Chapter 48: Hunting With the Princess
It had been a few minutes since I told the princess how to use the 'Search' spell, and while I could feel the waves of energy coming from her body, she kept her eyes closed in meditation, completely silent.
Suddenly, she opened her eyes wide and exclaimed that a monster was close, then turned around and stared at a tree located a few meters away from us.
I had been using my spell too, but the monster that she referred to felt so weak that I ignored it without thinking about it twice. To calm her mind, I took a few steps toward the tree and a giant cricket-looking bug jumped at my face.
For a moment, I heard the yelling of the princess and both maids, who were standing a bit further away behind some trees, telling me to watch out. However, I simply waved my hand and swiftly destroyed the bug's head with a smack, leaving its lifeless body on the ground.
"It's alright, It was just a bug!" I exclaimed as I turned back, seeing the princess with her mouth open, surprised about my feat of swatting a bug.
Turned out that these cricket bugs that I had seen ever since I arrived in this world were not actually bugs, but monsters. Honestly, I had my doubts at some point, but they always felt so weak and insignificant that I never even thought about using 'Inspect' on them.
During the time that I built my tree house a few years back, I ended up killing so many of them that at some point they stopped wandering around my house.
The princess told me they were called "dark crickets," and were a G-rank monster that were known for killing the pets and cattle of farmers in remote areas next to forests. "I-it's not like I'm scared of a G-rank monster! Those bugs are just nasty..." the princess said while blushing a little, embarrassed from her own reaction.
I giggled at how cute the princess was acting when I felt something from my search spell. It was the energy of a monster I had never seen before, but it didn't feel extremely powerful. Excitedly, I asked the princess if she could feel it too, and after closing her eyes for a few seconds, she opened them and pointed in the direction that the energy emanated from.