In Another World with JUST MONIKA 20 The Pain of Small Animals

We returned quicker than we left once Linze was willing to be carried piggyback on her sister's shoulders while Elze had stacked [Boosts] on her legs. On my part, I was yet to feel any strain whatsoever or any sign I'd be running out of magical power anytime soon. Maybe, like Monika, I didn't actually have an internal reserve of power and ran off world energy. Maybe it really was like bending.

Or maybe I was tapping lands for mana, who the heck knows.

"Oh my goooooshhh-!" Elze cried out as she dared to jump as high as she could and fully cleared the tree cover.

Beside her I kept pace my own explosive air jet boosts. On her face was a look of wide-eyed wonder at the sight and I smiled back. Up high, there was a feeling almost godlike in being able to do things like this without the assistance of machinery.

Linze was screaming her little white-haired head off. "I regret EVERYTHING!" she wailed.

/"With enough practice you all could do ninja tree-jumping for better speed and stealth,"/ Monika told us. /"I mean, it's not only to you or Elze I can apply stacked [Amplify] to, after all."/

"I thought you had no particular knowledge of manga and anime?" I mentioned as we began our descent.

/"Well one would have to try hard not to get some cultural osmosis from the juggernauts of anime in the 2010s. You couldn't really escape Naruto, apparently not even in the virtual world."/

"Believe it."

"Nggh…" Monika shuddered with horror.

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"So you understand now what it means for this party?" I asked the girls as we walked back 'home' to the inn after getting our mission stamps. "We're going to be a very unconventional party that can punch well above our weight class. Money is frankly a secondary concern… we're looking for information, and sometimes the best way to get that information is to accumulate fame and influence.

"We might be a bit dependent on Monika for our terrifying surge ability to WRECK FACE, but what we do is for Monika so the karma balances out in the end."

"I understand. If you both would just stop terrifying Linze, that would be great, you know?!"

"I'm all right…" Linze called out, her steps still shaky.

"That's… kind of your own fault, you know? It would have been just fine, running to town."

Elze snorted. "You were taunting me. You were taunting me with your skip-jumps and your turtleface comments. Linze agreed to chasing you down. I completely blame you for everything."

/"Yes, Player. I don't think she can be called a tsundere if she is actually righteously angry at you."/

"Fair enough." I nodded. It was just trying to get her used to the idea of moving far beyond human limits.

I really needed to figure out Aang's air ball. It would provide repulsive force pushing up at me for levitation at the same time air could push against it for motive power.

Or maybe steel-soled insulated boots so I could mix air and fire for sustainable jets. Maybe some metal thrust bells on my clothing so I could perform thrust vectoring? Even if magic fire and air didn't provide recoil force at the point of origin, they would do so to objects around the point of origin.

That would look ridiculous though.

"I wonder how far I could really run if I got down to it?" Elze mused.

"Can you run faster than I can fly?"

"When do you want to try it out? Just let me know."

"All I really want now is to just lie down on a solid, not moving bed and rest…" Linze continued to mumble.

"Sorry!" Monika, Elze and I apologized to her again.

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"Wait, is teleportation magic a thing here?" I suddenly spoke up and froze mid-stride in the middle of the street. People looked at us oddly and walked around us.

"Actually… yes," Linze replied. "There are ancient teleport gates between some of the big cities, and some people have Null magic that are similar to teleport."

"That would have been so much easier instead!"

Linze stared at me with an adorable amount of undisguised hostility.

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So we spent the next few days taking some quests and trying to rank up. I spent most of my income on buying books and studying magic. Monika meditated on the book of Null spells, trying to figure out which she could [Decompile] and [Recompile] into something she could use.

Monster subjugations had become even more trivial to accomplish. With Monika applying [Multi-Track] to Linze's spells, taking them on became even easier. If I tried the same spells however, they turned out to be an overpowered mess. If Elze didn't have such good reflexes in the first place, I might have accidentally killed her with a [Water Cutter] several meters long.

Sparring with each other had us slowly getting used to being very light on our feet.

Linze also started studying to increase her number of viable spells and her role as our ranged support. Water was still her weaker affinity, but no longer a problem with [Amplification]. All she really had to do was to say "[Priority Please: Water]" or any other element, and Monika would automatically apply the power boost as long as she was in range.

Alternatively "[Supercharge please]" would allow her to draw from my functionally bottomless pool of magic.

In exchange, she began teaching me her spells. Light spells, specifically Healing spells, were of the utmost importance. It wasn't something I could mess up with stupidly overpowering the spell.

For a moment we feared that we would cause cancer, but the test mice didn't show any problems. Linze let them all go after our tests, in sentimental thanks for all their help.

"Such a nice girl," Monika commented. "Though I can't help but to think that some cats somewhere are going to eat nicely. This is not a very kind world to small creatures."

-x-

Chapter end