Chapter 93: The Past Always Stabs You in the Back
Bilac: "What we're lookin' for won't be found on the surface of this place... not by pokin' around these mountains of junk."
Emul: "Then what do we do... wa?"
Bilac: "We look for a door. The Magic Application Unit is, in short, a tool used by smiths back in the Divine Era."
Sunraku: "So basically, we're looking for a workshop."
As Bilac nods, I glance sideways and we begin searching for the entrance to this so-called workshop. Since it's a place we absolutely must visit for Bilac to acquire the "Ancient Craftsman" class, it shouldn't be as hard to find as something like the Hidden Garden in the Prismatic Forest Grotto—a secret area that's difficult to locate even when you know it exists.
Sunraku: "Still, with all this wreckage piled up, even finding a door is gonna be a pain."
Giant ribs support themselves by plunging into the ground. The area within them is littered with the debris of some kind of structure; deactivated golems lie scattered about, with grass creeping over them through weathering. On top of that, the low visibility of nighttime is making me start to slightly regret beginning this expedition at night.
Sunraku: "Isn't there some kind of, like, navigational guide that'll lead us to our destination?"
Bilac: "If it were that easy, I'd've come here by myself. The whole reason I haven't been here 'til now is 'cause ya gotta search properly."
Sunraku: "I see."
Since this is a game, players essentially have infinite lives and can share information from a third-person perspective. But for NPCs, spending a long time exploring a place with no guarantee of safety isn't something they can do lightly. It's the difference between an offline game where the world's time stops the moment you save, and an MMO where time marches on even when you're logged out. Slow-life games often link directly to real-world time, but that's not relevant here.
Sunraku: "In that case, maybe we should split up and search..."
Arameese: "Nay, in consideration of safety, splitting into two groups would be best! Indeed, truly rational!"
Why are you so... Ah. That's why.
Sunraku: "So how do we split up?"
Bilac: "Me and the bird-person'll be fine."
Bilac... Arameese is staring at you like it's the end of the world. Are you doing that on purpose? You're doing that on purpose, aren't you?
Bilac: "I'm all for splittin' up, and if it's Arameese, I can trust Emul with 'im no problem."
Sunraku: "Hey now, you're saying I'm not trustworthy?"
Bilac: "Yer the type who'd gleefully pick a fight with one of the Seven Colossi, after all..."
Yeah, can't deny that. But still, even if he's an NPC, a part of me wants to support Arameese's approach...
Bilac: "So... ya can handle it, right? Arameese."
Arameese: "If... 'tis the maiden's... request...!!"
Ah, so you're the one who folds. So my internal conflict means nothing against a single word from Bilac, huh? Got it.
Emul: "...Wait, does my opinion not count... wa?"
Sunraku: "Seniority and level hierarchy. Give it up."
And so, we split into the Sunraku & Bilac pair and the Emul & Arameese pair, and begin our search for the destination.
Bilac: "Heave-ho!"
Sunraku: "Ouryaa!"
The head of a golem—bristling with what looks like broken swords sprouting all over its body like a hedgehog—gets crushed in. Bilac used me as a springboard to leap, and her skull-crushing blow made the golem's torso reel. I thrust my straight sword through the gap in the swords, piercing the gem-like core visible beneath.
Sunraku: "Well now... I never realized a dagger wouldn't have enough reach. A real blind spot."
With its core destroyed, the Sword Golem's form collapses. The scattered swords—apparently classified as parts of the monster rather than drop items—also vanish into polygons. What remains is a stone idol, likely carved from rock. I pick it up and examine it; it seems to be modeled after a female knight.
Sword-Repelling Idol: A small-scale offshoot of itself, rarely produced by naturally occurring golems. An idol produced by a Sword Golem. It strongly attracts the attention of certain monsters. The more the Sword-Repelling Idol repels them, the more it draws their interest.
Sunraku: "I can say this with absolute certainty: that 'certain monster' is definitely an orc or a goblin."
So this female knight is the type that's off-limits to minors? That's seriously messed up. As I forcefully suppress the sudden urge to start collecting idols, I take another look at the straight sword that dealt the finishing blow to the Sword Golem. The blood-rusted lump of metal that once rested in the hands of a clumsy Dullahan, endlessly reaping heads regardless of life or death—that form is long gone. It's been reborn as a beautiful, slightly reddish-bladed two-handed sword... a so-called Zweihander.
Sunraku: "Wait, hasn't the blade gotten longer than before?"
Bilac: "That's what it was originally. That Dullahan wore it down over all those years, so it got scraped shorter."
Sunraku: "Huh... Well, it might be just right for practicing my handling of Twin Moon and picking up skills."
Its name is the "Flame General's Executioner Sword." Given the painstaking acquisition requirement—restoring a weapon dropped from a rare enemy—its performance is quite good. It doesn't have any flashy abilities like fusing grotesque flesh to your arm or flipping the user's attribute along with the weapon. But it inherits a trait from its days as the Dullahan General's Decapitator... or rather, that was probably the original form—an bonus to attacks against the head. On top of that, its staggering durability is truly magnificent. To say it has five times the durability of the Marsh Dagger [Revised II] should give you an idea of how extraordinary its toughness is. It even has resistance to extreme heat—they've really thought of everything.
Sunraku: "That said, it's bulky, so I think I'll stick with dual blades after all."
Different handling from dual blades means different footwork, too. These weapons that fall between a greatsword and a shortsword are hard to use unless you have a certain level of defense. My stats as Sunraku—needless to say—dump defense entirely, so normally this kind of weapon would be a bad match for me. But I can't say that so easily, given the existence of my trump card, Twin Moon. Looking back at the Wethermon fight, the problem was that I had too few skills available while using Twin Moon. Almost all my skills are built around the light footwork and high hit count of dual blades. That's why I need skills suited for a straight sword... no, when Togetsu is combined, it leans closer to a greatsword.
Sunraku: "But they say skills are harder to level up outside your main job, after all."
The relationship between jobs and skills in this game is a little complicated. For example, my main job, "Mercenary (Dual Blade User)," is a "Mercenary" that specializes in dual wielding. Basically, the "Mercenary" job has a hard time learning magic but picks up weapon skills easily. It's particularly suited for sword skills and hand-to-hand combat skills, but in my case—with the Dual Blade User designation—I learn skills for weapon types where you hold one in each hand more easily: twin swords, dual daggers, Blade-to-Blade Sword, and so on. But should I say, when one steps forward, the other steps back? The flip side of learning dual-blade skills easily is that greatsword skills are hard to pick up. Well, in the end, theoretically, you can learn any skill if you keep leveling and experimenting. This element of RNG in skill acquisition is a major hurdle in time attacks, and while the randomness carries the danger of turning things into a total trash game if the RNG is terrible, it's also a flavor element that extends the game's world-building...
Sunraku: "In short, RNG is crap."
Bilac: "Ya got a face like ya just reached some kinda truth, but I'm pretty sure that's just yer own misunderstanding."
Sunraku: "Yeah, probably..."
Let's pull my thoughts back to the current problem. It's like being told to reach a destination without a map. Finding the location of the Magic Application Unit—or, as Bilac calls it, the "workshop"—demands reasoning worthy of a master detective. First off, what is a "workshop"? Bilac, as a smith, used that word for a place where weapons are made. But from my meta-aware perspective, "workshop" equals "production factory." Whether for one-off weapons or mass production, if a super-civilization was making something, it wouldn't be a place where you swing a hammer on an anvil—it'd be a far more science-oriented location.
Sunraku: "In that case, from the building shapes and the surrounding conditions..."
At the very least, they wouldn't be doing precision work "above ground in the middle of fighting external enemies." Furthermore, they would've had some degree of self-defense. For example, placing security and defense golems around the perimeter... something like that.
Sunraku: "Bilac, let's search for a place where golems with clearly combat-oriented—specifically interception and defense-oriented—armaments are clustered."
Bilac: "Aye aye, got it."
Golems, golems, golems, golems. When you're constantly fighting either freakishly tough ones or ones where you never know what they'll do next, the fatigue naturally piles up.
Sunraku: "Damn it... what the hell was that matryoshka thing... no matter how many times I cut it, smaller golems kept popping out from inside..."
Bilac: "When the broken outer shells started movin', even I was ready to meet my maker..."
Fortunately, since they were like empty eggshells, Bilac smashed them one after another and we somehow managed to take it down. But the fact that the smallest golem got away really stings.
Sunraku: "Working for nothing really stings, huh..."
Bilac: "But, now that that golem's gone, it means there ain't no more obstacles left to stop us."
Ahead of us, within the crumbling ruins, something that was once an elevator sits precisely where the Nesting Golem had been stationed until moments ago. Golems with armaments that appear to be defensive equipment—oriented outward from the building and now deactivated. An elevator leading underground. And most tellingly: unlike every other building we've searched so far, you can actually enter this one. That's extremely suspicious.
Sunraku: "How far down does it go?"
Bilac: "...Looks like it's pretty deep."
Bilac had tossed a scrap of metal—what looked like some kind of part lying on the ground—past the open elevator doors. Her black ears twitch as she reaches that conclusion.
Sunraku: "Now what... I doubt there's a cushion waiting at the bottom..."
I can't be certain, but the underground level below seems to be at a considerable depth—not the kind of easy descent where you could just cling to the wall and climb down with your bare hands. If I wanted to descend as safely as possible while minimizing the gamble...
???: "It'd sure be handy if we had a rope or something, wouldn't it, Sunraku-kun?"
???: "What a coincidence. Right here, I just happen to have an archaeologist turned treasure hunter carrying a massive amount of rope."
Sunraku: "Oh, that's a lifesaver. Well then, let's get right to—"
???: "Hieee!"