Chapter 270: Scrap and Build

[Not a mistake—I was on a roll, so this is another consecutive update.]

[Forgive me if I take tomorrow off. (Preemptive excuse.)]

Pencilgon: "Brutal. Best entertainment ever when you're just watching, though."

Sunraku: "Byakko's abilities are Compression and Release, right? Compressing dirt to fire landslides from its fists, sucking in air to boost like just now... Not really my style."

Pencilgon: "Really? I kinda thought it'd be right up your alley, Sunraku-kun."

Sunraku: "The air-compression acceleration feels nice, but the attacks are pretty unforgiving, don't you think? That thing's attacking like normal, but it's constantly slamming the brakes and pulsing the throttle."

I'm basically the type who moves nonstop from start to finish, but Byakko's movement is a behavior where it repeats extremely short start-to-finish bursts over and over. It's like doing side-step drills — accelerating and stopping repeatedly to execute complex movement. Not that I can't do it, but the compatibility's not great.

Sunraku: "It's like, drawing a circle with straight lines. To make it more sphere-like, you have to keep connecting lines while shifting the angle bit by bit."

On that note, my compatibility with Seiryu was insane — it makes paths in the air and you glide over them, so the freedom is ridiculous. Pair it with Gravity Zero and you could pull off buggy maneuvers as long as your inner ear held out.

Kyogoku: "What is that?"

Pencilgon: "Ah, Kyogoku-chan doesn't know? That's one of the non-standard Tactical Machine Beasts, Byakko, and its terminal, Banbu. Along with the other three, they're the reward for beating the Unique Monster Wethermon the Tombguard."

Kyogoku: "No... ah, yeah, I'm curious about that too, but that's not what I meant... He's, like, incredibly strong..."

Sunraku: "Well, his livelihood depends on it, after all."

The second player on the Schwarz Vulf side was a long-coat wearer carrying a katana. He seemed to be trying some kind of iai technique, but Oikatzo accelerated and closed the distance in a flash, clamping down on the pommel so he couldn't draw the blade.

Sunraku: "Iai (can't draw)."

Pencilgon: "Like peperoncino without the pasta."

Psyger-0: "That's... um, just olive oil, isn't it...?"

Pencilgon: "No no, Zero-chan, there's still garlic and chili, right?"

Oikatzo: "I think once it loses its identity as pasta, it's already done."

Mr. No-Noodle Pasta goes sailing through the air. Everyone's so lightly equipped that they go flying in the most hilarious ways. Not that we can talk, since we're all lightweights too... Huh? What? Being half-naked counts as light equipment, dammit!

Pencilgon: "Sunraku-kun picking fights with his own thoughts sometimes is so fucking funny. Is he an ouroboros or something?"

Sunraku: "Local production for local consumption? More like self-production, self-consumption. What am I, a Crystal Scorpion?"

Mr. No-Noodle Pasta gets launched skyward by a somersault kick driven home with acceleration far beyond normal jumping power. The way he shattered midair looked kind of like fireworks.

Pencilgon: "Alright, next up is Rebellious-kun."

Sunraku: "It's Rebellias, don't mess his name up."

Oikatzo: "You got it wrong too. He's Rebullius."

Psyger-0: "U-um... I believe it's Rebellius...?"

It's not like his name is particularly hard to remember, but the way it gets exquisitely typo'd every time is, in a sense, a talent.

Still, the guy's lucky. Tactical Machine Beasts are a hell of a forbidden move, dragging sci-fi into fantasy, but they have a fatally reasonable drawback — a time limit on the battery... or rather, the reactor. Especially when the special armor and the machine beast are combined, the energy consumption is shit-tier garbage. It burns through energy just standing there, so it's about to time out.

Sunraku: "Even if the pilot's that guy, he's a top player. Tough enough to take a beating."

Now then, how's Oikatzo gonna move? That guy, he's still...

...He hasn't hit the level cap yet, has he...?

Byakko: "Energy... BAD, man..."

Oikatzo: "Yeah, well, after all that insane moving around..."

Oikatzo casually brushes off Byakko's oddly peppy empty-tank warning and glances at the third guy... Rebe... Rebulidos? Was that it?

Rebellius: "A troublesome Unique... But I suspect it has a time limit, doesn't it?"

Oikatzo: "Yeah, pretty much. Unlimited would be a broken mess."

Oikatzo's current level is 86. Not low, but far too unreliable to face Rebellius, who's probably been repeating level-down builds. But Oikatzo didn't claw his way back up from the level 20-ish hell that scumbag's scheme dropped him to just by coasting.

Oikatzo: "Anyway... you're working until the reactor's dry, Byakko!"

Byakko: "Oh, Yeaaaaaaah!"

The chalk-white pugilist, accelerated by a deep breath and Exhaust, cocks its fist back.

Rebellius: "Tch... Slick Rampage!"

Maybe the feel of watching two fights from the sidelines is different from actually facing one. Rebellius furrows his brow and activates his skill. The effect imbues the two-handed sword in his grip, and Byakko's accelerated steel fist slides across the blade...

(Slick Rampage... an attack skill that prevents deflection, if I remember right... I see, so it can be used for parries too.)

Just because it can't be deflected doesn't mean it can absolutely cut through. Skills aren't all-powerful. Byakko's fist, durable enough to resist the skill's correction, slides across the sword and is parried. A direct hit could've led to a full combo like the other two suffered, but Rebellius slips the blow and shifts to offense.

Rebellius: "Freeze and surge... Cocytus!"

Oikatzo: "—! Exhaust!"

A flash. A jet of atmosphere from Byakko's shin blasts Oikatzo away in a completely random direction. And a blink later, frost descends on Byakko's arm, like a hand that missed a jewel, grasping regretfully at the afterimage.

Oikatzo: "So that's the rumored Cocytus, the Dark Glacier."

Rebellius: "Indeed. A magic sword that rivals the unique weapon Excalibur, wielded by our clan leader... As sub-leader of Schwarz Vulf, I'll pay you back in kind."

Oikatzo: "Sorry, but our scumbag's orders were to take three in a row... Kinda pisses me off that it's not a full sweep, but on the flip side..."

Byakko: "Oh, Empty..."

Byakko, out of fuel, vanishes. Battering Ram vanishes. Banbu vanishes. Left standing on the ground is a lone pugilist. At level 86, a disadvantage that his bearing doesn't let you feel at all — enough to make anyone sense his skill without knowing his background.

Oikatzo: "I'm not like that idiot over there, stacking Uniques left and right. Or that scumbag over there, extorting NPCs and scheming up all kinds of nasty tricks. Or the recent PK recruit, breaking through the level cap. But..."

Hack and slash. Cut to pieces, slash to bits. The essence is a loop of combat and strengthening. In a system where you keep getting stronger until the day you turn the game off, Uniques and all that are, in the end, just a difference in the color of the paint you're using.

Oikatzo: "If you keep piling things up, you get stronger. Even if you can't multiply, if you can add, you can still reach a hundred."

In that case, having a Unique or not has nothing to do with strength. If you can set up an environment where you can output your full power, even off-the-shelf weapons and armor can rival a one-of-a-kind weapon. That's Oikatzo's fundamental philosophy — different from Sunraku, whose core is "use everything you can get to become stronger," and different from Pencilgon, whose core is "even I'm nothing more than a single cog."

Oikatzo: "Pile it up and push it to the limit... Simple, don't you think?"

Even so, Oikatzo lets out a wry smile. His current battle style, so far removed from that philosophy, feels like the endless stone-piling of Sai-no-Kawara, he thinks.

Oikatzo: "These are Master’s Gauntlets... the quest reward for training up the Monk job. And when I equip them... —!"

Crack. The gauntlets, shining with a craftsman's skill, shatter. Not from combat damage, and not because their durability was at its limit. Oikatzo destroyed them... by his own will.

A fist weapon, self-destructed, Monk... "Even if the pilot's that guy," Rebellius is still the sub-master of Schwarz Vulf, a top clan in Shangri-La Frontier. He arrives at the answer.

Just like Rebellius's own Sword Master — an upper-tier swordsman class — this is an upper-tier fist-fighting class derived from Monk and Pugilist. A crystallization of high risk and high return, born from mixing the Monk's premise of fighting barehanded with the Pugilist's trait of increasing firepower as equipment gets damaged. A job mocked as "asset-eating," yet sought by many for its sheer firepower.

The name of that job is...

Rebellius: "Destroyer...!"

Oikatzo: "Any firepower I lack, I'll pile up by smashing and forging. Scrap and build...!"

To oppose the freezing magic sword, a light accompanied by destruction roars.

[Cocytus, the Dark Glacier The magic sword wielded by Rebellius. Consumes MP to imbue the blade and its surroundings with a freezing effect. Its defining trait is the limited means of nullifying it. If struck directly, the freeze will not be removed unless a status recovery is used, causing continuous frostbite damage. Most troublesome of all: the numbing of the hands severely hampers player skill.]

[I try not to touch job-related settings too much. Why? Because I could refine them endlessly and never get back to the main story.]

[Destroyer and Sword Master are upper-tier jobs. From there, clearing certain conditions (like winning an NPC-hosted tournament) opens the path to the highest-tier jobs. The conditions for changing to Master of the Sword are known, but they're so harsh that there aren't many. Generally, an upper-tier job is enough to stand on the front lines of progression, but players who have a "Highest-Tier Job," "Unique Job," or "Hidden Job" can naturally get a step ahead of other players.]

[Bonus: Half-Naked: Main — Mercenary (Guild Unregistered) / Sub — Arcanum: The Fool Pencil: Main — Demon Lancer / Sub — Hero Bonito: Main — Destroyer / Sub — Various Psyger-0: Main — Paladin / Sub — Dark Knight Kyogoku: Main — Sword Master / Sub — Six Blades of the Nine-Tails Psyger-100: Main — Master of the Sword / Sub — Hero Argent Owl: Main — Gladiator / Sub — Priest]

[Seems there's a protagonist who's technically jobless despite the story progressing quite a bit. I really ought to get him employed one of these days.]