Chapter 133: Mental Zombies Revive on Caffeine

Only got two hours of sleep today, so I'm suffering? Excuses like that do not fly in an MMO. If you have enough spare resources to move your mouth and make excuses, you should be spending them on spell chants instead. In short, I had been bouncing back and forth between reality and SLF, taking care of one thing after another.

Normally none of it would have been especially taxing, but doing all that with almost no rest immediately after fighting an absurdly powerful enemy like Lycagon the Nightslayer was pretty rough. Though most of the mental exhaustion was actually the Usurper Dragon's fault. Hmm. I really do need some kind of ranged attack.

There was plenty else besides. Bilac screamed when she saw how battered my Gilta Brille had become, then gave me a thorough scolding. Then she screamed again when I immediately piled weapon repairs, upgrades, a new set of armor, and more work on top of her. Then Peatz screamed when I sold him a huge batch of materials because I was short on Mani. Then Emul screamed when Elke caught the scent of money. Then Bilac screamed again when a suit of armor shattered into tiny pieces for a certain "test"... Rabituza had been about sixty percent noisier than usual this morning.

Still, the payoff was substantial. In particular, this thing called Lycagon's Contusion, which Lycagon had apparently "updated" just to screw with me, had granted what I desperately wanted in an extremely twisted way. Testing it was urgent for all sorts of reasons.

Three minutes.

That was the time limit before armor equipped on my cursed torso and legs exploded into fragments. Exactly three minutes regardless of defense. Legendary-class armor or paper-thin junk sold around town, it did not matter. Pour hot water into instant noodles, wait until they are ready, and your armor explodes at the same time. Even a cicada lasts longer. Impressive, really.

If the strength or quality of the armor made no difference, that meant even Non-Standard Specialized Armor would explode after three minutes. To Bilac, esteemed creator of the brand-new armor I reduced to nothing, I offer my deepest apologies—and at the same time my deepest gratitude for its noble sacrifice in the name of testing. She forgave me with a headbutt to the solar plexus.

Come to think of it, if some guy who metamorphosed into a half-naked state every three minutes wandered around town, somebody would definitely report him. Both in the city-guard sense and the game-admin sense.

Three minutes was a long time if I completely stopped thinking of armor as passive equipment and instead treated it as a time-limited active buff to be consumed. But if I thought of it as the amount of time I could remain a minimally respectable intelligent life-form, it was way too short. Whether I stockpiled mountains of armor or removed each set at two minutes fifty-nine seconds so I could reuse it, the expense in Mani would keep piling up. Treating armor as just another kind of buff and burning through it was probably both the cheapest and the most effective option.

That was where having Inventoria gave me a huge advantage. As long as I had the Mani, I could use three-minute buffs almost without limit. Assembling full equipment sets would land a critical hit straight on my wallet, and I would have to keep hunting specific monsters for the materials, so I could not do it while I was in a hurry. Once everything else was finished, maybe I should stop speedrunning for a while and take my time improving my equipment.

Either way, I still needed to return to the Ancient Castle Ruins of Fruitless Falling Radiance.

My skills had not changed, and my armor was staying as it was for now, so my weapons were what had changed the most. I had reforged and upgraded almost everything, starting with the Marsh Dagger—the oldest weapon I still owned that had retained its original form. I pushed things a little too far, so my wallet was gone. My material stockpile was gone too.

At this point I had gone beyond penniless. I was super-penniless. I had never imagined I could spend every bit of profit I made clearing the ancient castle ruins and still end up in the red. I needed some way to make money, anything at all, and preferably something on the level of striking it rich in one shot.

Oh, right. There had been talk about pirates and all that. Maybe I could fish? The salmon I caught in bulk at the Iron Ruin of the Divinity sold for a pretty good price. And if I was fishing in the vast ocean leading to the New Land... maybe I could catch tuna?

Tuna is great. Tuna really is great. But you have to observe the proper dosage and usage instructions. One time Dad brought home an absurdly huge bluefin tuna, and we ended up eating tuna for all three meals three days in a row. It was hell on earth.

I never thought the fat on toro would start feeling heavy before I was even twenty. At the final dinner, when a tuna head sat enthroned in the center of the table, the whole thing had taken on this almost cult-like atmosphere while our family silently ate tuna hamburgers...

Sunraku: "Uaaagh..."

Nope. This was bad. Staying quiet because I was exhausted was making my thoughts steadily weirder. Why the hell was I thinking so passionately about tuna?

Still, I had taken a bath and slammed an energy drink. Give it a little longer and the caffeine would spread through my whole body and put me into a high state... Caffeine was legal. Yes. Legal.

Normally I was a lively bird-face. Right now I was a dead bird-face. My eyes were as dull as the severed head of a chicken that had been sitting around for a while, and I staggered along on zombie legs that, in the right kind of game, would absolutely get a shotgun pointed at me. As I lurched toward Deadbeat Alley going "u-bwaa, u-bwaa," even I had to admit I looked exactly like some monster fleeing the light to crawl into darkness.

The marks from Lycagon’s Contusion on my torso and legs had grown even more ominous too, so I probably looked like a corpse that had died in a brutal battle and was now forcing its mangled body to wander around. But seriously, stop readying your weapons at me.

The number of obviously shady NPCs was increasing, yet every last one of them acted like, Do not get involved with that thing, and would not even speak to me. What was this? If I started screaming something like "Uuueaauuwoooaaagh!" and biting people, could I make the AI misunderstand the situation and start a zombie panic on its own?

Sunraku: "............Hm?"

That was when I noticed two players walking ahead of me.

NPCs and players alike were heading toward the enormous ship at the harbor, but these two—an archer and a mage—were going the same direction I was, into Deadbeat Alley, the city's underbelly. The smaller archer had brown skin and a short silver bob. Lengthen her ears and I could easily believe someone telling me she was a dark elf. She looked that much the part.

The other one, the big mage... how do I put this? Did you choose the wrong class? He had the face of a battle-hardened swordsman, or some legendary general who had cut down a hundred men on the battlefield without taking a scratch, but he was a magic class. From what I could tell he had completely abandoned physical offense: what people call a pure mage. For such a huge guy, even the way he walked was kind of frail. Well, you do not often see a player who can roleplay their movement itself that completely, but this was not even a sheep in wolf's clothing. At best he was a sheep with a wolf doodled on it.

Sunraku: "I'm getting déjà vu."

A curt little archer and a timid giant... Yeah, intense déjà vu. More specifically, I had pretty recently hard-countered them and beaten them senseless, and also been hard-countered by them and beaten senseless myself.

I checked the player names above their heads. The short one was Rust, the big one was Mold. Bingo.

In a full-dive game like this, the effect your physical condition has on your mentality ends up directly affecting how your avatar moves.

I had never had a hangover, but my current mental state was probably close to either that or the aftermath of working an all-nighter. I was a zombie seconds away from revival through energy-drink power. My thoughts had wandered off somewhere, and the tiny amount of processing power I had left for recognizing my surroundings issued my body a single command: Get closer to those two.

Oh. Mold noticed me.

Sunraku: "Gooood morniiing..."

Mold: "Hyeeeh?!"

Oi.

Rust: "That is a bizarre outfit... Is that some kind of fetish?"

Sunraku: "Mostly the fault of a bastard called Lycagon. I cracked its jaw a few hours ago, and it decided to screw with me even more..."

Mold: "Wasn't Lycagon a Unique Monster...?"

Whether it was Unique or not did not matter, Mold. What mattered was whether I could hit it. In the end, that was the most important thing. Muscle-brained thinking was not bad, but someone who simply punched first was only a second-rate muscle-brain. A first-rate one always thought about maximum efficiency and maximum firepower before throwing the punch.

Maybe the caffeine had finally made it from my stomach to my brain, because my thoughts were starting to come together. Now that I had escaped my mental-zombie state, I even had enough room to enjoy the scenery.

Sunraku: "Still, wow... It looks like somebody compressed a whole town together without bothering to organize it."

Mold: "If I remember right, when they were building Fifticia they had to create housing for the workers as quickly as possible, so it ended up like this... or so I heard."

Sunraku: "So once the city was finished and the temporary housing was no longer needed, it became a breeding ground for outlaws... That's the story?"

When I looked up, a shipwreck large enough to rival the giant vessel waiting to depart from the harbor lay on the ground, apparently split vertically in half, blocking the morning sun. Countless shacks had crowded together around it as though using the wreck itself as a wall.

People sometimes talk about "sweeping a square room in circles," but this was the reverse. It looked as if somebody had swept a bunch of scattered houses toward the middle. One fire and the whole thing seemed liable to go up at once. The smell of the sea mixed with damp air, creating one gloomy-ass view.

That only stood out more because the rest of Fifticia, outside Deadbeat Alley, had such a fresh and open feel to it.

Rust: "...Still updating the record. Half-naked power is incredible."

Sunraku: "Huh?"

When I asked what she meant, apparently they were timing how long it took after entering Deadbeat Alley before an NPC picked a fight with them. Their previous best was two and a half minutes, achieved by Mold keeping the scariest face he could manage and glaring at everyone around him.

We had already been in the area for more than five minutes.

The guy who looked like he would lick a knife while laughing. The guy who looked like he thought fists could solve every problem in the world. The guy who looked capable of murdering somebody while thinking about what to have for dinner. Every one of them first looked at Rust with interest, then looked at Mold and decided, Yeah, we can take them, then finally saw me, made a face that said oh shit, and backed away.

The way they looked at me was basically, a prime target and the weak-looking guy attached to her... plus the magical beast lumbering along beside them. I felt like I should be allowed to kick at least one of these assholes.

Still, unlike the players, I could understand the NPCs' attitude. That damn shit-wolf had carved soul-level wounds into my body. Nobody wanted to pick a fight with a guy carrying two seals of approval from a natural disaster. A player could see the name floating above my head and understand that the person underneath all this was just an ordinary human doing some roleplay. But to NPCs, for whom this world was reality, there was no way to know I was merely a high-school kid.

Sunraku: "Ah, hiding Emul is a pain anyway. You can stop pretending to be a scarf."

Emul: "B-But that disguise was a once-in-fifty-years masterpiece! Why'd you expose me, waaa?!"

Sunraku: "What, next year you're going to say, 'The weather was favorable this year, producing quality on par with last year's vintage. Fluffy, with excellent fur texture'?"

Mold: "The scarf..."

Rust: "It talked?!"

I had intended to reveal Emul eventually anyway, and once we were inside the city we could manage somehow. Leaving the two of them staring in shock at the talking monster that was Emul, I thought about where we were going, what we were about to do, and what I had to do after that...

This was where my hellishly busy week began.

Apparently there is somebody walking around with an intimidation factor on the level of "the seven scars on the chest."