Chapter 205: Together Under Heaven — Part Eleven

I had an idea while poking around Narou's features. If this turns out to be a bad idea, I'll change it back.

Happy New Year, everyone. Please continue to support this humble work this year as well.

I pulled Hokusai, so I'm updating in a peaceful state of mind.

Sunraku: "Whoa!?"

The night sky is white. The coliseum is red. Ctarnidd looks weirdly white. I look at my own hand. Pale, bluish. Not a normal human hand.

Psyger-0: "Wh-what... what is, th-this..."

Sunraku: "Rei-shi, calm down. It's just... the colors got flipped."

Psyger-0: "Colors... r-right... yes..."

It looks freaky, but it's just the colors that changed. If this were a bug, a GM call should've gone off by now. Since it hasn't, this mess came from that green chalice.

Akitsu Akane: "Wah, wah-wah! What is this?!"

Sunraku: "Calm down, I said calm down... Aaah, goddammit—EVERYONE, LISTEN UP!!"

Maybe it's the female avatar, but my throat stings from yelling. But to fight back against Ctarnidd, who keeps piling panic on top of panic, I've gotta shove right through it with enough force to blow the panic away.

Sunraku: "Akitsu Akane, quit thrashing around—you're gonna get hurt! Rust, don't lock up! Mold, you too! Flipping colors is the kind of thing you do just by messing with your screen settings! Get a grip!!"

Anyway, we need to get things back under control. We don't know what the last two chalices do, so we've gotta pull back for now. I jump up and smack Akitsu Akane on the head, flick both Rust and Mold on the forehead, and drag Rei-shi by the hand to the corner of the coliseum where we stashed the NPCs.

Emul: "A-awawa, Sunraku-san! Sunraku-san!"

Sunraku: "Aaah, what a pain in the ass—EVERYONE, FOCUS!!"

There's a monster right over there, so why the hell am I stuck acting like a kindergarten teacher? But this ain't solo play. I'm not alone. If only one person here can think straight, then that person's gotta be the one in charge.

Sunraku: "Calm down. You hear me? Calm down. Even if you can't calm down, calm down. Deep breaths... In. And out. Close your eyes and tell yourself: 'The sky is white. My skin is pale.' Got it? If you get it, say 'Yes, sir'—no, 'Yes, ma'am.' EVERYBODY SAY IT!"

Rust: "...Sunraku should calm down first."

Sunraku: "It's reverse-teaching cooldown. When you see someone more freaked out than you, it actually settles you down, right?"

Alright. Everyone, NPCs included, has settled down enough to hear me out. I gave Stude one chop and his eyes rolled back. He's quiet now.

Sunraku: "You don't need to get how it works. Long as you know who did it, that's good enough."

Same thing with bugs. Getting hit by attack detection when nothing's there is way worse for your head than trash mobs somehow dealing final-boss damage. That first one, by the way, is from a game where players dug into the data and found out "the final dungeon map got reskinned on the surface but nothing else changed, so it looks empty but the final dungeon mobs are actually right there—just invisible." It wasn't a required area for the main story, so it could've been worse... but if you tripped a certain event flag, an item in that zone became mandatory. It turned into "the spot where you absolutely cannot piss off Fuckaria" and became legendary horror in that one game.

Sunraku: "Alright. What we know right now: 'When one of those chalices glows, something happens.'"

Rust: "...Blue flipped gender. Green flipped the colors we see."

Sunraku: "Uh... you're Rust, right?"

Rust: "...My eyes are finally adjusting."

A tall, lean guy who looks like a pretty boy straight out of a shoujo manga mutters while rubbing his brow. If you ignore the fact that he's wearing women's clothes stretched tight to the limit, it's actually a nice-looking sight... but yeah, he just looks like a creep. Akitsu Akane is a lost cause—she's pure comedy at this point.

Rust: "...Is Ctarnidd testing the waters?"

Sunraku: "Probably just game-design kindness. Like a tutorial."

Mold: "Uugh... hard to move..."

I'm not touching that one. I'm not reacting to Mold, who now looks exactly like a shoujo manga heroine. Dammit, these guys have their souls flipped, so their current looks actually fit them better, and that's just... Aaargh! This is not the time to be messing around with gender-bending gags! But I hate that I can't just shrug this off!

Emul: "THUNRAKU-THAAAAAN! THOMETHING! THOMETHING GREW, WA—!!"

Sunraku: "I'm not asking WHAT grew. Next!"

Araba: "I was not aware Ctarnidd possessed such power!"

Sunraku: "Means he wasn't even trying before. Next!"

Ceecrue: "Ngh... to suffer such shame...!"

Sunraku: "Yeah, yeah, 'kill me now.' Next!"

Nereis: "I don't... thee any change."

Sunraku: "Means you don't have a gender. Next!"

Dammit. Half these guys are walking comedy gold, and I can't even enjoy it right now. While we're dealing with this, another chalice lights up in Ctarnidd's grip. My whole vision goes orange. Wait—if colors are flipped, this ain't orange, is it?! So what color just went off?!

???: "No—it's not orange... it's blue...!"

Sunraku: "I see. So getting hit by the same light turns you back...!"

The old man turns back into the fox-masked girl. The shoujo-manga pair turns back into the youth-manga pair. I look around at everyone back in their right bodies, then face Ctarnidd again.

Sunraku: "First, we gotta make Ctarnidd use the 'Green' chalice again and get our vision back. Then, the second our eyes are normal, we try breaking that thing."

Ctarnidd's tentacles are always holding the chalices—even when he's slamming them down for attacks. Plus, after using a tentacle for a physical attack, there's a bit of a longer pause before it pulls back. The chalices can probably be broken. What we've gotta watch for is that just breaking the chalice might not undo the effect. Worst case, we'd be stuck fighting with flipped genders and messed-up vision.

Sunraku: "I wanna know what the last two chalices do too, but we hit them the moment one goes off and things go back to normal. Rei-shi and I will bait the tentacle attacks. Once a chalice gets close to the ground, everyone unload on it!"

Actually, if breaking them just takes raw power, Rei-shi's our best bet. Don't tell me she brought a hammer just for smashing objects...? No, no way. But yeah, for "smashing stuff," a hammer beats a sword. Guess hardcore gamers really do know how to manage with limited inventory—unlike me and my endless storage.

Sunraku: "Rei-shi, let's break the gender-flip chalice first. We can't have the NPCs losing their minds every time."

Psyger-0: "Got it."

Especially since Ceecrue—our next-best attacker after me and Rei-shi—totally falls apart from this. And having to relearn how your body moves every time is even worse than messed-up vision. Rei-shi and I sprint up to Ctarnidd. With our colors flipped, Ctarnidd looks pure white. Worse, the chalice colors are flipped too, so we've gotta track them by which tentacle's holding what.

Sunraku: "Which leg was it?!"

Psyger-0: "Um... I think... it's the reverse of blue, so that chalice is... gender-flip... and that leg is color-flip!"

Sunraku: "Gender-flip first!"

Slashing won't do damage—I'm counting on that. But I can get its attention. Even if it doesn't draw blood, having ants crawl on your skin grabs your focus whether you want it to or not. Our weapons hit one of Ctarnidd's tentacles—the one holding the chalice that would be "Blue" in normal colors. The effect... yeah, not much. But Ctarnidd's eye swivels toward us. Power fills the hollow tentacle. Danger closing in. Still, colors flipped or not, I'm not nearly out of it enough to get hit by something this obvious.

Psyger-0: "Here it comes...!"

The tentacle slams down into empty ground. The Blue Chalice drops near the dirt, and right then, everyone waiting behind us jumps forward—weapons, magic, arrows—all piling onto the Blue Chalice. So, how tough are these things...?

???: "No good! This thing's crazy hard!!"

Sunraku: "Can we even break it?!"

Araba: "It cracked! We can do this!"

Araba, who'd slammed Daikaikyou into it, yells out—but Ctarnidd isn't gonna leave his tentacle pinned for long. Rust's last arrow hits, but we can't finish the job in one go. The Blue Chalice goes back up, out of reach for the close-range fighters.

Sunraku: "We've got the pattern down. Keep baiting attacks and breaking these things!!"

Ah—it flashed again. Dammit, gender-flipped again?! This underwear I'm stuck in with no gear on doesn't hold anything in place, so it's all bouncing around and it fucking hurts!!

Sunraku: "UOOOOOH, THIS IS JUST A HUGE PAIN IN THE ASS!"

They’re bouncing all over the damn place!