So I’m a Spider, So What?, Vol. 15, page 1
Copyright
So I’m a Spider, So What?, Vol. 15
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. 15
©Okina Baba, Tsukasa Kiryu 2021
First published in Japan in 2021 by KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo.
English translation rights arranged with KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo, through TUTTLE-MORI AGENCY, INC., Tokyo.
English translation © 2022 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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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 9781975301989 (v. 7 : pbk.) | ISBN 9781975398996 (v. 8 : pbk.) | ISBN 9781975310349 (v. 9 : pbk.) | ISBN 9781975310363 (v. 10 : pbk.) | ISBN 9781975310387 (v. 11 : pbk.) | ISBN 9781975321826 (v. 12 : pbk.) | ISBN 9781975339852 (v. 13 : pbk.) | ISBN 9781975341756 (v. 14 : pbk.) | ISBN 9781975352165 (v. 15 : 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: 978-1-9753-5216-5 (paperback)
978-1-9753-5217-2 (ebook)
E3-20221013-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Insert
Title Page
Copyright
1 A New Dawn
S1 Waking to a New World
2 The World Is Terribly Cruel
S2 The Value of a Life
3 If You’re Not Strong Enough, You’d Better Get Groveling
S3 There’s No Point Dwelling on Past Misfortunes
4 Friends
Interlude Kunihiko Tagawa
Interlude Kengo Natsume
Interlude Yuri
5 World Quest
S4 Change of Scenery
Interlude Katia
Special Chapter The Demon Lord Left Behind
S5 An Ever-Changing World
Interlude Dustin
Special Chapter The Demon Lord Makes Her Move
Interlude Speeches from Each Side
Epilogue & Prologue
Afterword
Yen Newsletter
Good morning.
Yes, it’s a new dawn.
Though unfortunately, I wouldn’t exactly describe it as refreshing.
I spent the night in one of the intact homes in the elf village.
It’s the kind of elf house you’d see in a story, carved into a giant tree trunk.
Can you call that a tree house? Yeah, sure, why not? Probably.
Very fancy and fantastical and all that.
Big fairy-tale vibes, too.
I normally spend my nights sleeping in my own home, but I can’t resist trying it out for a night if you show me something like this.
But I can’t say it was a very comfortable night’s sleep.
After all, this is a postwar zone.
Thanks to Potimas’s stupid secret weapons, like the sea urchins and that pyramid thing, the formerly lush forest has been reduced to a wasteland.
Frankly, there’s a serious burnt smell.
This is pretty far away from the site of that battle, but you can still smell it from way over here.
Not to mention that there were battles with robots and mega-robots in this area, too, leaving plenty of scrap metal lying around.
Those robots clearly didn’t run on gasoline or other liquid fuel, so it’s not like that’s leaking out and stinking up the place, but the faint smell of metal and burnt parts is…less than pleasant.
Even if it’s not as bad as the stench from the burnt wasteland.
Man, I’d hate to have the Olfactory Enhancement skill at a time like this.
My sense of smell went back to normal when I became a god. Otherwise, I bet I wouldn’t have been able to sleep, no matter how much I wanted to, with that smell keeping me up.
Well, unless I just turned the skill off, I guess.
But there’s also the fact that it was elves who lived here.
That in and of itself is enough to make me a little nauseated.
Not to mention that we’re the ones who killed those residents.
It’s not like I’m afraid of ghosts or curses or whatever, but I can’t say it doesn’t make me feel a teeny bit uncomfortable.
And of course, I suppose I have to mention the stink of blood and guts and all that…
Overall, I would say it was just a really poorly timed stay in this particular home.
Maybe if I were visiting or on a trip or something I might have felt differently… Not in this situation, though.
I didn’t sleep well, and I think I had nightmares, too.
Since I just finally wrapped up a big job, you’d think I at least deserved a good night’s sleep.
Then again, I guess it’s to be expected, given that the “big job” in question was an elf genocide.
Yep, it was an all-out attack on the elf village.
Of course, the main goal was to take out Potimas.
It’s almost entirely his fault that this planet is in such a horrible state, you know.
Destroying the cause would hopefully rectify the problem at least a little.
That was the idea, anyway.
Although there’s also the fact that Potimas and the Demon Lord had some serious bad blood.
To be totally honest, I have mixed feelings about letting the Demon Lord finish Potimas off herself.
By battling Potimas, the Demon Lord was able to finally destroy him like she always wanted.
But it came at a serious cost.
The backlash from that battle has rendered the Demon Lord almost entirely unable to fight.
And that’s not all.
In fact, this part is way more important: The Demon Lord’s life span has been shortened to almost nothing.
Now, she already knew she wouldn’t live much longer, which is why she took on the role of Demon Lord in the first place.
Physically, her body doesn’t age, but her soul was already reaching its limits.
That was reflected in the Demon Lord’s stats.
All her stats and skills had long since stopped changing.
The stats and skills governed by the system are strengthened by absorbing a portion of the soul of a defeated opponent in the form of “experience points,” attaching that piece to one’s own soul.
Basically, the process forcibly expands your soul.
And the Demon Lord’s soul has already been blown up to the point of bursting like an overfilled balloon.
So it can no longer absorb the soul pieces called experience points, which is why her stats and skills can’t get any stronger.
And so the Demon Lord’s soul was unable to take on even more experience points.
Either her soul would explode, or its contents would start leaking out like a balloon with a hole poked into it.
Either way, the Demon Lord’s soul had reached its limits.
So she knew that she was going to die in the near future.
Except that’s by the standards of the Demon Lord, who’s lived a stupidly long time.
From a normal human’s point of view, I’m sure she still had plenty of time left.
But that was all used up in the battle against Potimas.
Now the Demon Lord looks like she could die at any moment.
Seeing her like this, I can’t help but wonder if letting her fight Potimas was really the right move.
Even if it was her wish, maybe I should’ve dug in my heels and refused.
But at the same time, part of me also recognizes that because the Demon Lord fought Potimas, I didn’t have to waste any precious energy.
It’s an invaluable victory that the Demon Lord won nearly at the cost of her life, yet here I am looking at it in terms of numbers.
Even I have to admit that’s a pretty gross personality trait.
Man, I suck sometimes.
Ugh… I’ve gotta stop dwelling on this, though.
What’s done is done, and I can’t change it.
I’ll reflect on what I’ve done, but I won’t sit around and regret it.
Because regret just means you’re rejecting the person you were up until that point.
No matter what happens, you’ve gotta accept it and use it as fuel to keep moving forward.
All righty, then.
I guess that means my first order of business is checking on our prisoners of war.
In this battle, we captured Yamada and the rest of his hero party.
The reincarnations who were being held in the elf village under the guise of protection.
And Ms. Oka, the last surviving elf.
That’s it.
In other words, it’s almost all reincarnations.
Y’know, since we killed all the other elves.
The entire race of elves was really just based on a bunch of Potimas clones anyway.
What this world knows as elves were all either Potimas’s clones, people who got remodeled into elves, or their children.
From what I’ve heard, the elves were abducting people even before they started kidnapping reincarnations specifically.
They’d turn the abductees into elves and have them make children with Potimas’s clones.
Otherwise, if it was just Potimas clones reproducing, there’d be some genetic side effects.
The children created in that way were raised as elves.
By nature, that means the majority of elves were blood relatives of Potimas.
Is that even a race, or just a bloodline?
Well, at any rate, what I’m saying is that exterminating all the elves was better for everyone in the long run.
The only exceptions are Ms. Oka and the half-elves.
Ms. Oka aside, it would’ve been a huge pain to take out all the half-elves, too.
Even I’m not all-seeing, you know.
There are places I can’t reach, and more that I’ve overlooked, I’m sure.
I do think it’s for the best to wipe out the elves as thoroughly as possible, but eliminating every last one outside the elf village here would be way too much trouble.
I was bound to miss a few here and there.
So basically, I’m ignoring anyone who cut ties with the elves and went off on their own.
Which includes the half elf in our pal Yamada’s party, too.
Apparently, she already died once, but that doesn’t count.
She came back to life, okay? All’s well that ends well.
Yamada might have gotten knocked out hard in the process, but that’s not my problem!
Don’t look at me!
Seriously, it’s got nothing to do with me!
So yeah.
I’m a little nervous, but I guess I have to check on how Yamada made out, huh?
It’s probably my fault that he passed out in the first place…
I bet it was you-know-what, right?
His Taboo skill finally maxed out?
What am I gonna do if that totally altered his personality or something…?
Aaah, I’m so nervous.
I guess I’ve gotta explain things to the other reincarnations, too, huh…?
Are we sure I can’t just get Mr. Oni to handle it?
Speaking isn’t exactly my strong suit.
In a way, this next quest is even harder than conquering the elf village.
I guess I should go scope things out.
The first thing I see when I leave the tree house is a mountain of corpses.
No, really. I’m being totally literal here.
The bodies that make up this actual mountain are what’s left of the imperial army that invaded the elf village.
With Natsume leading the charge, they fought the elves, and then got pincered in a surprise attack from the demon army behind them, leading to their utter downfall.
While of course there are some survivors left, from a military standpoint they’ve taken enough damage to call it more than a decimation.
It’s considered decimation if they lost at least 10 percent of their forces, right?
Or was it twenty?
Well, either way, this is definitely more than that.
The troop Natsume was leading directly faced off against relatively average foes like Yamada’s party and Ms. Oka; their losses were relatively few.
But the other troops all got stuck fighting Potimas’s secret weapons, to the point where some of them were completely obliterated.
And by secret weapons, I don’t mean the ones I fought, like the sea urchins, or the Gloria Omega the Demon Lord fought.
I mean the ones I’ve been calling robots.
No, not even mega-robots. Just the regular mass-produced cannon fodder.
But while they might seem like hunks of junk from my perspective, they’re a horrifying threat by the standards of most people in this world.
How big of a threat? you ask. Believe it or not, those robots were probably on par with Earth Dragon Araba, if not stronger.
We’re talking weapons that no number of ordinary humans could stand a chance against, and they’re mass-produced, popping up in droves from all over the place.
Yeah. I can see why most of these guys kicked the bucket.
And there you have it: a mountain of corpses.
I guess the surviving imperial soldiers and Mera’s men stayed up all night recovering them from the battlefield.
You mean while I was complaining about getting a bad night’s sleep, these guys were working overnight right after fighting a hard battle all day?
Okay, that’s my bad.
Sorry for complaining about champagne problems, guys.
I guess I was lucky that I got to sleep at all.
Turns out soldiers in this parallel fantasy world fight until they die, and if they don’t die, they get put to work all night. Worst working conditions ever.
Hey, all you isekai fans! Want to try getting reincarnated as a soldier in another world?
…Yeah, now I’m starting to feel really bad for them.
Although this was all part of the plan in the first place, since I always intended to use the imperial army as expendable pawns.
I even had Natsume gather soldiers from corrupt imperial noble families and such, specifically so it wouldn’t be a big deal if they died… But it’s their bosses who were at fault, not the soldiers.
I’m sure some of them were benefiting from those dirty dealings, but still.
Well, either way, they all played their parts perfectly well.
So I think they at least deserve to be properly mourned.
Obviously, they can’t carry all these corpses back to the empire, so they’ll either have to make do with mementos or cremate the bodies and bring back the ashes.
Either way, we’ll have to bury them with care and respect.
On the other hand, the elves’ corpses are nowhere in sight.
They’ve all vanished into my stomach.
Or the stomachs of my little clones, to be more precise.
Look, this is my way of showing respect to the dead, too, okay?
In the natural world, it’s only right to eat anything you’ve killed.
By eating their bodies, they become part of my flesh and blood.
Ah, the circle of life.
I’m sure Potimas would be thrilled to bits that his descendants became the flesh and blood of a god, too, no doubt.
“Good morning, Lady White.”
As I look out at the mountain of corpses, Mera approaches me politely.
“Have you eaten breakfast yet? I would be happy to prepare something for you.”
Okay, so he’s casually offering me breakfast.
I dunno about that one, chief.
Normally there’d be nothing strange about such an offer from an attentive guy like Mera, but right now, he’s here as an army commander.
Since we’re technically the same rank, it’s gotta look weird to his subordinates for him to make such a considerate offer to me.
And Mera’s usually good at keeping his personal life and his official duties separate.
He’d never make it so obvious to his men that he considers himself below me.
