Chapter 439: O Dragon, O Dragon! Part Sixteen
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Sunraku: "All right, Saina! Emul! Plan B!!"
Oikatzo: "What's Plan B?"
Sunraku: "Plan B: Blood. I fight until I die."
Oikatzo: "That's less a plan and more a suicide charge..."
Sunraku: "Honestly, for players who can respawn, both self-destruction and suicide charges are valid options."
Oikatzo: "I feel like Pencilgon would go as far as using human bombs. What do you think, Sunraku?"
Sunraku: "...No, she'd first prepare some way to blow herself up spectacularly. This is the woman who blew up the royal castle along with the fall of the Pencil Dynasty."
Apparently even lumber counted as loot, so the castle still hadn't been completed. That end-times Round Table really was end-times as hell. It was a world that had thrown away tomorrow in a completely different direction from Bakumatsu...
Saina: "Plan B confirmed. Reconfirming, Contractor (Master): we Conquista Dolls teleport to the Contractor's vicinity in conjunction with the Contractor's reconstruction."
Sunraku: "I heard you, I heard you. What about you, Emul? Will you stay here with Rei-shi and... uh, Diale? Or head back to the save point—the place we teleported from—before me?"
Emul: "I'll stay here, wa! Besides, I'm a whole different flavor now—two flavors, even, wa...!"
Diale: "... ...? ...?!"
Oh, Diale had noticed something and was now putting on quite the display with her face... Yeah, well, it was exactly what she thought.
Emul had overcome the wall imposed upon NPCs—the wall separating two-digit levels from three-digit levels.
All while accompanying WIMP's hellish power-leveling and my repeated farming runs...
Emul was now Level 101. Reaching Level 100 had taken an absurdly long time, but going from 100 to 101 had been relatively easy.
Of course her level had gone up after she stuck her nose into the showdown between Treynor and Fortress over and over again.
As for Diale... Well, there wasn't much I could say except that she had my condolences...
Diale: "Khhhh... kill meee..."
I could imagine how she felt.
Even though I was basically the one responsible.
Anyway, we couldn't stand around chatting forever. The moment the signal firework went up, Rust's plan was as good as complete.
The final stage of Plan B would be completed by blowing myself up spectacularly, so I was going to die either way. But, you know... while maintaining a high degree of flexibility and responding appropriately to changing circumstances...
Sunraku: "Unleash the beast within..."
Oikatzo: "Don't die before Rust gets here, okay?"
Sunraku: "Think she'll make it within five minutes?"
Oikatzo: "Who knows..."
Whatever. Reducing the number of Color Dragons before taking down Siegwurm was part of the plan either way.
And unlike the scorpions, these things made it easy to rack up kill score. This battlefield might as well have been made for me...
I slipped the red skull over my head, looked forward through one of its six eye sockets, and took a step.
Sunraku: "Oh, I'm going to make quite a spectacle, so you should probably stand back."
Psyger-100: "Will it cause damage to the surrounding area?"
Sunraku: "I warned you."
Now then... Five minutes.
Five minutes, huh?
The quota itself wasn't much to worry about, but... could I fight at full power for the entire five minutes?
It would probably be fine.
After all...
Sunraku: "I've already taken my dose of QUANTUM—spelled in English letters...!!"
Oikatzo: "You're doped up."
Sunraku: "It's legal! ...Blood Heart!!!"
That word.
The instant the sound leaving my throat made the skull vibrate, it felt like a low-spec computer freezing for a moment as it tried to begin some massive task.
Put simply, it felt as though the air had frozen.
Even through the mourning outfit, I could tell because I was wearing it directly on my head.
The misshapen red skull had just... pulsed.
Oikatzo: "What—wait, what is that?"
Psyger-0: "Blood...?"
A red skull.
Red bone.
That red thing.
I didn't know whether it was actually made of calcium, but thick red liquid began seeping from what should at least have been solid bone.
Naturally, it poured out and clung to me, crawling across and soaking into the body of its wearer.
My body stiffened and shook violently. From my point of view, it was only a system-controlled animation, so there was no pain at all.
But one look at the reactions around me made it obvious just how horrible it looked from the outside.
Before long, the overflowing red liquid stopped merely dripping and began forming something new.
Drops running along the outline of my face gathered into a lower jaw. The red liquid flowing from my shoulders down my arms transformed weak human hands and fingers into those of a beast.
Spike-like growths sprouted from my back and shoulders, seemingly designed for the sole purpose of harming anything they touched.
Something slid out from behind my waist.
There was no mistaking it.
A tail.
Finally, the eyelids covering the six sockets of the skull—now coated in red liquid, in the blood of something—opened.
Six bulging eyes emerged beneath them and glared across the battlefield.
Sunraku: "Fuuuuuu..."
Oikatzo: "Um... Sunraku? Are you still sane?"
Sunraku: "..."
I silently stepped toward Oikatzo.
Oikatzo took one step back.
Sunraku: "Dumb faaaaaace..."
Oikatzo: "No good. Looks like you've lost your reason, so I'll put you out of your misery."
Psyger-0: "No, that's..."
I didn't have time to waste on the bottom bastard whose face stayed exactly the same even after switching sexes.
Unlike my second form—or rather, R.I.P.—my third form, Broad Crown, wasn't unlimited.
Sunraku: "Massacre Festival (Harvest)—Haaaarvest!!"
I charged forward, my voice distorted by an effect.
I grabbed the neck of a nearby humanoid lesser dragon and tightened my grip with a crack.
The lesser dragon shattered with the sensation of snapping a stick of puffed-wheat candy, and its death effect was drawn into my now-beastlike head.
Sunraku: "Yessss!!"
I backstepped to where I'd started, pulled the two swords planted in the ground free, and threw myself fully into the battlefield.
Sunraku: "Outta the wayyy!!"
???: "A monster?!"
???: "W-watch out...!"
Sorry, everyone!!
This form physically made me taller!!
Stop swinging and start moving—get out of my way!!
The Memento Mori I threw pierced straight through the torso of a giant lesser dragon. I followed it with a flying kick to the pommel, driving the huge sword all the way through and into the ground.
Sunraku: "I need to start chipping away at the main body alreadyyy!!"
Bryleinyego continuously produced forces from the inside outward against the players' encirclement-and-annihilation formation.
Naturally, the closer I got to its main body, the greater the enemy density became.
But with attack hitboxes covering my entire body in this form, even swinging my tail could deal damage.
Sunraku: "FuhahaHaHaHaHaHa...!! Let's kick it into a higher geaaaar!!"
Red alert.
Better stay indoors, you white bastards.
Every white-dragon-type enemy currently outside was getting wiped out.
Memento Mori's weight-reduction effect disappeared when the battle ended or when it was returned to my inventory.
In other words, if I left it stabbed into the ground somewhere, the weight-reduction effect would remain active.
And I could still wield another weapon while it did!!
Apparently, leaving weapons deployed on the battlefield while fighting was a fairly common technique in SLF. But it had one drawback: if the player died, any weapon they weren't holding at that moment would remain where it was.
I didn't think ownership could transfer outside of PK, but even then, I'd still have to go back and retrieve it.
Worst of all, even if someone couldn't put it into Inventoria, they might still carry it away.
Well, all that meant was that I shouldn't die.
And anyone shameless enough to try stealing it could be beaten half to death.
Besides...
I wasn't going to give them enough time to try.
Sunraku: "Full throttlrrrrr!!"
The effect on my voice was starting to make me laugh, which wasn't good.
Wee aaaree aaaliensss.
Red Beast Form
The third form of the dark-arts magical girl who's starting to leave humanity behind. Think of that handsome Gohan desu yo! guy, only red.
So does that mean the "black" Origin Kin is... No, it's fine! That one's a solid!!
From the outside, it looks like Sunraku has completely lost control, and it obviously seems terrible for the body. From Sunraku's own perspective, however, the only real change is that everything looks slightly red, so there is no particular problem.
The number of eyes increases to six, but the player is not actually flooded with six separate streams of visual information. From the player's perspective, vision remains the normal two-eyed type.
Raid-monster reward items generally fall into three categories:
- High risk, high return
- Medium risk, medium return
- Low risk, low return
Broad Crown belongs to the high-risk, high-return category. In the worst case, it carries the possibility of the user's entire race being contaminated by the Origin.
That does not mean low-risk, low-return rewards are failures. Many of them, like Necrophagy, make you think, "Isn't this just normally useful?"
In fact, in a dense forest with plenty of things to grab onto, wouldn't that be a better pull than Broad Crown...?
Curse you, Tottori!!
(With the same energy as the green dragon.)