Afterword
GOOD DAY! I’m Akisuzu Nenohi.
This series’ volume count has finally reached the double digits. This volume was a continuation of the previous one, mostly detailing the Halloween event.
This event was a bit unique—as a city event told through a first-person novel, a lot of the developments happened without our main character’s involvement. Therefore, please allow me to use this space to explain things that weren’t shown.
This will include spoilers, so please finish reading the book before you continue!
The routes this event offered were for Shub-Niggurath, Cthugha, and Our Ladies of Sorrow.
Nyar’s avatar was nothing more than an extra addition. As suspicious as he seemed, he had nothing to do with the main event. His three avatars were Jack O’Lantern (the pumpkins), The Haunter of the Dark (the cat), and the Kruschtya Equation. The pumpkins were the cause of players getting lost and straying from their destinations. In other words, it’s just a little extra fun.
Shub-Niggurath’s fight is supposed to be the most difficult, followed by Our Ladies of Sorrow. Cthugha is supposed to be the easiest.
Our Ladies of Sorrow had the hardest investigation phase, followed by Shub-Niggurath and then Cthugha.
The banishing phase was equally hard for Shub-Niggurath and Cthugha. Our Ladies of Sorrow were the easiest to banish.
As for the BBS, our protagonist was part of Server 1. I also included scenes from other servers that failed their quests. As you can imagine, the word count would only skyrocket the more I included.
This event starts with the building of the campfire. The residents take the green flames home with them in order to protect the entire town, at least to a certain degree. The residents take care of the fire even if players skip out on helping them; however, players won’t receive exchange tickets unless they chip in, and player participation influences the amount of townsfolk who go missing. In the Cthugha route, fanatics also attempt to destroy and tamper with the campfire, which can have a huge effect on the number of missing children unless the players step in and help. This is all just background information, though. The real story is the one of Mama Shub-Niggurath.
Missing townsfolk and lumber play a big part in this tale. The missing children are actually nothing more than a way for players to realize that the story is really getting started, however, as the lumber is the much more important clue. Of course, the players won’t pass up looking into it, and tracing it eventually turns into a search for the children along the way.
The lumber itself isn’t crucial—it’s only a way of guiding players toward the fanatics. You can think of it like a flow chart. The actual lumber probably all burned up in the fanatics’ fires, and they hoped that everyone else would be occupied by the act of replacing it.
Then there’s the abandoned mine. In Volume 9, I mentioned that the players start in the western field, with a mountain to the south and the remainder of the town surrounded by forests. The townsfolk mine the southern mountain, and it only takes a bit of asking around to learn about the existence of the abandoned mine. However, you won’t be able to extract information about suspicious people entering the mine unless you ask the right residents (miners or those in similar lines of work) about the missing lumber. Of course, no true gamer would hear about an abandoned mine and neglect to find out everything about it, so the various groups investigating different things inevitably end up connecting as information spreads between them.
Players also learn about the “thing” spotted in the eastern forest, and this information is passed on to the rest of the server. Essentially, the game indicates to the lumber-gathering players that it’s safest to collect wood from the northern forest and that everyone should be wary of the east.
The players investigate all over, gather up the documents and notes, and then have nothing to do but wait for the climax. They’re granted time to complete their preparations as they all work together on deciphering the documents.
Then comes the climax. I won’t go into detail about the successful Shub-Niggurath route, since that was included in the book, but failing her route results in Shub-Niggurath leading her Dark Young and Blessed to descend upon the town. She crushes everything underfoot and smashes the rest with her tentacles, leaving nothing but carnage in her wake—in short, the town is completely overrun.
Our Ladies of Sorrow are extremely powerful beings.
The three communicate with telepathy, are capable of reviving each other, and share each other’s total stats. They also possess their own different creatures as servants. They can read the minds of their targets, control the weather with their thoughts, and have no restrictions on the spells at their disposal.
In this story, they control their creatures and cast spells to kill targets, then control them as zombies. Once they have enough zombies to protect themselves with human shields, they summon a servitor race of the outer ones (like the Dark Young or Shoggoths) and overrun the town.
These ladies are summoned simultaneously from three different locations. The players are expected to split up and stop each summoning. If they fail at even one location, the lady will be summoned, and the event will proceed to the banishing phase.
If more than one lady is summoned, they will sense each other’s presence and attempt to group up. The quest is essentially failed if they manage to unite, so each group of players will have to fight them, stop them from leaving, and succeed at a banishing ritual. Not only that, but they’ll have the ladies’ creatures and their attack spells to fight off too. Dead players are turned into zombies and lose control of their bodies, so everyone will have to come up with a strategy to prevent this beforehand.
I’ll skip what happens if the banishing phase is failed, since the BBS already contained an example of that.
Cthugha’s exploration and battle phases are easier than the rest. He takes over the giant campfire in the town square and uses it as a catalyst, so the final battle happens right there in town. However, it’s the hardest route to prevent damage to the town, and there are also many more fanatics than the others.
Once the fight to prevent the summoning ritual begins, some of the fanatics turn to guerrilla warfare, raising hell all over town to split up the fight into smaller battles. Players must constantly watch out for the surrounding buildings and residents, so this fight is particularly nerve-racking.
Cthugha naturally burns his surroundings from the very moment he’s summoned, so no one is safe if the ritual succeeds.
Cthugha’s route would have been the ugliest if it was this story’s main event. The fire would have spread to everything around the town square, and the players would have to retreat once the town burned down. In other words, the residents in the story would have slowly burned into nothing along with the buildings. No one would have been spared, of course, regardless of their age or gender.
Since the summoning occurs at night, the residents probably would have awoken to their homes in flames, then died a fiery death. Even those who fled the town would burn up in the fields and forests once the inferno spread.
In the end, the event would entirely consist of searching the town, gathering information, and stopping the summoning. The banishing phase would be nothing more than bonus content, or something like that.
Frankly, the Mama Shub-Niggurath route we saw in this book is really the only necessary one. But since the event was first introduced as having multiple routes selected at random, I decided to come up with some other ones and include them as failed servers on the BBS.
Also, the heroine evolved and is back to wearing a dress!
I like nun outfits, but in the end, nothing beats a dress.
…I think I’ll wrap things up there.
I hope you enjoyed reading Volume 10, even if only a little.
Let us meet again in Volume 11.
July, 2025