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TL: ALT
Chapter 4 – Huh?
It’s common in action RPGs.
When you run toward the outside of the battle area, the word ‘ESCAPING!’ appears, and when the gauge accumulates, you can escape.
That’s it.
The funny thing is, my unique skill, ‘Escape,’ seems to be a precise replica of that one.
“D-don’t be ridiculous!”
Still, I had no choice but to escape.
If it is the same as the game’s specs, the gauge may be reset if I stop running.
If that happened, I would have to start all over again from the beginning.
Since I couldn’t kill this Slime with magic, starting over would almost certainly mean death.
――But can I escape from this?
The second-hand shows 20.
Twenty seconds left.
With the Slime closing in right behind me, I need to keep running for 20 seconds.
――If this is the case, it would have been better to bet on five magic shots!
But there is no way I could stop ‘escaping’ and shoot magic now.
It would have been fine if I had started shooting magic from the beginning, but it would be too late if I had started shooting magic when the distance was already shortened.
If I continued to ‘escape,’ there was a high possibility that I would die, but if I stopped ‘escaping,’ I would be in an even more dangerous situation.
“Damn it!”
The image of me screaming in desperation and continuing to escape without moving would be surreal to the casual observer.
But I am desperate.
Seriously, desperate.
Fortunately, I’ve been granted status, and even though I’ve been running for more than a dozen seconds, I don’t feel like I’m getting out of breath.
I had another stroke of luck.
Literally, I was lucky.
“Whoa!”
Suddenly, my ankle snapped, and I was knocked off my feet.
Even a screwed-up kid could be unlucky, tripping over in the middle of nowhere.
…When I thought about that, I saw a greenish liquid pass by the side of my head where I had lost my position.
The toxic liquid passes unobstructed by the transparent wall that should have been in front of me.
The liquid scatters on the dungeon floor and evaporates with a disgusting fizzing sound.
Is this the Slime’s dissolving liquid?
I shudder to think what would have happened if I had been exposed to it.
I was just thinking, “This is a lucky turn of events for me,” when I remembered.
According to the wiki, a high ‘Luck’ value makes accidental evasion more likely to occur.
In the wiki, it is called ‘lucky evasion’ to distinguish it from evasion by agility.
“So if I’m lucky, I won’t get hit…!”
There are 16… 15 seconds left.
How many attacks will come during that time, and how many of them will I be able to avoid?
The odds seem low, but that doesn’t mean I’m completely ‘stuck!’
“I’m not done yet!”
I get impatient, but the second hand on the escape timer only advances at a hatefully constant pace.
It tells me there are exactly 12 seconds left.
Twelve seconds is twelve seconds. No matter how impatient I get, it won’t get shorter.
The Slime that had been removed from the solution was trembling behind me.
Is this some kind of preliminary action? I thought it was, but apparently, it was just trembling.
I had read that Slimes, with the lowest level of intelligence, could just sit around and do nothing.
“Well, if that’s the case, why don’t you just stand there all the time?”
I guess I shouldn’t have wished for that.
The Slime bounced on the spot and used the recoil of landing to jump on my back.
“Agh!”
I let out a cry of anguish as I was pushed toward the invisible wall.
A gel of this size and weight hits me with all its might.
The impact was not light.
It was an impact like when I was hit from behind by a bicycle when I was in junior high school.
It must have taken away a lot of my HP.
“Five to go, four, three…”
The Slime jumped at me again.
But my knee snapped, and the Slime’s body hit the air.
It was a lucky evasion!
“Two, one…!”
The pressure of the transparent wall disappeared!
I continued to run with all my might for about ten meters before plunging into the vortex of white light that lay ahead――the dungeon’s exit.
“Ugh, g-gaaahh, o… oh!”
I rolled through the thicket, stumbled over a protruding tree root, fell, did a two-and-a-half-turn spin, turned upside down, and hit the tree trunk on my back.
I looked up, still upside down, and saw a blue sky above the gaping canopy of the thicket.
“Ha-haha…”
It makes me laugh.
Really, it makes me laugh.
Here we go again.
Did I escape again this time?
What came next after the laughter was a rage that I couldn’t handle.
“Ughhhhhh!!! Damn it!!!”
I fire a series of fire arrows into the sky.
After a dozen shots, I run out of MP and get a severe headache.
I still tried to shake it off and force myself to continue, but I couldn’t shoot any more magic.
“Shit, shit…”
Clutching a fallen leaf, I sobbed at my misery.