In a small room in Tachyrinn Station’s underground, Sakita looked down at the basic portal stained with blood.
According to an ally stationed at the adventurer’s guild headquarters in Raghion, a player who had never registered at the guild had appeared in support of Tiuccia. The reports had described him as a male, A-tier, non-metal crafter. If that were the case, then he wouldn’t pose much of a threat...or so Sakita had thought. But they had met unexpected resistance at Croway Plains, turning what they’d initially judged to be a swift victory into a long, arduous war effort.
Tiuccia should have been low on supplies as its trade routes had been put under pressure and compromised. But miraculously, their situation had improved. Consumable supplies had arrived at the front lines from Tachyrinn Station.
It hadn’t been difficult to guess that the unknown crafter had employed the apprenticeship system to teach abilities to a large number of NPCs and thereby improved their mass manufacturing capabilities. Furthermore, he had prioritized quantity over quality.
They’d seized matériel that’d been en route from Tachyrinn Station to Croway Plains. Aside from boxes that had been trapped with a mechanism that caused them to break when opened, all of the supplies had been low-quality light orbs.
When filled with MP, light orbs became an adequate replacement for potions. They wouldn’t cause sickness like potions did, so it was possible to use them in bulk. The only issue was that the materials required to create orbs were expensive and required a certain level of crafting ability. The minimum required proficiency was A-tier, meaning that it was essentially impossible for NPCs to create them.
On top of everything else, even if the light orbs were densely packed full of MP, their contents would disappear over time. Because of all these restrictions, light orbs were typically only used by high-tier players engaging in short battles. They were bespoke items boasting great efficacy with the price to match, much like works of art.
But these had been deliberately made at a lower quality.
That decision had been a pragmatic one by someone unconcerned with conventional wisdom. Since NPCs didn’t have large MP pools to begin with, low-quality light orbs were more than enough for their use, even if the orbs wouldn’t retain their MP for long. NPCs only needed to use them up before the MP evaporated.
If the crafter had disregarded profitability and made the orbs himself, then as far as Tiuccia’s needs went, light orbs would have been the correct choice over potions. The man who had been standing next to the control panel for the Altiuccia portal must’ve been said crafter.
The image of a young man with long, black hair and an olive complexion came to Sakita’s mind. He was alluring and had a rather unique air about him, unlike himself—Sakita’d been born with a perfectly ordinary visage.
“Oh, so here you are, boss.”
“Yde.”
Sakita’s companion had cleaned the splattered blood off himself and changed into casual clothing. He was poking his head into the small room.
Yde was one of the players who had abandoned Tiuccia in solidarity with Sakita. Six years ago, Yde had been sixteen years old and had remained in Tiuccia during the royal entourage to Raghion. Sakita himself had been twenty-two then.
The orange-haired young man, who was now twenty-two himself, looked down at the portal array and the pool of blood. He snorted.
“They sure made a clean getaway, huh?” Yde remarked, then glanced at Sakita. “Any idea where they’ve gone?”
“No. This portal’s connected to Croway Plains, but since the Croway portal’s broken, they would’ve been teleported somewhere random.”
“D’ya think that’s what he was going for?”
“Probably. We had them cornered, but he took advantage of the system to escape. Smart man.”
Yde shrugged at Sakita’s words. “Are you saying you’re impressed, even though he’s the enemy? Well, you ain’t wrong. He really did throw us for a loop, eh?”
All of the portals in Tachyrinn Station had been rendered useless, and owing to traps on the road and both inside and outside the station, Jump couldn’t be used either.
“Because of all the crap all over the place, four of us got caught, and I’m willing to bet none of them are of any use anymore. They’re too scared to use Jump at all now—especially the one guy who really overlapped with shit. He’s totally broken from the trauma. Well, he was only B-tier, and that was after proficiency-boosting equipment, so I’m not surprised.”
Sakita didn’t have anything to say, but if Yde had noticed, he made no indication and continued talking. “Hey, boss, didn’t the guild ban obstructing Jumps?”
Sakita was silent for a moment. “That man wasn’t a member of the guild. I doubt he knew.”
“But Jump itself is still a guild secret, right? Oh, damn...” Yde groaned with no small amount of dramatic sarcasm. “If he taught NPCs about Jump, I guess we’ll have to kill all the NPCs. Y’know, for the safety of the guild and all our player friends. But it looks like I’ve already killed pretty much all of the Tiuccian NPCs who knew anyway.”
Yde snickered as he relished the memory. Sakita gave the young man who was clearly enjoying himself a cold glare.
Yde was an S-tier player who was the exalted leader of a group known as the Radicals. Since this world was so similar to Golden Dawn that he considered it to be, in fact, the same world, Yde had declared his intention to live the same way he had played the game in his old life, and he did so with abandon.
Sakita had responded that Yde ought to head to the edgelands instead of sticking around in the Central Nations if he truly considered the world to be that of the game. There were other players who considered this world they’d been reincarnated into to be a continuation of the game, after all. Many of them had departed for the untamed edgelands and, even now, persisted in fighting powerful beasts.
But Yde had claimed to be more interested in the war-related events that the game had hosted than in hunting monsters. Sakita thought he was a cowardly weakling, too afraid for his life to take risks.
Sakita figured the Radicals were just a bunch of selfish kids playing out their own desires in the safe confines of the Central Nations, keeping their atrocities limited to what the guild was willing to overlook.
But despite originally being a moderate group, once they’d moved from Tiuccia to the nearby Khrasiel, Yde and his followers had begun their rampage.
There was no one at the Khrasiel branch to stop them. And while Sakita was in a position to keep them contained, he had been fanning the flames instead.
For letting her die, I will destroy Tiuccia, no matter what it takes.
His fiancée had been his goddess.
In his old life, he’d passed away without knowing the love of another. He hadn’t had any friends or partners, and leveling his character in Golden Dawn had been his only goal in life. But, unfortunately, he had died before he managed to reach SSS-tier.
Then, in his new life, he hadn’t been blessed with stunning good looks like other ex-players. But despite everything, she had chosen him. She had been his very first sweetheart, either in his past life or in this one.
“So, boss. What’re we gonna do about that little princeling? The crafter’s basically dead, but the prince still got away.”
“If he ended up in a nation on good terms with Tiuccia, he’ll return,” Sakita said. “When he does, all we need to do is push our invasion all the way to the capital. But if he teleported somewhere else...since he’s royalty, we’ll know if he lives or dies from the Right of Rule.”
“Oh, so does that mean I can go play a little game of hide-and-seek?” Yde asked with a grin. Though he was just as handsome as the many other gorgeous players, the smile that came to his lips was repulsive. “Now that we’ve taken Tachyrinn, our NPC soldiers are gonna make headway on Tiuccian ground, right? Taking care of that sounds like a pain in the ass, so I’ll leave that to you. I bet hunting the prince down will be way more fun.”
Sakita turned Yde’s proposal over in his mind. The young man didn’t seem to understand the state of the teleportation station—or maybe he didn’t care.
“Tachyrinn’s portals have all been destroyed. With the state this station’s in, there’s no way we’ll be able to move a large army through here. Winter is almost over as well, so Croway will soon be underwater. A full-scale invasion will have to wait until next winter.” Then, Sakita’s tone darkened. “Until then, do whatever you want.”
“My thanks, boss,” said Yde, tone as cavalier as always. “I’ll bring his head back as a souvenir, just you wait.”
“If you can,” Sakita grunted back.
Yde left the small room with a spring in his step, but Sakita didn’t turn to look at him. Instead, his eyes remained transfixed by the pool of blood on the portal.
Was this war truly just?
A thin-lipped smile came to him.
It had to be. The guild deemed Tiuccia guilty of wrongdoing. To trust in the adventurer’s guild was to trust in righteousness. An enemy of the guild was an enemy to all players.
However...I know what I’m doing is wrong. I turned Croway into a sea of flames out of a personal grudge. I became the reaper of so many lives—my own damned heart feels like it’s bleeding out.
But even so... I don’t regret this.
“If it means I can avenge her, I’ll even sell my soul to the devil.”