Chapter 154: The Domestic Energy Drink a Half-Naked Man Drinks Is Weak

Sunraku: "Haaah… I came back… I really came back…"

Araba: "Hm? Is that not Sunraku? If my internal clock is not mistaken, it is presently night. Are you nocturnal, perhaps?"

Sunraku: "Yo, Araba. My active hours are whenever my motivation's on fire. Day or night, makes no difference."

Araba: "I-Is that so…"

As for the others… they were holed up in other houses, but it didn't look like any of them were logged in. Emul was asleep. This house served as the base for me, Araba, and Emul—two people and one bird. The players had spread out across different houses mainly because there weren't enough beds in any one place for everyone to save. So I couldn't easily tell whether the other players were logged in or not.

Sunraku: "…Well, no need to wake Emul. Oi, Araba, I'm gonna go poke around a bit on a nighttime expedition."

Araba: "You're one of those, aren't you—you either sleep or dash about, with nothing in between? The sort that dies if you stop moving while awake, or something of that nature?"

Sunraku: "Who're you calling a tuna? Want me to yank off your fins and boil 'em into soup? Relax, I'm just gonna play around a little."

A full-scale assault was out of the question. I could always launch a suicide charge at a Blocker, but this time the main goal was to explore Ruluiath while trying out a few things. Since I fully intended to die without reservation, I couldn't exactly drag NPCs along with me.

I slipped out through the hole in the roof and began my exploration of nighttime Ruluiath, moving rooftop to rooftop. Ruluiath, positioned upside-down on the ocean floor, had its light supplied by mysterious light sources, so day and night barely mattered—but it was common enough for different enemies to spawn depending on the time of day.

Sunraku: "Whoa… now that's a fantastical sight."

If daytime was "a blasphemous city prowled by fish-man zombies," then the word that best fit now was "a former city transformed into a paradise of fish." Fish, fish, fish—swimming through the air. A spectacle of teeming fish so abundant you could only call it a Great Fish Swarm—something you'd never witness in the real world. The rotting fish-men were created from fresh fish… which meant the original forms of the fish-men who choked the streets during the day were likely that very swarm of fish.

Thanks to my dad's hobbies, even I—never that interested in fishing—had a decent grasp of fish names and appearances. That was precisely why, seeing each individual fish swimming through the shoal bear features resembling real species yet designed to be decisively different, I felt yet another wave of astonishment, though I'd lost count of how many times I'd already felt it. Nobody would complain if they'd just copied real fish designs wholesale—so why go to the trouble of crafting every last detail with the obsessive precision of someone inspecting the corners of a lacquered box under a microscope?

Sunraku: "Still… just because the fish-men aren't around, doesn't mean nighttime's a cakewalk, huh."

Now, a question. Why do fish form schools? The answer's simple: the more slips there are in a lottery, the less likely yours is to be the one drawn.

Sunraku: "So daytime's a zombie panic, and nighttime's a monster panic. Got it."

A colossal shadow lunged into the fish swarm. Though vertically long, its massive jaws—easily the size of a train—yawned open and gouged out a vast chunk of the dense mass of fish. With the speed and length of an express train, yet somehow preserving a mysterious elegance within its gargantuan form, the creature was unmistakably an Arctus Regalex—the very same I'd clashed with in furious battle during the day.

But if that were all, I'd just think, "Oh, a bonus monster!" and gleefully pick a fight. The reason even my reckless brain felt compelled to label this a "monster panic" lay elsewhere.

The answer was, as ever, in the air above—in the water. Within Ruluiath, providence was inverted. And before that, physically speaking, everything was inverted. That was why this creature, which had slipped into the city as if surfacing from the deep sea, was now falling upward the moment it breached fully into the aerial space. Twisting its body—spinning in a corkscrew, just like when I'd dodged Katzo's molten-iron shot earlier—it descended from below to above, spreading its beautiful "wings" as it pounced upon the rainbow-belted Dragon King Fish.

What burst from the ambusher's body was a radiance that had no business existing here. A brilliance fundamentally opposed to the underwater world—something that should never have been able to sustain itself in water. Wreathed in "azure" flames that stood out even in this city of unrelenting blue, its pectoral fins—massive enough to resemble outspread wings—beat with overwhelming power, effortlessly stripping Arctus Regalex of its status as the apex of this domain.

Sunraku: "Oi, oi… monsters stronger than a Giga Oarfish can show up here? Daytime's actually safer, isn't it."

Crystalline growths, sprouting from its pectoral fins like blades, like feathers, hammered into Arctus Regalex's body. Simple as the attack was in description, the Arctus Regalex—which ought to have possessed the toughness befitting its titanic frame—let out a scream-like roar and writhed in agony.

If Arctus Regalex's swimming evoked a profound sense of beauty, the assailant's was the swimming of the "strong"—one that prized sheer power above all. Even watching from a distance, I felt as though the sheer force of its turn sent a blast of wind-pressure washing over me. With a roar that shook the very houses, its body—small compared to the Arctus Regalex, yet still the size of a large truck—surged forward.

As if an invisible giant's arm had swung full-force in an underhand pitch, the predator executed a ferocious U-turn and swam upward once more, its jaws yawning open. Writhing, suffering, yet obeying its biological instincts, the Arctus Regalex tried to flee the predator's fangs. But for all that its massive body could match a train's velocity at top speed, it was tragically lacking in the explosive acceleration needed to bolt from a standstill.

The fangs bit home. The blazing azure flames were no mere decoration. Flesh rent by teeth, body seared by azure fire—Arctus Regalex's unmistakable scream echoed across the whole of Ruluiath. The great fish coiled its body around its attacker, trying to resist, but astonishingly—even with its colossal form wrapped around the predator and constricting with all its might—the assailant's physical strength still surpassed the rainbow-belted one's. That constriction contained enough STR to simultaneously crush a hundred of me into paste, and yet the attacker simply kept swimming, unbothered, not even slowing its pace. This was no longer a battle between equals. This was merely the routine work of a predator finishing off its prey.

The attacker's wings blazed with light. The radiance unleashed by those crystalline edges was something altogether different from the cloak of flame enveloping its upper body—not the wild, warm glow that lit the dark abyss, but a cold, merciless killing intent that permitted not even a speck of dust to exist in defiance of the "King's" will. Since ancient times, humanity had feared such power as the work of the divine: a real-cheat technique that was both an ultra-high-speed frame attack and a near-instant-kill on direct hit.

In other words, what people called "lightning."

The crystalline wings crackled with sparks. Accumulation and amplification—a lightning strike's voltage could, depending on scale, reach hundreds of millions of volts, though surely even a monster couldn't muster quite that much firepower. And yet the sheer magnitude of energy was such that even that common-sense assumption felt uncertain, granting the predator wings of thunder. Whether it was system-driven behavior or an instinctive alarm reproduced by the system, Arctus Regalex released its hold on the attacker and attempted to flee. But it was making a fundamental mistake. This hunt had been the same from start to finish: the moment it entered this inverted city, the hunter was the attacker, and the prey was Arctus Regalex. And the truth that until this very moment, Arctus Regalex had been the one caught, and the attacker the one doing the catching—that fact had never once been overturned.

If those azure flames were the attacker's lifeblood, then the lightning that erupted from its body was azure as well. Though I'd certainly defeated it in a one-on-one fight, the Arctus Regalex—whose colossal presence had been undiminished—now writhed in an utterly inglorious display. Its desperate struggles deserved the name precisely because they accomplished nothing. And then the reaper's scythe swung down.

The radiance of the lightning wings reached its zenith. The blue-crystal glow illuminating Ruluiath was overwritten by the light of electrical discharge. Expanding outward in a sphere centered on the attacker, the "lethal radius" engulfed a portion of Ruluiath along with the unlucky fish too slow to flee, then detonated—scattering a storm of azure lightning pregnant with catastrophic damage that I didn't have the slightest desire to test by taking a direct hit.

Sunraku: "………Thirty seconds. Two seconds. Five seconds. Short."

All monsters are, by definition, enemies that players must face and can face. Even friendly monsters like Emul are no exception to this rule. And that attacker—the blazing orca with crystalline wings—was no exception either. If so, then what I should be doing wasn't cowering in fear at the power that had one-shot a Giga Oarfish, but pursuing how to conquer that power.

All areas are, by definition, dungeons that players must clear and can clear. Even places like Ruluiath—the very seat of a monster's power—are no exception. If so, then what I should be doing wasn't giving up on clearing it because of some absurd reset ability, but testing and verifying how to break through that absurdity.

Things I want to do. Things I should do. Things I'd better do. When you don't know where to start, let me show you a smart solution—special treat. Since there's no audience, I'll compromise and give it to you, you dual-element orca.

Sunraku: "If there's one thing about this game I can complain about, it's that the gore censorship makes monster predation animations look kinda lame."

The sight of it chewing polygons looked all the more ridiculous precisely because SLF's realism was so off the charts otherwise. Sneering at the dual-element orca as it did so, I made a show of snatching up a few of the drop items that had fallen to the ground. Now what'll you do, Dual-Type? An insolent little insect just made off with the scraps of your feast. And what's more, that bug has the audacity to direct outright hostility toward the being that sits at the apex of this abyssal ecosystem—excluding Ctarnidd, since that thing doesn't belong in any pyramid.

Sunraku: "You're putting out enough fighting spirit to physically radiate it… well, same here, goddammit…!"

It wasn't that I'd provoked this thing just to kill it. There was something I wanted to verify, and for that I needed "an entity capable of wielding massive destructive force."

That was precisely why I, without flinching, picked a fight with the king of the deep that now stared down at me from this inverted sky. And as a bonus, I'll even throw in a Taunt command! Thanks for the drop items, sucker!!

[Though my artistic skills are crude, I have posted something along the lines of a design reference for the dual-element orca, Atlanticus Lepnorca, over in the setting-compendium-style work "Setting-Key Inventoria: Miscellany of SLF." I hope it may serve as an aid to my clumsy written descriptions. Thank you for your continued support.]

[By the way, the "thirty seconds, two seconds, five seconds" that the protagonist was counting refer respectively to:

• The lightning attack's charge time
• The blank window between the attack motion and the moment the damage judgment activates
• The attack duration during which the damage judgment is active]