Chapter 331: A Descent Accompanied by Souvenirs
Aren't you overrating Octopus-chan No. 3 a bit? Landing spam is just not okay… I won, so here's an update.
Shangri-La Frontier uses two main kinds of abilities: skills, which are physical techniques, and magic, which handles the fantasy side of things. Using both is what lets the game go beyond a simple physical hack-and-slash and become something properly fantastical.
I don't know enough about magic to say much there, but skills have one especially annoying catch.
The condition for strengthening or learning skills is leveling up. The higher your level gets, the more experience the next level requires, and sooner or later you hit the ceiling called the level cap. In other words, the stronger you become, the more fixed your skill set becomes.
Right now my status is Lv. 99 Extend. I haven't removed the cap, so no matter how much experience I earn, my skills won't get stronger.
Before the New Land opened, it was apparently standard among hardcore players to deliberately lower their level so they could strengthen skills and farm stat points. But once you know about the skills newly unlocked past level 100—the so-called triple-digit skills—there isn't much reason to hesitate over which route to take. Then again, keeping my level low is pretty important in my case, so the former route isn't impossible either… but in SLF, where I'm half-convinced the game reads your mind, playing around too carelessly feels like it'd shave down my Vorpal Soul. So I guess the latter after all?
Sunraku: "The Awakening Altar, huh… Do you know where it is, exactly?"
Hesh: "I'll explain that one."
Hm. You're the high elf Tottori brutally described as, "Compared with ordinary elves, she's better at magic, so if you want to call her high, I guess she's high—but in the end she's still an elf, meaning a wimp who might die if you leave her alone." You're… uh…
Sunraku: "Beige."
Hesh: "It's Hesh! You rude human!!"
Oh, that scored high on the elf-o-meter. SLF's elves seem like a race of cowards—the exact opposite of Vorpal Bunnies—so a prickly elf like this is actually pretty rare.
Hesh: "This 'Awakening Altar' you're talking about is without a doubt Belhe Mortia, the Tear of the God Who Examines and Judges, which our elven ancestors worshiped!"
Sunraku: "What if it's actually something else?"
Hesh: "What! Are you saying you doubt me!?"
I mean, it's in a place that's abandoned right now, isn't it? And if this is ancestral information, that means she hasn't actually seen it herself, right? It's like a ghost turning out to be nothing but dead grass, or an emotional special effect turning out to be a bug. When the noise on a digital-lifeform heroine turns out to be a plain bug and fixing it removes the effect entirely, it kind of ruins everything.
Tottori: "Calm down, Hesh… Well, on this one, my clan leader heard about it from a player who already unlocked their level cap and checked the story, so it should be right."
Hearing the words "a player who unlocked the level cap" brought Kyogoku—the manslayer with dead eyes and a smile pasted over them—to mind. I've been running into her less often in SLF lately. But Kyotimate, the day you can smile from the bottom of your heart is the day you become a first-rate Bakumatsu player.
I'm telling you, events where the rewards change based on kill score are brutal. The rankers who normally cannibalize each other get completely serious about hunting weaker players… Even rankers can rack up deaths in the double digits if they get trapped badly enough. Hell, I've killed them myself.
Tottori: "Well, the problem is that the village the elves used back when they were still a settled people has concealment work on it, so it's hard to find."
Sunraku: "So that's no good."
Hesh: "…If we can just get close enough, we'll know. There's a mark passed down only among the elves. If we follow that—"
Sunraku: "Hey, is this elf village underground or inside some giant hollow tree or something?"
Hesh: "What are you talking about? The village of days past… Tiaplaten is said to be a place in the forest surrounded by great trees."
I see………… Yeah.
Sunraku: "Might take a little while, but wait here. I'll go pin down the coordinates for you."
Bug techniques and little exploits usually work through combinations or chains of specific actions. Do a charging motion in front of a wall and get launched behind the world, or cast healing magic under certain conditions and peel the texture off the ground under your feet. All of it's Fuckaria, goddammit.
Those little tricks are often outside what the developers intended while still being completely valid as far as the system is concerned. If the developers mess up the prices and accidentally reverse the buy and sell values, making a money-making exploit possible, the system itself is still processing perfectly ordinary trades.
And this chain of actions is the same. Whether it goes beyond what the operators expected or not, it's an extremely legitimate bit of recklessness built from combining multiple items and abilities.
The required ingredients are:
The busted accessory, Inventoria.
Flit Float, the skill that defines a foothold in midair and lets you jump from it.
Levin Trigger: Hazard, for covering distance.
And Arcanum: The Fool, for cutting down the time.
The procedure is simple. Jump at full power in Overflow State, double-jump in midair, then escape into the storage space. Once the recast is over, come back. That's all it takes to make "flight" through infinite jumping possible.
When I come back, I just reverse the process and use Flit Float. Honestly, since I used a makeshift save point, the fastest option would be to just fall and respawn, but that's bad for my mental health, so rejected.
Sunraku: "Hmm, if I get too carried away, getting back down's gonna be a pain too… Hm?"
I'm almost high enough to clear the clouds now. Looking down at SLF's horizon from an altitude that would make anyone with a fear of heights pass out, the realism is enough to make you question whether this is really a game.
The great sea of trees stretches ridiculously far. The four ships clinging to the edge of the continent look like beans. Turn my gaze the other way, past the boundary of the forest I'd thought went on forever, and there's a desert, snow-capped mountains, a volcano… Wait, just now, was that a jewel-like light—
Sunraku: "Ah, shit—"
Falling, falling. If I stop paying attention, even escaping into Inventoria won't save me—I've only got 1 HP, so fall damage will kill me. Returning to real space can reset my inertia, but on the way into storage there's still a little bit of motion detection left, so I have to be careful.
In full-dive, being completely alone in the sky without relying on a plane or dragon is pretty damn scary. Just your own body, without even any propulsion… it really is… Well, honestly it's fun, but I still want some thrust.
Grab.
Sunraku: "…Oh, come on. Is multiplying the number of heads the trend in the New Land?"
This wyvern has two heads. I thought it might be a dragon, but dinosaur-types apparently aren't dragons, so maybe it originally came from a bird or something.
Oh? Is it headed for that strange empty patch in the sea of trees, the one surrounded by especially tall trees? Seriously? That's the express service. But I'm playing in a party this time, so sorry—I'm getting off halfway.
Sunraku: "Let go or I'll turn you into grilled chicken, asshole!!"
The skewer is Areadbhair. The skewer probably costs more than the meat.
When I slash the Two-headed Wyvern's leg with Areadbhair Rebuild, its scorching blade—hot enough to melt and cut even an anvil—draws a high-pitched scream from the wyvern, and it releases the leg that had been gripping my shoulder. Good. If it had tightened its grip even more instead, I'd have died.
Sunraku: "Thought I'd fall if you let go? Too bad. Your fate as grilled chicken is already decided!"
You've gotta be tired from all that grabbing, right? Don't worry. This time I'll grab your leg. Actually, I'll just climb right up and get on your back.
I'll show you the power of the immortal medic who shot down countless propeller planes—as a souvenir for the afterlife!!
Using the half-dead Two-headed Wyvern for a nice controlled descent, there are ten minutes left until I come dropping out of the sky with the wyvern and send the elves into a full-blown panic.