Chapter 169: Pouring Gasoline on a Campfire by the Liter
Truth be told, if you put Pencilgon in a one-on-one match under perfectly equal conditions, like a martial-arts bout, she falls on the weaker side as a gamer.
What made her rack up results impressive enough to be called a hardcore-player killer—Giant Killing—in Shangri-La Frontier was the way she reinforced herself with external buffs, debuffs, and every other advantage she could bring to bear. But aside from simply losing to someone whose raw skill eclipsed hers, Pencilgon’s playstyle has two clearly defined natural enemies.
The first is the type that brute-forces its way through with overwhelming specs, like Sunraku. At that point it is less like PvP and more like fighting a monster: the sort of opponent who breaks through the usual rules of player-versus-player combat by methods those rules never accounted for.
This kind of player is ultimately the poker type who slams every card in their hand onto the table. If you hold anything back, you lose the bidding war. What works best is speed—once the conditions are in place, finish them immediately.
The other type is Katzo… Kei Uomi, who comes at you logically through experience and behavioral prediction. Against this type, the more of your hand you reveal, the worse off you become, because they use the cards you have shown them to deduce what comes next. In other words, they are the Daifugo type who sees three of your cards and tries to infer the remaining seven.
The countermeasure is the exact opposite of what works against an intuition-driven opponent: reveal as little of your hand as possible, then drive in the blade you kept hidden until the very end.
Which means that, in this second round, the optimal move for **Clockfire—Pencilgon—**is an extremely delayed, spectacular suicide.
Clockfire: “Took you long enough to make it up here. What’s wrong, Doctor? Stairs not your thing?”
Dr. Sandalphon: “Funny thing… the elevator got blown up, so I couldn’t use it…! But I’ve got you cornered now, don’t I?”
Clockfire: “Cornered? Non, non! You were invited here!”
Their remaining HP ratio was roughly seven to one. The elegant bomber’s life was already hanging by a thread, but the information she had accumulated and the dolls—bombs—she had recovered gave her, and only her, the sense that final victory was already within reach.
Clockfire: “Well, well. At long last, Director Clockfire’s three-act production is about to enter its final chapter.”
As if dancing, as if singing, she spun along the edge of the building, casting her gaze above, to the side, below, and straight ahead—as though a mere comic-book character somehow knew there was something beyond an invisible wall.
Clockfire: “And so, in order to move on to the grand climax, I shall be taking my leave for a little while. See you in about a minute… oh my, how forceful.”
Dr. Sandalphon: “The chase ends here…!!”
Clockfire: “Too baaaad! Your fists aren’t what I’m dying to!”
Dr. Sandalphon: “You’re serious…!?”
Clockfire hurled a cat doll at the ground and stomped on it. The fancy cat face crumpled under her heel, bulged outward from within—and burst. The blast shoved Dr. Sandalphon backward, while the flames stripped away the last of Clockfire’s HP and brought the round to an end.
Dr. Sandalphon: “She blew herself up… Doesn’t even feel like I won…”
A defeated character remained for only a few seconds before breaking apart and vanishing. Lucas made no attempt to hide his bitter expression as he watched the bomber fall from the rooftop, her body shattering into pieces on the way down.
He had taken a round back. The score should now have been even.
And yet the taste of victory—the taste he had known so many times before—was nowhere to be found.
It felt exactly as she had said, as though everything was proceeding along a scenario someone else had already written.
Lucas (thought): (No… even if that’s true, I’ve figured out her playstyle now. Those tricks won’t work on me anymore.)
Turning NPCs into active bombs had caught him off guard, but given Clockfire’s mechanics, she was guaranteed to be hiding somewhere nearby. Countering that was easy. No matter how she appeared, all he had to do was corner her before she could do anything. Her own combat sense was not especially high. In the end, she was nothing more than an extra whose entire value lay in catching people off guard on the first encounter.
That was Lucas’s conclusion.
Yes.
If that was all the player amounted to.
Thirty seconds were given.
The climax would be loud, flashy, and impossible to ignore.
Clockfire: “Come one, come all! If you’re far away, listen to the sound! If you’re close, step right up and see! Clockfire’s special parade is about to begin… or something like that.”
Everything she had done in rounds one and two had been nothing more than reconnaissance and preparation for this third round. Chaos City changed its exact layout every match, but it still followed certain rules.
The roads were laid out in a grid. The skyline was packed with clustered high-rises. The interiors of those buildings shared common structural patterns.
Clockfire: “Savings are made to be blown all at once! Nfufu… now then, let’s make this flashy!!”
She was done peeking from the shadows.
Pencilgon stood in the dead center of the main boulevard, atop an abandoned taxi, and waited for her opponent to arrive.
Dr. Sandalphon: “Oi, oi. Changing styles now?”
Clockfire: “I warned you, didn’t I? This is the climax. So let’s make some noise!”
If she was having fun, great. If everyone around her was having fun too, even better. Pencilgon had always been more suited to raising hell in public than quietly playing around inside a small circle.
Which meant this moment was her grand stage.
Maximum results. Maximum damage.
Not victory. Not defeat.
The absolute best.
Clockfire: “Hiii, everyone! Haven’t all of you had something you wanted to try at least once? Something you thought would be fun, then gave up because you knew you could never actually do it?”
Psychic power gathered around Dr. Sandalphon’s fists. The doctor in the white coat charged, intent on shutting her down before she could make a move.
Clockfire: “Then I have wonderful news for you! Here—right here! If you’re a villain, you can do it without holding back!”
In round one, while using NPCs to disrupt Lucas, she had mapped out the current area, studied the NPCs’ movements, and broken several of the support columns in certain buildings ahead of time.
In round two, she used bombs to guide where the NPCs fled. They were now packed inside the sports stadium further down the road.
And now, in round three, the bombs she had planted inside the buildings she cracked during round one were detonated by the red-eyed magician.
That was why she had destroyed part of the buildings.
To open a line of sight.
Clockfire: “Come on—let’s play dominoes!!”
Explosions chained one into the next, and the already battered building slowly began to tilt. Half of the supports holding up that enormous mass of steel and concrete had been snapped away, and the structure sagged sideways before slamming its full weight into the building beside it.
Dr. Sandalphon: “You’ve gotta be… fucking kidding me…!”
Lucas stopped dead in spite of himself and stared upward.
The neighboring building could not bear the impact of the one Pencilgon had toppled into it. It broke, collapsed into the next building, and then that same process repeated again and again, flattening the city one tower at a time.
Dr. Sandalphon: “Un… believable…”
Clockfire: “Nfufu. You still haven’t noticed, have you…? Even though my victory is practically guaranteed already.”
Dr. Sandalphon: “…More of your favorite mind games?”
Clockfire: “Non, non. It’s a fact.”
The four of them—including the one who was not here now—had tested the game obsessively.
Not how to fight.
Where to fight.
How the system worked.
Knowing those things was the key that let Pencilgon disguise and reinforce the gaps in her actual skill.
Clockfire: “Now then—shall we begin an unfair fight?”
Until now Pencilgon had done nothing but run and hide, striking back only in response to Lucas’s attacks. The shock of seeing her suddenly take the initiative was real—but Lucas’s judgment as a professional gamer overrode it.
If Clockfire was coming to him, then all the better. It saved him the trouble of chasing her.
He raised his fists and watched the grinning magician for her next move.
Clockfire: “If we’re going to put on a show, we may as well get into it! Good morning, my clown—Wake up Clown!”
Dr. Sandalphon: “You’re spending the gauge here!?”
In the comic Hydro Hands, Clockfire used this gigantic bomb to destroy the fire station where the protagonist, Hydro Hands, worked.
It laughed.
It swelled.
And then, when it exploded, it scattered the countless miniature clown bombs packed inside its body across a massive area, inflicting catastrophic damage.
A cluster bomb.
Its impact in the original comic was so memorable that the bloated clown had been turned into Clockfire’s ultimate move in Galaxia Heroes Chaos.
Now that clown bore down on Lucas.
The earlier building destruction had probably been done to build gauge for this. By the third round, most of the NPCs had already fled somewhere else, but destroying empty buildings still gave at least some gauge back.
Dr. Sandalphon: “Too bad! I already know the specs of every character in the roster!”
Just as Pencilgon’s group had tested the game, Star Rain had also studied every playable character and prepared countermeasures.
Clockfire’s ultimate, Wake up Clown, had enough power to blast a huge area—but it also had exactly one safe zone.
Dr. Sandalphon: “I know the trick! The safe zone is right above its head!”
Wake up Clown’s belly was packed with countless doll bombs. Because its defining behavior was to scatter them outward around itself, the area directly above its head took comparatively little damage.
An ultimate was the strongest attack a character could unleash by abandoning the option of securing the Chaos Cube. A direct hit would still put him in serious danger.
But he could reduce the damage.
There were only a few seconds until the clown exploded. Dr. Sandalphon had a gauge skill that, for a brief moment, dramatically increased his physical ability—including his jumping power.
Dr. Sandalphon: “Hah! You rushed the finish!”
The only answer was a smile.
No Face: “Ahh. You rushed the finish.”
I watched Pencilgon on the screen wearing the biggest grin imaginable and found myself feeling sorry for Lucas.
His choice was not wrong. If he could not avoid the ultimate, then reducing the damage was the correct response. Perfectly logical.
But why had Pencilgon destroyed the buildings like dominoes instead of blowing them apart like a game of Jenga?
Failing to notice the answer to that question was what cost him the match.
No Face: “I mean, even I didn’t think of that… Seriously, that’s vicious.”
The enormous display was focused primarily on Pencilgon and Lucas’s match.
But how many people understood the significance of the collapsed building visible at the edge of the screen—falling straight through the center of the sports stadium like a watermelon being split open?
What that did to Pencilgon, however, was something anyone present—and everyone watching from elsewhere—could understand just by looking at Clockfire’s Villainic Gauge.
Commentator 1: “What is this!? Is it a bug!? No Name’s gauge… it isn’t going down?”
Commentator 2: “No—rather than not decreasing, it’s refilling at an incredible rate the instant it’s spent…”
You watching this, world?
You watching this, development team?
It’s an unofficial trick, but honestly, you should probably patch this.
No Face: “I call it… Gauge Burst.”
Feeding on the despair of NPCs, laughing clowns multiplied in droves.
Q. What the hell did that bastard just do?
A. She smashed a building into a sports stadium packed with evacuees. The catastrophic damage is still increasing as we speak.