Chapter 440: O Dragon, O Dragon! Part 17

Author's Preface
I randomly thought to myself, Man, I kind of want to write some ShanFro fanfiction... and it took me ten seconds to realize what those words actually meant. I'm the creator, aren't I...

Flowing like the wind.

Unceasing as the rain.

Fierce like lightning.

In short, it was exactly like a tempest of pure crimson.

"...Alright, let's get moving on our end too!"

"I'm amazed you can watch that and just write it off with a reaction like that..."

"Well, I see him pull off that level of stuff pretty often... The way he operates his menu screens hasn't changed, either."

From OiKatzo's perspective, Sunraku's greatest strength wasn't his reaction speed or his Trash Game-forged experience... but rather the sheer speed at which he adapted to User Interfaces, or UI.

This wasn't strictly limited to ShanFro, but in any game where players manually "summon" their weapons via inputs, managing window operations mid-combat carried an extreme amount of significance.

"ShanFro's windows are summoned via thought commands and then operated with your fingers, right? There are other games with that type of UI outside of ShanFro, but... Sunraku designates the coordinates right at his 'fingertips' and operates it completely blind."

Like a dragon, like a wolf, like a shark, like a bird of prey—at the very least, a red beast that made its intentions to harm its enemies and devour its prey abundantly clear, laughed.
Amidst its restless movements, those hands would occasionally summon a window right to its fingertips, continuously calling out the next weapon into the hand freed up by throwing the previous one, dismissing it, and endlessly repeating the summoning cycle at a dizzying pace.
Twin swords danced wildly, iron fists crushed the enemy, and just when flames seemed to trace an arc, before anyone realized, a massive hauled-out greatsword was already shattering the wind and carving the enemy down to the exact same fate.

"Without looking... you mean?"

"He literally memorizes the scroll speed when he swipes his finger and exactly what coordinates each item will land on. He calls it his 'Item Sword-Drawing Technique', but well, even doing it blind still means one of his hands is occupied, so he gets pretty weak if you pressure him during that."

"Is it an acrobatics act...?"

"Not exactly? If you stick the weapon you want at the very top or bottom of your item box, you can pull it out fairly easily."

In reality, OiKatzo did similar things on a daily basis, and it wasn't exactly some one-in-a-million feat.
However, in Sunraku's case, his true strength lay in the fact that he could instantly adapt to any kind of UI.

"...I remember a time when he was complaining like, 'This UI is so garbage it's actually insane.'"

Something about how every time you opened the item menu, some tone-deaf voice line or whatever would play and interrupt things, making it take up to a full minute just to pull out a single item... Sending his thoughts wandering into the past, OiKatzo snapped back to his senses, let out a breath, and refocused himself.

"Guess I'll go look for Rus-Mol... Oh, right, Psyger-100-san, do you happen to know where the Vampire squad went?"

"Vampires... Ah, those players that the chef players were getting so enthusiastic over. I believe they felt bad about letting them die needlessly, so they had them fighting against Bryreinyego's Small Dragons... I think..."

Pressing a hand to her temples, Psyger-100 squeezed out the details of their movements. She must have had a weak impression of the Vampires, who had, for better or worse, experienced a rehashed version of the exact same First Contact as the Elves.

"Ah, I remember now, I think their safety increased from the buffs out of Skull Azuchi, so they shifted their aggro onto Dreadhowl."

"Which means..."

Currently, Dreadhowl had crashed straight into Bryreinyego after being driven back by the players, leading to an incredibly unsightly clash entirely motivated by an attempt to pass off aggro. In other words...

"Ah, there they are!!"

"Bweh?! Oh, it's just you, OiKatzo-san..."

"...It's been a few hours?"

He found the mismatched duo entirely without effort.
Various parts of their equipment were coated in soot or slightly melted, showing a level of wear and tear that made it obvious they had been engaged in a fierce battle with a fire-attribute enemy, but at the very least, they didn't seem pushed quite to the point of struggling in combat.

"Anyway, the Rust Plan is currently underway; once we regroup with Pencilgon, we'll be in the final phase."

"Plan... what plan?"

"Because the idiot currently rampaging over there finally brought over our base. That mecha... you know."

"Hmm... Hmm?!"

It was a spectacular double-take, and right beside him, Mold was also doing a double-take while blurting out, "Wait, that wasn't a monster?!" These two are always so perfectly in sync... OiKatzo thought to himself in a pointless aside as he turned his gaze toward the other battlefield: the Green Dragon's combat zone.

"Ownership over Tactical Beasts and Enhanced Armor is split three ways, you see, so even if we want to share it among the clan, we still need approval from all three people. Ah, here's the reactor by the way."

"W-Wait, uh, w-huh—"

OiKatzo tossed the non-standard Ether Reactor with the casualness of tossing an apple to Rust, who caught it with the utmost care, as if cradling a newborn baby.

"I mean, they're probably going to come this way eventually anyway... Somehow, everything we needed to do got wrapped up without us even lifting a finger..."

In reality, while not quite on the level of Akitsu Akane, who practically nullified the Desire Sensor entirely, OiKatzo had set some of the top records as a pro gamer, meaning he had quite the "pull."
Thus, things managed to wrap themselves up so smoothly... and because of that, he was actively keeping himself away from the potential triggers of Unique Scenarios, though he would likely never realize this himself.

"Alriiiight... let's see how Operation 'Promoted Pawn' is coming along..."

It was a strange setup to begin with. Even though "Defeat Siegwurm" existed as a clear condition, Siegwurm himself was hovering high up in the sky. It was impossible to assume the prerequisite at this stage was for almost every player to have access to Tactical Beasts or Enhanced Armor; therefore, there had to be some sort of trigger dictating the flow of the Siegwurm battle.

The Gold dancing in the high skies remained ever distant, and thus far, only one person had actually reached those heights. But in all likelihood, the method that person used to get up there was not the intended one. OiKatzo ran his thoughts in circles, convinced there had to be a condition that would bring Siegwurm down to the ground.

"...Heroes, B.I.G., his character—"

"—'The B.I.G. positive evaluation calculated from the total player base reaches a certain threshold,' or something like that, right?"

"Hm, you're late, Pencilgon."

"Man, they were just so persistent, you know... So I found Tottori the Shimane-kun and dumped all of Brockentried's aggro onto him."

Somewhere, the scream of an archer being hailed as a Hero or whatever echoed out, but it dissolved into the battlefield and faded away, never reaching Pencilgon's ears. Thus, having written Brockentried off as a thing of the past, Pencilgon downed an HP recovery potion while gazing out at the battlefield where the White, the Red, and the other Red were currently rampaging.

"Phew, I feel like it's been ages since I actually ran into Sunraku-kun in-game... Wow, he's really gone feral, hasn't he?"

"Yeah, kinda like a black bass or something."

"Like, 'Oh no, those invasive species from Trash Games are so scary'? Kukuku, nicely said, Katzo-kun."

Insulting Sunraku with the most natural flow imaginable, Pencilgon—flanked by her Human Dragoras, whose numbers had been reduced down to seven—looked up at the heavens and scanned the earth.

"If he keeps going on and on about heroes like that, the condition's gotta be somewhere around there. I did hear a little rumor on the wind about Sunraku-kun challenging him to a 1v1 and him actually accepting it, at least..."

"Which means worst case scenario, is there a chance he doesn't come down at all?"

"No, no, Katzo-kun. 'Dragon Slaying' is a universally shared heroic legend across all worlds, you see."

"Aaaaaah....... The possibility that he'll come down once the Color Dragons are defeated..."

"It's highly inconvenient for us, but yeah, that's incredibly likely..."

Given 【Wolfgang】's policy, Noirlind absolutely had to survive. That meant the "sacrificial pawns" would have to be either the Red, the White, or the Green, but...

"No, let's keep going like this! I realized this from fighting it, but it looks like Brockentried can hold out for quite a while. In that case, we should whittle down the Red and the White too—a high-risk, high-return strat to create a bunch of 'free agents'!!"

"The return might be huge, sure, but isn't the risk way bigger?"

If the number of Color Dragons decreased, the number of players heading toward the remaining Dragons would naturally increase. That meant reinforcing the fighting force against Siegwurm, but it was also a double-edged sword that could potentially direct even more hostility toward Noirlind.
Furthermore, the Anti-Noirlind faction had a massive trump card known as Skull Azuchi. That supreme strengthening buff that had even mitigated Dreadhowl's jet-propulsion-like flames was guaranteed to garner massive support.

"We'll just have to use Siegwurm as our reference point for that."

"Meaning?"

"——'Come Forth, Heroes!', right?"