Itai no wa Iya nanode Bōgyo-Ryoku ni Kyokufuri Shitai to Omoimasu

The sound of constant typing echoes through their room.

“Even though they’re on the highest level of difficulty, they’re climbing it quite smoothly, huh?”

A man murmurs while staring at a monitor.

The monitor is showing the current number of players and the highest floor. The players at the top at the list are playing on the highest level of difficulty, and are currently on the third floor of the tower.

“Looks like it. Well, it’s full of troublesome bosses, so the race is far from over.”

The other man replies without looking away from his own monitor, as he had no intention in stopping working even for a moment.

“Maybe we can kick it up a notch overall... The ones at the second-to-highest level of difficulty are advancing quite fast too.”

The players are going through the tower faster than anticipated. The reason for this is that the players who could take on the highest level of difficulty are challenging the second-to-highest level instead.

“Well, this has only just started. How does it look? Are we looking at some boss room?”

“Let’s take a look at the highest difficulty. They seem to have just entered the room.”

“Understood. Okay... done. Can you see it?”

“Ngh...”

After the man looks at the monitor, he groans as he closes his eyes, then shakes his head, and then opens his eyes slightly.

What had appeared on the screen was a girl wearing black armor and another girl in blue clothes.

In other words, Maple and Sally.

“N... Ngh... Look.”

The man had been expecting to see a regular player’s fight, but his wish hadn’t come true.

On the screen, Maple and Sally are being attacked by a dragon.

“Oh, it’s tough! Well, we can’t have a boss that can be easily defeated with a bit of firepower, can we?”

“Still, that dragon’s breath attack has a piercing effect, doesn’t it?”

“There has been a lot of planning poured into its movements too.”

As the conversation goes on, the two players on the screen are shown to be engulfed by the dragon’s breath attack.

The man’s expression changes into surprise as he sees that.

After all, Sally did not take any evasive action.

“She didn’t dodge it, huh? But she hasn’t taken any damage. She seems to be quite powerful now.”

“She is now, yeah. Sally is quite kind, too. Ah, if only...”

The man covers his mouth with his hand and seems to ponder for a while.

Then, as soon as he opens his eyes wide as if suddenly having realized something, on the screen, Maple jumps into the dragon’s mouth.

“What?”

“No! The bomb... Ah!”

A wave of deadly poison overflows from the dragon’s mouth, then lasers burst out, and lastly the sound of multiple explosions made by the black rocks. Then, as the dragon digs into the ground, a monstrous mouth goes through the dragon’s body from head to tail.

“It... It exploded... ”

“That... That mouth...”

“What went wrong here?”

“It’s because it’s opened its mouth....”

The two men are thinking that if the dragon had closed its mouth, it would not be a motionless rock by now.

Then, they could not help but vaguely thinking that the player who had defeated the dragon also sort of resembles a motionless rock herself.

“Why did you have to jump before throwing those rocks? If you hadn’t jumped, the dragon would have beaten you for sure!”

The man spouts out quite an obvious question, but no one answers it.

“The next boss can’t open its mouth, so it should be okay... something like this can’t happen to it... definitely not...”

“Next boss? What have you come up with? What’s it like?”

The seemingly glittering image of Maple, who had wrecked the dragon’s mouth, appears on the screen, and the man’s thoughts vanish without a trace.

“Hey, let’s show this to the other guys later. Starting from the one who designed this dragon.”

“Ah... sure.”

The man who had suggested that they should share their tragedy with the others is actually the one who had designed the boss of the second layer, the one that Maple had blown to bits.

These men all share a common tragedy.

“It won’t turn out like this next time!”

“You say that every time!”

The two men then leave the room in order to take a break.

Later, the man who had come to the room to see the footage of the battle with the dragon he had designed lets out a scream after seeing what had happened.