Chapter 261 - An Irreversible Step
—According to what Yuji Kobayashi (25), a leader of a Han-gure group, said.
'Alright, I'll just tell you everything, okay, goo-goo ga-ga? By the way, can I really get stronger like this? Waaah.
When I'm talking in baby talk, people's eyes are really starting to bother me...
Dammit, I never thought the day would come where I'd be crawling around at this age.
Uh, where should I start?
Let's see. If I recall, it was last Monday. We were just wandering around town after returning from a club, like we always do.
The time was... around two in the morning, I think.
We were looking for a second shop, so we were messing around with our smartphones on the street.
We must have been so absorbed in the screens that we didn't notice someone approaching.
When I suddenly looked up, a man was standing right in front of us.
At first, it was dark and I couldn't tell much, but looking closely, I realized he was a foreigner.
He looked pretty young.
I thought, "This is a perfect mark."
A Westerner wandering around a downtown area in the middle of the night is either a drug dealer or a tourist coming to buy women.
Since he's probably doing something shady anyway, he won't call the cops no matter what happens to him.
We dragged that foreigner into a back alley and tried to intimidate him into giving us money.
He pulled out some foreign coins. It was a design I'd never seen before. When I asked if he had Japanese yen, he shook his head.
I lost my temper and shoved him, and the man collapsed without resisting and stopped moving.
Then, a rectangular window floated up in front of my eyes... and numbers started appearing one after another.
How should I put it, it was like the screen of a game I used to play as a kid...
I heard a voice inside my head talking about leveling up or something, and finally, I heard an auditory hallucination saying, "You have learned the Light Ball magic."
The foreigner said, "You are free to use that power however you wish."
Power?
I thought for sure I'd been drugged, but my head was surprisingly clear for that.
...I thought I might as well give it a try.
Following the hallucination, I held out my palm and chanted, "Light Ball." Bam! A ball of light shot out, and the asphalt shattered.
This is amazing. What the hell happened to me?
The foreigner was laughing happily. I think he said something about the latent... potential? of Earthlings, but it was too complicated and I forgot.
All I know is this.
I'm telling the truth! You can hit me all you want, nothing's gonna come out anymore!
Misusing magic? No way, I don't want to be targeted by a monster like you.
I get it, I won't be going out at night anymore; I'll focus on crying through the night. Goo-goo, ga-ga, ga-ga!
Hehe, just you watch.
If I had just kept up with boxing properly, I wouldn't have fallen this far.
My injuries kept piling up and I ended up completely disillusioned... but it's okay now.
I've found the answer.
If I regress to a baby, I can become strong again. I can return to being a boxer.
Who cares about being a heavyweight champion! I'm in the babyweight class! Goo-goo, ga-ga, ga-ga!
I wonder, if I keep crying goo-goo ga-ga like this in broad daylight, it might actually feel good.
Hey, can I make a quick call? No, I'm not calling my crew.
...Hello, Mother? It's me, it's me, Yuji. I've got something to talk about, but is it okay if I come over to suckle later? Huh? No, I'm telling you, I'm not doing drugs anymore. See ya.
...How's that, old man!
I'm baby-fying more and more, just like I was taught!
I finally ended up asking my mother in her fifties for breastfeeding!
What? Even for an old man like you, you can't go that far? This is bad, man, did I suddenly take over the world?
Well, yeah. Once I decide to do something, I'm a straightforward man.
Just watch, I'll become an adult baby that surpasses you in no time!'
Even if he is a hopeless thug, it's not that my heart doesn't ache seeing him start racing down a completely wrong path, but more importantly, I should be concerned with the content of the man's statement right now.
So, if he shoved a foreign man, his level went up, huh.
It is true that the condition for generating experience points is not the killing of an enemy.
That is merely the condition for obtaining 100% experience; even if a battle ends with an enemy surrendering or fleeing, a certain amount can still be received.
If one were to take advantage of that—one could even perform a feat like going around scattering experience points to those around them.
"...An otherworldly person is performing leveling for Japanese people?"
I don't know what the objective is, but it seems this needs to be investigated.
Leaving the noisy, babbling Han-gure group behind, I headed toward Mano-chan.