Kumo Desu ga, Nani ka? Volume Chapter 9

My eyes were glued to the book in front of me.

“What do you think? Impressive, is it not?”

Katia, the duke’s daughter who used to be Kanata, grinned at me smugly.

Since the day of the Appraisal Ceremony, she had started coming to visit me often.

At first I called her Kanata, but that felt unnatural for both of us, so she told me to use her current name instead. Karnatia, or Katia for short.

But Katia still called me Shun.

Since my current name was Schlain, Shun didn’t sound too unusual as a nickname, so Katia insisted on doing it.

Personally, I didn’t mind, but it was annoying that other people assumed things about our relationship, since we called each other by nicknames.

We really were close, of course, but Katia was a girl now.

Because of that, some people got the wrong idea.

Leading the way on that front was my sister, Sue.

Whenever Katia came over to hang out, Sue would seethe and glower at us for a while, then stubbornly take up a position between us.

Every time this happened, Katia could barely suppress her snickering.

I know I aimed to be an ideal brother and all, but how did it end up like this…?

Recently, I had the feeling that she was even envious of Fei.

Getting jealous over your own brother is bad enough, but even over a pet? Really?

At that moment, Fei was sitting in my lap, gazing with great interest at the book I was holding.

She was so clever that I sometimes found myself wondering if she understood the language here.

But of course, I had no way of knowing whether that was the case, and even if it was, I seriously doubted she’d be able to read on top of that.

“It’s a skill encyclopedia belonging to the house of the duke, you see. This one has much more information than the ones you’d find on the streets.”

The book contained detailed explanations of currently known skills.

It covered their effects, of course, but it also included the conditions required to learn and improve each one.

It was like a strategy guide.

Incidentally, Katia’s manner of speaking in the native language here was very different from her Japanese.

Compared to her manly inflection in Japanese, she’d been brought up to speak the country’s language in a register befitting an aristocratic young lady.

Since I knew who she’d been in her former life, the contrast threw me off at first, but I was used to it by now.

We only spoke in Japanese when we were alone, after all, and Sue was usually around whenever we hung out, so I encountered the ladylike side more often, anyway.

“Yeah, this is amazing. Couldn’t you get as many skills as you want with this?”

“I’m afraid not. Your time is limited, after all. I believe it would be more prudent to choose which skills are of the highest priority and spend time on them accordingly.”

I flipped through the pages eagerly.

Some skills I already knew, while others I didn’t.

When I saw unfamiliar abilities with impressive-sounding effects, I couldn’t help but stop and read more about them.

“You and Sue already have all the basic status skills, do you not? In that case, you ought to improve those as soon as possible.”

Basic status skills were just the ones that increased your stats, like life, magic, strength, and so on.

“Those evolve at skill level ten, you know. The effect becomes much larger, and each time you level up from then on, your stats will increase by a significantly higher amount. We won’t be fighting any monsters for a while yet, so we’re still level one. If we acquire those skills now, it’ll pay off in incredible stat bonuses when we level up.”

We were all still level 1.

You could only level up by killing living things, monsters or otherwise.

We didn’t even have permission to go outside, never mind fight monsters, so we had yet to level up at all.

Still, our stats gradually increased as we grew and trained.

However, the changes weren’t nearly as dramatic as they probably would be with a level-up.

“Ideally, I’d prefer to evolve the skills twice before leveling up, but that’s almost certainly too much to hope for.”

There were various benefits to a skill reaching level 10: The skill might evolve, or you might gain other subskills. But the higher the skill level, the more proficiency was required to raise it further, so getting a skill to level 10 was pretty tough.

“If you evolve the skills as far as Fortitude, Stronghold, Skanda, and such, the way your stats go up will alter as well. Reaching that point is ideal. But at the very least, we ought to reach the preliminary stages of those skills.”

“Makes sense. I’m surprised there aren’t any skills that improve your ability to earn EXP or proficiency, though.”

In RPGs, you could sometimes find super-rare items and such that did that, but I guess not so much with skills.

“Indeed. But did you notice anything else unusual?”

“Yeah.”

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Having looked through all the skills in the encyclopedia, I knew what Katia was getting at.

Sue had been peering over my shoulder at the book, too, but she didn’t seem to have noticed.

She appeared perplexed, not to mention irritated that Katia and I understood each other.

“There aren’t any item-production skills.”

“Yeah, if anything, they all seem to be specifically for combat.”

Yes, while there were enough skills to fill an entire book, not a single one of them was for production or any other noncombat usage.

There were a handful that seemed potentially useful for production, but all of these were only secondary effects of combat skills.

With such a huge number of skills, it was bizarre that they were all so heavily biased toward one purpose.

Katia and I probably only noticed this because we used to play games back in Japan.

The people of this world probably just assumed that was what skills were for.

“It’s like this whole world is based around combat.” My own muttered observation scared me a little.

A world where you can’t level up without killing things.

Skills that all revolve around battle.

Really, it was as if this world was encouraging its inhabitants to fight.

“Not many people know about this yet, but I’ve heard the Demon Lord’s army is rapidly expanding its ranks and armaments.”

“Then that means…”

“We may be called upon to battle someday. So until then, we should try to become as strong as we can.”

The only response I could muster to Katia’s grave words was a silent nod.

Fei was shifting uneasily in my lap, so I patted her head to reassure her.