[I'm aliiiiive! (My schedule's just a complete mess until around mid-March.)]

[Do I really need some kind of real-time notification system after all...?]

Chapter 505: Resound, Grateful Legacy — The Real Deal's Best Outfit

Like a squirrel hoarding food before hibernation.

Like a dog burying its favorite bone in the ground to hide it.

In the end, this moment and this place all trace back to the free time I got in the gap between Dust taking down that shitty TV and then being taken down by Cursed Prison—a gap created because Amelia Sullivan prioritized absorbing equipment from the Machine Swarm.

If I wanted to be greedy, I'd have preferred to use Twinkle Pixie to take out the other side's Cursed Prison before we had to compete over the same resources, but I'll admit they were one step ahead of me there.

Still, Twinkle Pixie pushed the other Cursed Prison to the brink of death and almost certainly succeeded in forcing the opposing Cursed Prison to retreat from there. And since I just appeared near where Dust originally spawned, conversely, that tells me the other side's coordinates too.

Cursed Prison: "Now then... time to pull out my best outfit."

Cursed Prison's battle style can broadly be divided into two types. If Amelia Sullivan is going to switch among all kinds of equipment as the situation demands, then today I'll just show her the strongest outfit I've got. A true fashion king starts by hand-picking the materials themselves—

The lineup I chose is an All-Fighter setup, with every slot filled by a combat-focused character... Muscle-brained? Nope. A combo isn't decided by the kit. It's decided by what you do.

Cursed Prison: "It was guarded so heavily it almost would've given the game away..."

What makes Ms. Play Display such a pain is the ability to use cameras installed all over the city to see things remotely. Given the nature of this place, that shitty TV in particular had to be taken down fast... even if that meant burning an Ult to do it.

Cursed Prison: "A bank vault... now that's a top-of-the-line locker."

I use Cursed Prison's brute strength to force open the heavy door, and Dust's legacy greets Cursed Prison inside.

Those things had once been created by humans as tools. Then they fell under the Machine Swarm's banner and became grotesque things. And then... Dust destroyed them, picked out only the parts he needed, and stockpiled them in the deepest reaches of this bank.

Cursed Prison: "Heh... no peeking."

I mutter as if addressing the anonymous masses probably watching this city from somewhere even farther removed than a bird's-eye view. Feeling a little embarrassed inside at how cheesy I'd just sounded, I close the vault door.

And then............

◇◇

For the pro gamer Amelia Sullivan, games are both work and hobby.

From either perspective, achieving "victory" is worth staking her life on. And Sylvia Goldberg means even more to her than that.

The strongest in America, and beyond that, the player who had continued to reign at the very summit of the world... Sylvia Goldberg had lost. Amelia herself was undefeated, and precisely because she was, she had kept challenging the pure-white shooting star in hopes of putting a black mark on her record. So naturally she was stunned... and after watching the GGC footage, she concluded that Uomi Kei's victory had not been "inevitable."

It wasn't so much that Kei had won through sheer ability. The biggest reason was probably that Sylvia had unconsciously been satisfied by the match immediately before that one. Of course, it was also true that Kei possessed enough skill to keep up with Sylvia in the first place. Even so, if "that guy" hadn't spent a full four rounds locked in that brutal fight, Uomi Kei probably could never have scored that unprecedented upset.

—Real Cursed Prison.

Because its opposite already stood at the summit, an empty seat for its counterpart came into being, and countless gamers challenged for it... only for every last one of them to be defeated by Real Metius, Sylvia Goldberg.

Because of that, the title of Real Cursed Prison gradually came to be associated above all else with the image of "someone who can beat Sylvia Goldberg with Cursed Prison."

But on that summer day, one player who stepped onto a new battlefield presented an answer to the question of just what a Real Cursed Prison was.

Greedy. Arrogant. The way he carried himself was as though the sheer power to force his own way through everything had taken human form. Even Amelia had found herself thinking, Ah, so that's a Real Cursed Prison.

At the same time, however, Amelia the pro gamer had reached a conclusion after repeatedly rewatching the battle between Sylvia and No Face.

No Face, like Sylvia, was the kind of player whose mental state fed directly into his player skill, making his level of play fluctuate.

Perhaps that itself was the minimum qualification for being called Real Cursed Prison. And so Amelia had wanted to pose the simple question that arose in her heart—to No Face, to Sylvia, and to the public.

—Even if he is Real Cursed Prison, does the fact that I failed to become Real Cursed Prison mean I'm inferior to "No Face"?

—No. It only means he's "apparently the best at handling Cursed Prison."

—But if the character called "Cursed Prison" is a villain who, arrogant beyond measure and wreathed in curses, forces his own will through regardless...

—Are you stronger than Amelia Sullivan?

It wasn't jealousy. If anything, it was curiosity.

She had simply wanted to throw everything she had at the person who had reached a title even she had failed to claim—the mysterious man who hid his face and had remained an unknown buried outside the professional scene.

That was all.

Cursed Prison: "Huh. Guess you really can pull it off if you try..."

About five minutes had passed since Twinkle Pixie went down. The Cursed Prison that would presumably be wearing the 2P colors because it had been selected later by the game system still hadn't appeared, and sure enough, the Cursed Prison that had first entered this city had survived.

Target Enemy "Commander."

The core and highest-ranking entity within Mechanitan the Machine Swarm, this Target Enemy spawns in the deepest part of a fortress that appears on the map as soon as the game begins.

There are three main features associated with this enemy.

First, you can't even enter the fortress unless either Valkyrie or Colonel has been defeated.

Second, you have to clear a randomly generated interior map.

Third, once the leader enemy is defeated, the NPC faction stops growing in number.

Normally, the idea is to create situations where 1P and 2P are hostile to each other yet still work toward the same objective. Under a limited set of conditions, however, the fortress can be cleared alone—and easily.

One such trick is available to Cursed Prison against Mechanitan the Machine Swarm: by wearing the Target Enemy Colonel as equipment, Cursed Prison can completely bypass every mechanic inside the fortress.

And so, to accomplish the goal of making a Cursed Prison mirror match happen, Amelia took on the machine commander while in an extreme state where even a single hit would instantly empty the HP bar... and in the end, Amelia's Cursed Prison stood there with HP restored to around thirty percent, wearing Commander and Colonel as armor.

Cursed Prison: "Guess it's worth trying things..."

Amelia knew that she wasn't the kind of player who could boost her performance by getting hyped up the way Sylvia or No Face could. She also knew that unless something seriously disturbed her emotionally, she could always perform at her best.

Even Amelia had considered taking down Commander without taking a single hit to be a long-shot gamble... Amelia wasn't especially religious, but even so, she decided then and there that she would attend the next Mass.

Cursed Prison: "...Huh?"

And then it happened.

Child: "Hic... sob..."

The voice was far too frail to belong to Amelia and far too high-pitched to belong to No Face. In other words, the small crying voice of a third party reached Amelia's... Cursed Prison's ears.

Cursed Prison: "Tch..."

A small child. Crying. A third party... The character Cursed Prison had no reason to save a child, but Amelia Sullivan, fighting in WΔ, had a reason she needed to deal with it.

Cursed Prison: "Hey, you little shit."

Child: "Eek."

For the record, Amelia Sullivan is extremely bad at dealing with children.

Cursed Prison: "Uh... if you don't wanna die, get lost."

Child: "Ah... uh..."

Cursed Prison: "...?"

A question, somewhere between a sense of wrongness and déjà vu, suddenly surfaced in Amelia's mind.

(...I feel like I've seen this NPC somewhere before.)

In GH:C, NPCs are reused even when the map changes. You could simply chalk that up to the setting—that Chaos creates them as "residents of Chaos City"—but for some reason Amelia remembered this NPC.

No, that wasn't it. The one connected to this NPC wasn't Amelia Sullivan, but............

???: "Yo, raptor. You're the wrong actor for this scene. Move."

Cursed Prison: "There you—gah!?"

A thunderous noise drew closer along with the voice. The instant Amelia turned around with a savage grin, a blow accelerated toward her face with enough force to punch straight through it—and came in at a speed she hadn't expected.

Child: "Eek!"

???: "Hey, kiddo. I don't believe in RNG fate, but we sure keep running into each other."

Child: "Mister, who are you...?"

???: "Me? Let's see..."

What followed was a single concise declaration, brimming with absolute confidence that seemed to need no justification, utter arrogance, and a commanding presence.

A grotesque four-legged form stood there, a mane of roaring explosive flame streaming behind it. Its strangely shaped four legs supported ultra-heavy armor that surpassed even Amelia's Cursed Prison clad in two Target Enemies.

It carried a mechanical hammer reinforced with layer upon layer of armor.

And the figure proclaimed in a ringing voice:

???: "—I'm Cursed Prison."

[Sunraku's Cursed Prison right now is kind of like Kimaris Trooper. (Though its heavy armor is around early Gusion levels.)]