Chapter 58: Putting Feelings Into a Moment, Part 6
Oikatzo: "Man, a Unique... so jealous."
Sunraku: "That's all you've said."
After I introduced Emul and Oikatzo learned she was tied to a Unique, he'd been like this the entire way to the Iron Ruin of the Divinity. As for Emul, she was plastered to my head, conserving walking energy. At this rate, was my job title going to change from Mercenary to Rabbit-Perch or something?
Oikatzo: "Man, a Unique... so jealous. I wanna fluff a bunny too."
Sunraku: "Are you forgetting we're power-leveling specifically because of a Unique right now?"
Oikatzo: "Finding one yourself versus piggybacking on someone else's find are totally different things... oh, isn't that it?"
As we chatted about the difference between "self-started" and "backup," Oikatzo pointed ahead. Following his gaze, I saw a "door" — weathered and degraded, yet bearing an SF aesthetic completely different from any area or civilization we'd seen so far.
For a split second I wondered, "What would happen if we skipped this door and kept going?" I glanced further down the path, but a massive fissure in the earth made it impossible to bypass the Iron Ruin of the Divinity and cross to the other side — the devs must have planned for that. Something about this fissure felt different from a canyon or something formed over eons... even if the lore said it was a simple earth-split, something felt off.
Oikatzo: "C'mon, let's go."
Sunraku: "Hm? Ah, yeah..."
Oikatzo: "It's a creative way to open, but is it an automatic door?"
Sunraku: "If you can call something twisted and warped 'open,' then sure. Anyway, once we're inside, we're supposed to head to the second underground floor first."
Oikatzo: "Alright, let's move."
Emul & me, plus Oikatzo — we slipped through the door that had long since abandoned its role to the passage of countless years, and stepped into the Iron Ruin of the Divinity.
Oikatzo: "Whoa, this is insane. It's like a whole different game in here."
Emul: "The black plates are going whoosh...wa!"
Oikatzo: "I feel like I've seen something like this somewhere before... oh right, the final boss stage from Brave Galaxy Fighter."
Sunraku: "I can't say I know that game..."
Oikatzo: "It's a landmark sci-fi fighting game acclaimed around the world, y'know."
That's a god-tier game — there's no way I'd know it, give me a break! It's not like I only play specific genres when you take trash games out of the equation, and I definitely wouldn't know a specific stage inside a specific game inside a specific genre.
Oikatzo: "Still, we were in full fantasy mode just a moment ago, and now suddenly this..."
Oikatzo muttered this while watching a floating black plate — or what looked like a metal panel — drift past us. I nodded in agreement.
If the areas we'd seen so far traced their origins to fantasy, this one traced its origins to science-fantasy. Beyond the thoroughly weathered door, after descending what were probably once escalators — now broken, gap-toothed stairs — what awaited us was a vast underground facility where, true to the intel, "black plates float through the air."
These weren't just metal. The plates pulsed with light tracing cybernetic tree-like patterns as they hovered, sometimes landing elsewhere, sometimes endlessly bumping into walls. That alone would have earned this area a passing grade as a game zone, but whoever built this place apparently decided to layer on a ruin element. Though civilization barely clung on here, sunlight streamed through cracks in the ceiling caused by weathering, and aggressively expansionist plants had stretched their roots even into this SF space.
Oikatzo: "Personally, I like these ruined-type areas."
Sunraku: "Moving objects like that always do hilarious things when they bug out."
Oikatzo: "Go wash your eyeballs out and rinse off that trash-game filter."
Emul: "S-Sunraku-san! Something's coming this way...wa!"
Oops — seems I got a little too carried away with party play for the first time in a while. My situational awareness had slipped.
Sunraku: "If the area's like this, then the enemies must match. Security drones, something like that...?"
Flying toward us at roughly head-height was a metallic, equilateral-triangle-shaped enemy whose flight principle was a complete mystery. How do I even describe this thing... a triangular UFO?
Sunraku: "What do you think, Oikatzo?"
Oikatzo: "Eh, let me punch it first. I want the EXP."
No sooner said than Oikatzo lunged forward bare-handed. The triangular UFO must have registered the charging Oikatzo as hostile — it spun like a frisbee and shot toward him.
Oikatzo: "Straightforward movement. Practice enemy for counters, maybe?"
The moment I heard that mutter, the triangular UFO was sent flying as if it had slammed into an invisible wall. Was that Repel Counter? First time I'd seen someone else use it.
Oikatzo: "Red!"
What was that — magic, or something...? Oikatzo's fist was wrapped in a crimson aura. He closed in, slipping right beneath the triangular UFO as it wobbled midair from knockback, and drove his fist upward as if spitting in gravity's face.
Oikatzo: "Crash Upper!"
Sunraku: "Ohhh."
Emul: "One hit...wa?!"
That was no ordinary bare-handed uppercut. The crimson aura had clearly granted some kind of buff, but a one-shot full-HP kill? Before we could figure out exactly what it was, the triangular UFO burst into polygons, and the crimson aura faded from Oikatzo's fist as he held his uppercut pose, basking in the afterglow.
Sunraku: "What's your job?"
Oikatzo: "Monk — Spirit Fist User... basically a monk. Can't equip weapons, but you pile on buffs that juice your bare hands and just beat things down. That move just now was Spirit Fist 'Red Rush' — magic that buffs STR and VIT."
Sunraku: "So the devs are officially doing 'mage (physical),' huh..."
Maybe I should've researched a bit more before picking my job. Fighting with aura-wreathed fists is pretty damn cool. Plus, not relying on weapons and fighting bare-handed has real appeal. And magic that activates on a short, single word like "Red" syncs perfectly with Oikatzo's style — in the sense of fast startup.
Oikatzo: "But missing out on weapon bonuses hurts pretty bad, and against really hard enemies you can end up taking damage instead. It's fairly advanced."
Sunraku: "I see... so how'd you build your stats?"
Oikatzo: "Light warrior build... but took the points I would've put into AGI and dumped them into HP and VIT. I take a lot of chip damage, so I beefed up toughness."
That's a fighting game player's mindset right there. Oikatzo's playstyle basically assumes damage is inevitable — "kill them before they kill you," essentially. Mine, for the record, is "just don't get hit and it's fine." There's a risk of gradually dying to chip damage without realizing it, but being able to redirect the time and resources you'd spend on evasion skills into offense is a pretty big deal.
Oikatzo: "And Sunraku... ah, you don't need to say it. Paper armor, STR/AGI min-max, right?"
Sunraku: "Wrong! AGI/LUC specialist — I'm a luck warrior!"
Emul: "Vorpal Soul at full throttle...wa!"
Oikatzo: "Huh... wait, what even is a Vorpal Soul?"
I'd like to know that myself.
After that, we passed the time by expounding on the magnificence of the Luck stat. Then Oikatzo got cocky and declared he could solo all the enemies up to our destination — only to get surrounded by three of those triangular UFOs (apparently called Delta Unit Drone T1 Models) and nearly die. When I relentlessly mocked him for it, he muttered something about "it's stubborn and hard to kill plus ridiculously fast, so basically a cockroa—," nearly sparking a PvP incident. But in the end, we reached our first objective — the second underground floor — with our stats in peak condition.
Sunraku: "The ruin factor's getting worse. I figured it'd be the opposite — that the deeper you go, the more intact the facilities would be."
Oikatzo: "Maybe it collapsed from below? Like a pot with the bottom blown out."
Sunraku: "That analogy doesn't quite land for me, but..."
I scanned our surroundings and confirmed no other players were around. After having Emul — whose hearing seemed sharp — do a sweep for enemies too, I pulled out the map Pencilgon had given me.
Sunraku: "Apparently, there's a hidden area we can reach from this floor."
Oikatzo: "A hidden area, huh... I feel like I'm just getting spoon-fed stuff I'm supposed to find myself lately."
Sunraku: "In this day and age, people who read strategy guides before playing aren't exactly rare. No point worrying about it."
Honestly, my personal take is that as long as you avoid story spoilers, checking a strategy site isn't that big a deal. Even in god-tier or good games, you can get totally stuck and spin your wheels forever. Trash games? The strategy sites don't make sense, and there's either no guide at all or extremely sparse info — end of story.
Oikatzo: "Man, I really wanna find a Unique on my own..."
Sunraku: "Yeah, yeah. Let's see... this way."
Pass to the left of the plate with a hole in the center, leap across the fissure, ride the plate with four broken sides into the gap between the second and third floors, and from there...
Sunraku: "This is a pain in the ass!"
Seriously, who found this?! What kind of mental state leads to discovering something like this? Wait, did Pencilgon actually find this herself?
Oikatzo: "Whoa, in this day and age, a hidden element this elaborate in full-dive is rare."
Sunraku: "Feels like there's a secret passage if you knock on a wall in a specific rhythm..."
Anyway, what we had to do was follow this absurdly convoluted route.
Sunraku: "...And the final step is jumping into this hole."
We'd followed the barely-a-path route written on the map, and the last obstacle standing between us and the hidden area was this giant pit. Since we were already underground, the bottom was completely invisible. Being told to jump into a hole like that — the realism of full-dive made it just a little intimidating.
Oikatzo: "This isn't actually some roundabout assassination prank, right?"
Sunraku: "If it is, that pencil woman's gonna have some kejime to settle."
Emul: "Kejime! Daddy — I mean, the Head says kejime is important too...wa!"
A kejime from that yakuza bunny... part of me wants to know, part of me's happier not knowing. No, surely it wouldn't go full max-gore... yeah, let's stop thinking about this.
Sunraku: "So..."
Honestly, I was uneasy. If it were just me and Oikatzo, I'd be fine backflipping in with a twist, but since Emul can't respawn, I had to be cautious about this kind of blind danger.
Oikatzo: "Alright, I'll jump down first. If it's safe, you two follow."
Sunraku: "...Appreciate it."
Emul: "Fyu."
Seeming to pick up on my caution, Oikatzo said that, then gave Emul — who had relocated to my shoulder — a pat on the head, and without a moment's hesitation, leaped into the pit.
Emul: "Fwah... she's such a cool lady...wa."
Sunraku: "Yeah...... wait, Oikatzo's a guy."
Emul: ".........?"
Ah, right — with that appearance and voice, it's not surprising she'd misunderstand. Especially since his Shangri-La Frontier avatar is a woman.
Sunraku: "He's got a feminine face, but he's a guy."
Emul: "Eeeeeeeeeh?!"
He's androgynous in real life, so in private games he often plays female characters or feminine-faced characters. Something about having two older sisters and one younger sister — the sole "black speck" in a sea of red, or whatever? — meaning that until he started gaming, all his hobbies were feminine stuff... he once told me with a distant look in his eyes.
Emul: "Th-the mystery of life...wa..."
Sunraku: "Guys who look like women are pretty common."
Emul: "This is a different kind of shock...wa!"
Is that so. More importantly, how were we supposed to know if Oikatzo was dead or not? Ah, we hadn't registered as friends. Just as my thoughts were drifting from the question to unrelated tangents, a faint, echoing voice rose from the depths of the pit.
Oikatzo (distant): "...re..."
Sunraku: "Guess it wasn't Pencilgon's roundabout assassination prank after all."
Wait, what's he even saying?
Emul: "Um... 'Get down here, you coward!'...wa."
Sunraku: "Oh, that's how it is?! I'm gonna kill that bastard!"
Emul: "Wha— wait, I'm not mentally prepar— waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa?!"
Without a shred of hesitation — and, as a corollary, without giving Emul any time to mentally prepare — I pressed my hand down to keep Emul from peeling off and leaped into the hole.