“‘Warrior’ is generous…”
I’m a farmer. Honestly — the skills are broken, but the man attached to them is a completely ordinary civilian.
“Now — take up your weapon!”
Look… about that “weapon.” What I’m holding is a regular hoe.
“All I’ve got is this hoe. Is that… acceptable?”
The elf queen let out a sharp little laugh.
“Come now — that hoe of yours was never for tilling FIELDS, was it? No — your hoe exists to till the SKULLS OF YOUR ENEMIES!”
That is one hell of a sentence.
—“Till the skulls of your enemies”…
“No, hold on! Just hear me out!”
“Blows have been exchanged on both sides. A war once begun can end in nothing but blood!”
Right — someone did mention elves are a warrior race.
Either way, the atmosphere is clear: nothing gets resolved here without a duel.
“Fine, fine. But if I win, you hear me out. Deal?”
“Before a duel… I keep no headspace for the world AFTER my defeat!”
And the elf queen loosed her arrows at me.
…FOUR arrows. In one draw.
She’s a serious archer, this one.
One at my head, two at my torso, one at my legs.
The arrows screamed toward me on perfectly plotted trajectories.
—Too soft!
One flash of the hoe… no, four flashes.
I intercepted every arrow midair, then broke into a dead sprint to close the distance to the elf queen.
“It’s over! Ranged fighters are finished once you close the gap, right?!”
I raised the hoe high overhead — and the elf queen grinned.
“YOU’RE the soft one! GREEN HOLY FLARE — Gospel of the World Tree!”
A presence behind me — I spun, and there hovered a green sphere some two meters across, materialized out of nowhere at my back.
Looking closer at the ground beneath it: a magic circle, clearly planted long in advance.
So the entire duel was choreography — herding me onto a pre-loaded magic circle?
“The elves’ base-defense ritual formation, decades in the weaving! Even a Demon Lord would not walk away unbloodied — now TASTE the supreme secret art of my village!”
My gut spoke up, loudly:
—A direct hit means VERY bad things!
But the green sphere was already at point-blank. No dodge comes out fast enough from here.
And at that moment—
[Skill: Farm Labor Level 10, activated.]
UOOOOOHHH!
—Power is flooding through my body!
Every motor nerve and reflex I own is being honed to an absolute edge — I can FEEL it.
In a world that seemed to have stopped moving entirely, I backflipped — actually, acrobatically BACKFLIPPED — over the green sphere.
Landed, reset my stance, and gave the hoe one clean flash!
The green sphere ceased to exist in a single stroke.
Several heartbeats of silence later, the elf queen — who had watched the entire sequence — wore an expression of total system failure.
”…IMPOSSIBLE! What WAS that movement?! WHAT are you?!”
Lady, I have the same question.
Why does a FARM LABOR skill grant superhuman athleticism? Why does FARM TOOL HANDLING erase magic from existence?
The queen shrugged where she stood and turned her face to the sky.
“—No… accepting all of it with grace… that too is the warrior’s discipline.”
She laid her bow and arrows on the ground, and knelt.
”…I have lost… Kill me.”
I shook my head.
“We didn’t come for a fight. The opposite — today we came to BUILD relations.”
“Relations, you say? Words like that, with who-knows-what behind them. Do I look the sort of fool who swallows an enemy’s honeyed words whole?”
“Look, the point is… one bite of my carrot and we’ll be getting along great, guaranteed.”
At those words, the elf queen’s gaze locked — onto my crotch.
Then, face flushing crimson, eyes dropping to the dirt, she said:
“Kuh… kill me. Your debaucheries… I shall NOT submit to them!”
I don’t know how, but she has interpreted my words in an extremely different direction.