After the four of them had finished eating, Michael glanced at the naked Bloodworm-Goblin, then at the freckled cat-girl, whose robe was soaking wet and practically transparent. He sighed, and told them “We need to wear clothes, or I’m gonna end up having a permaboner.”

Sarah immediately asked “What the fuck’s a permaboner?” which caused him to start laughing hysterically. Inari went to sleep as soon as she scoffed down her pile of raw meat, but she wouldn’t have made a meaningful impact into the conversation anyway.

However, Elina quickly replied “Probably a permanent erection…” while staring at his penis for a few seconds, and then saying “Shouldn’t you go, take care of that?” Even after hearing that, the relatively blind girl, still had no idea what they were talking about.

Michael smirked, as he nonchalantly explained “Nah, I just masturbated less than an hour ago. Even if I jerked off over and over again, as long as I’m surrounded by beautiful naked-women, I’ll be stuck in this condition. Sarah, I have your shitty gear, which is barely any better than garbage. Here, take it!” She wasn’t even able to see the mana-less armor, as it appeared in the palm of his hand, and was promptly thrown at her chest.

The thin and crude leather only gave her a single point of Defense Rating, even though it was practically a full set of equipment: all that was missing, was the helmet. She shouted “Oh, ha-ha, throw things at the blind-girl! Real fucking funny!” He was still holding a slight grudge against her for murdering him, twice.

There were a decent amount of holes and patches on the armor, and Elina actually had to help her put it on. Most of it was just brown cloth, with the actual leather only covering her breasts, thighs, wrists, and shins; there were both boots, belt and bracers included in the set.

Between the ripped shirt and pants, the base of her tail had plenty of room to dangle out. He smiled and told her “Yeah, that’s much better. As long as I don’t abuse my ability to see through your clothes, I should be fine.”

With that dealt with, he then transformed ten of the remaining rank-G, level-one, bunnies, into pelts. After that, he swiftly sacrificed one of the field-mouse mana-cores to recreate his set of white-rabbit fur kilt and boots.

The moment he donned the new equipment, his Agility increased to five, and his Defense Rating doubled: reaching four. Then he reached down and placed Inari in his first Companion-slot, while telling the two girls “Now, it’s time for us to hunt.”

Sarah grumbled “You have my knives, right?” to which he sighed, and casually tossed the five, rusty, poisoned daggers at her face. However, a barrier appeared, causing them to suddenly stop a few millimeters from her bright-red skin, and fall into her tiny deft hands.

The partially clothed Human turned on his ‘Mini-Map’ and the worm-girl immediately asked “What the hell is this thing? Ah, one of em popped-up in-front of me too.”

Elina muttered “She doesn’t even know what a map is? Hmm, I’ve never heard of Raphael’s Jungle…” before exclaiming “This-this is ‘The Forbidden Forest!?’ Michael, how did you even make it this far inside?!”

He snickered as he started walking towards the west, away from the waterfall, and said “While I was carrying the two of you, I just kept running in this direction. There was a gigantic horde of undead that were about trample us, but for whatever reason, none of them entered this beautiful… noisy, annoying, sweaty, and seemingly endless rain-forest. I did feel a little disoriented at first, but I have an automatically updating map, so it’s not like I could get lost, heh.”

Sarah yelled “Ow, damn it! Hey, wait for me!” as she scratched her slimy tail against a thorny bush, and nearly tripped over some vines. From her perspective, she had only been unable to see for less than a day, so she obviously wasn’t able to walk properly on her own.

Elina frowned as she gently led the Goblin by the hand, and told her “The next time you level-up, you should focus on raising your Perception. I’ve known quite a few people who’ve lost their sight, but were able to regain their vision that way.”

At that, Michael snickered and suggested “Or~, we could do some monkey hunting… I definitely saw some ‘tarsiers’ while I was trying to find a place to rest. They’re basically tiny primates with big-ass eyeballs, so I figure that if we find a couple that have evolved, you should be able to get a decent amount of Perception from their mana-cores.”

However, she immediately shouted “Fuck no! I’d rather be blind than have to experience that bullshit again!”

He sighed and told her “Calm down, the trick is to wait until you’re about to get killed by some magical-beasts, then swallow a handful. Hehe~, it’s practically cheating, but ya do kinda have to die, so either way, it’s probably gonna suck.”

The Priestess, whose white-robe was surprisingly already dried, asked “How can you talk about dying so casually? Even if you are immortal to a certain extent, how could you possible be sure that you’ll be able to keep coming back to life? There might be some kind of horrible price that you have to pay for each time…”

Michael answered her questions by making a screen pop-up before her eyes, which made her shout “Wh-what is this?! Gameplay?!” Once she settled down a bit, Elina muttered “No death penalty, Friendly-Fire is off? Are these The Laws of The Goddesses?”

Then he explained “You are right in a way though. At the moment, I’m the only ‘Player’ and I can’t actually alter the settings, but who the hell knows if those rules will change or not. That’s why, while respawning is ‘free’ and ‘quick,’ the three-er four of us, need to hurry up and become as powerful as possible. Pray to your Goddess that no other people from my world are brought into this one… It’ll be Noobageddon.”

As the three of them were loudly yelling and talking to each-other, while continuing to walk deeper into the forest, level-one magical-beasts continued to flee away from the dangerous humanoids. Michael had used his wisp form at maximum altitude, to see a fairly mountain in the western distance, but he also noticed a decent amount of colossal animal-shaped treants, prowling or lumbering around.

Green and brown wyverns, along with other airborne creatures were flying above the canopy, and a decent amount of rainbow-colored bird-like dragons seemed to be the aerial rulers of the jungle. However, they were very slowly trudging in that general direction; even if there were no monsters to fight, it would have still taken them a week to walk that far at their sluggish pace.

After an hour of trudging along the first enemy finally appeared. Michael and Elina had been quietly humming when Sarah yelled “Shut the fuck up!” Then she whispered “How is it that I’m the blind one, yet neither of you can see that giant pitch-black monster over there?” while pointing towards a normal-looking tree. Letting go of the cat-girl’s hand, she pulled out two poisoned daggers.

Her body suddenly vanished in a puff of smoke, as she appeared on one of the low-hanging branches, and stabbed both weapons into a relatively thick, yellow vine. A huge, bright-orange, ‘-27’ popped-up, accompanied by a loud hissing sound.

She immediately jumped a few meters backward, and used her slimy worm-like tail to latch onto the branch, and avoid the creature’s counterattack. The moment that the description “Stealthy Boa-Constrictor, Level-9, rank-F,” was visible to him, Michael pulled the ‘Crude Pitchfork’ out of his inventory, and threw it like a javelin.

Before the snake had the chance to lunge at Sarah, the thickest portion of its body was impaled upon the tree, and its health quickly dropped down to 25/80. Elina didn’t even have the time to realize what was going on, before he pulled out a handful of tiny, jagged rocks, and telekinetically launched them at the immobile serpent.

A myriad of negative numbers appeared as the deadly-poison, along with the barrage of pebbles and the various ‘bleeding’ debuffs swiftly slaughtered the magical-beast. Then a ‘+6 Exp’ could be momentarily seen above each of their heads.

After that, Michael yelled “Oi, good job brat, now pull the pitch-fork out and toss the bastard down!” However, without listening to him, she walked over to the boa’s relatively large head, and used her knife to dig-out the mana-core.

She shouted “This one’s mine!” as she placed the tiny black bead into one of her belt-pouches. Then she used all of her strength, but wasn’t able to remove the three-pronged pitch-fork from the tree’s bark, so she just used her daggers to slice open its body and allowed it to fall to the ground.

He sighed and said “Ugh, sure, whatever… don’t worry about the damn pitch-fork, and I honestly don’t give a shit if you wanna keep the fucking mana-core. It’s just that, when you die, you’ll probably lose it, so it’s better if you let me keep it with the rest of this asshole’s corpse.” as he reached down and shoved the two halves of the snake into bag-slot eleven.

It was at that moment when he received a strange notification: “Would you like to unlock Companion bag-space for Sarah Carelia? The first slot will cost a rank-G mana-core of at least level-one.”

Next Chapter!