Chapter 353: Dragons, O Dragons! Part Eighteen
Deep Throater: "Ahahahahahaha! Did you see that!? Did you see that, Tottori-kun!? What even was that movement? Creepy as hell!!"
Tottori: "This is insane..."
Tottori's eyes had witnessed the entire sequence, but he still couldn't grasp even half of what he'd seen. One moment, Sunraku suddenly swapped genders, then pulled off a transformation straight out of a little girls' anime — and then turned into something absolutely not out of a little girls' anime, followed by... that.
Tottori: "So, basically... he accelerated? Is that it?"
Deep Throater: "Eee-hee-hee-hee... ahh, my sides hurt. Well, summing it up, yeah, that's about right..."
But that's not the full answer, Deep Throater says with a laugh.
Deep Throater: "I didn't catch every single detail either, but... my guess is he combined an air jump with vector changes to the physics engine."
Tottori: "You mean, like Gravity Zero or Flit Float stuff?"
Deep Throater: "Well, probably what they call triple-digit skills, yeah? Even so, the secret behind that speed is still a mystery..."
If we're to reveal the trick: Sunraku had activated a massive number of skills alongside Levin Trigger: Hazard. On top of the usual physical-boosting skill lineup, there was Hermes Boot, which allows midair walking for a set time or until hit. Space Charge, which — unlike Gravity Zero, which required sole contact — lets the player decide the direction gravity acts on them just by thinking. Exceed Gravity, which lightens the effects of gravity the more unstable your footing and the more you defy it. Warrior's Ultimate Manifestation, boosted to its limit to jack up the firepower of Hecaton Edge and Sharpening Completion. Sword Dance: Endless Spinning, which raises damage with higher combo counts from consecutive hits and reduces stamina consumption per action as the combo climbs. Dead Horizon, a unique buff skill that grants stat boosts every time your remaining HP crosses the 10% threshold, back and forth. And Quantum Gaze, the skill that visualizes attack signs and gives you the eyes to observe the world at godlike speed.
After that, it was simple: moving up, down, left, right, ignoring the ground and even gravity, he ran across the Great Red Devourer's own body and carved it up, with the tail as his finish line.
Deep Throater: "Ufufu, fufufufufu...!!"
Tottori: "You're looking like you're having fun."
Deep Throater: "Does it look that way? Guess it does, huh... kukuku."
Including the attack skills, that was the ultra-rapid sequential activation of a full nine skills. A feat that a normal mind should never be able to pull off.
But... if a human mind were to pull it off, there's no way other than using parallel multitasking — slicing up your thoughts like you're cutting a pancake. That said, what Sunraku is doing isn't true parallelism, where you split your thoughts to think about different things at once. It's a trick of high-speed switching — like sending balls rolling down a lane one after another — to shrink the gap between skill activations to the absolute limit. Either way, it's a technique tied to parallel multitasking.
And Tottori doesn't know that this is exactly why Deep Throater is laughing. So he just files it away with a quick thought: "Is Deep Throater-san like, a Sunraku fan or something?" Then, to get himself ready to return to the front, while recovering and resupplying, he looks back toward Sunraku once more.
Tottori: "So... players who can take down Unique Monsters have to go that far, huh."
Deep Throater: "Who knows... I've got no clue what kind of fight a Unique Monster forces on you either..."
Well, at the very least, it was probably an enemy that demanded a build specialized — over-specialized — in that kind of mobility, yeah. Watching Sunraku dodge the onslaught of the tail, regenerated from red mist spewing out of the raging red tornado behind him, and launch another attack, Deep Throater stows her wand and pulls out a single long rod. Tottori has never seen the real thing before. But as he catches the rumor that players who've reached the "Sage" job whisper about... and sees the radiance of that long staff — with gears forcibly twisted into a Möbius strip and five palm-sized monoliths floating around it — a brilliance nothing like a mass-produced item, he instinctively murmurs a certain name.
Tottori: "The Desire...?"
Deep Throater: "Oh? You know about this, Tottori-kun...? That's weird. I've had it tucked away in my inventory forever and barely ever use it... Ah, keep it a secret, okay?"
Tottori: "Wait, that's seriously The Desire!?"
The Desire. The name is all too famous, and its owner — despite their name and face being utterly unknown — has rung out a notorious reputation among players as the "Usurper."
There was a time when many magic-job players were fired up over the Unique Scenario "The Secret to Reaching Ultimagia: Desire." The trigger condition was having the highest-tier job, "Sage." Collect an item called "Fragment of Ultimate Magic" obtained from NPCs, and the ultimate staff — the staff called The Desire — would be yours... That was the pitch. You could see the heat from the fact that the clan leader of "Witch’s Church," a clan made up solely of magic-job players, put out a huge bounty for other players.
But that heat vanished abruptly at a certain point. In the end, the Witch’s Church clan leader, who had gathered Fragments of Ultimate Magic from over half of all Sage players and pinpointed the coordinates of the ultimate staff, found at that location...
An empty shrine, with the staff already taken by someone.
Witch’s Church now rides a wave of popularity as the de facto headquarters for magic-job players, boasting a "Holy Staff" owner among its members. But even so, the grudge runs so deep that the clan's operating rules include a stipulation: "The owner of The Desire is banned."
Tottori: "You had it, Deep Throater-san!?"
Deep Throater: "That's right... While that witch la—guy was painstakingly throwing money around, I just casually nipped in and grabbed it..."
Tottori: "Uh, but that person's a woman..."
Deep Throater: "That person is a guy playing a woman online. If I’m the one saying it, you can bet it’s true."
As Tottori sweats, feeling like some earth-shattering truth just got exposed, Deep Throater readies The Desire and begins preparing to cast a spell.
Tottori: "A-anyway, let's put that aside for now... Hey, Deep Throater-san, uh, what was it... E... Eu..."
Deep Throater: "Hm? You mean Eurus Baberi: O Angolmoa, Great King of Destruction from the East Wind?"
Tottori: "Yeah, that spell drops a meteor, right? ...How wide is the damage range on it?"
After all, it's a spell she's bringing out The Desire to cast. It's probably not something you can write off as just another AoE. At first, Tottori had wondered if Sunraku would get caught up in it, too. But after witnessing that off-the-scale speed, that worry had blown away somewhere. In that case, what Tottori should do is evacuate the elves ahead of time so they don't get caught up...
Deep Throater: "There's no way that was real, is there? I mean, teleporting a meteor...? Ufufu, no way, impossible."
Tottori: "...Huh?"
The demon who destroyed the MMO that created magic sneers.
Deep Throater-san is from Spell Creation Online. In other words, that’s exactly what this means.