"Phew."
At first, it felt like hell... no, it really was hell, the hell of the Tensura world. When I first fell here, I nearly despaired at the thought of having to survive alone in this gloomy place crawling with monsters, but unexpectedly, I managed to get through about a hundred years without too much trouble.
Maybe it was because demons are a race that lives by the law of strength, but instead of attacking me, a pure [Arch Demon], they either avoided me or tried to strike deals on their own, terrified that all the years they had accumulated would go to waste. Rather than paying with their lives, they offered other prices instead.
And that wasn't all. I even met a few good people along the way.
Thanks to that, I ended up living an absurdly peaceful life.
On top of that, maybe because I had become a demon and my sense of time had dulled, or maybe because I was a spiritual life-form by nature, my mind had stayed exactly the same as when I first possessed this body in this world.
"If anything, I think my mental fortitude might actually be stronger than it was in my previous life."
Every now and then, there were demons who picked fights with me.
That said, they were only Lesser Demons who still didn't understand the gap between races, or young Greater Demons too immature to tell the difference in rank, so they were all opponents I could beat easily.
"Maybe it's because I'm a demon. It feels like the way to fight is carved into my head on an instinctive level."
From handling magicules to using higher-tier spells, I could do it all as naturally as if it had been in my head from the very beginning.
...............
And then, after fighting Greater Demons dozens of times...
"...This is more fun than I expected."
[Confirmed. You have successfully awakened your innate combat instinct and acquired the Extra Skill [Fighter].]
A strange voice rang out inside my head.
"...What?"
If I had to guess, it sounded like what people in this world called the Voice of the World.
This was a peculiar world, after all, one with a system that granted abilities in the form of [Skills] based on a person's achievements or even the thoughts they held at the moment of reincarnation.
"No, that's not what I meant... I just liked that it felt like I was learning something every time I fought. Why does that suddenly mean I enjoy fighting?"
I wasn't all that shocked, since I already knew the Voice of the World existed, but I definitely had questions.
Unfortunately, those questions were completely useless as far as the Voice of the World was concerned.
[Confirmed. Through the manifestation of your desire for continued learning, you have acquired the Unique Skill [Seeker of Learning].]
Once again, the voice echoed through my head, announcing that I had gained another [Skill].
"......Skills are really that easy to get...?"
Just from imagining something?
By the time the Voice of the World spoke for the second time, a new question had already formed.
[Answer. Skills are innate abilities born when a life-form grows and earns the world's recognition.]
"......That's not what I was asking... Is there nobody who can give me a proper answer?!"
[Confirmed. As there is a need for a free-willed skill capable of answering questions, you have acquired the Unique Skill [Answerer].]
That made three already.
I'm pretty sure the novel said that for an ordinary person, obtaining even one Unique Skill in an entire lifetime was difficult, but I had already gotten two.
All because of a single thought and a single question.
"...No, come on... if this was how it was going to be, you could've at least given me one offensive skill from the start!"
At that point, I was so dumbfounded that I just blurted out whatever came to mind, half wondering if it'd hand me another [Skill] for that too.
But the problem was...
[Confirmed. As there is a need for a skill to be used in combat, you have acquired the Unique Skill [Sword Demon].]
"......"
"......No... why would you actually give it to me...?"
................
"No matter how I think about it, I still don't get it..."
Now, nearly a hundred years later, looking back on it, that whole situation still feels utterly ridiculous.
"......Well, it's not like I'm complaining, considering I've been making great use of them ever since..."
Come to think of it, even the protagonist of the novel got absurdly broken skills and just rolled with it, so there didn't seem to be much point in wasting energy overthinking it.
In the end, it had been an incredible stroke of luck.
For skills I had obtained so absurdly easily, not a single one of them was useless.
First, the Extra Skill [Fighter] was a berserker-type ability that temporarily boosted all my abilities for about ten minutes in exchange for driving my mind into a battle-crazed frenzy.
That said, it didn't erase my reason the way a normal berserker ability would, so it wasn't just decent. It was an excellent buff skill.
Next, the Unique Skill [Seeker of Learning] wasn't merely a generally useful ability like [Fighter]. It was a ridiculously overpowered skill, the kind only a protagonist should have, with abilities like weakness detection, area sensing, and reading an opponent's information.
Thanks to this skill, I was able to defeat the occasional yellow, purple, and white [Arch Demons] I ran into.
"If I hadn't had this, I probably would've lost back then, when I had absolutely no combat experience."
In other words, [Seeker of Learning] was one of the two skills keeping me alive.
And the other one, needless to say, was the easiest skill of all to obtain, and also my combat skill: the Unique Skill [Sword Demon].
As the name suggested, [Sword Demon] was a skill specialized in magic and swordsmanship, one that could automatically imbue sword-related abilities with magic, including techniques like sword aura.
This skill was just as broken as [Seeker of Learning], and for an example...
It let me spam techniques similar to Melt Slash, the move used by the [Hero] Hinata Sakaguchi in the original story, which fused swordsmanship with the highest-tier holy magic Disintegration.
If that protagonist saw it, he'd probably say, "That's completely broken."
Even I, the one using it, thought so.
"If I'd been born human, would the skill have been called [Sword Saint] instead?"
Well, by now I was so used to it that all I could think was, "Yep, that's broken," and move on.
Maybe that was because after staying in hell for so long, even bizarre things had started to feel normal.
Anyway, back to the point. Last was the Unique Skill [Answerer].
[Answerer] had abilities similar to [Great Sage] from the original story, such as managing all my skills and explaining information about this world.
On top of that, it had a sense of self, so whenever it got bored, it would sometimes play word-chain games with me.
[Report. The last skill is not me, but the unregistered skill [????].]
Our dear [Answerer], who somehow always picked up on it the instant I was talking about it, suddenly spoke to me.
"Oh, that question-mark skill? But there's no information on it, and I can't even use it."
A few months after gaining my skills, once I had more or less adjusted, I happened to discover that I had one more skill.
An unregistered skill made up of nothing but question marks: [????].
It was a strange skill with an unknown rank and even an unknown name.
But since I had no idea how to use it and even [Answerer] had no information on it, I had basically been treating it like a skill I didn't have.
The skills I already had were more than enough to get by.
[Question. In that case, may I dismantle that skill?]
...Dismantle?
......I suddenly have a bad feeling about this...
"Uh... no, leave it alone for now. You never know. I might need it someday."
Feeling a vague, instinctive sense of danger, I refused [Answerer]'s request.
......But at the time, I had no idea what kind of trouble that skill would eventually bring...
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