Chapter 201: Sharing the Same Heaven - Part 7

"...Well then."

"Ah..."

"Oh, Rei-shi."

Having already downed some Riot Blood myself, and being generally used to this kind of all-night march anyway, I quickly took care of business, wolfed down a light meal, and returned to the game... only to run into Rei exactly as she logged back in.

"You're back early, Rei-shi."

"Y-You too..."

"Well, I just grabbed a quick bite to eat..."

Silence. No, wait, wait, surely there's something we can talk about. We've been doing the same quest together for a whole week... Ah, right, Rei was absent for more than half of that.

"........."

"........."

"O-Oh, right!"

"Yes, what is it!?"

"I forget the name of it, but... are you not going to use that armor and sword?"

"Eh? Ah, um! That's a bit, well, you could call it a change of pace... Ah, but I definitely plan on using it for the final battle with Ctarrnid! Yes!"

"I-I see."

The charge on my Gilta Brille is almost complete as well. Thinking about it that way, challenging the final battle right at the edge of the one-week time limit ended up being perfect timing in various ways.

"........."

"........."

Well, this is troubling... The conversation is going to die again at this rate. With this level of communication power, Love-Clock is going to come crawling up from the depths of hell just to laugh at me.

"Umm..."

"Excuse me."

"Nnh?"

Right in the middle of my brain cells frantically doing rush construction to build a bridge to keep the communication flowing, Rei spoke up from her end. Talk about a godsend! I'll use this as the starting point to keep the conversation going!

"Umm, well... there is one thing I'd like to ask you."

"As long as it's something I can answer."

Her armor vibrating, Rei gave off an aura almost like a wild beast growling. What is this, what is she planning? Is this one of those situations where she's silently conveying some kind of "You're prepared for the consequences if you lie, right?" type deal?

"It's about... the clan 'Wolfgang'..."

My brain, processing calculations at high speed, predicted Rei's upcoming statement and presented several possible outcomes. The considered possibilities were:

• Aren't you getting a bit too cocky lately? I'm going to crush you.

• What exactly are you hiding from me? I'll crush you until you spit it out.

• It'll be annoying if you become a threat later. I'm going to crush you now.

"...Fuuuuuu..."

If we're talking pure player skill, Rei probably isn't that overwhelmingly exceptional. Compared to Sylvia Goldberg, Sylvia is definitely stronger.
But this isn't a fighting game. In PvP here, the advantage lies not in player skill, but in stat parameters. From that perspective, Rei far surpasses Sylvia Goldberg. You don't need to jump or bounce around to use a sniper rifle; it's all about how optimally you can perform the simple action of lining up the sights and pulling the trigger. In other words, it's not about the skill of a single body, but the overall performance including parameters and equipment. In that regard, Rei—who balances heavy armor and high firepower, and constantly maintains a passing grade even if she doesn't reach a perfect 120 points—is an absolute powerhouse within the category of a hack-and-slash action game rather than a fighting game. If Rei were to unleash her full power and attack me right here and now, my options would be incredibly limited, leaving me with nothing but the hope of either escaping or desperately trying to persuade her...

"U-Umm..."

"If possible, please keep it non-lethal..."

"???"

Huh? I totally thought she was going to challenge me to a 1v1 and force me to spit out all our information... Was I overthinking it? Not resorting to the unseemly act of actually growling herself, but instead conveying her intimidation wordlessly by vibrating her armor... I gotta admit, I'm somewhat impressed that there's a provocation command like that.

"Umm... well... right now... is your clan, um, currently recruiting new members... by any chance?"

"Members?"

What the heck, why does she care about the membership status of our clan? We're just a tiny, insignificant clan with practically nothing to offer compared to the largest, most hardcore clans out there.
Sure, I'll admit that clearing a Unique Scenario EX with just three people is an achievement I can personally boast about, but at the end of the day, we're still just three people.
If we were pressured even slightly by sheer numbers, we'd throw in the towel immediately. That's just how battles of attrition work. If an army of one-man armies forms an actual army, there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.

What am I supposed to answer here? Should I tell her the truth: that literally everyone here except her already has a tentative offer to join "Wolfgang"?
No, but what should I do? Hmm... damn it, I feel like I've reached this exact same conclusion before. This kind of smooth-talking is Pencilgon's territory!!

"Well, it's a brand-new clan, so I don't think we're over capacity or anything..."

"I... see...!"

"...Umm, why do you ask?"

I asked! I went and asked! I actually asked it!
The ultimate forbidden move in gaming: asking the enemy for the answer before you solve the mystery yourself! Usually, you end up getting hit with the classic enemy-exclusive truth evasion—summarized with an incredibly infuriating face as "Figure it out yourself, trash"—which inevitably spikes your murderous intent... err, I mean motivation, for the impending battle. It's a dangerous technique.
But this is PvP! Feign a simple question and draw out their true intentions...! That bastard who can just casually pull this off with a straight face really is a fiend. An extreme carry-me-please player whose communication skills are worse than a Chihuahua is completely out of the question.

"Eh, why? Umm, why... umm, well, umm... that's, well... the truth is..."

The truth is?
Rei's avatar is currently dressed as an Oni Warrior. Because her expression is hidden behind the faceguard of a furious Oni mask, I can't discern the reason for her silence.
This time I counted it properly. Twenty-three seconds. After twenty-three seconds of silence, Rei finally spoke.

"...No, regarding this... I'll tell you when we return to the surface."

".........Right."

Gaaaaahhhhhh I'm so incredibly curiousssssss!!!
You can't just evade the question there, Rei-shi! It makes me even more curious! I'm ridiculously curious now!!

Damn it, as expected, Psyger-0 is not to be underestimated. To think I would be played this easily... So this is what it means to be a hardcore player standing on the absolute front lines of ShanFro... Gaaah, time to drown my sorrows in energy drinks!!

"Something urgent just came up, so I'm gonna log out for a bit! Good niiiiight!"

"Eh, heh! Y-Yes!?"

Log-oouuuutt!!

"Damn it... is she some kind of teasing master or something?"

No, rather, maybe she avoided revealing it here precisely because she had a very serious reason for it. Perhaps Rei judged that it was better to tease me and leave me agonizing over the contents. Energy drink, energy drink... there we go.

When players encounter a world crisis or learn truths they weren't meant to know, they can just brush it off with a "Huh, is that so?" because, at the end of the day, a crisis in a game world is ultimately someone else's problem. Even looking into it is a hassle, so whatever, this is fine.
But in ShanFro—no, in any game where the player creates their own avatar—the events that occur in the game are not someone else's problem; they are facts that directly befall the player themselves.
Pssh, I pop the tab and chug it in one go... What is this taste? It feels like the specific astringency of a highly concentrated energy drink is sparkling, absorbing straight into my body before I can even taste it—

Riot Blood - Revolve Lantern

"Ah."

I made eye contact with the goofy face of the pumpkin head drawn on the can. A streak of fluorescent, vermilion liquid—a color unlike any I've ever seen—dribbled down from the corner of my mouth.
I drank it... I was planning on properly steeling my resolve, setting up the right environment, and then challenging it, but ahhhhh the caffeine is seeping into my bodyyyy... Whoa, this is amazing, it kicks in way faster than any of the ones before! Amazing! But this is absolutely not something healthy, ahahaha!!

Log-iiiiinn!!

"Ah, welcome bac—"

"Alright, break time is over! Let's go to the throne, the throne! A pre-raid raid! Whatever that means, ahahaha!!"

"Eh, wait, what happened in those five minutes!? What happened to you, Hizu—Sunraku-san!"

No matter how much time you spend building things up, the results of practically everything culminate in just a single minute! Worrying about the little details is useless, useless!
The sky is so preeeetty! Even though what's up there is actually the bottom of the earth, ahahaha!

It's like this: imagine humans have a switch, and right now I feel like I ripped that switch out and I'm just running the electric current directly. If I had this, I might have even been able to beat Sylvia Goldberg!
How do I describe it? It feels like the very principle of how this high hits you is different from the others. If the previous highs were like removing the impurities from a pipe to create a clear flow, this one adds straight-up acceleration on top of that.

No, wait, is it because I downed Riot Blood right after drinking Undead? Whatever, humans don't die just from drinking two energy drinks in one day.
The effect duration was supposed to be short, right? Let's hurry up, solve the mystery, and raid Ctarrnid!

Anyway, lesson learned! Even if Revolve Lantern gets officially released, I'm going to carefully choose the time and place to drink it!

Author's Afterword
Yeah, teasing him like that and ultimately leaving it vague is exactly why you fail, Heroine-chan.

The protagonist being weirdly high is almost entirely a placebo effect. It's the energy drink version of the classic "gets blackout drunk off a single glass of alcohol" character trope.

Also, I completely forgot to include the usual 100-chapter milestone spoiler corner in the previous chapter, so I decided to put it in chapter 201 instead. As an apology, I'll reveal some pretty special lore.

• "Lycaon", "Wethermon", "Ctarrnid", "Siegwurm", "Orchestra", "--------", and "-------" actually exist in the real world within the universe of the story "Shangri-La Frontier," not just inside the game Shangri-La Frontier.
  And the entities existing in the real world and the entities appearing in the game are, in a broad sense, the exact same existence.