Chapter 198: Sharing the Same Heaven - Part 4

Deduction—yes, among the things required of players in this game, deduction exists.
Simply defeating the enemy in front of you, gaining EXP, and going "Yay, I leveled up!"... You cannot conquer these mysteries with simple hack-and-slash alone... No, they aren't mysteries. If I had to describe them with a word, it's the "unknown" that exists.
For example, imagine a situation like this: "There is a suspension bridge. The ropes supporting the bridge across both banks are frayed and tearing, and some of the wooden planks acting as footholds have rotted away, leaving missing gaps like a toothless smile." If you try to sprint across this without thinking, you'll end up experiencing at least three different falling endings just off the top of my head. If you want to conquer this situation, you need approaches like walking carefully so the ropes don't snap, and checking your footing to identify the rotted planks.

And that exactly is "deduction." Pulling in clues from a situation where you know nothing, and trying to figure out what picture a puzzle was originally meant to form when the vast majority of the pieces making up that picture have been scattered.
So, back to the main topic: what exactly serves as the material for deduction in this Unique Scenario EX, "Behold the Abyss Above, as the World Turns on Its Head"?

".........Well, at the very least, it's not like something happens the moment we step inside the castle."

"...It seems, that way."

Aside from being entirely blue, the entrance interior is rather standard... well, maybe not standard, but at the very least it hasn't deviated too far from what a "castle" should look like. We remained cautious, keeping an eye out for any changes, but even after waiting a few minutes, not a single enemy encounter triggered, so Rei and I decided to relax our shoulders for the time being.

"If anything, this might be a situation where there's another dungeon nested inside the dungeon."

"Sunraku-san! I found stairs going up and stairs going down!!"

Ooh, as expected of a Ninja, you're shrewdly doing exactly what a scout should. But next time, make sure you Report, Communicate, and Consult before investigating. That being said, stairs going up and down... The top floor and the lowest floor. It's safe to assume Ctarrnid is on one of those.
Using common sense, there's no way you could cram the owner of those massive tentacles onto the top floor of a Western-style castle, so it's natural to assume it's underground. But unfortunately, our opponent is a cheat monster capable of making gill-breathing and lung-breathing coexist in the exact same place. So there's absolutely a non-zero chance of encountering it on the top floor through some sort of ability.

"For now, let's search this entire first floor before deciding whether to go up or down."

"Split up...?"

Pondering Rust's words for a moment, I judge that no dramatic changes will occur as long as we don't head to the absolute extremities of the upper or lower floors, so we split the party into two to explore the interior of this floor. Since entering this castle, I can't shake the feeling that the game genre has shifted into one that demands a dice roll for every single action... but this is a Unique Scenario. In other words, it's a story.

"There might be clues for the strategy lying around, so exploration is important."

"Look at this! The candles are blue!!"

"Hmm, I doubt that has any meaning beyond flavor text, honestly."

I mean, that's literally just an object, isn't it? Let's try to find something more... item-like. Although, back in the era before VR, when games existed in massive cubes called CRT TVs—in RPGs that are beyond retro and practically fossil-level—there apparently were cases where the ultimate equipment was just randomly dropped in weird places... But as expected of ShanFro, standing at the absolute cutting edge of the era, it doesn't seem like they've placed the ultimate equipment on the first floor of the castle, which is essentially just the entrance to the dungeon.

"Well then... it seems that octopus wants us to explore. So, which should we check first, up or down?"

As a result of a majority vote, we, Team "Cannot Share the Same Heaven" decided to investigate the underground first, descending the stairs that Akitsu Akane had found............

Yes, and so, having opened the underground door with absolutely zero context, we immediately laid eyes upon the Giant Octopus (Ctarrnid) sitting in the vast space beyond, and are currently undergoing a SAN check.

"Wait, hold on! Say what!? Everyone, prepare for battle!"

No, seriously, you set up this massive, elaborate stage and then we just encounter it the second we open the door?! Give us a bit more, you know... like feeling an evil aura emanating from beyond this point... or one of those classic RPG final dungeon system messages like, "Would you like to save? You cannot save your game beyond this point"!!

Taking a second look at Ctarrnid, its appearance is............ an octopus. Eight mollusk-like tentacles, a perfectly round, bald head completely different from a squid—though apparently, that's actually the torso, not the head. Its appearance has absolutely no twists to it; it honestly just looks like a standard octopus mob scaled up in size.
If I were to force myself to overlook the size and point out differences from a normal real-life octopus, the first would be that its entire body is pitch black. And the second is that out of its eight black tentacles, four of them are pinned to the ground by chain-like bindings.

A mechanical warrior possessing peerless techniques. A black wolf that attacks when night falls. And though I only know of it through hearsay, a golden dragon king... Compared to them, it's just way too... um, how do I say this... normal-looking. It's really just a giant octopus. I mean, Vysache—whom my suspicions of being a Unique Monster only grow stronger by the day—is, at the end of the day, just a human-sized, talking, bipedal rabbit, yet you can feel an oppressive aura radiating from him that feels like hot air blowing directly into your brain.

But I don't feel a shred of that from this octopus that is supposedly Ctarrnid. To be blunt, Atlanticus Repnorca felt way more like a boss than this thing. Is it because half of its tentacles—which could easily serve as potent mass-based weapons—seem unusable for some reason? With just that much, it feels like we could defeat it right away............ Wait, what?

"............Emul, what do you think looking at that?"

"I think right now is our chance desu wa!"

Alright, understood. This is awful.

"Everyone, retreat. We need a massive overhaul of our strategy."

Turning eyes of surprise at the judgment I handed down were Akitsu Akane, Emul, Ceecrue, Araba, Nereid, and Stude... Aside from one specific exception, the vast majority of them were NPCs. And the moment the shitty brat reacted that way, Rust and Mold seemingly became absolutely certain of this intense dissonance as well.
Practically dragging the NPCs along, we hurried back out the door leading to this vast space, choosing to retreat to the entrance. Acting as the rearguard just in case, I stared down Ctarrnid—who stood quietly at the deepest part of an underground space roughly the size of a baseball dome, a space that clearly couldn't exist without warping dimensions to form it.

".........Well, at least we got a 'passing grade' on that one."

I spit out the words, yet the corners of my mouth curled up into a smirk at the fact that we had broken through the "major premise" it had set up, as I withdrew from the underground space. Right before the door closed and cut off Ctarrnid from my backward glance, my eyes definitely perceived it.

The horizontal, slit-like pupils unique to octopuses curving into a crescent shape, likely out of joy... Yes, without a doubt, it was looking at us and smiling.

"I'll be blunt: if we challenge Ctarrnid exactly as we are right now, we have a 100% chance of losing."

"Why! If we all go together, we can wi—"

"Shitty brat, shut up."

Thwack! I only gave a brief glance at Stude, who was currently writhing in agony after taking a solid hit that made a rather nice sound against his head, as Rust took over my explanation.

"Our opponent is a Unique Monster. To put it simply, a final boss unconstrained by the story... For us to even think we can win when it's overwhelmingly larger than us is bizarre in and of itself."

"Ah! That's definitely true!"

Were you actually thinking we could take it, Akitsu Akane...? In a sense, I'm almost envious of a sensibility that lets you immerse yourself that deeply, but what's required here is the third-person perspective of a player... no, that's not quite right. It's the third-person perspective born specifically because we are entities that do not belong to this world.

To begin with, humans are creatures that will view even an insect—something overwhelmingly smaller and more fragile than them—as a danger simply because it possesses the two elements of "stinger" and "poison." The caution humans possess is proportional to their knowledge and common sense; if an entity possesses even a single element that surpasses the specs of the collective consciousness known as "humanity," they will harbor a sense of caution toward that target.
And just from what we currently know, Ctarrnid possesses the advantages of a "massive body far surpassing humans" and the "inversion of reality transcending human comprehension," things that cannot even be compared to a human.

So why on earth would anyone look at an opponent like that and think "we can win"? And even a Vorpal Bunny—a race whose very defining trait is the weak standing up to the strong—thought the same thing. If you think about it calmly, the answer is obvious.
The Unique Monster "Ctarrnid of the Abyss," even in its first phase... to put it in the style of this world's lore: "It is inverting the emotion of threat directed at itself." And it would be incredibly foolish to assume it stops at mere impressions.

"But still, to even affect the players... is that technically possible?"

"Mold, do you know the argument that the people campaigning against Full Dive VR systems have been shouting non-stop from the dawn of Full Dive all the way to the present day?"

Full Dive VR is widely accepted by the public nowadays, but it's not like every single human being on Earth threw their hands up and accepted it as part of their daily lives. It's a fact that there are people who reject virtual reality and insist that only true reality is correct—self-proclaimed "Realists" who hold a strong rejection toward the Full Dive VR system itself.
The vast majority of their arguments make you want to say, "Before you loudly scream about the dangers of Full Dive, why don't you go to a hospital and get some rehab so you can distinguish between fiction and nonfiction?"... Arguments that sound like they were ripped straight out of the lore of an antiquated sci-fi novel. But well, it's not like all realists are idiots.
It's a fact that among them are individuals who argue that projecting one's consciousness into virtual reality is inherently harmful, based on solid, factual knowledge.

"According to them, 'Full Dive VR is nothing more than a glorified electric chair. There is absolutely no way that running electric currents through the brain to freely scatter noise called dreams is biologically healthy for an organism.' ...That's their argument."

"You sure know... a lot about this."

"You know what they say: If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. Words have no meaning if you don't argue back after fully understanding your opponent's stance."

Well, that doesn't really matter. The important part is the mechanism of the VR system that the relatively smarter realists point out: "running electric currents through the head."

"What you see, what you feel... none of it is true reality. It's just what your brain perceives as a result of the electric currents sent into it causing simulated reactions. Well, basically, it means it's not weird for anything to happen since it's practically inside a dream... Ah crap, I'm getting tangled up in my own explanation. Just forget 80% of what I just said."

Rust and Mold gave me half-lidded stares, but I can't help it; it's not like I actually wanted to give a philosophical lecture on VR.

"What I'm trying to say is, technically speaking, 'tricking' a player isn't all that difficult."

"Sunraku, the real-world technicalities don't matter right now. What's important is that if things stay like this, we have no choice but to charge straight into a Ctarrnid that hasn't revealed its true form........."

"Thanks for the extremely concise conclusion, Rust. In other words... for that shitty brat over there, who was shivering under a bed until just recently, to look at that thing and think 'I can win!' means something is already fundamentally wrong."

They say it's no use crying over spilled milk, but... if there was a gimmick this ridiculously annoying hidden here, we should have just stormed the castle on the very first day, dammit!

Deduction—yes, among the things required of players in this Unique Scenario EX, deduction exists.
We have to think, verify, and correctly perceive Ctarrnid before defeating it... all within the slightly more than ten hours we have left.

Author's Afterword
Well, I think most of you have probably guessed it by now, but the monster lore for Ctarrnid of the Abyss is heavily influenced by the lore of paranormal entities contained by a certain Foundation, and the lore of a paranormal entity from a certain mythology that chips away at your sanity.
And to reveal just one more piece of lore: "Ctarrnid's skin color is not black."

Honestly, if you think about it calmly and ask whether manipulating your consciousness with a computer is biologically healthy, the answer is obviously "That's super dangerous, isn't it?" It's something that shakes the very foundation of the category.
To put it simply, the arguments of the "Realists" are essentially like telling someone whose hobby is skydiving, "What's so fun about doing something that's practically suicide by jumping?" To the people who enjoy the hobby, the response is, "We prepare properly so it doesn't become suicide by jumping," and fundamentally, "We don't need you telling us what to do."