[Author’s Opening Note: By the end of the year! Just ten more chapters! I’m gonna finish iiiit!? HYAHHOOO!! (losing my mind)]
Chapter 463: O Dragon, O Dragon! We Race Toward the End of Our Longing — O Dragon, O Dragon! Part Forty
[Castle Battle!]
[Victory Condition 1: Reduce the opposing structure’s Resource Value to zero.]
[Victory Condition 2: The opposing structure’s owner surrenders.]
[Victory Condition 3: Defeat the opposing structure’s owner.]
[Lord of Skeletal Castle Keep: Skull Azuchi — Anju]
[Lord of One-Night Castle: Scorpion Sunomata — Kyogoku]
[Players belonging to the same clan or party as either castle lord are exempt from the usual PK penalties for killing members of the opposing force.]
[And now, fair and square... FIGHT!!]
◇
The twenty-fourth declaration of war had finally been accepted.
At last, it was Kyogoku’s turn.
She stretched her back and stepped out of One-Night Castle: Scorpion Sunomata—which was a “castle” in name alone. In reality, it was a ramshackle shack that could barely fit a few people packed tightly inside.
Professor: “Ah, are you heading out?”
Kyogoku: “Huh? Oh, you’re from Library. Yes. The signal came.”
Whether Professor had come to see her off or had some other purpose in mind, Kyogoku straightened herself as she answered the leader of Library, the clan that had helped “construct” Scorpion Sunomata.
Professor: “I’m glad our research proved useful.”
Kyogoku: “We’re blatantly abusing it, though... Are you really okay with that?”
Professor: “Hehehe. Even an old man has moments when he wants to forget his age and get carried away.”
Watching Professor give an adorable smile—at least as far as appearances went—Kyogoku briefly wondered whether her late grandfather had ever had moments like that too.
Then another thought crossed her mind.
Was it really okay to use the swordsmanship her grandfather had taught her for something like this, even if it was only a game...?
...But thinking too hard about that would also disqualify everything she did in Bakumatsu, so Kyogoku abandoned that train of thought.
Professor: “Ah, I seem to have held you up. I merely came to confirm whether forming a Clan Alliance affects the system as well. Go ahead and swing your sword to your heart’s content.”
Kyogoku: “Um... Then please excuse me.”
She gave him a small bow and took off running.
As she summoned her weapon into her hand, a vicious grin spread across her face.
Kyogoku: “Legal, legal. The admins themselves told me I’m allowed to do this. That means I’m not the bad guy... right?”
With her Black Katana: Tempered Dragonhorn at the ready, Kyogoku reached the wide-open Skull Azuchi with almost laughable ease and slipped inside.
After all...
Skull Azuchi and Scorpion Sunomata were only about a one-minute walk apart.
◇◇
Anju: “...A Castle Battle? Huh? What is this, what is this?! You never told me about this, Emilia!!”
Inside the castle keep, Feng Shui Master Anju was in a state of total panic.
Her friend had entrusted Skull Azuchi to her.
And now there was a Castle Battle.
She had no memory of provoking one and no clue why anyone would start one.
In other words, as far as Anju was concerned, someone had picked a completely unknown fight with her out of nowhere.
To be fair, Anju had an excuse.
She was already struggling to control the unfamiliar Skull Azuchi when declaration-of-war confirmation windows began appearing among the countless control windows.
Again.
And again.
And again...
As far as she could remember, close to twenty of them had appeared.
Anju: “Ugh... It was an accident. An accident! I kept rejecting them on autopilot and then I misclicked...”
She offered excuses to no one in particular, but she understood that this was bad.
From what she had managed to learn about Castle Battles through the system, losing would almost certainly stop Skull Azuchi from providing support during the final-battle phase.
Anju: “Kyogoku... Kyogoku... Ah! That PK Kyogoku!!”
She recognized the name.
Kyogoku was an active PK who had once belonged to the infamous Ashura Kai.
She should have belonged to a different clan now, but...
Why was someone like that picking a fight with Skull Azuchi?
Anju: “And what even is ‘Scorpion Sunomata’?”
She could at least understand the “Sunomata” part, but why a scorpion?
Tilting her head, Anju opened the dedicated map to find this mysterious enemy structure.
It wasn’t there.
Thinking that perhaps it had been built somewhere outside the frontline base, she expanded the map’s display range all the way to Tiaplaten.
Still nothing.
Anju: “What the hell is this...?! Come on!”
???: “Anju-chan!”
Anju: “What?!”
???: “Some crazy beast-eared woman just charged into Skull Azuchi! Isn’t that Kyogoku?!”
Anju: “HOGYAAAAH!!?”
Her scream contained enough shock for two separate revelations.
First, the enemy commander herself had simply charged straight into the castle.
Second...
The mysterious Scorpion Sunomata had finally appeared on the map as an unbelievably tiny point of light practically touching the gigantic marker that represented Skull Azuchi.
◇？◇
Allow me to explain!
One-Night Castle: Scorpion Sunomata is an experimental structure built by carpenter-class players belonging to Library!!
The purpose of the experiment was simple!
Could a declaration of war still be issued when two structures possessed equivalent Resource Values, even if one of them was several times larger than the other!?
It was a theory almost impossible to test, because an ordinary structure could never provide a meaningful comparison!!
Skeletal Castle Keep: Skull Azuchi uses huge quantities of monster materials across its outer structure.
Its Resource Value is an absurd number reaching into the tens of thousands.
So how could anyone possibly prepare a structure capable of matching it...?
The answer was One-Night Castle: Scorpion Sunomata!!
???: “What if we just tile the whole thing with tons of rare gems and rare Crystal Scorpion materials to inflate its Resource Value?”
And thus, an utterly impractical theory was brought into reality.
Scorpion Sunomata was an unassuming shack built right at the very edge of Skull Azuchi’s territory...
But its interior was completely insane.
Every single material used was a high-rarity, high-Resource gem, mineral, or crystal, all of it spent purely on decorating the inside of the shack!!
As an aside, the person who supplied those materials required no fewer than fifty-eight runs to obtain them!
A Library player who received the materials later had this to say—
???: “I never knew a human being could remove that much humanity from the way they move.”
◇
Scorpion Sunomata had no offensive capabilities.
Scorpion Sunomata had almost no defensive capabilities.
But Scorpion Sunomata had Kyogoku.
That alone was enough.
Kyogoku: “Making such a huge clan came back to bite you.”
???: “Ghah!”
Tonight, Black Katana: Tempered Dragonhorn hungered for blood.
Or at least, that was what Kyogoku’s repeated acts of violence made it look like as she continued moving forward—and upward.
Kyogoku: “...”
Bakumatsu Lesson Number One:
Do not constantly stay on guard for an ambush.
Read the moment when an ambush is going to happen, and move accordingly.
Kyogoku: “Hiding behind an object and jumping me from there? The old me might’ve fallen for that.”
???: “H-How did you know...?!”
???: “Damn it! Keep her pinned right there! Forgive me, but I’m taking both of you out!!”
Bakumatsu Lesson Number Two:
When facing many opponents, do not think of it as one-versus-many.
Think of it as a succession of one-on-one fights.
???: “Ghk...”
???: “One thrust to the throat...?!”
Kyogoku: “If that’s enough to surprise you... Well, thanks for the ambush.”
There was no need to properly settle every individual fight.
As long as one opponent could not rejoin the battle before she finished dealing with the other ambusher, that was enough.
That was why Kyogoku’s throat strike had been aimed not merely at dealing damage, but at rattling the opponent enough to freeze their movements.
Two flashes of steel.
She cut down the ambusher, then finished off the other player who was still clutching their throat.
There was no actual blood on the Black Katana, but Kyogoku flicked it clean all the same, sheathed it, and continued upward.
Kyogoku: “Now then... Even if my job is only to buy time, getting myself killed would defeat the whole purpose. So I really ought to proceed carefully...”
Bakumatsu Lesson Number Three:
Beyond recklessness and challenge lies the Best of Tenchu!!
Kyogoku: “I went through the trouble of bringing a mountain of healing items. Might as well keep going until I die.”
In the end, once someone had been thoroughly contaminated by Bakumatsu, there was simply no escaping the mentality of a human bullet.
◇◇
Emilia: “A Castle Battle... Directly attacking Skull Azuchi to cut off its buffs for the fight against Noirlind... No. Knowing her, she probably has another objective as well.”
Even Emilia had not anticipated this development.
She wondered how she was going to apologize later to her best friend, the Feng Shui Master upon whom she had dumped complete authority over Skull Azuchi.
Then she let out a single breath and shifted her thoughts back to the present.
Emilia: “Ten-Don-san, thank you for agreeing to such an unreasonable request.”
Ten-Don: “Ahaha, don’t worry about it. Wolfgang... and probably every clan allied with them is on that side, but personally, I don’t dislike this kind of messy factional infighting. Whichever side is ‘right,’ things feel a little flat if there’s nobody opposing you!”
Judging from the situation, the final-battle phase had almost completely tilted toward defeating Siegwurm.
The moment the Saint openly threw her support behind that side had been especially devastating.
But even then, there were still players who had agreed to fight alongside Emilia.
Their reasoning was simple:
“There’s no rule saying we deserve a penalty just for targeting Noirlind.”
Even with nearly every top clan turning against them, enough players agreed with Emilia’s goal of defeating Noirlind that they had the numbers to stand their ground.
And if that was the case, then the leader of Knights Tempura—now the largest clan in all of SLF—was right.
At this point, it no longer mattered which side was right and which was wrong.
Both sides had something they wanted to accomplish.
So they would throw every card they possessed onto the table to make it happen.
Emilia: “Let’s go.”
Dawn drew near.
The night moon grew distant.
And the human struggle surrounding gold and jet-black approached its climax.