The Peerless Kobold - Chapter 6
The growth of a young kobold is quite fast.
At six months, my siblings and I were able to walk on two legs. With our recent growth, my mother has allowed us to go out and wander around the area where other Kobold burrows are located.
And as I began to meet other Kobolds aside from my parents and siblings, I began to realize a crucial fact.
There were no elderly within the Kobold, and perhaps, even the oldest of them only lived to about 10 years at the most. It seems that the survival rate of the Kobolds, who are at the lowest level in the monster hierarchy, is very low. Maybe not as low as an ordinary wild dog, but the odds of dying before they reach the end of their natural life span seems to be very high.
A dog person’s basic lifestyle is just a repetition of sleep→wake up→go out to hunt→eat→sleep and repeat, with no other elements. What I’m trying to say is, they haven’t even thought of making better weapons or training themselves to increase their survival rate!
As it stands, I’ll most likely be killed by another monster or human, and my second life will end prematurely. I refuse to be like that, and I still haven’t forgotten the “regret toward my uselessness” that I harbored on my deathbed during my previous life. Even if Kobolds were weak monsters, I wanted to have the strength to die while smiling proudly without a shred of regret this time.
Therefore, I decided to train myself as much as possible, and pushed my Kobold body to its limits. We have no choice but to do our best every day because we don’t know if and when we will lose our lives.
And because it was better to have more friends I could rely on, I recruited my siblings to train as well. My sister, who is attached to me and is willing to share in my activities, would do push-ups, sit-ups, tree climbing, and stone-throwing without even understanding the meaning behind it, but… my little brother immediately got tired of it. I thought I didn’t need to force myself and my siblings at that time, but I would regret later on that I should have trained harder. The law of survival of the fittest was tough…
And so, every day, we ran till we were exhausted to cultivate our basic physical strength. While we trained as children, the results of our hand-to-hand combat training continued to pile up, and we had become the strongest out of our generation of eleven Kobold pups that had been born this spring. Consequently, there may have been some pride in our parents.
As the seasons progressed, it was almost time for me and the other young kobolds to gradually explore outside the settlements. By then, the mothers in the pack had stopped meddling and only followed close to their children.
One day, as my friends and I were strolling through the forest like always, I suddenly felt the presence of something huge stirring in the bushes, and an indescribable chill ran down my spine.
“Wauu!!” (It’s an ambush!!)
The same time as my warning came, something emerged from the bushes. Standing before us was a terrifying creature with large jaws that devoured its prey to the bone, huge paws, and hard claws that tore through trees with ease. This was the worst monster in the area – the Gray Bear!
“Guruuuuh…… Gaaaaah!”
Growling, it raised its stout arms as it roared and reached for the nearest kobold pup with a swing of its arms, hitting it with a heavy sideways blow!!
