So I'm a Spider, So What?, Vol. 7

  Copyright

  So I’m a Spider, So What?, Vol. 7

  Okina Baba

  Translation by Jenny McKeon

  Cover art by Tsukasa Kiryu

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  KUMO DESUGA, NANIKA? Vol. 7

  ©Okina Baba, Tsukasa Kiryu 2017

  First published in Japan in 2017 by KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo.

  English translation rights arranged with KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo through TUTTLE-MORI AGENCY, INC., Tokyo.

  English translation © 2019 by Yen Press, LLC

  Yen Press, LLC supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact the publisher. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First Yen On Edition: December 2019

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Baba, Okina, author. | Kiryu, Tsukasa, illustrator. | McKeon, Jenny, translator.

  Title: So I’m a spider, so what? / Okina Baba ; illustration by Tsukasa Kiryu ; translation by Jenny McKeon.

  Other titles: Kumo desuga nanika. English | So I am a spider, so what?

  Description: First Yen On edition. | New York, NY : Yen On, 2017–

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017034911 | ISBN 9780316412896 (v. 1 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316442886 (v. 2 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316442909 (v. 3 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316442916 (v. 4 : pbk.) | ISBN 9781975301941 (v. 5 : pbk.) | ISBN 9781975301965 (v. 6 : pbk.) | ISBN 9781975301996 (v. 7 : pbk.)

  Subjects: CYAC: Magic—Fiction. | Spiders—Fiction. | Monsters—Fiction. | Prisons—Fiction. | Escapes—Fiction. | Fantasy.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.O44 So 2017 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017034911

  ISBNs: 978-1-9753-0199-6 (paperback)

  978-1-9753-0198-9 (ebook)

  E3-20191031-JV-NF-ORI

  TRANSCONTINENTAL JOURNEY PROGRESS REPORT

  “Okay. Say ‘aaaah.’”

  “““““Aaaah.”””””

  “Now say ‘eeee.’”

  “““““Eeeee.”””””

  A chorus of young girls’ voices echoes across the barren wasteland.

  They’re not actually singing, but when you hear a bunch of people repeating things in unison, it sort of sounds like a song, doesn’t it?

  And no, don’t point out that none of them are human. That’s rude.

  Right now, we’re in the middle of a huge wasteland in the cluster of small countries north of Sariella.

  When we arrived at the initial destination of our little journey, the capital of Sariella, Vampy and Mera decided to leave their homeland behind and go to the demon territory.

  These two were driven out of their hometown by a war with the Word of God religion and Potimas’s machinations.

  The fact that they’re both vampires, not humans, probably played a big role in their decision to take things a step further and leave their home behind.

  Vampy is a Progenitor who was born as a vampire, and Mera was turned into one when Vampy drank his blood.

  If they want to live in the human world without anyone protecting them, they’ll have to hide that fact.

  That’s why they decided to follow their protector, the Demon Lord, into demon territory. That decision took guts, if you ask me.

  It’s been about a year since they made that decision.

  We headed straight north from the capital of Sariella and crossed the border.

  It’s been a pretty peaceful journey since we left the capital, without any notable incidents.

  In fact, the biggest incident since we started this journey was my Parallel Minds going rogue.

  I kept bracing myself for Potimas to attack, but he hasn’t. Things are going so smoothly, it’s almost anticlimactic.

  Still, we can’t let our guard down.

  Just to be safe, we’ve been avoiding any regular routes where we might be seen, taking the roads less traveled, to the point where there aren’t even any roads.

  People don’t normally cross through this wasteland, so it’s a perfect place for us to travel.

  It’s easy to see why nobody else is here when you look up at the sky.

  Countless black shadows fly about in the air.

  Birds? You wish.

  Some of them look a bit like birds, but most resemble reptiles.

  A bunch actually look like feathered dinosaurs, so somewhere between birds and reptiles, I guess.

  The creatures flying through the air are wyrms or maybe even dragons.

  They’re the rulers of this wasteland.

  Yeah. With that many wyrms and dragons loitering in these parts, it’s no wonder humans don’t set foot in this place.

  A single dragon or higher-ranked wyrm could destroy an entire army of humans.

  The only people who would be reckless enough to walk into this nightmare territory must either be suicidal or hoping to go down in history as legends.

  But we’re neither of those things.

  Because we’ve got a demon lord, who happens to be far stronger than any dragon.

  If she felt like it, the Demon Lord could probably wipe out all the dragons flying overhead without breaking a sweat.

  Dragons can wipe out an entire army of humans, and the Demon Lord can wipe out an entire army of dragons.

  This is just getting stupid.

  Even power creep should have a limit, if you ask me.

  But that being said, we’ve got Vampy and Mera in our entourage.

  If we got caught in a cataclysmic battle between the Demon Lord and the dragons, those two might not survive.

  Of course, it’s highly possible that the Demon Lord could protect them both while defeating all the dragons. But there’s no need to get into a dangerous situation like that deliberately.

  Before we entered the wasteland, the Demon Lord yelled to the dragons, “We’re just passing through!”

  I don’t know whether they heard that and understood her or not, but they’ve only been flying around above us the entire time, not paying us any mind.

  Maybe they decided to keep an eye on us but not interfere unless they had to.

  With that, we get to dodge a pointless battle and avoid the possibility of Vampy and Mera dying.

  Plus, this way the dragons won’t have to be totally obliterated.

  Fighting wouldn’t benefit either party, so they made the right call there.

  And so we’re just walking along normally, not bothering the native wildlife, either.

  Maybe crooning as we walk isn’t really normal, but don’t worry about that.

  There’s a reason for this chorus, okay?

  Otherwise we wouldn’t be doing it.<
br />
  To clarify, what we’re doing is vocal training.

  The baby bloodsucker’s gotten so big, she can barely be called a baby anymore.

  Guess you could say she’s evolved into a toddler.

  But there’s one little problem.

  Since she’s been using Telepathy to communicate this whole time, she’s not very good at speaking out loud.

  She’s a little vampire girl with a lisp.

  I guess that has appeal for a very specific audience.

  Considering her physical age, it’s not that weird for her to have a lisp, but in her case, it could be a bit of a problem.

  On top of using Telepathy instead of talking, she’s never screamed and cried like a normal baby, so her vocal cords are close to unused.

  It’s led to a vicious cycle: She can’t fix her lisp, so she gets embarrassed and uses Telepathy, which means her vocal cords continue to go unused.

  If it keeps up like this, we can’t expect her lisp to simply go away with age.

  The solution we hurriedly came up with was these vocal training exercises.

  Watching a little toddler traipse through a wasteland while shouting weird phrases is surreal.

  But it actually seems to be fairly effective.

  For the vocal training and for her stats.

  Generally, stats go up more as you utilize them, but there are limits to that.

  To really get results, you have to do training that most people will find hard or even painful.

  And the Vampy’s starting as a baby, the lowest physical form imaginable.

  For her, even just walking is a tall order, which means it made her stats go up like crazy.

  I mean, most babies at this age haven’t even learned to walk yet, never mind doing it all day.

  No wonder her stats went up so fast at first.

  But at this point, since they’re so high, walking alone isn’t enough to raise them much anymore.

  Walking for a whole day isn’t even a challenge for her now, making this the perfect time to add another element.

  That’s why I’ve got her doing vocal exercises as she walks now.

  This training requires a lot of deep inhaling and exhaling, so if you do it while you’re already exercising, it can get really hard to breathe.

  It might even be sort of like the high-altitude training some athletes do.

  On top of that, I’ve got her practicing what little magic she’s capable of while she walks, and all that multitasking is raising her Parallel Minds skill, too.

  That’s the reason our weird little procession is making so much noise as we walk.

  Now, have you noticed anything strange about my little update so far?

  Bingo. Vampy’s voice alone wouldn’t make a chorus.

  As it happens, she’s not the only one participating in this training.

  There are four other girls practicing along with her.

  Or four monsters, to be exact.

  It’s the four puppet spiders, the Demon Lord’s underlings.

  As the name implies, they’re spider monsters that control puppetlike dolls.

  Their actual bodies are tiny spiders, but they use these puppets made of thread to fight. Pretty crazy stuff.

  The thing is, these puppets used to look like the drabbest mannequins. But I’ve done so much magical modding on them that now you’d totally think they were human, at least from a distance.

  Once I was satisfied with their looks, I tried my hand at crafting some vocal cords for them, but that ended up being fairly difficult, so I was stuck for a while.

  Heh-heh. But I finally got it done!

  It was hard.

  It was so hard…

  But I think I nailed it!

  I spent the past year in an endless cycle of trial and error until I finally produced these vocal cords.

  Even now, they don’t function all that well.

  You’ve gotta make the thread vibrate to produce something that sounds like a human voice, but accomplishing that is no walk in the park.

  Even a single syllable takes a lot of effort.

  That’s how the puppet spiders started doing vocal training alongside Vampy.

  They still seem to have a lot of trouble with even simple sounds, so it’ll probably be a long time before they can speak smoothly. They seem determined though, so I’m sure they’ll get there eventually.

  I figure I can keep trying to improve the artificial vocal cords, too.

  By the way, the puppet spiders used to get summoned only when the Demon Lord and the others went into town, but these days they’re with us all the time.

  Maybe the Demon Lord got sick of summoning and dismissing them over and over.

  Whatever the reason, the percentage of girls in this group has certainly skyrocketed.

  Congrats, Mera! You’ve got yourself a harem!

  Although there isn’t a single normal human girl in the bunch.

  I’m a half-human, half-spider arachne; the Demon Lord is…a demon lord; the puppet spiders look cute but they’re still just spiders on the inside; and the baby bloodsucker is a toddler.

  Okay, yeah. That’s not much of a harem.

  Plus, Mera’s master, Vampy, is always keeping an eye on him, so he has to be careful.

  Frankly, if she gets any more attached to Mera, she’ll officially be a crazy stalker girlfriend.

  She already starts glaring whenever he interacts with the other girls.

  Not to mention, her Jealousy skill level’s been going up.

  Jealousy evolves from the Spite skill, and it’s already level 2.

  “Sophia, don’t get so worked up, okay? You have to make sure you don’t raise that skill. The Seven Deadly Sins skills can have a serious effect on your mind, so it’s bad news all ’round. Just stay calm, all right? Why is it going up so fast anyway? Those skills are supposed to be really hard to level up…”

  That’s what the Demon Lord had to say on the matter.

  Apparently, Vampy’s Jealousy skill is a lesser form of the Seven Deadly Sins skill Envy.

  The Demon Lord says the Seven Deadly Sins skills are supposed to be hard to level up, but the baby bloodsucker’s making crazy progress.

  That can’t be good…

  Her poor servant can’t sleep because of the weight of his master’s love.

  Hang in there, bud!

  Luckily, Mera has a very serious personality and hasn’t shown any interest in relationships with women, so Vampy hasn’t flipped her lid yet.

  If Mera was more of a womanizer, we might all be in big trouble.

  He’s maintaining a healthy distance between master and servant, even when the bloodsucker keeps shooting him weird looks, so everything seems to be all right.

  I mean, she is a toddler, so it’s not like there’s anything to worry about in the first place.

  Good thing Mera isn’t a creep who goes after little girls.

  Speaking of the non-creep, he’s actually walking silently in front of me right now.

  A heavy thudding sound rings out as he walks along, leaving literal footprints in the bedrock.

  I’m applying heavy pressure on him with my Repellent Evil Eye. That’s why his feet sink into the rock with every step.

  As you may have guessed, this is for Mera’s training.

  Mera’s stats are higher than Vampy’s.

  It’s only natural, since he’s an adult man who was recently turned into a vampire, while she’s still an toddler.

  On top of that, he hasn’t missed a single day of training on this journey, so he gets stronger every day.

  That’s why he has to resort to measures like this or his stats won’t go up much.

  Even shouting while he walks, the way Vampy and company are doing, wouldn’t raise his stats much.

  Plus, he doesn’t need vocal training in the first place.

  Hence the Repellent Evil Eye weight training.

  This is way more intensive than the vocal exercises, so his stats h
ave been going up at a decent clip.

  They’re about as good as the average monster’s at this point.

  Compared to his stats, though, his skills have been ranking up preeeetty slowly.

  Like, they’ve certainly grown, but when you compare them to my overpowered Pride skill’s high-speed leveling, it’s not very impressive.

  But even I’ve hit a bit of a wall.

  I haven’t had many chances to fight monsters on this journey, so my level hasn’t gone up, and my stats and skill levels are so high that they barely budge anymore.

  If I want to level up at this point, I’d basically have to slaughter enough creatures to wipe out an entire freaking ecosystem.

  No wonder my level hasn’t gone up.

  Since the Demon Lord and I have a ceasefire now, it’s not that big of a deal, but I can’t help feeling impatient after getting stuck like this.

  My ultimate goal is to be strong enough to defeat the Demon Lord or Potimas, but it doesn’t look like I’ll be accomplishing either of those goals anytime soon.

  I’ve been working on some strategies to deal with Potimas, so I might be able to hold my own against him, but I still don’t feel like I could take on the Demon Lord.

  “Say ‘oooo.’”

  “““““Oooo.”””””

  At the moment, said Demon Lord is happily leading the chorus made up of the baby bloodsucker and the puppet spiders.

  Looks like she’s having a great time.

  Kinda easygoing for a demon lord, isn’t she?

  If she looked a little older, she could be mistaken for the host of a children’s TV show or something.

  But unfortunately, the Demon Lord looks like a little— Huh?! I just got a chill!

  Um… I should probably cut that train of thought off there.

  That particular topic strikes a nerve with the Demon Lord.

  Now she’s looking right at me, with a smile that’s 200 percent scarier than before.

  Sorry, sorry. I wasn’t thinking about anything, I swear.

  I deeefinitely wasn’t thinking about how the Demon Lord looks like a little kid.

  I think I just saw the Demon Lord’s grin widen a little, but I’m sure I’m only imagining things.

  Yeah. Let’s go with that.

  Oh yikes, now even the baby bloodsucker and the puppet spiders look scared.

  Let’s try not to frighten the children, okay?

  A thousand pardons, Madam Demon Lord, but I would be most appreciative if you could forget about me and focus on the kids. Many thanks.