Chapter 166: Cruelty Lurks in the Shadows and Sneers at Peace

A grand total of twenty-four minutes and four seconds—that was all the time Natsume-shi managed to buy us with her absolute best effort.

"I have no face left to show you..."

"No, no, honestly, the moment you ate that Gauge move in the 3rd round I thought it was completely over, so the fact you managed to recover there was actually amazing."

"Yeah, yeah, even I was totally surprised when you feinted like you were going for the Chaos Cube to set up that sneak attack mid-match!"

Looking strictly at the results, Natsume-shi lost. She successfully caught him off guard multiple times but Lucas's adaptability was just way too ridiculously high—in the end, Yggdrya was completely suppressed by Dr. Sandalphon just five meters away from the Chaos Cube.

"Nah, honestly the real monster here is the guy who managed to completely read Natsume-shi's movements right at that exact moment."

Up until the midway point he was falling for her diversions perfectly, yet suddenly Lucas saw right through all of them and completely caught up to Natsume-shi. From her perspective, it must have felt like absolute nonsense as she's still sitting there with question marks floating above her head.

"Natsume-chan, the thing is—you totally forgot you were being chased by the news helicopter, didn't you?"

"...Ah."

"He realized that even though he was actively taking hits from the Villain, the news helicopter was steadily drifting further and further away from him."

"Right..."

Honestly, I don't really blame Natsume-shi for this one since Galaxia Heroes: Chaos simply has a fundamentally absurd amount of information to process compared to your standard fighting game.
Because the NPCs have eyes, ears, and mouths, the act of escaping itself has an insanely high difficulty, but if you get completely distracted by that, your opponent will just stuff you with attacks. Basically, you have to actively simulate the shifting states of the surrounding NPCs while you're fighting.

And since the game is set in the modern era, information travels between NPCs absurdly fast—meaning if you just ask a random NPC, you can figure out exactly where the Villain rampaging on the complete opposite side of the city is heading, which forces anyone playing a Villain character to incorporate all of that into their neutral game.

"...Even though I'm a pro gamer I couldn't secure a single win so I might not have the right to say this, but please... take care of the rest."

"Nfufu, no need for the polite tone! Just leave it all to your Onee-san with a bang!"

"Damn straight, at the very least it's a way more acceptable request than being asked by Mr. I-Can't-Trigger-Unique-Scenarios-By-Myself over there."[*2]

I mean, seriously, all I can say is that Katzo bastard needs to suffer something awful at least once. It's incredibly rare to have someone go this far for us while fully prepared to tank their own reputation. At this rate, we might need to add Natsume-shi as a third faction to the post-event 'What are we eating' war.

"Alrighty then... Now it's time for No Name-san here to show the whole wide world exactly what true Villain gameplay in this game really looks like!"

"Keep it moderate, alright〜"

Since this is an elimination-style team battle, Star Rain's Lucas stays fully dived in, while our second-in-command Pencilgon... I mean, No Name steps up to the plate.
With Sylvia Goldberg coming out as an unexpected third combatant our plans were thrown completely out of whack, and factoring in Natsume-shi dropping her first match we are practically hanging off a cliff right now... but if Pencilgon secures two wins and stalls out the entire timer against Sylvia Goldberg, and I manage to do the exact same stall strat, we can just barely balance the books.

It goes without saying just how utterly impossible of an ordeal that is, and exactly how much of a burden it places squarely on Pencilgon.
However, the vast majority of the world simply doesn't know what it actually means to let Pencilgon... no, to let the monster once known as the "Pencil Warrior" fight inside a "Sandbox" environment.

"Is Amane... I mean, No Name-san... going to be okay?"

"No problem at all! Sure, her actual fighting game fundamentals are frankly trash. She's so utterly weak that in your totally standard, run-of-the-mill colosseum-style fighting game, even Natsume-shi could easily farm back-to-back wins off her."

"Then...?!"

"But you see, the absolute second you hand that woman any degree of freedom..."

She's the exact kind of gamer who would bulldoze literal hell itself just to pave it over in her own colors.

『And here we go into the second match! Lucas will continue using Dr. Sandalphon, but the mysterious masked player No Name has chosen...』

『Clockfire, it seems! She's a character whose main gimmick revolves around placement traps just like Yggdrya, but according to the data, unlike Yggdrya who leans towards close-range counters, she's an active, highly mobile attacker-type character.』

The comic where Dr. Sandalphon appears is titled "Dr. Sandalphon", while Clockfire is a Villain from an entirely different series. Does that mean she's deviating from our original time-stalling roleplay strategy? Not a damn chance.
When it comes specifically to Pencilgon—the Pencil Warrior—rather than worrying about some narrative connection, the absolute best answer is always the character that lets her fully unleash her sheer villainy—and on that front, Clockfire is a character so insanely compatible with her that I honestly suspect she was custom-built entirely for her.

No, they were far too compatible.

"Alrighty then, I suppose I should give them a proper Japanese-style welcome..."

A navy-blue tailcoat, a silk hat, and a left eye replaced by a glowing ruby prosthetic that was completely unbiological—a woman dressed in an incredibly bizarre fashion. That was the exact appearance of the Villain "Clockfire" from the Galaxia Comic series "Hydro Hand".

"Hmm, for starters... there we go, hey there little missy〜, where'd your mommy go?"

Closing her left eyelid to hide the prosthetic eye, Clockfire flashed a warm, gentle smile as she struck up a conversation with a young NPC girl who was happily licking an ice cream cone on a bench.

"Mommy's over there talking with her friends!"

"Is that right? She's a very pretty mommy. Is the ice cream yummy? What flavor is it?"

"Candied chestnut!"

"That's a pretty mature taste, hey... Ahem. Anyway, I have a present for such an adorable little girl like you."

Smiling cheerfully without a single trace of malice, the tailcoat-wearing Villain firmly stuck a cute teddy bear onto the stomach of the young girl in the dress.

By some unknown mechanism, despite not being secured by a belt, the plushie clung perfectly to the girl's stomach. Even when she pulled at it with a puzzled expression, it showed no signs of coming off.

"A bear?"

"Mr. Bear really likes you, so make sure you take good care of him, okay?"

"...? Okay!"

"Alright, I need to go have a little chat with your mommy now, so you just keep enjoying your ice cream〜"

With steps as light as if she were dancing, Clockfire approached the mother the girl had pointed out and tapped her lightly on the back.

"You're that little girl's mama, right?"

"Huh? Yes..."

"Sorry to be so sudden, but... hey, do you see that teddy bear stuck to your daughter's stomach? It's exactly the same as this one..."

Like a magic trick, Clockfire had somehow produced an identical copy of the plushie she forced onto the girl, and she casually tossed it out into the street.

Bouncing and rolling with a silly boing, boing sound, it reached the middle of the roadway. Right as it was crushed under the tire of a speeding car that hadn't applied its brakes... it exploded.

"To put it bluntly, Mama, could you do a liiiittle job for me?"

An overturned car, scorching flames licking at people. The explosion gouged out the asphalt, sending shattered fragments raining down on the pedestrians. In the blink of an eye, peace was painted over with panic. Amidst the echoing screams of the crowd, Clockfire—No Name—patted the shoulder of the wide-eyed, frozen woman with the casualness of someone making small talk.

"Your reward is your child's safety. It's not that difficult of a task... so you won't refuse, right?"

The heroes still hadn't arrived.

Dumbfounded, stunned, horrified. Clockfire's sheer skill in threatening an NPC so fluidly and matter-of-factly left even the play-by-play commentators at a total loss for words.

I get how they feel. Even if it's just a game, you wouldn't expect someone to go that far off the deep end. I thought the exact same thing when I first met Pencilgon.

"A hedonistic psycho-bomber who loves nothing more than destroying peace with her own homemade explosives... The synergy between the character's lore and the player inside is just way too high."

『Ah, um, err... h-how exactly will Lucas handle this situation... I wonder... eep.』

Sasakamaboko-san barely managed to keep the commentary going, but he completely failed to keep up with Pencilgon as she fluidly moved on to threatening a taxi driver next.

"To think that she is the idol of young girls everywhere..."

"The world's a cruel place. I feel you."

Clockfire can place up to twenty doll bombs that detonate either manually or on impact. Against player characters, their damage isn't particularly devastating, but against environmental objects and NPCs, they output a level of firepower entirely faithful to her comic origins.

"They probably should've slapped an age restriction on this game."

One on the NPC girl, fourteen on the taxi driver. Now then, where did the remaining five go?

『Ah! The mother is clinging to Dr. Sandalphon... and she exploded!? Aaaah!? A taxi! A taxi is ramming into him...! And of course it exploded toooo!?』

『She's using and disposing of NPCs on a frankly refreshing level... Wow, her Villainic Gauge is already half full.』

Using the daughter as a hostage, she forced the mother—who had invisible chameleon dolls (bombs) attached to her—to cling to the enemy. Then, when her opponent was blown away, she ran him over with a taxi driven by a man she'd threatened with, "If your family is important to you, you can't afford to die here, right? So all you have to do is step on the gas a little." Naturally, she detonated the taxi the very moment it crashed.

While Dr. Sandalphon was sent flying spectacularly by a grand total of nineteen explosions, Clockfire elegantly withdrew from the frontline in an entirely different taxi. Her atrocious gameplay made it look like she was playing a completely different game, and the crowd had long since bypassed booing and moved straight onto screaming in terror.

"Since those bombs detonate in the order they were placed, no matter how you slice it, the little girl from the beginning got blown up too."

"Is that person a demon or a devil or something...?"

"Hahaha, if throwing beans or holding up a cross was enough to deal with her, my life would be a lot easier."

Galaxia Heroes: Chaos is not a simple fighting game. Why is a single round a full ten minutes long? Why does it use a city map instead of a standard colosseum stage? Why are there NPCs...? Professor Pencilgon's special lecture is about to begin.

Author's Afterwords

Those in the know might have already figured it out, but this "No Name" person is basically playing Watch Dogs in the middle of a fighting game tournament.

Sorry, Natsume-chan... Due to pacing, descriptive constraints, and various other things piling up, your scenes got entirely cut...!

Usurper Dragon: "Wipe your tears."

Goose's note: the translation of this particular chapter might be a bit rough because its content blocked the output of AI so I had to do some workaround.