“Okay! Now we’ve got an excuse to get bro fishing! Let’s do this!”
And so, we used the wooden bridges to make our way across the wetland.
“The footing here is worse than I thought,” said Shouko.
I nodded. “We’ll need boats to reach the deeper places.”
We were using our mount pets to move around for mobility’s sake. Perhaps it was to be expected, but it quickly became evident that Yamikage’s ride was amphibious.
How enviable.
Brave Pekkle’s mount was in a similar position—a white chick with pink-tipped feathers that glided elegantly along the water’s surface. Would it have been rude to point out that he didn’t even need it? I mean, he was a Pekkle. He could swim.
As for mine...maybe I’d have better luck if I just switched over to the small boat, I thought as I rifled through my inventory...
“Huh? My mount can equip a boat.”
Just as I was about to pull the boat out of my inventory, that shield-shaped “equip” icon on my Library Rabbit mount lit up. That had to mean it could equip it.
“It’s a pet, but it can equip a boat?”
I tried equipping the boat to it just to see what would happen. And then, the small boat appeared right in front of my Library Rabbit and it hopped aboard. Its staff...was replaced by a paddle.
“A ride riding a ride,” L’Arc chuckled. “He’s really looking the part, at least.”
“You’ve got a perfect ferryman!” said Therese.
I was struck speechless. How exactly am I supposed to react to this?
“So he holds you in one hand and rows with the other, I daresay.”
“Yeah...looks like it.”
What a surreal setup. Let’s try moving around a bit.
Controlling it was the same as on land—I just had to concentrate on where I wanted to go, and my mount would row me there with the paddle. It was nice that I didn’t have to move it myself. And strangely, I felt pretty balanced.
The speed seemed to be around the same as Yamikage’s kappa mount.
“Is this the special ability of your pet, milord?”
“Hard to say.”
Incidentally, Tsumugi’s dog mount could handle the water to some extent and was able to cross the marshes with a doggy paddle.
As for Sheryl’s otter... Well, it could swim, obviously. It seemed to move just as well on water as on land, and with the way Sheryl was sitting on its back, she probably couldn’t even feel a difference. On the other hand, Shouko’s cat, L’Arc’s horse, and Therese’s mole couldn’t enter the water at all.
“There seems to be quite a bit of variation,” I said.
“Well, maybe they can hop in a boat like yours, bro?”
“Yes, perhaps,” said Shouko. “Sheryl, would you mind helping us with that later?”
“Okay.”
Sheryl happily agreed. We’ll have to gather the materials after this.
Just as we were trying out a few things, there was a heavy rustling...something large was crawling toward us through the morning mist.
“Looks like it’s monster time.”
“I shall take the lead! Let’s start with a Drain, I daresay!”
Yamikage angled herself at whatever it was and fired off her Drain—a spell she’d been using less frequently as of late. A satisfying, meaty sound filled the air as the spell hit true.
I followed it up with a swing of my fishing rod, hurling my lure at it. The lure soon struck and caught nicely.
Though we hadn’t been able to make it out at first, the monster that emerged turned out to be a Big Brown Slug...a monster that, well, looked like a giant slug.
“You’re on!” I psyched myself up.
“Here I come!” Shouko declared as she rushed out.
“Uh-huh...” Sheryl capped it off.
Before long, everyone had rushed out to attack the monster.
Since we had crossed through a new checkpoint, this monster was a bit tougher than those in the previous region. However, everyone had pretty much gotten the hang of combat, and they were well equipped. Add their high proficiencies to that, and they were able to dispatch the Big Brown Slug without any difficulty.
The battle lasted only a few minutes.
“Just forty-nine to go,” I said.
“So it seems,” Shouko replied. “And then, we’ll have to deal with the Giant Purple Toads too—let’s take care of this quickly.”
“All right! Let’s make sure this counts toward the total.”
“I wouldn’t mind if more came at us, I daresay.”
“Let’s finish up and observe the little lady.”
“Yeah!”
“You don’t need to watch over me. And if you want to finish up here, should I trigger a Fever?”
If I used my Fever Lure, it would guarantee a feeding frenzy.
“I’m good with that,” said L’Arc.
“Me too!” Therese concurred.
“We don’t have to go that far! Don’t just go along with those two, I daresay.”
All right, all right. So that idea’s been rejected.
“As a sidenote... I guess we’re all fine with slugs and frogs, huh?”
From my experience, most girls didn’t like those sorts of creatures, but Shouko and Yamikage seemed perfec tly fine. Tsumugi? She was my real sister. I already knew she could stand pretty much anything that wasn’t the bug that dealt psychic damage.
“’Twas just a big slug, I daresay. Frogs don’t bother me either.”
Ah, right, she did say she’d prefer to have one of those as a mount instead of what she got. Maybe she sees them as ninja summons.
“I don’t particularly dislike them either,” said Shouko. “Honestly, you won’t get far in battle if you are squeamish around monsters like these.”
“Point taken...”
It was a game, after all—no use fussing over it.
“There are people who can’t clean fish, but this is a game, right?” said my sister. “Oh, but...VR horror games can be pretty brutal. Those ones actually give me chills.”
“I’m fine with them,” said Therese, “but L’Arc can get squeamish around bugs.”
“You have to understand that you’re the strange one when you stomp cockroaches without a second thought! I’m fine with everything else!”
So L’Arc thinks Therese is too tough as well. Being able to stomp those psychic damage generators is pretty impressive.
Everyone here was—how to put it—a bit dauntless in their own way.
“Are you going to dismantle it, Kizuna?”
“Yeah... I need to diversify my dismantling anyway.”
Quantity was important, but more than that, I needed to take on unfamiliar dismantling tasks if I wanted to fulfill the conditions for higher-tier skills. That said, I heard you could get a few of them just by defeating the same enemies again and again, so it really was case-by-case.
There were still some parts of the system that seemed vague to me. But the general gist seemed to be that you could grow stronger by challenging the unknown. With that in mind, I got right to dismantling the slug.
Which tool is right for this... Let’s go with Cerberus Slaughter. The ice knife will do too much damage.
My Cerberus Slaughter had begun to feel a bit obsolete, but it was still usable for dismantling. I plunged the pitch-black blade into the slug.
Where have I felt this sensation before? It’s not quite like Jello. The firmness is a little different. It’s closer to slicing up a large shellfish.
I wound up with some Big Slug Meat and Big Slug Slime. Also, there was something called a Slug Crystal, which was described as a substance that formed in their slug bodies.
The crystal seemed like it could be used to craft armor. As for the meat, while it was edible, I for one wasn’t going to cook it by choice.
“That’s about it. Just to make sure to check them off my dismantling list...I’ll probably dismantle around ten of them.”
Dismantling ten Big Brown Slugs would be enough to count it as a new creature type for skill progress. It wasn’t just quantity—you needed to dismantle a wide variety of monsters. It was kinda a pain, but I knew I’d hit a wall if I didn’t do it.
Essentially, it was like expanding my catch variation in fishing. In that sense, fishing and dismantling really were a great skill combo.
“Then let’s move on to the next one.”
“Yeah!”
Like that, we continued progressing through our wetland monster subjugation quests.
The next one we encountered was a Giant Purple Toad—a frog bigger than we were. It wasn’t a boss monster and was more than manageable with our current strength.
Naturally, I dismantled it. I got its poison sack, skin, bones, and meat—a variety of useful materials.
According to the item description, the thigh meat had a nice chew and could be used as a substitute for chicken. Maybe I should sneak it into a meal to surprise everyone.
“We’re taking them down pretty steadily,” Tsumugi said after a while. “It might not take long to get to fifty.”
“That’d be great. By the way, what are we doing about that unidentified monster?”
“Yeah, that’s the problem, isn’t it? What monster do you think it’s talking about?”
“When we accepted the quest, they mentioned something about a villager who went deep into the wetlands and disappeared. The person who went to look for them came back saying they saw something terrifying...”
“Sounds like some typical flavor text to me,” said L’Arc. “It could be interesting if it’s a boss.”
“Right? We don’t even know the first thing about it,” Therese nodded.
There was some unknown monster lurking in the wetlands, and we were supposed to take it down. Sure, I got that part, but where exactly were we supposed to find it?
We headed deeper and deeper...the fog growing thicker along the way.
“It’s getting harder to see,” I grumbled.
“That it is,” said Shouko.
It felt like something could pop out at any moment—and just as I had that thought, a loud splash echoed through the fog. The shadow of something large was swimming toward us.
“Something’s there. It might just be that large monster we’re looking for.”
“You’re sure it’s not just another Giant Purple Toad?”
“No, it doesn’t move like one. And...do toads have tails?”
The silhouette clearly had something like a tail. It definitely wasn’t a Giant Purple Toad, at the very least.
“All right, let’s see what we’ve got,” L’Arc said, taking his stance. “Therese! Yamikage! You two take the first strike.”
“On it! Thunder Bolt!”
“Leave it to me, I daresay!”
At times like these, it was up to our long-range attackers to take the initiative. The rest of us readied our weapons and prepared for combat as the two of them calculated the distance and fired off a lightning spell and a Drain.
“Gwwooooaaar!”
The attack effects flashed as an enormous, mud-covered amphibian emerged from the fog... It was a lizard-like creature roughly five meters from head to tail, roaring as it charged at us.
“Here I come!” shouted Shouko. “But...this terrain makes it hard to move.”
Her mount wasn’t built for the water, so she had to dismount and take a stance with her fan, which she used to divert the monster’s first strike.
“Tsumugi, we’re up next,” said L’Arc.
“Yeah!” She nodded. “That’s one big newt!”
“Salamander...” Sheryl murmured.
“Looks like Sheryl got it right. Its name is Mist-Mud Salamander.”
It raised a splash as it pelted us with bolts of water.
Whoa there, that was close. I managed to dodge thanks to the distance and a quick order I gave to the Library Rabbit to row us out of the way, but I was inches away from getting hit.
“The water keeps tripping up my feet,” Shouko complained.
“How about we lure it toward one of the wooden bridges?”
“Sounds like a plan. Let’s do this, everyone!”
“Understood, I daresay.”
“Uh-huh.”
With everyone agreeing that our poor mobility was an issue, we quickly got to work drawing the Mist-Mud Salamander to someplace where it would be easier to fight. However...when we tried to draw it closer to the nearest bridge, the salamander didn’t give chase. It backed off and kept a distance, instead one-sidedly launching bullets of water and mud at us.
“Looks like the game isn’t going to let that happen.”
“How bothersome, I daresay.”
“That’s such a killjoy.”
“How about we ask Sheryl to handle it, bro? She’s good at fighting in water, right? And so are you.”
Huh... You’re turning to me here?
“If we’re talking mobility, Yamikage should be fine—with the kappa.”
“I daresay, you have a point, but...”
“Fighting back with long-range is doable, but it’ll take a lot of time and effort.”
No, wait...we have it. The perfect equipment for this situation: the Kappa Costume!
“Little lady, it’s written all over your face.”
“Kizuna, I already know what you’re going to try to subject us to. You don’t have to say it.”
“Then you’ll wear it?”
“I did not say that.”
“What a shame. Right, Yamikage?”
“Why single me out?! You’re in the same boat, I daresay!”
Tsk... Is dressing like a kappa really that bad?! C’mon!
“So do we stick to whittling it down from afar?”
“That might be best... But Kizuna, couldn’t you do something with your specialty weapon?”
“You’ve been using that fishing rod in battle a lot lately.”
