After resting for three days, the side effects of the healing magic wore off. Under Spider Child's lead, Tsukasa and the fairy Eidor headed toward the demon territory. Spider Child stated that Tsukasa's current strength wasn't enough to join the Demon Lords Army.
She wasn't qualified yet, so Spider Child planned to train her nearby to the minimum standard of the Demon Lords Army before bringing her into the formal ranks. This revealed quite a bit of information. First, it was clear that Wakaba was not the Demon Lord. Second, Wakaba's current status among the demons was not low, having reached a height where she could take the initiative to add newcomers to the main demon legions.
But... was there something wrong with Wakaba's training method? Recalling the fear of having her meals controlled by Wakaba over the past three days, Tsukasa's face turned pale as she clutched her stomach while walking, her expression somewhat stiff. Because Wakaba was very powerful, she had been able to eat the meat of various high-level monsters during these three days of recovery. However, Wakaba's culinary skills were truly hard to describe. It was a fanatical style that restored the freshness of ingredients to the maximum extent, combined with her habit of adding all sorts of strange seasonings during the cooking process. The resulting food was undoubtedly true hell-style dark cuisine. Because those strange seasonings were all highly toxic, it really could kill a person.
Rather, anyone who eats that kind of cooking and doesn't die isn't human! If it weren't for Miss Fairy's all-purpose healing magic, Tsukasa felt she would have been poisoned to death long ago. The first time she ate that cooking, she thought it was just simple dark cuisine—at most unpleasant, but certainly not to the point of being lethal. But from the first bite, she knew she was wrong, terribly wrong. It was dark cuisine that could actually kill! With just the first bite, her consciousness seemed to see the Yellow Springs leading to the afterlife.
After being saved by Miss Fairy, she learned the truth from Wakaba: the training had already begun. Since the system allows one to obtain skills this way, Wakaba hoped she would gain various useful resistance skills by consuming this true dark cuisine. However, Tsukasa had eaten the dark cuisine for three days without any results, so she highly doubted whether Wakaba's training method was reliable. Moreover, if she remembered correctly, most monsters possess the convenient skill of Eating, so the method might not be wrong, but it simply didn't apply to humans.
However, even when she brought this up to Wakaba, the girl would just fall silent, and the next meal would still be the same dark cuisine, with no sign of giving up. It seemed impossible to get Wakaba to abandon this training in the short term. But just when she thought Wakaba's training was already brutal and inhumane enough, Wakaba brought her a brand new surprise in the next moment. While walking, Tsukasa had just sensed an approaching crisis, but before she could react, a magic attack shot out from the ground and pierced her body!
A black shadow transformed into a sharp spear, instantly piercing her lower abdomen. Because the attack was completely unexpected, the shock of that moment caused her mind to go blank for a time. It wasn't until Miss Fairy cast healing magic behind her that Tsukasa, feeling the price of the healing magic, finally reacted. She then looked grimly at Spider Child, who had suddenly attacked her, and demanded: "Are you trying to kill me?"
"You won't die," Spider Child replied calmly.
Tsukasa felt she was making it sound far too easy.
Although she was indeed still alive, without Miss Fairy's magic, she definitely would have died from that blow.
The fact was that the skill Perseverance had even been triggered; without it, she would have died very cleanly just now. So why on earth do this? She didn't think Wakaba was the type of person who would be bored enough to enjoy abusing others. After all, this was someone who, back at school, could calmly smile even after a classmate splashed water on her. She shouldn't have fallen so far as to become a piece of trash who enjoys violent abuse. Such methods were far too low-class; in Tsukasa's heart, Wakaba could not be such a low-class character.
"What is the point of doing this?"
"Training."
Spider Child answered via the Telepathy skill.
Come to think of it, she seemed to be able to communicate with others now?
Previously, because she was entirely focused on how to trick Classmate Tsukasa into joining the Demon Lords Army, she had conversed with Classmate Tsukasa without realizing it. But now that she had come to her senses, she found she could indeed communicate naturally with Classmate Tsukasa. Was this the effect of the Fairy Race's skill to communicate with nature? After all, she really was just a spider. It wasn't that she couldn't communicate normally with people before, but rather that her nature made her unaccustomed to doing so.
But in front of Classmate Tsukasa and that fairy, she didn't feel that awkwardness at all; instead, she could communicate with them quite naturally. Her Main Body remained as taciturn as ever, so it was certain that she hadn't changed, but rather that some skill of the Fairy Race had successfully influenced her. However, while the fairy was easy to understand, Classmate Tsukasa's race was undoubtedly human. How exactly could that mysterious power allow the human Classmate Tsukasa to obtain a skill of the Fairy Race? This completely violated the basic logical programming of the system.
Suppressing her dissatisfaction, Tsukasa asked: "What kind of training effect can this have? And can you please tell me before you start?"
"It trains the proficiency of danger-prediction and perception-type skills, increases vigilance against sneak attacks, and gains magic resistance of the corresponding attributes."
Spider Child's answer was so clear that Tsukasa immediately knew Wakaba wasn't lying to her. This was indeed an effective training method, as she had experienced its effects before. It was just that she was still a bit afraid. Wakaba's training
was truly hellish training in every sense of the word. Having accepted this training, she had already passed through the gates of the underworld more times than she could count. It truly used the pressure of death to force out one's potential. Could it be that the reason Wakaba was able to become so strong wasn't because she was the protagonist, but because she had always persisted in training like this?
She thought of this.
For a moment, her feelings were very complicated.
Originally, she thought she had worked hard enough, but now she realized her previous efforts were nothing. Wakaba was clearly a far more talented person than her, yet after reincarnating into this world, this Wakaba worked ten million times harder than a mediocre person like herself. No wonder the gap between them had grown so wide. She had previously comforted herself with the absurd reason that Wakaba was only so strong because she was the protagonist, but that was only because she had no idea how much suffering Wakaba had endured in this world to gain such strength.
"Whew..."
"I understand. Let's continue."
Although she didn't think she could catch up to Wakaba, she couldn't let even her effort fall behind Wakaba's. After all, even a mediocre person like her had her own persistence!
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