Chapter 822: December 17th: Blazing Beat Up Part 5
Author's Preface
September is going to be a bit tough for me (in terms of deadlines).
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The attack from the Smoldering Great Crimson Wings. The players challenging it don't know its name, but to counter this attack—dubbed "Multi-Faced Deployment Scorching Eye Photograph"—all they actually need to do is cover themselves with a single piece of cloth.
As long as they block the line of sight of the generated "Scorching Eyeballs," they can escape the instant-death enchantment.
This is because the "Scorching Eyeballs" are ultimately acquiring a focus on their subjects through purely two-dimensional recognition. If the target's body is completely hidden, even by a single piece of cloth, the secondary combustion effect caused by the enchantment will hit whatever is hiding them instead.
However, that is strictly theoretical. In actual combat—especially when facing the All-You-Can-See attack unleashed against a group of over a dozen people—the strategy begins with "identifying the Scorching Eyeball looking at you."
"Guh.........! Sorry, magic classes! Just spam obstacles at random right now!!"
<<We can, but the recasts won't be ready in time for the next attack! This is way worse than we thought!!>>
In addition to OiKatzo's party, there are players who charged in solo and players who formed separate parties from OiKatzo—combined, there are about thirty players present. Furthermore, if you include the players in other instances, the total number of players fighting here approaches several hundred, but that is something the users themselves are unaware of.
The problem is that finding the eyeball looking at you among dozens of Scorching Eyeballs, and then executing some method to block the line of sight between yourself and the eyeball before the flash is fired... is a sequence of actions they've had to repeat five times already, and they are currently on the sixth.
"Kuh...... Is this the same pattern as Wethermon's Seiten Taisei?"
Wethermon the Tombguard's ultimate secret art. A continuous barrage of fatal blows with its recast limits removed, repeated endlessly until the players overcame his greatest, most powerful secret art.
The important thing wasn't just that Wethermon did it, but the fact that "situations exist in this game where specific motions will continue eternally unless a certain condition is met."
"A certain amount of damage? Or maybe surviving it ten times? Staggering it to interrupt it would be the easiest and save us... No, does that thing even stagger in the first place?"
OiKatzo's frank impression after fighting the Smoldering Great Crimson Wings thus far was that it was the "eye of a typhoon." Not as a metaphor for being the center of a commotion, but literally the empty void of a typhoon.
Meaning that punching it wouldn't accomplish anything against the entity itself.
Whether it was a forest fire, a massive eruption, or some other even hotter concept that just happened to take the shape of a butterfly... Could an opponent so distinctly different from the Wandering Great Azure Plague—which at least could be touched (even if touching it meant death)—even stagger in the first place? An unpleasant hypothesis surfaced in OiKatzo's mind.
At the same time, despite having fought the inactive Smoldering Great Crimson Wings several times, he wondered if going in without a rehearsal was reckless after all...
"......Hah."
Therefore, OiKatzo laughed at himself.
When fighting Wethermon, was he thinking about things like that? When fighting Ctarrnid, he challenged it using almost entirely hearsay information, and the Dragon Calamity War goes without saying......... In that case, it wasn't a matter of whether he could or couldn't do it,
"I just have to do it!!!"
OiKatzo sprinted across the extinct volcano illuminated by the scorching gaze while manipulating Inventoria. The sensation of his spine freezing was due to a gaze mixed within the light locking onto him, but OiKatzo chose not to block that gaze... and moved forward.
"Raid battles like this are just a giant game of group jump rope when you get down to it... In that case!"
It was a term used to mock multiplayer content where multiple players had to execute perfectly synchronized movements to achieve a single strategy, but paradoxically, it presented a certain truth.
───If everyone works together and jumps, it can be cleared.
And if it's their first time seeing it, there are times when they have to take a gamble.
"At this rate, we'll just slowly get chipped away! Anyone willing to bet it one or eight............ Start 'extinguishing'!!"
What OiKatzo pulled out of Inventoria was a metal chunk that, at first glance, looked like a firearm.
But this wasn't a gun. At the very least, it was a gadget that was the exact opposite of a firearm.
A chill ran down his spine, making his brain tremble. The dark shadow of death, deepened by the illumination of the eyeball, was about to touch OiKatzo's shoulder. But he couldn't call himself a pro gamer if he was terrified of a mere Game Over.
"It's even or odd whether this will even work in the first place. Ahh, I hate this, I hate this. I'm not Sunraku, you know............!!"
The identification name of that gadget was the "Enthalpy Eater."
Originally developed, it was a miniaturized, man-portable version of heavy equipment meant to be used for environmental adjustment upon discovering planets suitable for human habitation. So, for what purpose was this Enthalpy Eater actually created?
As they say, "A name expresses its own substance."
It was a Devourer of Heat, created for the purpose of suppressing excessive mantle activity in new frontiers. While preparing inside the Behemoth, every member of the party had brought one based on an extremely simple idea as a countermeasure against the Smoldering Great Crimson Wings.
To reiterate, this was not a firearm. Even if it looked like one, and regardless of how complex the theory behind it was, it was truly.........
"Please work, please Kami-sama!!"
A fire extinguisher.
A Sponge-Structure Compressed Endothermic Warhead, designed to accelerate the basic principle of enthalpy flowing from high to low, was fired at the Smoldering Great Crimson Wings and reached its surface layer. If this were a normal warhead, it wouldn't pose any problem for the Smoldering Great Crimson Wings. As a living mass of energy, the Smoldering Great Crimson Wings was the pinnacle of enthalpy, an existence at the absolute peak......... Its body should have been invincible without even taking a defensive stance.
But the environment, the Pioneers, and the interference that had just arrived............ all of them were baring their fangs and gnawing at the existence known as the Smoldering Great Crimson Wings.
Therefore—
"Kyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!!"
Its energy devoured by the warhead like a sponge soaking up water, and a massive portion of its flaming wings gouged out entirely, the Smoldering Great Crimson Wings let out a shrieking metallic sound resembling a scream.
At that moment, the hearts of all the Pioneers who had been fleeing and hiding from the scorching glare became one.
"""""Murder it!!!!"""""
Author's Afterword
・Enthalpy Eater
Heat-eater. If you thought you'd seen this somewhere before, you're right. Strictly speaking, honing the fundamental theory behind this to its absolute limit leads to that demonic bullet.
To explain this one simply, it's a sponge that absorbs heat instead of water and expands. It wouldn't work on the normal Smoldering Great Crimson Wings, but because the environment—a heavy downpour—was constantly dispersing the Smoldering Great Crimson Wings' physical body, and because it had switched to the offensive to deal with the swarming Pioneers, it was wide open and relatively cooled down, which is why it worked on the Nira-Butterfly.
Megrez is a pseudo-perpetual motion machine—or rather, a bullet that "sustains itself with stolen heat while stealing heat from the target until they die"—whereas this one has an upper limit to its absorption capacity per shot.
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