Chapter 245: Wolf War Prelude — You Can’t Dodge a Logical Punch
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Is this what they call walking on pins and needles?
All I did was break a window at an in-game base, yet for some reason I’m getting death glares.
I’ve got no reason to back down, so I puff out my chest and stand tall, and the gazes awkwardly slide away. Hehehe, justice prevails…!
Pencilgon: “It means put some clothes on instead of bouncing around, Sunraku-chan-kun?”
Oikatzo: “Looks like we’ve hit thread number one hundred, huh.”
I go silent… and with a killer pass only Kei-kyun (Oikatzo) can understand, I snuff the light out of his eyes. Just then, the talks between the two wolves finally begin.
Psyger-100: “Now then, let’s skip the introductions… Originally, I intended to reconfirm the terms of our alliance, but there’s a matter that needs settling first, wouldn’t you say?”
Nearly every gaze in the room zeroes in on Kyotimate. The expressions on the players whose gear is weirdly shabby for members of a no-life clan are especially fierce—they look ready to slash at her with their swords any second.
Pencilgon: “Hmm, starting there, huh… Well, whatever. I’ll get straight to the point—eighty per—… Okay, even I know that’d be a joke. Let’s settle on fifty percent.”
Psyger-100: “…Factor in the possibility that all of Schwarz Vulf might deal with you, and make it twenty percent.”
Pencilgon: “Nope. Even at my most generous, forty percent.”
A negotiation unfolding in nothing but bullet points. The onlookers split into those who get it and those who don’t.
The former, who understand what’s going on, correctly recognize this as a fierce haggling match: Pencilgon making an outrageous demand, and Psyger-100 hinting at retaliation to wring out concessions… But for better or worse, the victims themselves—the players who got fleeced—fall squarely into the latter group.
Victim: "Wh-What the hell are you talking about…?"
Kyo the Ultimate: "You don’t get it? Your leader is haggling over how much she’ll pay to buy back my gear."
To put it in plainer terms, that earlier exchange translates to:
“If you want your items back, pay me the total sell price plus an extra forty percent.”
“Keep mouthing off and the whole clan will retaliate—settle for twenty percent extra.”
A perpetrator smiling sweetly while explaining this to her victims. The sheer depravity freezes the victims for a moment before comprehension seems to dawn.
Maybe they still can’t grasp why they have to pay extra to get their own gear back, because one of them shouts in a voice that’s high-pitched—age-appropriately high—
Victim: "Wh-Why the hell do I have to pay for my own gear?! Just give it back!"
Kyo the Ultimate: “Why? The ownership of your… let’s see, Ascension Blade Kai-Six is mine now, so I’ve got no reason to hand it over for free, right?”
Victim: "It was mine originally, dammit!"
Ah, they really don’t get it. Look, Psyger-100’s holding her head, and Pencilgon’s grinning that thoroughly nasty grin.
Having enough scumbag aptitude to keep pace with these degenerates, Kyotimate explains—like she’s teaching the ways of the world to a kindergartner, in other words, in a tone that’s insanely infuriating—exactly why the victims need to pay up.
Kyo the Ultimate: “Listen, kiddo. In this game, PK isn’t against the rules. The game system explicitly recognizes it as one playstyle. So yeah, I took your gear, but that doesn’t make it wrong. Unnerstand?”
See, the mistake people make is not realizing that the player-killer system is something the devs intended.
For example, if Pencilgon had smooth-talked these victims out of their gear, they’d have the right to cry to the admins or put her on blast in a shame thread. Fraud is fraud, even if it’s just digital data.
But PKers are different. PK is a legitimate way to enjoy SLF, a recognized playstyle.
Yeah, your gear gets jacked if you die, but PKers do this fully aware of the massive downside: if they lose, all their assets are forfeit.
Let’s set aside the fact that Inventoria negates that problem—putting that aside, this case is simply the natural outcome of a player-killer winning, no stalking or clan conflict required.
Once Kyotimate takes your gear, what she does with it is entirely up to her. She doesn’t even have to sell it back to Schwarz Vulf. So at this point, you could say she’s already being gracious enough… logically speaking, anyway.
But if the world ran on logic alone, there’d be no wars.
Sunraku: “Whoa, incredible. Listening to this is making me want to throw a punch.”
Pencilgon: “Kyotimate… seems to be quite a find… though she is the weakest among the Four Heavenly Kings…”
Kyo the Ultimate: “Eh, I don’t wanna be a Heavenly King, I wanna be the Demon Lord.”
Sunraku: “Then I’ll be one of the Four Heavenly Kings, the type who ultimately ends up with the light attribute.”
Pencilgon: “Characters like that show up in a lot of stories, but honestly, they’re just wishy-washy double-crossing bats—how do they act so high and mighty? I get that they’ll become enemies, but you’d think they’d show a little more remorse, you know?”
Oikatzo: “I get that, but if they keep angsting over it the whole time, that’s annoying too.”
Sunraku: “You know, there’s this game where a character mopes and agonizes through the whole story, but then in battle, they reuse their enemy voice lines and gleefully slaughter their former allies.”
Pencilgon: “That’s a trash game, no question.”
Well, yeah, it is a trash game. But it’s that half-baked kind of decent where you can’t help but think the whole time you’re playing, “If only it were just a little better…” and the more you replay it, the thicker that feeling gets—like a rotten piece of dried squid you can’t stop chewing. It’s weirdly addictive.
You’ve got a character who angsts in the story like, “Can a traitor like me really deserve happiness?” and then immediately in the next battle goes, “Now, let me hear you scream!” all hyah-hyah. That’s prime comedy material.
Victim: "Psyger-san! Why do we have to go along with what these assholes say?!"
Oh, looks like they realized they can’t out-argue Kyotimate and ran crying to Psyger-100.
But did they forget? Psyger-100’s been operating on the assumption of buying the gear back from the start. No amount of crying will get it returned for free.
At least she’s being considerate enough not to sell it off to another clan, so the smart move is to pay up quietly… but I got curious, so I toss a question at Kyotimate.
Sunraku: “By the way, how much does all that mugged gear total up to?”
Kyo the Ultimate: “Mm, when I asked an NPC, it all came to about fourteen million Mani.”
Even at twenty percent extra, that still comes to around seventeen million…
Kyo the Ultimate: “Ah, sorry, but I want it in one lump sum.”
Sunraku: “You demon.”
If you want to make money in this game, you either solo ridiculously strong monsters or grind mobs into extinction.
Sure, there are back alleys like swiping an entire treasure mountain, but… at the very least, there can’t be many people who can casually cough up a lump sum of roughly twenty million Mani.
Kyo the Ultimate: “Well, from the looks of it, it doesn’t look like a Unique weapon anyway, so why not just give up on what you lost and craft it again from scratch?”
Damn, she’s savage. If someone said that to me, I’d be slapping them with a white glove.
Getting insulted outright is maddening enough, but being out-logicked is even worse. A sound argument tends to hurt people. It’s one of those things you get, but you can’t accept.
Victim: "……!"
Kyo the Ultimate: “Oh, I’ll accept any revenge matches, but I’d suggest waiting until after the talks are over.”
A provocation so brutal you couldn’t complain if she punched you with a white-gloved fist as a challenge letter. But judging by Pencilgon’s expression, this was probably planned in advance, huh?
Knowing her, she’s surely secured testimony that someone on Schwarz Vulf’s side picked the fight with Kyotimate. In other words, she’s planning to make Kyotimate the “victim” and then gouge them.
Pencilgon: “Now, now, Kyogoku-chan. What you’re saying isn’t wrong, but let’s leave it at that.”
Kyo the Ultimate: “Hehe… If the clan head says so, I’m not a demon. I’ll give a little ground.”
She smoothly makes a point of showing that we’re in the right while still saying, “We’re friends, so I’ll compromise.” Should I learn from that shamelessness? …Nah. It’d contaminate my humanity.
Kyo the Ultimate: “I’ll let you pay in installments.”
Sunraku: “That’s the part you concede?!”
Couldn’t help but butt in. So instead of lowering the price, you concede on the payment method?!
Unable to win with words, with reason siding with Kyotimate, the choices are two: pay the extortionate price to buy back your gear, or give up and cry yourself to sleep.
The atmosphere of the top-tier clan turns prickly after having that shitty binary shoved down their throats by a minor clan, but our scumbags act like they don’t even feel the breeze.
Every last one of them’s got skin thick as a brick wall—if they didn’t, they couldn’t survive as a model, a pro gamer, or a PKer.
Still, out of the three-round match—the three topics Pencilgon envisioned—this feels like a first-round victory.
One wrong move and it could’ve turned into, “We’ll call off the PK incident, now cough up the info.” The whole point of riling up the victims was to flip the perpetrator-victim relationship and force through our logic.
The real show starts now.
Pencilgon: “Well, that’s enough of the warm-up… Let’s move on to the next topic.”
Pencilgon smiles, ready to overturn a situation where they’re so clearly in the wrong. Psyger-100 narrows her eyes, poised to press for real accountability.
Right, onto the next topic… but first—
Sunraku: “Ah… hey.”
Psyger-0: “……Um…… sorry I’m late……”
Rei-shi came in looking incredibly awkward, and I greet her.