Chapter 828: December 17th: Climax Heat Up (First Half)
Author's Preface
The text got way too long again so I'm splitting it further. I guess next will be the Second Half Part 1...... (white eyes)
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Severing a baby's head. Just looking at the words, it was absolutely out of the question; before even discussing it, there would undoubtedly be a unanimous agreement to hand the person who proposed it straight over to the police.
However, if that baby was so gigantic it could hug a mountain, had a butterfly for a face, and was a massive monster representing "power" itself endowed with a will, scattering beams from the massive number of eye patterns floating on it, no one would bring up ethics meant for humans.
"Gather numbers! Draw its gaze over here and lure it to the crater!!"
"Those who can fly, get around to its back! Concentrate your attacks on the neck!!"
"Hey, the ground team has a super high chance of dying doing this, don't they!?"
"The tracking is rough! If you dive to the side with everything you've got, your gear will only get a little singed!"
"Right under the neck is dangerous! You'll get caught up in the movements of its hands!!"
"Get up, get up! If you're a Tactical Mech pilot, you can carry at least one person! Ask the guys going up and have the heavy hitters cling to them!"
"Sorry if I drop you halfway, alright?"
"Want me to hug you!?"
"I'd rather pass on anything other than female avatars regardless of who's inside, so..."
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"To think the thing I'd be doing with the Tactical Mech I brought in for the decisive battle is digging a hole!"
"......It was looking around? Don't tell me its neck has already... steadied......? No, even estimating from the length and thickness of its arms, it's reproducing a baby around two months old...... Tch. To insult even the healthy development of a baby, I can't forgive this......!"
A madman was swinging around absurd arguments while unleashing violence. With this utterly insane, dangerous guy right beside him, OiKatzo was smashing both arms down at his feet without a moment's rest...... right into the nape of the Smoldering Great Crimson Wings.
"I was kind of imagining something more... musou-style, you know!?"
The Tactical Mech "Tiger on the Folding Screen" was equipped with a mechanism that compressed mana...... magical energy, shaped it into forms like bullets or claws, and released it.
While it had an excellent concept suited for close and mid-range melee combat...... when the attack target was a monster the size of a mountain, the situation resembled civil engineering work far more than an ultra-close range brawl.
"The damage heals slower and attacks go through easier, so it's probably actually effective, but......!"
At any rate, the size was just too huge. The players who had somehow managed to reach the back were continuously launching attacks at the nape, but if the back alone had enough space to play baseball or soccer as you pleased, naturally the neck wasn't a normal size either. The spine was probably the size of a small tunnel.
"Does anyone have explosives!?"
"No one brings bombs against a fire-attribute enemy! Dying already means a total loss of equipment as it is!!"
"I brought some."
"No, seriously, what do we do about this...... The guys acting as decoys won't be able to hold out forever either......"
"I mean, I've been counting for a while now, but the number of eyes floating on its butterfly face is gradually increasing! I don't know what the MAX is, but if it hits the limit, won't things get really bad!?"
Amidst the shouting conversations, OiKatzo distinctly caught those words.
"Who just said they have bombs!?"
"Eh, that's me, but......"
"How many did you bring!?"
"Heh......... A whole lot."
Spotting a player raising their hand—dressed in unremarkable leather armor likely bought from an NPC shop, perhaps in anticipation of equipment loss—OiKatzo pulled them by the hand and led them to the absolute frontline of the civil engineering work, right into the dead center of the nape.
"The bomber is here! Back away for a sec while they set them up!!"
The voice of a player equipped with a Tactical Mech is amplified to a certain extent through the machine. The crowd backed away at OiKatzo's words as he guided the explosive-carrying player right up to the wound—which, while visibly carved out, still hadn't exposed any bone.
"Plant as many as you have!"
"You got it."
A bomb was planted, a bomb was planted, a bomb was planted, a bomb was planted, a bomb was planted, bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb..................
"Uh, where are those even coming from......"
".........Truth be told, I was planning on leveling the Royal Capital with these, but this seems way more fun."
He had dug up a completely unhinged landmine from the general populace. Hiding his twitching face beneath the "Screen Tiger," OiKatzo backed away from the wound now densely packed with an amount of explosives no single individual should reasonably possess. He turned to ask the player next to him to detonate them...... and suddenly realized he hadn't called the guy by name even once.
That said, there was no need to actually ask for a name. After all, player names are displayed right over their heads in this game. Reading the name floating above the player, OiKatzo called it out properly this time, alongside the detonation order.
"Uhhh......... then, Shiitake-san, please detonate."
"Gotcha.
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"VooooooooooooooGyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!?"
The Smoldering Great Crimson Wings screamed. The explosion that occurred on the nape of that impossibly massive infant was truly horrific.
"What did you do, OiKatzo......!"
Pepper Cardamom, who was mixed in with the ground team desperately avoiding the scorching eye lasers while trying to maintain the Smoldering Great Crimson Wings' attention, wondered what the hell OiKatzo had done after climbing up its back. She gritted her teeth as the curiosity of the Smoldering Great Crimson Wings that they had somehow managed to string along completely dissipated in an instant.
To begin with, the players on the ground were barely fulfilling their roles as decoys. If they got close to its arms they were crushed, and their attacks could barely reach its face. The only thing they could do was spam every aggro skill they had to guide its gaze...... Which was exactly why the clear, massive damage from the explosion on its nape easily stripped the Smoldering Great Crimson Wings' aggro entirely away from the ground team.
"So we're literally beneath its notice now......"
Every single one of its swiveling eyeballs, along with its entire face, turned in the same direction to look at its own back. If its head was still intact, it meant the players who went up its back hadn't accomplished their goal yet.
"BaaaaaaaaaaaaaaJuuuuuuuuuuuuuu......!"
And above all, the emotion the Smoldering Great Crimson Wings was showing now—despite never having shown biological emotions before—was dyed entirely in rage. Even though it shouldn't have eyelids, the scorching eyeballs on its butterfly face narrowed, eloquently expressing its intent without words.
"It's saying it's going to violently murder them, isn't it?"
Eyes speak as loudly as mouths, and the Smoldering Great Crimson Wings hesitated not for a second to execute the intent shown in its eyes.
"Hey hey hey...... what is with that oversized eyeball...!?"
"Hey, how big do you think a laser fired from an eyeball roughly the size of the Great Crimson Wings' current head is going to be?"
"It'll be the same scale or bigger than the one it fired at Thirdrema right at the start! What the hell do we do!?"
From the scorching eyeballs floating on the butterfly wings—the very trademark of the Smoldering Great Crimson Wings—a scorching gaze was fired upwards. The light emitted from nearly twenty "eye" patterns pierced through the rain clouds it didn't even care about...... actually, no, it didn't pierce them, but converged at a single point to generate a massive sphere.
It was so dazzling it could only be described as a sun...... and just as hot. And as a pupil opened within it, that massive...... overwhelmingly massive, sun-like giant scorching eyeball glared straight at the culprits who had inflicted pain upon its neck.
"What do we do!? Should we somehow gather the tanks and have them pop their aggro skills all at once!?"
"Is that even something individual skills can handle in the first place?"
"That's why we're having them use it as a group, right!?"
As the players on the ground ran around in confusion and argued, Pepper Cardamom was...............
"...............This pisses me off."
She was harboring rage for a completely different reason than everyone else.
"Not even being considered worthy of attention is......... yeah, it pisses me off."
The Smoldering Great Crimson Wings had absolutely nothing to do with that emotion. It was simply......... right, anger born from an association game completed entirely within her own brain over the current situation of "my actions not drawing the slightest bit of interest from the opponent," which was now being directed at the Smoldering Great Crimson Wings by way of pure displaced frustration. That was all it was.
Indeed, no matter how strong the opponent is, no matter how mighty the enemy, no matter if it is the strongest existence in the world......... the weak always have the right to challenge it. Taking action to challenge is a right held equally by everyone.
But for the strong, the ones receiving the challenge, to disregard it is......... incredibly infuriating.
It is the ego of the weak that ignores the circumstances of the strong, but it is precisely by using that arrogance as fuel that the weak first become strong. That is the very driving force for why Pepper Cardamom...... Natsume Megumi chases after the back of Uomi Kei, and the reason she picks fights with beings even higher than him.
"Flames or energy or whatever, I don't care......... basically, the eyes are a vital element for that monster, right?"
"Do you have a plan?"
While everyone looked up at the Smoldering Great Crimson Wings, taking actions lacking any certainty, Exploding Green Peas noticed Pepper moving with a clear purpose and asked for the reason.
"We just need to take away its sight, right? Then what we need isn't strength......... it's flashiness."
For the Alchemist job, it was an item slightly leaning towards romance......... to put it bluntly, leaning towards being a joke item. While the items required to craft it were low-rarity and easy to obtain, the required quantity was massive, and crafting it demanded a huge amount of Mani. And even if one made it, the situations where it could be used were slightly too niche, earning it a reputation as being far from practical.
But that was its reputation before this event began. Furthermore, when the blue Genesis Tribe attacked, it had actually started drawing some attention from players. However, because its "targeting" was too broad and inaccurate, it still couldn't escape the realm of joke items.........
However, the opponent was the massive monster, the Smoldering Great Crimson Wings. If its "targeting"......... literally, if the opponent was someone where the chance of hitting them was extremely high even with a broad and rough accuracy.
"I never expected to actually use all of these.........!!"
The Alchemical Product Injection Mortar. Using a magical explosion, it launched glass spheres filled with alchemically crafted chemicals over long distances without breaking them. Prepared by Pepper—a "war profiteer" who had come into a considerable amount of Mani due to various circumstances—she had a total of eight of these mortars.
Right now, they spat magical fire.
Author's Afterword
・Alchemical Product Injection Mortar
In short, a mortar. An item (not a weapon) capable of launching synthesized poisons and medicines over long distances.
However, if you think about it calmly, you'd realize there's a fatal flaw: there's basically no situation in ShanFro's battle system where a mortar is actually necessary, so it was treated as a joke item. (At best, a surprise attack for PKers).
Still, people did say it might be useful in defense battles like the one against the Wandering Great Azure Plague, but since the Azure Plague itself wasn't that big, it was ultimately dismissed as being too hard to aim......... But if there was an enemy you could hit just by firing randomly, its long-hidden true value would be fully demonstrated.
By the way, volume 6 of the Shangri-La Frontier manga releases on November 17th!
The cover features Emul (Human Form), who people jumping in from the comic constantly mistake for the heroine. The ones on top of the book are the one Sunraku feeds money to, the one Sunraku feeds materials to, and the one Sunraku extorts money from.
The expansion pass contains the Villainous Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which received huge praise from Editor I. I worked hard to fit it all into one chapter.
Please definitely pick it up and take a look.
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