Chapter 840: December 19th: Distant Crossing Motives
Author's Preface
Are the only people reading this the ones who ranked 1st in the Ancient Battlefield? I'm starting to get scared lately.
I finished writing this during the interval Mammoth-kun gave me. Thanks, Mammoth-kun...... Stop showing up at the Dark Ancient Battlefield!! [*1]
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The enemy's position data forwarded by Mold, and that single shot just now......... With just that, Rust grasped the general situation. Or rather, it would be more accurate to say it matched the situation she had anticipated.
(......I knew from the start that there was a sniper among their members. Or rather, basically all of them are the type of players who can fight normally at any range. Mold being targeted is well within expectations.)
If she was lucky, they would prioritize stream appeal and all snipe Mold together! ...or something like that, which would have allowed her to sweep them all up from the flank, but...... as expected, things won't be that easy.
(......While five of them are gathering in one place, only one is moving independently...... This lone person is the sniper from earlier. Did the five group up to break through all at once using numbers?)
If this were a normal match, Rust would also go after the independently moving sniper. A sniper whose position has been exposed is no different from a scarecrow.
But this is a defense battle. Even if she defeated a hundred players, if the remaining one captured the main keep, her kill score wouldn't contribute to victory. Therefore, there was only one choice Rust could make right now.
"......I'll take on the five."
The five were gathering near the location of their earlier skirmish — a terrible choice if they wanted to regroup while avoiding Rust; but considering they had surely known from the first wide-area scan that she possessed search capabilities, there was only one answer.
───They were calling her out, as if telling her to bring it on.
"......Bring it. I'll take you up on that."
A more dramatic situation was exactly what Rust wanted as well, for the more attention they gathered, the more power would reside in the characters' words in proportion.
Rust rushed toward the location where the five signals were gathering. Bearing a great mission on her back.........
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The true essence of the 【Safe Zone】 was not merely rear support.
By pseudo-reproducing the Sword Saint's signature technique, the Subordinate Sword Play, through the thought-control of drones, it enabled fulfilling the three elements of offense, defense, and detection at a high level as a "moving control tower." That is exactly what the 【Safe Zone】 is......... It doesn't set up camp in a safe place; it makes the place where it sets up camp safe. That is the fundamental concept of this Tactical Mech.
"I was really planning to use this for the final battle at the main keep though......!"
It was a slightly different deployment from Mold's initially anticipated use of combining final defense and decisive battle support, but he understood very well from the start that nothing goes exactly as planned in PvP.
Now that it had come to this, he had no choice but to do it. While solidifying the 【Safe Zone】 into its defensive form, Mold began controlling the respective drones deployed to fill his entire field of vision.
(Recall the Recon-Type Sub-Unit...... no, I'll have it orbit in a circular trajectory around the area where that sniper was earlier. The Defense-Type Sub-Units will stand by on a straight line with one set to self-defense mode, and I'll manually operate the Offense-Type Sub-Units.)
Mold had reached the exact same understanding as the conclusion Rust derived from the information extracted during the second wide-area scan. Therefore, leaving the gathering five members of the GUN! GUN! Mercenary Corps entirely to Rust, Mold focused entirely on his duel with the sniper...... "Golf," who was considered one of the top snipers in the Mercenary Corps, even taking into account the role divisions Mold had seen in their videos beforehand for intel gathering.
(If he gets even a slight line of sight on me, I'm out. He's the kind of guy who can land a headshot on someone driving a car...... If he sets up his aim first, I have no chance of winning.)
It looked like they were in the same situation, but the enemy was fighting a siege battle while Mold was fighting a defensive one. Given that the 【Safe Zone】 leaned toward functioning as a fixed turret, he couldn't engage in high-speed mobile combat, and above all, as the final defensive line, it wouldn't be good for him to move too far away from the Grand Duke's Castle.
In that respect, Golf...... his player name in ShanFro was Ginger Ale, right?...... who could freely move through the Thirdrema city streets and choose his sniping points, had a clear advantage.
Since his sniping skills were inferior, the moment Mold fell behind on the initiative, he would constantly bear the risk of a headshot.
In that case, Mold had no chance of winning unless he overturned that disadvantage. That's exactly what the drones were for.
(I can't use the Recon-Type Sub-Units much because they consume a lot of energy. I'll just keep their cameras connected and make him mistakenly think I'm currently searching...... My main play is the manually operated Offense-Type Sub-Units. I'll move these to flush out the hidden enemy!)
The Defense-Type Sub-Units had two purposes: serving as insurance in case the enemy struck first, and applying pressure to the opponent by deliberately revealing the card of "a means to prevent sniping."
From the start, he had the greatest defense known as the Grand Duke's Castle (though it's questionable for a defender to treat the object they are defending as a shield). He didn't actively want to use them up and get them destroyed, but it was a formation placed precisely because he didn't mind if they were.
(Man, operating drones brings back memories. When Rust was using the Nephilim from two generations before the Crimson Twinewing, I used drones to stick bombs on things all the time, didn't I?)
Mold effortlessly and smoothly controlled two drones flying through the city streets from two different perspectives. It looked just like Psyger-100's technique of manipulating multiple swords to handle fierce combat, but it was a completely different, astonishing technique altogether.
"Alright...... It's a quick-draw showdown."
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"───Drones, huh."
Meanwhile, Ginger Ale, who was hiding after smashing through the wall of a civilian house, pondered as he stared at the disk-shaped drones floating in the sky above.
"The ones constantly circling in the sky are probably search drones, so the ones hovering over there must be...... for defense? There are two of them, but one is...... its movements are fishy; it doesn't look like autopilot."
Unlike Mold, Ginger Ale was part of the GUN! GUN! Mercenary Corps...... in other words, a streamer. He had to verbalize his thoughts to convey to his listeners what he was thinking and what he planned to do.
While simultaneously checking his Tactical Mech "GGMC: Hole in One," he muttered further to the meteor iron mirror.
"The problem is exactly how many units there are. It's not a size that's impossible to hit, but because they're small, I couldn't grasp exactly how many there are in total. From the looks of it...... maybe five or six."
If there were ten or twenty deployed, he should have been able to see a massive swarm of drones flying in the sky much more clearly. But the absence of that meant that, considering the capacity of the Tactical Mech and by extension the player, there were eight units at most.
In other words, there was at least one drone currently existing that Ginger Ale had not yet accounted for.
"Calling him a potato sniper...... might be rude. He's an excellent Defensive Battery...... That's exactly why I'll attack using the same method used to counter a camper."
Pefu. Ginger Ale placed a stuffed toy of a cat-like monster that had been left on the floor of the civilian house onto the bed and stood up.
"It's a battle of patience."
Author's Afterword
・GUN! GUN! Mercenary Corps
They call themselves casual players who prioritize enjoyment, but they boast a high level of proficiency that allows them to go toe-to-toe with professional gamer teams decently well. They have a particularly established reputation for charging enemy bases when their members group up, and their video "We Tried Charging With Everyone as Snipers" recorded 60 million views.
Volume 7 of the Shangri-La Frontier manga is currently on sale and doing well. Thankfully, Volume 7 is ranked so high on Amazon's sales charts that you can find it within two seconds of opening the page, and there's the 30-meter display in Shibuya, and taking 1st place in the Ancient Battlefield... There are so many things I need to express my gratitude for that, for now, I'm just in a standby state of prostrating myself in thanks. A true quick-draw gratitude, capable of bowing the instant gratitude is demanded.........
Putting that aside, the fact that Volume 7 is out means Volume 8 is lying in wait. It gives me the chills...
Translator's Notes
- [1]: Apparently on Jan 18th 2022 (when this chapter was released), there was a glitch where Mammoth (previous Guild Wars boss) showed up in the Dark advantage Guild Wars instead of Artemis so the game got an emergency maintenance.
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