Chapter 187: Comfort Level: Roughly Equivalent to a Private Room in an Internet Cafe

Spirits—if anything, they're an ultra-major race even more mainstream than Chimeras, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the absolute staples of fantasy like dragons, angels, and demons.
Now, there are all sorts of varieties when you say "Spirit"... but speaking of the major ones, you've got your standard fire, water, wind, and earth elemental spirits, your Arabian-style Djinn represented by genies in lamps, and any sword named Excalibur has a pretty high chance of having some "Spirit of the Lake" pop out of it.

Depending on the game—or rather, depending on the definitions of whoever came up with the lore—they might have physical forms or they might not, they might look completely inhuman or they might just look like "wait, isn't that just cosplay?".
Conversely, sometimes they stick too strictly to the original lore and just look like filthy lizards... and in the worst-case scenarios, Ifrit gets treated as the fire spirit instead of Salamander. Hey, that guy isn't even from the European region!

Well, enough about other games. In the world of ShanFro, Spirits (Spirits) are, to put it extremely bluntly, "tornadoes with a will."
I don't mean that they indiscriminately scatter destruction everywhere; in this world, a spirit is defined as "an entity where a semblance of an ego has come to dwell within a certain accumulated mass of a specific attribute."
The reason I compared them to tornadoes is because of this very nature; spirits aren't lifeforms, they're basically just an ego residing in a place where magical power has pooled up... meaning that after a certain amount of time, they disperse. Just like a tornado unwinding and vanishing once it exhausts its energy.
And even though I say "ego," it's nothing grand enough to be called a personality—apparently, it's just a childish sense of self that can barely distinguish between itself and others, so most spirits either use up their power without thinking of the consequences and vanish, or they just aimlessly exhaust their power without knowing what to do and fade away.

That being said, whoever came up with the lore for ShanFro isn't stupid enough to slap a big name like "Spirit" onto some wannabe natural disaster.
Spirits have an ecology more fleeting than fireflies or cicadas, but very rarely, an entity will emerge with a firm ego that can actually be called a personality, locking its own existence in place by absorbing the same attributes as itself from the surrounding magical power.

If anything, from the players' perspective, those are the ones you'd actually call "Spirits." A natural phenomenon with a will, a mass of attributes that has acquired an ego—call them whatever you want, but sometimes they act as boss characters, and sometimes they're NPCs involved in Unique Scenarios.

"So, what's this 'Egg-sistence' thing?"

"It's a Spirit [Existence]. Do you know that spirits without strong power... spirits who fail to obtain great strength end up disappearing?"

"Only conceptually."

"Well of course you do, I literally just explained it a second ago desu wa..."

My bad, I don't read strategy sites that religiously.

"The Dwarves focused on that exact point. If the spirit doesn't have the power to maintain its own body, why not provide it with a vessel and sustenance from our side?"

"And that's an Exit-stent?"

"They are Those Who Have Gained Existence—the Spirit [Existence]! Sunraku, are you doing this on purpose!?"

"Well whatever, the name doesn't matter, keep going."

Araba looks like he just bit into a bitter bug, but apparently he owes me three or four favors so he can't complain too forcefully. Though personally, I consider my debt completely wiped clean thanks to him saving my ass back during that killer whale bastard fight.

"She was one of those spirits too. She had an ego, but couldn't learn how to acquire magical power on her own, so she was fading away."

Nodding repeatedly is the blue-skinned Nereid—who, if their story is true, should technically be a trash spirit (pardon my language), but right now she doesn't give off any of that precarious 'about to vanish at any moment' vibe.
Her skin, her hair, her eyes, everything is tinged blue, and she uses water draped around her like a celestial maiden's robe that strangely doesn't turn transparent to serve as her clothes—which is a rather stimulating look, honestly—but occasionally, the outline of her entire body blurs with a squelch, and the ends of her hair and limbs sometimes lose their human shape and liquefy, proving that she's composed of water and magic, not proteins.

"Ah, I'm getting the gist of it. You couldn't just leave her to die, so you somehow hauled her over to the dwarves, sealed her inside a weapon... no, it looks consensual, so you had her 'move in'. That about sum it up?"

"Have you... been watching us since a long time ago...?"

"As if."

Just a hunch that if you toss a bunch of typical tropes into a boy-meets-girl scenario, it usually ends up looking something like this.

"Based on what you're saying, that katana has a spirit dwelling inside it, and the user provides the magical power... no, the weapon itself gathers magic to some extent, or maybe the spirit learns how to supply magic the moment it houses itself in the weapon. Am I right?"

Heh heh, looks like I hit the jackpot. A royal road trope like a weapon housing a supernatural entity? I've seen it so many times I'm sick of it, so for someone like me, reading this situation is a piece of cake. Forget boiling tea with my belly button, I could cook rice in my belly button and whip up a full bowl of ochazuke with it!
...Somehow I'm getting hungry. I should make some ochazuke when I log out, I'm pretty sure I still have some salmon flakes left in the fridge.

"Even so, it's apparently not something that can be done so easily. You have to synchronize with the fading spirit and gain their consent, otherwise you can't form the contract. I hear it's impossible to forcibly seal them inside a weapon."

"Ah, sounds amazing. That's totally the setup for eventually cramming a massive amount of spirits together to create a weapon of mass destruction."

"What!?"

I literally just cleared a game with a storyline exactly like that. It's called Faeria Chronicle Online, you see... ugh, my head hurts.

"Joke, it's a joke, Dwarves aren't the kind of guys to do something so awful, right?"

"Of course! They can be a bit rough around the edges, but they're all good guys!"

If they're all heavy drinkers with old-man faces, that's a royal flush right there, and if they live in mines or underground, that's bonus points.

"When we came down here, we were attacked by those guys and I ended up letting go of her... I'm so, so glad we found you...!"

"When that thing ATE me, it was reeeally SCARY."

"Ah, so it really did eat you."

Tentacles, female spirit, predatory absorption... hmm, good thing ShanFro isn't an R-18 game, Araba. Actually, if things went south, Kaisen-Oh might have ended up spirit-ified... dangerous, dangerous. If she was a ghost-like ethereal body I could just chop her with my decapitation sword, but whether a spirit falls under that category is a bit iffy.

"Thank you, Bird Man. Nereid will reWARD you?"

"If you want to reward me, just do your best as Araba's weapon, otherwise we're all octopus food."

I seriously doubt that Ctarrnid—a boss practically stepping into the realm of gods or whatever—would just casually snack on people, but since Araba (who was relatively strong even with just his bare fists and fangs) has gotten his original weapon back, it's safe to officially count him as fighting power now.
With this, minus Stude, we've completed a mixed eight-man party of players and NPCs; isn't this a decent enough number to actually take on a raid boss? At the very least, it's way more reassuring than challenging a Unique Monster that slaps you with level-downs with just three people.

"O-kay, I'll do my BEST. Nereid will proTECT Araba and Bird Man. Also... that white, soft, sea urchin-looking thing."

"I'm not even being called a Vorpal Bunny anymore desu wa!?"

Probably because Vorpal Bunnies haven't expanded their habitat into the ocean, honestly. Well, whatever.

"Now calm down, Urchimul... ow! Stop relentlessly pecking the top of my head!"

"Puaaaaah!!"

If she were a true fiend she'd just laugh and mock me right back, but what a low boiling point this rabbit has, I'm totally gonna pull your cheeks and stretch your ears out.

"Fubyaaaah!?"

You know what? You're losing horribly to Nereid in overall Chuunibyou levels right now! Do you realize she's a spiritual entity dwelling in a sword?! That boasts a Chuunibyou power level rivaling an odd-eyed magic eye, a mere mascot can't compete with that!

"Well whatever, let's get right to it... Araba, we're going Clionea hunting."

"That's really sudden!?"

I can't level up anyway, and I'm not in the mood to go item-hunting, so the only thing left to do is boss subjugation.
That Clionea has a property that shuts down all magic, so at the very least, just physically swinging around a spirit-possessed weapon shouldn't turn it into an industrial waste drop.

(...Well, it's not like I don't have ulterior motives about wanting to check the boss drops before other players get here, though.)

I mean come on, there are four bosses, surely one of them, right?

"Ah, Emul, you're on house-sitting duty."

"Pueee!?"

I mean, magic classes are basically only good as glorified decorations or meat shields anyway...

Author's Afterword
As observant readers might already know...! Clionea-san's battle scene was described at the very beginning of this arc, so...! I'm Yuzapa-ing it...! (Meaning: I'm skipping it)

• Recipe for Spirit [Existence] Weapons

• Requirements:

  • Someone who has obtained a certain level of affinity or higher with a Spirit

  • A Spirit with a certain level of affinity or higher (limited to trash spirits)

  • A Vessel Stone with the same attribute as the Spirit

  • Ore materials with the same attribute as the Spirit

  • A Dwarf with a craftsmanship skill of Second-Class or higher

• Work Process:

  1. The intended user of the weapon injects magic power into the Vessel Stone.

  2. The intended user of the weapon transfers magic power to the Spirit.

  3. The Spirit dives into the Vessel Stone that has been synchronized with the intended user's magic power.

  4. The weapon is forged using ore materials imbued with the same attribute as the Spirit.

  5. The intended user of the weapon injects magic power into the forged weapon.

  6. The intended user of the weapon injects magic power into both the synchronized weapon and the Vessel Stone while assembling them together.

  7. Complete!

To summarize in game system terms: "The player's maximum MP at the time of crafting is divided into five parts, triggering five separate magic injection checks, and the resulting values affect the final completion grade of the weapon." It's a type of unique item, but there's a trap: if you focus too heavily on efficiency, you won't be able to easily raise the Spirit's affinity.
If you min-max your MP you can craft a great weapon but won't be able to wield it properly, yet with low MP you can't craft a good weapon at all... Now, what will you do?