I walked through the town of night, fiddling with the ID card I appropriated from the men in the subway.

I connected the card to my smartphone and used [Cyber-Manipulation] to read the info. The man was working in the material storage department. Hmmm… not quite what I was looking for. He looked muscular so I had thought he was one of the guards. If he was just a warehouse worker, there weren’t going to be many places I could get in with his card.

And that wasn’t my only problem. Once he noticed his ID card was gone and sent in a report, the card’s going to lose all of its functions.

But I didn’t think it was going to be that much of a problem. Further investigations revealed that reissuing cards would cost quite a pretty penny, and the card owner would need to go directly to the issuing office to get their card. Most people would probably go search for them first and only request card lockage once they were certain it was lost forever, right?

He just needed his mobile device to buy things, so I was thinking I’d probably have about half a day before I needed to worry about it… anyway, if things went wrong, I’d just make something up as I went along.

Besides, I could probably manage something about the card’s privileges too.

 

“…the 12th research center.”

It was inside a fifteen-story building in a semi-industrial district some distance away from the subway station. Or to be more precise, apparently the whole building was the 12th research center.

The 12th’s purpose within the corporation was to hold the developer department of the game World of Yggdrasia. At the very least, they seemed much more likely to be aware Yggdrasia was a real world compared to the other departments, so there was no need for me to hesitate. Not like I intended to, anyway.

“[Cyber-Manipulation]”

I checked for any patrolling watcher drones nearby. I used my Skill to look through the cameras, then weaved through their blind spots to dash into the underground parking lot. I got in.

I might be able to handle the city’s cameras, but I had no confidence I could use my Skill to completely fool the cameras of a place that took security as serious as this, so I just focused on moving through their blind spots. I went around behind the guard standing alone in front of the door, who obviously looked like he’d had experience in the army. I cut his throat with a quick swipe of my knife.

Had he been a mercenary before? He was unconsciously standing in a location where he wouldn’t show up on the cameras.

I moved the body to a dark spot, freezing the spilled blood and vaporizing it into dust. I couldn’t use my more obvious abilities here on Earth. I didn’t want to stand out, true, but mainly I just didn’t want to use those abilities too much.

It wasn’t like Earth had no mana at all, but compared to Yggdrasia, there was way too little of it. Back there, my [Absorption] allowed me to recover thirty percent of my magic each hour. Here, I could only recover a single percent after three days.

I’d already spent close to thirty thousand magic points just to come here. While I still had fifty thousand left, if I froze and demolished the entire building and then it turned out it wasn’t my target, no amount of mana could last me the entire trip.

Still, if I directly absorbed people’s lifeforce with my hands instead of using my cold mist, then while people here didn’t have magic, their souls would still refill a tiny bit of my own magic pool.

Honestly, while I had no personal grudges with these guys, my impression of the corporation wasn’t so good that I’d bother picking and choosing who to spare in a pack of beasts that had bore their fangs against me. If anything, I hadn’t even a single positive emotion to associate with them. They’d understand if I didn’t bother to discriminate.

 

I held up the ID card and the staff door opened. That was a relief. I didn’t really think they would actually put up eye scanners here anyway, but I still worried a bit.

There were more cameras ahead. Before the door completely opened, I slipped into a blind spot, then removed my weight and clung to the ceiling.

Two guards came out to check the door when they saw no one on the security monitors. Before they came into camera view, I threw my foldable knives into their foreheads, using [Causality Alteration] to make sure they killed them.

They made a bit of noise when they fell down, but no other guards came.

I floated my mist around a bit to check for signs of living people. There was only one person sleeping in the nap room that was in the back of the security room, so I sent them into a more permanent sleep and threw the two dead guards in there.

It had been two minutes since I infiltrated the place. Even if I’d had a bit of real combat training in Yggdrasia, considering how I was just a normal human kid in the beginning, I’d say I did pretty well.

…but there was nothing demonic about what I was doing, at all. More like a job for the special forces, or maybe an assassin.

 

“This place, right?”

Cutting the cameras would be too suspicious, obviously, though I did cut the alarm. I edited the camera footage just in case, but even in the small chance something still showed up on camera, it shouldn’t be able to reach headquarters.

I checked the screens in the security room. Looked like the lower floors were offices, warehouses, and document storage, while the main office for the developer department and the laboratories were on the upper floors.

I threw the ID card I used into the lost-and-found bin and took an ID card from one of the guards, putting it in my pocket.

I forced the elevator doors open and climbed up the shaft. Midway through, I stopped to check for presence of people. There was no one on the lower floors, while I sensed a few life signals on the upper floors.

From inside the elevator shaft, I used [Cyber-Manipulation] to check the cameras. I found a security room and a few guards on the upper floors, so I headed there first.

That was close. If I’d cut the cameras below, they’d totally be on alert by now.

From where the cameras were placed, I wasn’t sure if I could get there without being seen. So I used Cyber-Manipulation to force static into the monitors for a single moment and used the chance to dash inside the security room.

 

“Wha-where’d you-”

I threw the machete-ish combat knife at the one who noticed me first. It stabbed into his face, killing him instantly.

Another guard ran for the alarm, while the remaining two reached for the guns on their hips.

“Fuck-argh!”

Just as one of them was about to raise his voice, I crouched and swiped his legs out with my own, while my hand threw three foldable knives toward the head of the young man running for the alarm. Before I could see the result of my throw, I slammed my elbow into the throat of the man I tripped, crushing his windpipe.

“Who the he-!!!”

As the final man aimed his gun, I cut off his hand with my straight sword and stabbed his throat before he could scream. The man trying to ring the alarm was already dead, my three knives stuck in the back of his head.

It would have been simpler if I just froze them with my mist, but then they might realize it was me. So I’d used weapons, just in case.

I took back my knives, freezing the blood and fat on them and wiped them off. I cut the alarm and headed for the server room for the MMORPG World of Yggdrasia.

 

“Hmmm…”

I used Cyber-Manipulation on one of the servers. It held nothing but player data.

I was quite certain this was where they did the overall management of the players they were sending to Yggdrasia, but there was no sign of anything resembling the all-important monster avatars.

I was sure they were being sent from here. Perhaps this was just a layover spot, and the main system of the militarized avatars were somewhere else?

There was a more fundamental question here. While this was a building with a whole fifteen floors, was a facility of this size even enough to bridge the gap between dimensions? What if the dimensional-crossing system were also set up in the other locations on my list of suspects, the 4th and the 7th research centers?

In which case, perhaps this facility really was only used for connecting the game to the other world. What should I do…

“Maybe I should just destroy it.”

I looked at the supercomputer that took up a whole floor in front of me, wondering how I’d do this. Then my rabbit ears picked up a faint noise.

 

“Mmm? Is somebody there?”

It was the sleepy voice of a woman. I knew there were other people beside the guards on the upper floors, but I’d left them alone, thinking them to be harmless since they were just doing their job.

The habits from when I used to be a human drove me to an unwitting sigh, despite my lack of need for respiration.

Fine then. If I was discovered, then I had no choice. There was a bit of distance between us, and I didn’t want to waste more magic than necessary, so I slightly released the lid on my presence and quietly turned around.

The woman held not a single bit of wariness at the sight of me, looking like a high-school girl in a white parka and denim short skirt, even if she was feeling somewhat suspicious. Then the little bit of presence I released took her by surprise. She gasped, her face twitching fiercely.

I pulled my guardless straight sword, its length about 40 centimeters, from its black-lacquered scabbard. I silently closed our distance. The redhead woman, who looked to be in her mid-twenties and was wearing a white lab coat and a pair of glasses, was shocked silent. She sank to the floor, apparently too scared to even stand.

Thank you. You’re a nice person. You didn’t scream or run. Saved me a bit of magic.

I looked down on her and put on a smile. Her eyes were opening so wide they looked like they’d fall out at any moment.

 

“…the Dark Bunny Lady…?”

“…what?”

 

The hell is that? I knew I was called the Dark Lady, but Dark Bunny Lady? What were they thinking?

Her words were so out of left field I couldn’t help but stare at her face. The rabbit ears behind my head slipped out of the hood a bit. The woman beamed.

“Aaaahh, it’s really you! I can’t believe I’m actually meeting the Lady Bunny here! This is the best day of my life! Do you know I’ve filled my room with posters of you so that you’d bless me with your visage every day—ow that’s cold!”

I blew a bit of mist at her, interrupting her impassioned word vomit. She shivered as if someone had just poured ice water on her.

“Explain.”

“Y-yes…”

 

Her name was Jennifer. She wasn’t exactly a researcher of the 12th research center, but rather one of the people managing the game.

Jennifer had also personally joined the MMORPG World of Yggdrasia as a player. She knew about how the other world was real, and how I had come back to Earth and killed a facility’s staff members.

But she still loved the idea of a real-life Dark Lady. Apparently she’d bought every single kind of promotional goods related to me.

She was also the person who’d developed the backdoor program to log into Yggdrasia. She’d been gathering similarly-minded people who used monster avatars and finding a way to contact me. She pleaded with me not to destroy this facility since they were only working on the game and nothing else, and if the place was gone, she wouldn’t be able to join the game anymore.

 

“I see… any other last words?”

“W-waitwaitwaitwaitpleasewait! I can be useful to you, my Lady, even here or on the other side too! You have something to do here, right?! I’ll help!”

Jennifer stared at me with sparkling eyes. I scowled, but took some time to think.

True, if I had someone aware of the inner workings of the corporation to help, it’d save me some unnecessary trouble. But if an employee went missing on the day right after such a huge mess, they might be able to follow me by tracking her.

Oh well, I could just erase her if she turned out to be more trouble than she was worth.

“They might suspect you, you know?”

“It’s fine! It’s already time for me to leave work today, and I’ll be taking a vacation starting from tomorrow! If anything happens, I’ll tell them I got kidnapped by the Dark Lady!”

“Umm… right…”

I didn’t think the corporation was that naive anway, but well, if she’s willing.

 

After that, after Jennifer finished her weird performance in the security room devoid of any other people and clocked out for the day, we left for the underground parking lot and got into her second-hand car. The two of us headed for my next destination: the 4th research center.

---

Previous Chapter | Index | Next Chapter

With the demon Whitehare now heading toward Earth and ceasing her quest for the time being, Yggdrasia should have regained some measure of peace, if only temporarily. But strange incidents were happening, as if to cover for the Dark Lady’s disappearance.

 

The soldiers keeping watch outside human towns were holding their spears in a death grip, looking inordinately tense. Their vigilance was twitchy, jittery, as if they were terrified by something invisible.

Just a while ago, the Dark Lady had suddenly appeared and wiped out several countries in a blink of an eye, and they had certainly feared her. But as the Dark Lady Whitehare possessed no subordinates, always acting alone, the garrison soldiers in locations other than the capital, where the Sapling that was the target of Whitehare was, would at most only fear the loss of their livelihood that would result from her attack. They weren’t terrified of her.

The large countries had jointly requested the Heroes to subjugate the Dark Lady. Current rumors had it that while the Heroes’ assault seemed to be stalling, just the fact that the Heroes had begun to act was enough to put the Dark Lady on guard, turning the situation into a stalemate.

Then what were the guards terrified of?

 

“…there they come!”

“Confirmed sighting of dark pixies!”

 

These monsters had recently begun to appear from murky forests, from desolate graveyards, from crumbling buildings, and from rotting ruins. They were humanoid, twenty centimeters tall, with insectile wings. Their extreme similarity to the so-called ‘pixies’, their dark-red, enormous bloodshot eyes, reedy limbs, as well as their extreme belligerence and cruelty had all combined to earn them the name of ‘dark pixies’.

These dark pixies had one day suddenly appeared all throughout the world to ravage villages and towns without discrimination, killing cattles, demihuman slaves, and citizens alike. Their elusiveness and individual strength that was above a normal soldier made them troublesome foes. Furthermore, every time they showed up, it was as a group from several up to over thirty. Splitting up soldiers into patrolling teams of several men only added to the casualty. The soldiers were forced to huddle up for a chance of survival.

“Where are the adventurers?!”

“They’re on their way, sir!”

In response, the human countries had sent a request for the adventurer guild to focus their hunting upon the dark pixies. The guild was originally an organization set up to deal with the monsters that had begun threatening human cities in the last few decades. This sort of situation was exactly their bread-and-butter.

But no one knew where the dark pixies were coming from. They were forced to be reactive.

“Sir! The adventurers…”

“What?!”

“They had been attacked by an unknown group on the way… no one survived.”

“Impossible…”

The voice of the despairing soldier echoed in the darkness. Once more, a village was devastated.

 

Where were the dark pixies coming from? Who was this mysterious group working behind the scenes?

In the beginning, there had been rumors they were the Dark Lady’s subordinates. But once the mysterious group began to act, and from the testimony of the Blademaster who’d fought against the dark pixies and said “The dark pixies don’t have her smell, so not her,” the matter was judged unrelated to the Dark Lady.

Then what was the cause?

 

*

 

“Reporting, Your Majesty! The Third Knight Squadron has successfully vanquished the group hiding in the abandoned ruins!”

A knight came into his office to give the report as Tischlar, the emperor of Touze Empire, was doing paperwork. His hands stopped, and he looked up in puzzlement.

“Vanquish? Didn’t I order them to capture?”

“Y-yes,” the reporting knight paled, sweat beading on his forehead, “Our utmost apologies! Our suspects had not responded to calls of surrender and had fought to the bitter end. Even those who we’d captured had all killed themselves with poison!”

The emperor let loose a heavy sigh.

“…I see. Good job. Have you found out who they were?”

“Our suspects did not carry anything to identify them, except for the usual documents about the magic circle. We had hurried the analysts to reference them against information from all countries as fast as they can, and they had reported that the group heavily resembled Varringt’s prison escapists on the wanted list!”

“Got it. You can leave.”

 

The dark pixies had also been showing up in Touze Empire.

They’ve roughly determined the cause. There’d been incidents of felons escaping incarceration throughout the whole world before the Dark Lady quietened down. The knights had determined their hideout and had raided the place, and there, they had discovered an evil altar with a large number of live sacrifices, humans and demihumans both. They had also found a bizarre magic circle.

These criminals never surrendered. They would even turn themselves into sacrifices in their final moments. From the documents they left behind, it has been determined that these magic circles was related to the appearance of the dark pixies. However, their true goal was still shrouded in mystery.

 

“I have brought tea, young master.”

“Drop the ‘young’ already, gramp.” Tiz wryly smiled. The old butler would pamper him until the end of his life.

Tiz relaxed, smelling the fragrant tea leaves. He leaned deeply back on his chair.

“We still haven’t found her?”

“Indeed. And there are no sign her father is hiding her.”

Salia had been Tiz’s personal bodyguard before her egregious conduct caused her to be dismissed and put under house arrest. After her disappearance, attempts to track her had all ended fruitlessly.

The mad criminals that the countries had left alive by virtue of their standing and skill were now being released into the wild by an unknown party. They were plotting something foul.

“So, the ‘Fairy King’…”

Only several instances of the term appeared within the documents that had been in the possession of the prison escapists.

Some experts had said that the madmen’s goal was to summon the Fairy King. But many doubted their existence, and they believed there must be something deeper.

The Fairy King only ever appeared in children fairy-tales. There was nothing to prove their existence even in the whole history of Yggdrasia, a world with elementals and demons.

Did they really exist? If they did, then what were the madmen trying to do by summoning them? Or was it all just a distraction?

“Just Shedy’s already enough of a headache, and now this…”

 

The peace of this world was being threatened by many.

The monsters appearing and attacking human countries several decades ago.

The Dark Lady Whitehare’s destruction of the World Tree Saplings, and the subsequent collapses of countries.

The insurrection of demihuman slaves, a crucial source of labor.

The increased activity of Dark General armies.

And now, the summoning of dark pixies by criminal-turned-terrorists.

These were the reasons why humanity’s economy, formerly prosperous, was now grinding to a halt. Problems were beginning to appear all throughout the world. The people were still managing with the endless mana from the Saplings, but if trade continued to stall and refugees continued to increase, sooner or later, it would all come tumbling down.

 

“The cause of the dark pixies… can’t we even disclose the information about the escapists? Just them?”

“I believe it would be… inadvisable.”

Among the escapists throughout the world, there were many guilty with such serious crimes they were supposed to have been already executed. The higher-ups, especially of large countries, would loathe to let the information leak to the citizens.

This was why the only people in the know, even among the knights, were the squadron leaders and above, as well as the spy agency in charge of intelligence and assassination. Consequently, they were forced to be always one step behind.

Tiz stared at the cooling cup of tea and thought.

What was happening in this world? Was there some sort of root cause behind it all?

The last time he saw Shedy’s eyes, there was no trace of madness nor regrets in them. They were filled with a powerful determination. With purpose.

Tiz was thinking. Was he overlooking something? Something important, fundamental?

 

***

 

In the dimly lit subway train, my body swaying along the light vibration, I used [Cyber-Manipulation] on my mobile device to do some information manipulation.

They hadn’t shown any sign of knowing I was here. The disappearance of those guards was simply treated as a case of missing people. Well, not like I really knew how much they realized, though.

While it was necessary for me to steal their lifeforce for my manifestation, selling their items might have been too rash. I should have just hunted for some thugs around town if I needed money. It wouldn’t have left potential future troubles that way.

“…”

I wryly smiled as I noticed my thoughts so easily veering in that direction. I was supposed to be a human of this world until just a while ago, and now I was already thinking of them the same way I thought of hunting deers to sell their pelt and antlers.

Was this what it meant to be a Demon?

…no, not quite. No matter what might have happened, I’d never been a decent person in the first place.

 

*clack!*

The door opened. A black man and a white man, both well-built, entered the subway car formerly empty of people except for me. They were laughing loudly as they walked close to me.

The white man didn’t sit down, instead leaning on the subway door leading outside and looked at me, faintly whistling a catcall. I continued fiddling with my smartphone.

While my blank-white parka was hiding my face with its hood, I was wearing a denim short skirt and sneakers. My choice of clothing had simply stemmed from the thinking that people generally let their guards down to girls more than they would to boys. I’d forgotten that girls would have this sort of trouble too.

 

“Hey baby, what’s a girl like you doing all alone on a subway? There’re dangerous people around, don’t you know?” One of them started talking.

“Like us, for example,” the other sniggered.

“Yeah. Hey, hang out with us for a bit. We’re off our shift.”

“Scram.” I said, still looking at my smartphone. For a moment, the air seemed to have frozen still. Then it heated up with the men’s anger.

“Y-you…”

“Scram.”

I slightly raised my head. They saw my eyes up-front and visibly paled. They almost stumbled back a step.

“…tsk, let’s go.”

“Y-yeah…”

The two got their last words in and left for another car in a hurry.

 

…I really wished people wouldn’t force me to have to kill more than necessary. It wasn’t like I derive pleasure from killing. Although I suppose part of it was my fault, since I forgot about how I looked.

Maybe I scared them a bit too much? I knew I’d be having trouble reining in my presence, considering I didn’t have the necklace. Oh well.

I took out the ID card and used [Cyber-Manipulation] to read it… yep, I was right.

The card had belonged to one of the men back then. I pickpocketed them. I knew the 12th research center of that corporation was in this area, so I thought that if I was lucky, someone working there would get on the subway. I actually got a hit the first time around.

Sneaking in would be easy if I just completely transformed into mist, but then I wouldn’t be able to enter any airtight rooms, plus it wouldn’t be funny if they knew about me because I thoughtlessly destroyed the place.

…well, if I went all out I’d get found out sooner or later anyway, but I still wanted to try to get as much info as I could before then.

The train slowly came to a stop, the door opening with barely a hiss. I got on the platform, then exited the station. I walked through the town in the dead of night toward the 12th research center.

---

Previous Chapter | Index | Next Chapter

In a run-down district of a certain city in a certain country on Earth, there was an old high-rise building built since the beginning of the 21st century. Its basement housed a store selling personal defense equipment. Jim, the owner, looked at the creaking door and the new customer coming in. He slightly raised an eyebrow.

The customer stayed silent. So did he.

Among the faint sound of jazz music, they looked around the shop in apparent curiosity.

 

A strange customer, they were. The parka was oversized on their frame, with the hood pulled low to hide their face. They had on a pair of similarly baggy army pants and boots that looked to be clothes for a grown man.

It wasn’t the body size of an adult. They looked more like a boy… or perhaps actually still just a kid. In this country, people entering stores like Jim’s with that sort of suspicious look were, nine times out of ten, burglars.

Jim couldn’t relax, even if they were a kid. In this country, where guns were relatively easier to acquire compared to other first world countries, children could kill adults just by a pull of a finger. No one could have fault Jim for reaching for his gun just because a customer looked suspicious.

“…”

Yet even as he touched the gun hidden behind the counter, he didn’t take it into his hand. He couldn’t.

He was assaulted by a feeling of severe uneasiness and dissonance. The customer looked thin, their height only a bit over five feet. They looked like nothing more than just a kid. But the strange unease was telling Jim that the moment he held up the gun would be the moment he took his last breath.

 

“So I heard this place take trade-ins, right?”

“…where did you hear it from?”

Only when the customer first talked to him did he realize that she wasn’t a boy, nor a child. And she wasn’t even an adult woman — judging from how thin she looked, she was still just a teenage girl.

“On the internet.”

The girl waved her phone in front of him as her reply.

Jim hadn’t written anything about trade-ins on his shop’s homepage. Since she didn’t say ‘website’ but only ‘internet’, then she must have found somebody’s tweet and identified this shop and its location. Concluding that she wasn’t a normal customer, Jim lightly leaned on the counter and began to do business.

“What’re you offering?”

“These.”

The girl placed the goods on the counter. Seeing them, Jim asked, “Can I take a look?”

“Go ahead,” she nodded.

“…the newest model used by the military, I see. Already broken in at that. No outside defect. I heard these are only just beginning to be issued? It should be too early for it to start showing up on black markets… where’d you get it from?”

 

It was the newest handgun model, made by a conglomerate in the arms and munitions industry. The girl was offering two of them. They couldn’t have been acquired through any official pathway. Jim attempted a bit of intimidation, but there wasn’t a single twitch on the girl’s face behind the hood.

In this country, Jim’s shop was only one among the numerous stores secretly doing trade-ins behind the counter. There was a yearly cycle of several of such shops being exposed and then revived in some other underground locations. It was the reason why the police had stopped bothering with them, and were generally content to leave them be unless something significant happened.

Jim was an ex-policeman. Once in a while, his old co-worker would appropriate some of the guns they’d confiscated to sell to him, which was why Jim’s shop had been able to survive here for over a decade.

The girl showed no signs of being affected by Jim’s intimidation. He felt a strange chill seeing the strands of white hair faintly swaying behind her hood. They reminded him of silver threads.

 

“You’re not buying then?”

“…do you have the authentication?”

“Here. Not mine, though.”

“Obviously.”

The girl took out another phone in addition to the previous one and laid them on the counter.

Guns in the modern age required authentication upon use, in order to deny enemies the use of own’s own weapons.

The army, the police, or similar organizations generally used scrip certificates or such items as authentication, but keeping in mind future changes or additions to the info, mobile phones were instead the mainstream type of authentication for individuals or security companies.

The phones she had must have been taken from their owner. An individual or an organization.

The guns could be unlocked just with these devices, but there was a chance information about the location of future firearm use would be leaked to the organization who used to own them. Jim would need to transfer user authentication first.

“…alright. Six hundred bucks for each.”

“Isn’t that too cheap? I got you your authentication too.”

“That’s the kind of business we’re doing here. If you have complaints, go sell them to those shops in the front. Seven hundred each.”

“Fine. Do you have prepaid phones? Just count them into the bill. Also, any melee weapons? A knife would be fine.”

“…just wait there.”

He took one of the prepaid phones lining up in the shop and connected it to the store’s device, then went into the back and took out a slightly dusty wooden box.

 

Today, almost no one used coins or paper money anymore. In cities of first world countries, you needed a mobile device or your ID card to make payments. It was no inconvenience to normal people with a citizenship and a bank account, but not criminals or illegal immigrants, which was why there was still quite a bit of demand for prepaid mobile phones.

 

Batons and stun guns were among the goods being publicly displayed in Jim’s store, but not deadlier weapons such as knives. The girl slightly winced at the dust covering the box. She took out the combat knife, somewhat on the larger side, then nimbly gave it a few test swings.

The knife was black market goods appropriated from military supplies. It was supposed to be used by soldiers nearly 2 meters in height. In the girl’s hand, it looked more like a machete. Its grip almost looked like it wouldn’t fit, yet the girl was handling it with surprising proficiency. Jim couldn’t help but sigh in admiration.

“You’re good.”

“I had no choice. This is nice. This and this too, please.”

The girl put on the counter the large combat knife, one survival knife, and ten cheap foldable knives.

“You don’t want guns? I have some old models that don’t require authentication.”

Times changed, but weapons stayed largely the same. Even now, handguns were still using gunpowder and firing .380 or 9mm bullets.

“Unfortunately, I haven’t had the chance to use them before,” the girl blandly said.

Jim gave a light shrug. He wasn’t looking at the girl as a kid anymore. He was treating her as one of those people.

“Two hundred bucks for everything.”

“Still expensive… at that price, throw in a freebie for me.”

“…wait there.” Jim readily agreed, apparently having thoughts of his own. He went into the back and took out something that looked similar to a straight sword.

“This baby’s been used by the Asian mafia… apparently. You can handle it, right?”

The girl stayed silent, taking out the sword from its black-lacquered cylindrical sheath. She stared at the single-edged blade. It looked to be quite the antique.

“…nice sword. Already drank the lives of more than a hundred.” The girl blithely said. Jim stayed silent, feeling the honesty behind her words.

She returned it to its sheath and took it. Looked like she accepted the freebie. Jim took the money, depositing the change into her prepaid phone and handed everything over.

The girl took the package and they… disappeared. Where did she hide them? Inside those baggy clothes? He supposed it wasn’t exactly impossible considering the glimpses he’d seen of her hidden depths.

She met his eyes and gave a slight nod, then turned away. As Jim watched her getting ready to leave, staying silent all the while, the entrance door suddenly slammed open.

 

“Hah, hahhaha! GIMME THE GUUUUNS!”

 

“Tsk!” Jim reached his hand for the gun behind the counter. Unfocused, cloudy eyes. The intruder was probably a drug addict.

This sort of people was honestly worse than the typical burglars. They weren’t scared of guns, nor would they ever do the logical thing and retreat. Not just that, they might not even realize they’d gotten shot, even continuing to rampage for a while. The druggy only had a kitchen knife in hand, but it was plenty lethal with modern metallurgy.

Jim aimed his handgun with both hands. And then, he saw the girl calmly walked forward.

“No, you stup-RUN!”

She blurred. The single-edged straight sword was out of its sheath. The druggy suddenly looked pained, collapsed into a heap, and gradually stopped moving. The girl casually walked past the body without a second glance and left the store.

The heap on the floor was certainly dead, yet Jim couldn’t find a single outside wound that would correlate with the expected cut. On a later day, according to an underground professional corpse remover, the druggy’s lungs had been slashed to bits by a sharp object, and the cause of death had been drowning in his own blood. On a hunch, Jim checked the security camera.

No girl ever entered his shop.

 

***

 

“I actually managed to go shopping…” I left the shop with a sigh of relief.

Ever since I left my home, I’d always been either in the hospital or the facility. I hadn’t had the pocket money to buy something ever. I only knew you could trade money for goods from the VR device of the library.

In Yggdrasia I just needed to hand over coins. I’d never done digital transactions before, so I was a bit nervous. [Cyber-Manipulation] should probably be able to handle my money problem if I knew how to use it that way, but since I didn’t, I had no intention to be reckless.

I continued altering the city’s security camera footage as I went along to my next destination, a second-hand clothing store. I changed into something that would fit me better and snuck into the city.

Blobsy and Panda weren’t here, so my rabbit ears were showing again…

 

So I’d managed to manifest myself on Earth, but there was no longer anything important at that sealed facility.

There were several other facilities of the corporation in this country, but indiscriminately attacking them all would be too inefficient. It’d just unnecessarily set them on high alert. Wouldn’t be funny at all if they started bringing out some more weird weapons.

The information I got from [Cyber-Manipulation] had mentioned three names: the 7th research center, the 4th research center, and the 12th research center. One of them should be what I was looking for.

I pulled the hood of the coat I’d just bought lower to cover my eyes. I slipped through the ticket gate with my smartphone and got on the gloomy subway, empty but for only a few other people.

---

Previous Chapter | Index | Next Chapter

Yeah. I should just go to Earth and wipe them out.

Which was all fine and good, but there were a few problems with the idea.

For one, while I’d managed to go to Earth last time by going through the World Tree, that was only because my body and soul were still there for me to possess and manifest myself.

But now, there was no longer anything there.

I had no one on Earth who loved me. There was nothing tying me there — at most, there was only the desire for vengeance against those who had betrayed me and my secret alpha tester comrades. I’d always thought this would happen one day, that I’d go to Earth after I got powerful enough to rip apart space-time and cross dimensions by myself. I also knew that it’d take me around three hundred thousand magic points. I didn’t know how I knew that. I just did.

Then how would I do this? I already had the answer, as a matter of fact.

 

I would use No. 01’s ability, [Cyber-Manipulation], to once more manifest myself on Earth the way the avatar technology worked, then I would use No. 08’s [Materialization] to incarnate myself.

 

But to do that, I would need a digital connection to Earth.

There were a few possibilities. The first I could think of was the player character, but I felt like that sort of connection was a bit too weak for my purpose. I once tried to use [Cyber-Manipulation] on one of the players I defeated to dig for more information about Earthside, but the line was too weak. I barely got anything.

Besides, even if I could go to Earth through the player connection, whoever they were would be getting a huge surprise from seeing a real bunny girl suddenly appearing in front of them. And if I lacked the materials to incarnate myself, they might just be sacrificed.

Man, demons sure were scary, even if I say so myself.

 

“So that’s why I can’t take you along this time.”

*boing!*

“Ook!!!”

Blobsy and Panda clung to my legs in response.

I mean, of course I wanted to bring them along if I could. They kept me sane, after all. Maybe I’d be able to if I was actually crossing dimensions myself, but what I was about to do this time was faxing myself to the other side, for lack of a better word. I wouldn’t even be able to bring along the stuff in my [Inventory] such as money, weapons, or snacks for the two, much less other living beings.

As I explained as much, Panda reluctantly gave up once he heard the part about the snacks. I wasn’t about to tell him bananas also existed on Earth.

*boing-oing!*

Blobsy still didn’t like it. I pleaded with her as we played for a whole half a day, and she finally acquiesced.

 

“Alright… I guess that’s it. Let’s go.”

I left all my stuff at the World Tree — why did I have a troll’s loincloth in there? — and used the World Tree network to teleport to the new Sapling near the fallen large country of Xontdix.

I picked a location somewhat farther away as my landing spot just in case, but thankfully I didn’t sense any humans around. As I quietly approached the Sapling, I saw some pitch-black unicorns — actually called bicorns, I think? —  of over 2000 combat power grazing on a nearly grassy field. There was a whole herd of them. With them there, the humans probably wouldn’t be able to get close.

My eyes met with a bicorn’s. It wasn’t exactly hostile, but for some reason, it just scoffed as if disappointed… what was that all about?

 

I headed toward the capital of Xontdix. It had been quickly abandoned after my attack.

The fate of the other fallen countries varied. In some, the humans still remained in an attempt to rebuild their country and were fighting against the demihumans. In some, the country was claimed by the former demihuman slaves as their new home. Here though, all living beings had been frozen whole. I only saw some rats scuttling around at most.

In fact, the frozen people were still here, perhaps because my magic was still lingering. The whole place was looking incredibly dreary.

“…hmm?”

There shouldn’t be anyone here, yet there was something strange in the air.

The doors of several shops had been broken in. A closer look revealed that most of them were of restaurants. Probably fiend wolves making a mess of the places, since they were strong against the cold. This was a southern country, with the climate of one ever since the Saplings were destroyed. The fiend wolves might have moved in since then. Although… were there wolves in the south?

But more curiously, it wasn’t just the restaurants that were broken in. Shops selling bottled and canned products were also ransacked… were the wolves that smart?

I did a quick search of the adventurer guild I found on the way, found a guide map, and moved toward my destination, staying silent all the while. Finally, I arrived at the Temple.

 

Horrid shrieks rang out. Several men and women jumped at me from the shadows.

The dissonance I felt upon entering the city had prompted me to pay more attention to any possible presence. They didn’t surprise me. I calmly dismantled them with claws and sharp pin heels.

“…not players?”

They looked human, but then why were they here, and in such small numbers? Were they refugees immigrating from some other place?

Damn it, I shouldn’t have done that. They’d been so disgusting I couldn’t help myself. I should have left one of them alive, or maybe identify them before I did anything.

No use crying over spilt milk, I suppose. After all, the moment they attacked was the moment the distinction between humans and wild dogs disappeared in my eyes.

I entered the Temple and saw traces of people living inside. Still recent. So they must have been doing something here, then. What were the humans doing inside one of the corporation’s bases? Were they just clinging to the World Tree that they called their god? Or…

 

“…tsk.”

Deeper inside was a strange altar. An altar by itself wasn’t surprising considering this was a temple, but drawn on it was an eerie black-colored magic circle. On the circle was a pile of something that looked like rotten hearts. You couldn’t make it any more suspicious even if you wanted to!

On a closer look, I noticed there were traces of magic running through the circle. I wanted to destroy it, but my abilities were way too lopsided. I had problems actually just destroying things normally. And it looked way too disgusting for me to absorb the magic power, so I just froze it for the time being.

As I moved away, however, I noticed a few sheepskin scrolls lying on the floor. I picked one up. This world had paper made from tree bark, which meant these scrolls were old stuff…

“…summoning the Fairy King…?”

 

Fairy King…? This world even had that sort of thing? The other scrolls didn’t hold any information I could understand, and I couldn’t bring them along anyway, so there was no use worrying about them.

More importantly, I had something to do here.

“…there it is.”

In front of me were chairs and desks neatly arranged. On top of them were crystal tablets. People of this world probably wouldn’t understand what they were: office desks and work PCs. They weren’t on right now due to a lack of magic power, but magic was what I could supply. Hopefully they still worked.

I touched one of the crystal tablets and gently poured magic in, and the screen lit up and began displaying text. I started up the dimensional network connection as gently and quietly as I could, so as to avoid the attention of the corporation on Earth. I began hacking the other side.

“…sooo difficult.”

I managed to dig into the fourth informational layer, but couldn’t go any further with the skills I had. I had the ability, but not enough practice.

I supposed I couldn’t dive directly there… well then, let’s go somewhere easier to find.

 

***

 

The medical facility of a certain conglomerate had previously housed a large number of staff members, researchers, and patients, but a tragic accident several months earlier had frozen and killed everyone. The facility had been locked up ever since to preserve the scene for investigation.

*clack…*

“…man, still creepy as fuck.”

Hard footsteps echoed in the locked-down facility in the middle of the night. The patrolling guard expressed his displeasure in an attempt to stifle his fear, but his voice had sounded a lot louder than he intended. He winced.

“What, not used to it yet? Not like I disagree though.” His partner replied teasingly. Yet he, too, was shivering as he pointed the flashlight into the darkness. The pair of night-vision goggles he had on weren’t working very well. He gave it a few knocks.

It wasn’t fear that made him shiver. The guards here were all ex-mercenaries or ex-military. The corpses here might disturb them, but they didn’t scare them.

Ever since the incident, this facility had been covered with an air of coldness that no amount of effort could dislodge. The corpses on the ground floor were already taken away, but countless bodies still remained underground, fixed in place by unmeltable ice, their moments of death perfectly preserved.

According to the 5th research center’s investigation, this coldness was apparently caused by ‘mana’, a hitherto unknown form of energy. While this ‘mana’ was energy with high purity, it existed in no conventional form. Its purity and efficiency could change in a heartbeat depending on a living being’s will.

The researchers had hypothesized that due to an extraordinarily intense will, the efficiency of the mana here had been stimulated to near the maximum limit, turning it into a sort of ‘curse’ that would remain for over fifty years before dispersing.

Perhaps it was the reason why there had been many reports of malfunctioning electronic equipment in this facility. Equipment such as surveillance cameras weren’t working, forcing the need to have real people patrolling the place.

 

“I mean, who the hell would sneak into this kinda place anyway?”

“You know why, stop being an idiot. If the mass media found this place, we’re gonna be up shit creek. Really, if anyone could get in here, they might as well sign up for the special forces already.”

“No kidding.”

The men laughed at their own silly joke.

They weren’t scared. They were still disturbed, however, as they’d known how their comrades here had died.

It hadn’t been their shift that day. By the time they were called back, what greeted them were nothing but frozen faces of terror and madness. And then they’d heard the muttering of the shivering staff members.

A white bunny girl.

They’d thought it some sort of joke at first. On a whim, they had asked about the matter with the interim Deputy Director of the 7th research center, a beauty they’d been interested in since quite a while. She immediately turned pale and told them to forget about it.

 

It was no accident. There was somebody behind this tragedy.

 

“…hey, isn’t it kinda cold?”

“It’s always cold here.”

“I mean, colder than normal… there’s… air moving from somewhere?”

On a normal day, the guards would still feel the cold seeping into their core after a round through the facility despite wearing cold-resistant suits, which should have been enough for them to withstand even the summit of the Alps. Yet the bitter cold just now had been painful, as if their exposed face had been iced over.

The cause of it was a faint breeze blowing from somewhere within the sealed facility, the men noticed. They turned their eyes.

“…there.”

It was the place with the most bodies, as well as where their comrades had been executed to a man. The room with innumerable cold-storage capsules.

“Huh, nothing… wait.”

A small lamp was flickering. Was the electricity still on? Inside the room… at the center of the room, a mass of white mist was slowly dancing, twisting like a gentle whirlwind of cold air.

The sight wouldn’t have looked out of place if they were outside in the Antarctic.

The mist slowly changed shape, forming a human silhouette like those in spirit photographs from the analog age long ago.

 

The men gasped. In an instant, two hands appeared from the white mist to grab their faces.

 

“Be quiet at night… okay?”

 

A heart-meltingly demonic voice whispered deep inside their ears.

They couldn’t even move a single finger, much less scream. The frigid air felt as if it was swallowing whole their lives. Like a withered tree, the men’s bodies visibly thinned, their skin and lips cracking. The sight in front of their forced-open eyes was that of a human taking shape as if in inverse proportion with their leaking vitality. It turned into a pure-white bunny girl.

*crack…*

They crumbled like dried wood. The white girl took her hands off of them, picked up the men’s mobile phones and weapons, then disappeared in silence.

 

It was the day the white demon once again visited Earth.

---

Previous Chapter | Index | Next Chapter

The Heroes had accepted the request to subjugate the Dark Lady Whitehare from the coalition of large countries, but out of the three, the Warrior had disappeared following the destruction of his home country. For a time, the Blademaster had been pursuing the Dark Lady with his own method, but one day, he suddenly found he could no longer find her tracks. So now the man was busy traveling the world, taking into his care the noble ladies who’d lost their countries and the women who’d lost their husbands.

While the Sage had developed the spell to detect magical signals, ultimately, it could only detect the Dark Lady once she entered combat with someone else. As a result, the Sage was always forced to be reactive, unable to capture the Dark Lady. In the end, three more small countries lost their World Tree Saplings, forcing each and every human countries to strengthen their own defense even further.

The teleportation circle the Sage had invented required a magician capable of casting sixth-rank darkness spells, and so it had been purchased not by the human countries but the Temples. Adventurers were frequently sent out, but no progress was made into apprehending the Dark Lady.

 

The Dark Lady Whitehare was a unique enemy.

The past Dark Lords recorded in the history books and the current Dark General monsters normally led an army of subordinates, instead of acting alone.

No matter how powerful their personal strength were, alone, they would be defeated by several Heroes or Champions working together. If that wasn’t enough, then they just needed to be dragged into a war of attrition and surrounded by a coalition army, and humanity would have more than a decent chance to win.

Yet Dark Lords were still feared, and the Dark Generals still hadn’t been stamped out. While partly it was due to the lack of unity between the human countries, the main reason was that they were leaders of a large army of minions.

Whether it be the Trolls, the Ogres, or the Orcs, each army had tens of thousands of soldiers.

In pure numbers, the human race had more people with their total population of over a hundred million. But the Dark Generals’ armies had over ninety percent of their members as combatants, and even the weakest footsoldier could put up more than a good fight against a Rank 3 adventurer. The humans had no idea how much casualty they would suffer if their armies clashed face-to-face. They had no choice but to be cautious.

 

Yet the Dark Lady Whitehare was fundamentally different. She always worked alone.

The strength of the current Dark Generals lay in their armies, but at the same time their advance was forced by the need to defend against low-ranked monsters. On the other hand, nobody knew where Whitehare was. She was a phantom. The city guards couldn’t even slow her down if she appeared, and the Sapling would be long gone by the time the knights arrived.

Assigning high-rank adventurers and elite knights to the Sapling’s defense would buy some time, but they’d lose the ability to defend against the powerful monsters in the countryside in exchange. Humanity was caught in a catch-22.

 

And to pour salt on the wound, the demihumans all over the world were now rising up in a resistance movement.

They were attacking the remnants of countries that had lost their Sapling — groups of humans who had remained in an effort to rebuild their homeland — and take back the demihuman labour slaves. To combat the problem, the adventurer guilds had been issuing requests to eradicate the resistance, but most of the new adventurers who had been showing up in force in the last six months had refused. The nobility of certain countries had attempted to punish these adventurers, which had only resulted in the high-rank adventurers of the country leaving the border and ultimately reducing the national power.

A group of human countries had offered a peace deal with the resistance, saying “Let’s stand together against the Dark Lady and defend world peace!”, but the reply from the demihumans were just three words: “Go fuck yourselves.”

 

Yet humanity — or more accurately, the Temples — had still not yet lost.

On the surface, the Temples were cooperating with humans, giving assistance to the Heroes, and sending adventurers all over the world to defend against the Dark Lady. While the adventurers were killing monsters throughout the lands and receiving thanks from the local, their true purpose was to serve as the Temples’ eyes.

The watcher drones patrolling worldwide numbered around one hundred thousand, but not all of them had human supervision. They patrolled in an AI-determined pattern, and they only reported to the corporation once they detected a significant event.

But that wasn’t enough to watch for all the signs of an appearance by the Dark Lady Whitehare, who was not only an elusive phantom but also a cautious one. The 4th research center had made their first move as the newly-assigned anti-Dark Lady department: their plan was to make use of the eyes of nearly three million players, then filtering everything through an AI to search for certain terms such as ‘Dark Lady’, ‘the bunny’, or ‘Whitehare’, in order to look for the Dark Lady.

 

***

 

“Wha-what’s happening?! No, nooOOOO—”

 

It happened when I was in the middle of conquering another small country. An adventurer party had seen me and was excitedly jumping at me, when they suddenly screamed out in confusion and stopped moving.

 

By bringing along my lucky charms, Blobsy and Panda, I barely suffered any more Heroic interruptions. These days, I was continuing my trick of luring monsters to attack cities as a distraction to deal with the hardened defense of the Saplings.

I also realized one other thing recently: goblinoid monsters with a certain degree of intelligence, such as the goblins themselves, were hostile to me the same way they were hostile to humans and demihumans, but other types of monsters like the beast-type or plant-type generally didn’t go out of their way to attack me.

Just because I was the Dark Lady didn’t mean I’d get monsters at my beck and call. I’d talked with the World Tree one more time for more information, and it turned out that the reason for the increase in monster population these last few decades, as well as the reason they’d begun to attack human settlements, was because the World Tree was creating them from manaswamps and ordering them to attack in order to free the Saplings.

This was… quite the shocking truth.

No humans would ever have thought that the culprit behind the monster attacks was the World Tree itself: the cornerstone of the world, the foundation of their livelihood, and even the target of their worship.

No wonder Blobsy and Panda got attached to me so easily.

 

Anyway, so I had been using the monsters as a distraction to draw out the knights so that I could invade the vulnerable city and destroy the Sapling, but then suddenly, trouble happened.

The adventurers in front of me, probably players, had stopped moving. The light of awareness faded from their eyes. Armor of iridescence appeared out of nowhere to cover them whole, and they abruptly began charging at me with surprising agility.

[Iridescent Armor]
[Magic Point: 500/500] [Hit Point: 500/500]
[Total Combat Power: 3000]

I covered the six charging adventurers in cold mist. They slowed down but weren’t frozen. They continued moving and attacked me with an iridescent spear they pulled from thin air.

I struck their armor with the magic dagger I got from Tiz last time. The blade simply broke off without anything to show for it.

A spell barrier? No, that’s armor specialized against the cold. So troublesome.

“Damn it!”

But I still had a lot more total combat power. I relied on pure speed to weave through the iridescent armors’ attacks, slamming my claws into one of them.

They flew off with a metallic clang. Yet despite their broken neck and armor torn to pieces, they still stood up without making a single sound and once more headed toward me.

Who the hell were they?! Too damn tough!

With my power, I’d expected them to be vaporized by a single attack. Yet not only did they hold their shape, they were even moving. It must be the armor.

My guess was that they’d used the avatar technology to recreate a metal unique to this world, but had the players really advanced so much? And their combat power were even three times higher. Why?

I took a slow, deep breath, readying myself and taking a closer look at their movements.

 

There was no waste in their movements. No, that’s not quite right. Their movements were somehow different.

The people of this world, as well as the players, relied on skills and special techniques apparently called [Combat Arts] as the basics for combat, which often made their movements exaggerated and showy. In comparison, these armors looked… how do I say this… plainer.

Ah, right. They were moving like soldiers of Earth. Then why did they change their style so suddenly? Why did their combat power increased so abruptly? The hint lay within their [Identification] info.

[Iridescent Armor]
[Magic Point: 210/210] [Hit Point: 328/500]
[Total Combat Power: 3000]

Noticing the strange decrease in magic points, I changed my tactics. I fully transformed into mist, diving into the center of their formation and turned back to human. I touched one of them directly and once again began absorbing the armor’s magic power.

It broke apart into clattering pieces. The player left behind began to disperse into motes of light.

[Warrior-ish Young Man] [Race: Human ♂] [Adventurer]
[Magic Points (MP): 0/12] [Hit Points (HP): 0/340]
[Total Combat Power: 87]

The rest brought up their spears in caution at the sight. But they weren’t so scary once I understood how to deal with them. They’re just annoying.

But right at that moment, I noticed dozens of sets of iridescent armor riding on spidery-looking monsters rushing toward me from the depths of the city.

“…”

The battle with the iridescent armors took several hours, enough time for the knights to arrive. It was the first time I had to retreat without destroying the Sapling.

 

*

 

*boing*

“Ook.”

Back at the World Tree, Blobsy rubbed herself on my cheek, while Panda on my other shoulder patted me on the head.

“…thanks.” I said, sitting on a large root and began thinking. Ever since I was a kid, these moments of deep contemplation had been my way of protecting myself from the malice of grown-ups. It was how I had survived.

 

First off, I believed their drastic power increase hadn’t been because of a technological advancement, but because they’d consumed a large amount of magic.

Then why hadn’t they done that until now? The answer was likely to be related to the drastic change in their way of movement.

First, the premise. For a lifeform to become more powerful in this world, they needed a large amount of mana. But just being granted the mana wouldn’t work: their bodies also needed to acclimatize to it.

It was the difference between a body that had trained for years and a body doped with drugs.

…or wait, maybe that’s not the right analogy? Maybe it’s more like the difference in deliciousness between bread made from baking dough just after mixing and bread made from baking dough that had been allowed to rise… anyway, that’s the idea.

Then probably, the militarized monster avatars that had been attacking me until now were also mainly gaining strength by training up their magic, even if they were already initialized with a certain amount of magic power.

Then I could assume that in order to create those inordinately tough armor and gaining such a drastic amount of combat power, they’d needed to consume the maximum magic points that they’d trained up and acclimatized with. The proof was that the maximum magic of that dying player had been lowered to almost nothing.

That was even less magic than a human baby living in a city, really.

In other words, the corporation was doing the rational thing and sacrificing the players to gain usable firepower, without reducing the power of their personal military that were the monster avatars.

Obviously, the players wouldn’t have done it themselves. In which case the corporation must have taken control of their avatars back then.

 

“…I have to admit, they’re decisive if nothing else.”

If they’d done it to only a few, they could have waved it off as a bug and apologized and they would have been forgiven. But the amount of iridescent armors I’d defeated was already numbering several hundreds.

If the same amount of player characters disappeared, rumors would have started up in no time at all. Weren’t they worried people would leave their game?

Maybe they were soothing ruffled feathers and silencing the players by real money. A lot of money.

But in that case, they must be thinking the future profit from killing or capturing me must be worth more than the millions of dollars’ worth of profit they’d be losing.

 

So, that was my attempt to read into what they were doing. I probably wasn’t all that far off.

But then, I’d need to think of a countermeasure.

If the iridescent armors continued to show up in large numbers, it’d be difficult to reach the Sapling. Besides, while I might have managed this time by using my absorption ability, [Magical Defense] still worked to lessen the effect of [Absorption], so if I allowed them the time they might manage to counter that too.

Then should I strengthen my [Absorption] skill? How? Or perhaps I should just raise my total combat power and physically pummel them into dust… but then if they also decided to strengthen themselves, it might just turn into a futile game of cat-and-mouse.

“Hmm…”

[Shedy] [Race: Bunny Girl] [Archdemon Lv. 21]
・The rabbit demon of Laplace. Trickster and guide of man’s fate.

[Magic Points: 85,000/85,000] 14,000 ↑
[Total Combat Power: 93,500/93,500] 15,400 ↑
[Unique Skill: <Causality Alteration> <Cyber-Manipulation> <Absorption> <Materialization>] 
[Racial Skill: <Fear> <Mist Form>]
[Simple Identification] [Human Form (Wonderful)] [Subspace Inventory]
[Dark Lady]

“…this is probably enough magic, right?”

I hadn’t been able to stay for long last time. But with my current amount of magic, plus a bit of snacking in the local area, it might just work.

 

“Alright. Let’s go to Earth and strike at their roots.”

---

A/N: It was the 4th research center that had done the player character possession. The game development department had known nothing about it, and they’re making complaints.

---

Previous Chapter | Index | Next Chapter

“They’re gone…?”

In her room at the Tower of Truth, Marlene the Sage faintly frowned as she noticed the disappearance of her subordinates’ magical signals.

 

Whitehare, the Dark Lady, possessed some sort of power to hide her attributes from [Identification].

At its most basic, [Identification] was a skill that made use of the identifier’s own experience and nature to analyze the information they took in through their eyes, ears, and skin, then expressed it as numbers. But that didn’t mean the user wasn’t capable of gathering more than just vague information — with the help of the skill, the number they saw was virtually the exact reflection of the target’s power.

However, humans possessed weaker senses compared to demihumans and monsters, forcing them to spend more magic to activate the skill. Furthermore, the maximum attribute number the skill could display was limited to ten times the user’s own. This was simply because the standard for measurement was based upon the user, and if there was too much of a power gap, it wouldn’t be able to accurately measure the difference. The skill user could only vaguely sense that there was ‘a lot’, like how a human lacking knowledge could never grasp the size of an ocean.

The Warrior had reported that he was unable to identify Whitehare’s abilities, but Marlene thought it very unlikely that the Dark Lady could have over ten times Gold’s power.

Any monster with such power would even stand above Catastrophe-class monsters such as normal dragons and Dark Generals. They would be the ascendant Calamity-class, and in the whole history of this world, such existences could be counted on one hand.

Calamity-class described dangerous existences that were capable of destroying several countries. Whitehare had certainly done so, but that was because she’d attacked the World Tree Saplings. It was improbable she truly had the power to face the countries head-on.

Judging from the records of Whitehare’s battles as well as the fight at the auction hall of Trestan Kingdom where she was first sighted, Marlene had concluded that it was impossible the Dark Lady could have gained power equivalent to a Hero in just a few short months.

 

Marlene hypothesized that the Dark Lady Whitehare was a demihuman with a special ability, similar to the human Children of God, and that she could only exert enough power to destroy a city under limited circumstances.

Either that, or there was another possibility…

“The damn demihumans are helping her.”

 

Today, humans viewed the demihuman races as nothing more than cattle, but in the past, their magical culture had been far more developed than humans. Examples of such advanced magical races were high elves and dragonkins. Fearing the threat they posed, the human race had driven them to extinction a century ago.

Of the beastman races, only the canine and feline races still survived, as they were useful as labor for humans. According to the literature kept at the Tower of Truth, many beastman races had survived until several centuries ago, and the herbivorous races among them had possessed highly advanced magical technology.

Then Whitehare should either be a survivor from one of the extinct beastman races; or she possessed an advanced magitool left behind by the previous civilizations, perhaps by the high elves; or she had people helping her in her quest.

 

“If the demihumans are backing her, then I just need to deal with them first,” Marlene giggled, “oh, Whitehare… I’ll slaughter your comrades everywhere, and there won’t be a thing you can do about it. Ah, but then maybe sending those boys to go alone was a bit hasty? Well, whatever. I have plenty of replacements.”

 

Her soldiers were those who’d endured the torture that she called her hobby. They’d cried, they’d wailed for days and days. While most had drawn their last breath in agony and despair, some had had their minds broken and warped. They no longer held Marlene’s interest and were kept alive as guinea pigs for her experiments. They received training, and Marlene used them as obedient lab rats or as vanguard soldiers. Still, the boys she’d sent out had been getting uppity recently, so she didn’t quite care whether they lived or died.

 

Marlene sighed. She looked at the magical signal map once more and noticed that the powerful magic signal she assumed to have been in combat with Whitehare was currently moving fast, as if being washed away to somewhere.

Marlene had been convinced the powerful signal was some sort of high-rank monster, like a chimera or a manticore. But then, was there a reason for Whitehare to have spared them?

Was her conjecture correct, that Whitehare had limitations in using her power? Or was there a reason she didn’t kill the signal?

“…can’t be that stupid pervert, right?”

 

The first time Marlene met him was when she was still in her mid-teens. It was at a dinner party at a certain country. The blond, handsome youth had greeted her with a dashing smile and said:

“How beautiful you are! Please, become my 6827th woman! Allow this Calimero to show you the meaning of true love!”

Marlene had burned that thing to a crisp… or attempted to, at least. As the flame spell that had engulfed him as well as a few other unfortunate nobles let up, Calimero once more showed himself from behind the obese nobles he’d used as a shield and said:

“Such passion! Come now, don’t be shy, my dear!”

If the Warrior hadn’t stopped her back then, the whole country would’ve been a scorched wasteland.

As Marlene watched the lights on the map, she began working on her  “Blademaster Murder Plan” that she’d started. It was practically her hobby by now.

 

***

 

“Salia’s gone?” In spite of himself, Tiz asked for confirmation.

“Indeed, young master.”

 

He had been listening to his old butler’s report in the palace of Touze Empire. Normally, there was no need to bother the emperor with such trifles. Her father, the knight officer, had already moved out. This was the sort of thing where the only words Tiz needed to hear was “it has been done.”

But the problem this time was the other people that had disappeared at the same time.

“The problematic nobles inside our country who had been under house arrest or imprisonment, as well as the incarcerated magicians, had disappeared at the same time. Similarly, our plants in several other countries had also reported the disappearance of many dangerous characters.”

Tiz grumbled.

 

Every country had magicians doing dangerous experiments or nobles with threatening ideologies. Most of them simply died from an unknown sickness, but for those who, despite posing a threat to the country, also possessed useful knowledge or skills, some would be put under house arrest and convinced to direct their talents toward serving the country’s purpose.

 

“Who were they?”

“A researcher investigating how to control monsters, a necromancer, a researcher working on a mass-destruction spell, and a demon worshipper.”

“I see… Get the Third Knight Squadron to search for them. If they found them in our borders, execute them on the spot. No need for capture. Just bring me their heads.”

“…understood.” The old butler bowed deeply.

Tiz released a long sigh and leaned back deeply on his lavish chair.

With Shedy going around destroying Saplings all over the world, every country were tightening security around their vicinity. This resulted in an adverse effect on their monster suppression, and the armies of the Dark Generals, the Ogre Lord and the Orc King, were getting more active.

And just as if they’d been waiting for it, the demihumans had begun attacking countries that had lost their Saplings in order to rescue their comrades in slavery. And now the dangerous characters throughout the world were vanishing at the same time, as if it’s all been arranged beforehand.

The world had begun to change. The white-colored girl behind it all came to Tiz’s mind. He let loose a silent whisper heard by no one else.

“Shedy… what plans do you have for this world?”

 

***

 

“Urgh…”

Gold the Hero had lost his home country. He no longer had a place to return to. He had turned into a machine that knew nothing but fighting, and he had left the land of humans to wander the deep forests.

He thought he could have prevented that disaster, if only he was stronger. He should have been the Hero he was supposed to be, even if he had to turn his back on the emperor that he had as a brother. If he had stayed with his comrades, if he had kept his equipment, he might have been able to keep up with the Dark General, even stopping the Dark Lady.

But nothing could change the fact that he had lost to the Troll King. In the end, he was only alive due to the whims of the Dark Lady Whitehare.

 

He didn’t know how many days it’d been since he entered the forest.

His food supply was long gone. Still, he kept on swinging his sword, killing monsters with only the flesh and blood of animals to subsist on.

Perhaps by pushing himself to the limits, he could regain the power and the honor of a Hero. Or perhaps he was just punishing himself with the spartan training with nothing to show for it.

Then why was Gold subjecting himself with this torture?

The Dark Lady had killed the Troll King, an enemy he was no match for, in a single blow, even if it had been an ambush, and she had shown him mercy. Her words, the words of the white-colored girl, had stabbed deep into his heart.

 

“Funny that. To me, humans, demihumans, goblins, they’re all equally life.”

 

Who was he wielding his sword for?

He was doing it for the people, for the country, for his brother, for the peace of the world… so then, whose peace was it?

 

Gold let out a painful groan.

He had been swinging his sword for days on end without sleep. He had killed hundreds of monsters. His strength had run out, the light of a Hero no longer shining. Now, even monsters as weak as the fiend wolves were capable of savaging him.

No, that wasn’t quite right. The light had disappeared ever since Gold began doubting himself.

As long as a Hero held true to their conviction, the elemental of light would never abandon them, even for someone like the Blademaster. If Gold could no longer call upon the light, then the elemental must have finally given up on him.

Just as Gold finished dispatching the final fiend wolf, he collapsed, no longer having the strength to support his own weight.

No matter how much of a Hero he was, once he had lost both his blessing and his consciousness, he was defenseless. His fate would be sealed the moment a monster found him.

But he was fortunate. A hooded shadow, small as a child, was timidly getting close to him, their nervousness overcome by curiosity. A finger poked the unconscious Hero.

 

“…Daaaad! There’s a human passing out here!”

 

Their voice rang toward the depths of the forest. Their hood dropped to their back, revealing the long ears of an elf.

---

Previous Chapter | Index | Next Chapter

“My, you’re fast.”

“Anytime you call, lady Marlene. Besides, ‘fast’ should be our line.” Mason, the ambassador to the Temples, said with a dashing smile.

They were at the Tower of Truth in Quarancinq, the City of Magic. The owner of the room, Marlene the Sage, smiled in satisfaction.

“With my skill, it’s… well, I wouldn’t say it was simple, but the spell you requested had been the target of worldwide research since some time ago. Furthermore, this is Quarancinq, the pioneer of the world in magical research, and I am the greatest magician of all. It didn’t take much time to complete the spell. Still experimental, though.”

 

The Temples had requested the Heroine Marlene to develop several spells.

First, a new type of magical battery to retain mana that didn’t use magic stones.

Second, a radar system to detect magical signals worldwide.

Third, a magic circle of teleportation, a sixth-rank spell only usable by a few people throughout the whole world.

And fourth, a mana absorption system that worked through spells.

 

Marlene picked up the simply-designed Magic Gun leaning by the wall near her. She held it up into an aiming stance.

“This is good. I’d tried it out on my waste slaves, and I have to say it’s exciting stuff. But it’s true that it’s using too much magic. Even the average magicians wouldn’t be able to handle it, much less normal soldiers.”

 

Magic guns consumed the user’s magic instead of using gunpowder. They fired bullets made out of copper or silver, which were materials with high affinity to magic power.

During these last few years, thanks to the technological revelations coming from the ‘God’ of the Temples, single-shot magic guns were now capable of rapid-fire through the use of magazines. All the same, they required a lot of magic to output high firepower. And even if the guns were capable of rapid-fire, using the mana that would’ve been consumed to cast spells instead would still be more versatile, and the complexity of the guns made them quite costly. They hadn’t yet come into widespread use.

There were tools to seal in mana in order to cast spells without consuming the user’s magic, such as Magic Staves.

However, the mana-storage-capable materials used in such tools were extremely expensive precious metals, such as pure gold or mythril silver. One hundred large gold coins were the normal price for a mythril staff, and while staves of pure gold would only cost about half, they needed to be coated by a thin layer of lead to prevent the mana from leaking, making them far too weighty for general use.

 

The magic gun Marlene was holding was the latest rapid-fire model supplied by the Temples. It had both a semi-auto and a fully automatic firing mode.

The first designs had made use of mana batteries in the form of small boxes the size of a pen case attached to the gun. Of course, the batteries were made of solid gold and lead, and the woman working as Marlene’s assistant was already staggering just by carrying them.

But this gun had no such battery. While Marlene the Heroine could handle the mana consumption of the full-auto shooting mode, she still gave it back to Mason, who was no magician.

“There, I’ve carved a mana collecting circle on it. The magic circle’s still in development, and it’s only going to have 30 shots, but you show it to your bosses and get me more funds.”

“…understood.”

“Sure enough, collecting mana with spells still demanded a certain amount of spell knowledge and skill in the user. It’ll take time for me to develop a magic circle anyone could use, so you just take that spell formula back first. I’ll give you the magic circle later.”

 

Currently, countries worldwide were gathering mana from the Saplings by connecting them to several enormous magic stones by mythril electrodes, and then extract the magic from those magic stones.

Only some Children of God, by making use of their special abilities, were capable of directly extracting magic power from living beings like the Saplings. While there had been some pre-existing research on the matter, it did nothing to diminish the fact that Marlene had managed to turn theory into something usable in such a short amount of time. Her skill was the real deal.

 

“Understood. May I ask about the other two requests, as well as the progress in capturing Whitehare?”

“A teleportation circle anyone could use would be tough. You need to at least have someone capable of sixth-rank spells to activate it, and I don’t think there’s any other way. Ah, but that’s what I’m using to chase down the rabbit this time, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh, is that so?” Mason smiled, looking a lot more interested.

Marlene activated a spell, and a map of the world appeared on blank panels. Here and there on the map were shining points of light.

“Would this be… the detection spell?”

“Yes, it’s detecting every creature with over 500 magic. If I didn’t limit it to creatures only, the Saplings would turn the whole map white. The spell can only detect things near the observation equipment, though.”

The Dark Lady Whitehare seemed to possess an ability to disrupt identification, so Marlene couldn’t search by magic power value. But she reasoned that when Whitehare moved, the strong monsters near her must move as well.

 

“Then please allow the Temples to help you install the observation equipment… hmm, what would this be?”

“…powerful magic signals are moving fast. I’ll deploy a squad 10 kilometers ahead. You!”

“””Yes, my lady!””” Answering Marlene’s call, an assorted group of good-looking boys from early to late teens lined up in front of her, all equipped with the new magic guns.

“I’m sending you to this place. If you see Whitehare, kill her.”

 

***

 

What the hell was that thing…? I mean, he introduced himself so I knew who he was, but that didn’t make him any less disgusting.

And he was a Hero, the Blademaster. Were the humans really fine with that sort of Hero…?

Well, he’s gotta have died this time for sure.

 

I put the fruits for Blobsy and Panda into my [Inventory] and started moving.

I was only scouting today, and the two were still tired from last time, so they were resting at the World Tree.

With how lucky they were, if they’d been with me, maybe that idiot Hero wouldn’t have shown up. I was a really unlucky girl, after all…

“…mm?”

After running for nearly an hour, a mountain full of withered trees and a ravine that looked like a deep crack in the earth came into my view. Perhaps this was the result of the humans bending mana to their will. The problem had gotten so severe the World Tree even asked a demon for help, so this was a common sight around the world.

But then, as I continued running along the ravine, probably getting close to a human country, the space in front of me suddenly began to twist.

*rattatatatat!*

“Whoa?!”

I jumped the moment I heard the explosions. Something broke apart and gouged out the earth where I used to stand on. They were sounds of… guns?

 

“Ooooh, it’s really here!”

“That’s Lady Marlene for you! Her prediction was perfect!”

“Our Lady Marlene is truly amazing!”

 

From within the spatial distortion arrived a group of boys. They were holding guns that looked like assault rifles.

Marlene? Who? I had no idea. Anyway, they all had around 400 combat power, though considering their modern-looking equipment, the number wouldn’t reflect their real strength. And with how they fired at me so suddenly, this probably wasn’t a matter that could be peacefully resolved.

Honestly, that sort of magic gun was the worst.

As I was currently in [Human Form], no matter how much magic and combat power I possessed, my durability could be no different from a human’s.

I could defend against spells with magic power, and I could dodge physical attacks with my own physical abilities, but when there were multiple people shooting at me, some bullets were going to hit sooner or later.

The bullets themselves only hurt a bit, and my wounds would heal right away, but my magic would still be reduced. The unavoidable loss was what really hurt me.

And it’d be even worse if the projectiles had some sort of secondary effect, which was why whenever I found an enemy using magical projectile weapons on the battlefield, I always prioritized them first. And then I’d be forced to wipe out the whole area with a large-scale magical attack, which not only consumed a lot of my magic, but also attracted the attention of more enemies.

Well then, how should I go about dealing with these guys? I moved back to gain distance, trying to maneuver them to where I wanted them to be, but they didn’t fall for any of my feints, instead deftly moving to corner me at the ravine’s cliff. Despite their gaudy appearance, they were surprisingly well-trained.

I sighed. Fine then. Perhaps I should use [Causality Alteration] to gather them up and get rid of them, even if it’d take quite a bit of magic.

I stopped moving, narrowing my eyes to take a closer look at their past. They also stopped, smirks twisting their faces.

 

“Hey hey, so the rabbit thinks it can deal with us.”

“How ridiculous. A demihuman dares to fight us, servants of the Sage?”

“She said we only need to leave the head, right?”

“Then give the body for me. I’d always wanted to have a taste of a demihuman.”

“Hmm… in which meaning?”

“Both of them.”

 

Man, they sure are some deviant people… well, that just meant there was no need for me to hesitate here.

I raised my arm, and they raised their guns. Bit by bit, we approached each other. My magic and their guns got ready to fire—

 

“Hey, my lovely bunny, did you wait for long? I, Calimero, have come!”

 

—holy shit!

There, balancing and even posing on top of a large withered tree, was the Idiotmaster. He unsheathed his gaudy sword, flicked his bangs, smiled with bleached-white teeth, and jumped with an over-the-top motion.

“Allez hop!”

He was dancing, flying in the air as if he’d used a spell. Sweat sprayed out behind his back, glistening like wings of light.

Both I and the group of boys could do nothing but stare, mouths wide open in disbelief.

Calimero landed between us with a thud! And the ground started cracking.

““WHAAAAAaaaaa…””

The dried earth collapsed, taking everyone except me down to the screaming river at the bottom of the ravine. I’d secretly began floating the moment it happened.

“…”

Oooh, right, so since the tree’s withered, its roots couldn’t hold the earth together anymore.

Well, whatever… no one would miss them. I gave a prayer for their departed souls long since washed away by the raging water three hundred meters below.

For some reason, I suddenly felt like seeing Blobsy and Panda again. I decided to return to the World Tree.

 

…he’s gotta be dead this time, right?

---

Previous Chapter | Index | Next Chapter

World of Yggdrasia, a world sustained by the World Tree and ninety-nine Saplings.

Tolldorre was a breathtakingly beautiful large country situated to the north of the Western Continent. People called it “the Gateway to the West.”

Inside a thick forest within the country, several monsters were huddling together. The rag-tag group consisted of beast-type, bird-type, goblinoid-type, insect-type, and more, all monsters of different races and ecologies. They were staying vigilant of their surroundings, exterminating the occasional stray monsters with unnatural coordination.

 

“So that’s everyone, pretty much?”

“Two or three haven’t shown up yet. Looks like they’re having a bit of trouble joining.”

“It’s fine, isn’t it? Not like all of us can show up every time.”

“Yeah. Besides, we’ll still be getting new members.”

“Alright, let’s get started. Everyone, make parties of five or six, then we’ll go leveling.”

 

They were normal players using monster avatars.

At first glance, they simply looked like a group of online friends playing together, but they hadn’t been setting up secret conclaves in the middle of a forest far away from human eyes just because their avatars were enemies of humans.

 

“What’s the level range we should aim for?”

“Considering we’ll be discovered by humans sooner or later, at least equivalent to Rank 3. We need one evolution and one rank-up, but honestly I prefer a bit more strength than that.”

“Man, the next evolution’s gonna be a long way away. But if I’m going to be seriously traveling the world, then I wanna get to Rank 5. Maybe one thousand total combat power or thereabout.”

 

These players were using ‘mods’ — unofficial modifications to the game — that allowed them to log in without going through the official channels and away from the developers’ watching eyes.

As they weren’t under developer observation, they wouldn’t be able to request developer help if their avatars met with bugs or glitches, and if something went wrong with their VR devices due to a bug in the mod, their warranties wouldn’t apply.

These players still risked the dangers to log in because they had begun to hold suspicions toward the developers, as well as toward the game world itself.

Everything began when a player attempted to use a simple mod and found out it didn’t work. They simply wanted to pretty up the status screen and other such visual elements to their liking. This type of mod didn’t affect gameplay, and other games generally turned a blind eye towards them, yet the mods that should have worked in World of Yggdrasia hadn’t. All of them.

The modders hadn’t been able to mess with the system of mana absorption that had replaced the normal experience system; the use and acquisition of special skills like [Identification]; as well as [Spells] and [Combat Arts]. They hadn’t been able to modify most aspects of World of Yggdrasia, as if the things happening there weren’t programmed.

Then one day, a player had posted the following words on a personal website:

 

“It felt just like I was going on a tour to another country in real life with my avatar.”

 

Debate erupted. People discussed the overly-wide game world, the too-realistic NPCs, and the things no one would’ve batted an eye to in the real world but wouldn’t make any sense in a game. As more and more people came to hold suspicions, the aforementioned personal website was abruptly frozen by the service provider. This only further fueled the speculations.

A group of players continued their discussions on private servers or on heavily-locked-down Asian servers. The programmers and hackers among them began creating a mod to fool the developers’ eyes. They planned to log into and discover the mystery of World of Yggdrasia.

Currently, there were 17 members in the group. They were thinking of inducting another ten-odd new people in their next recruitment.

Some were in it because they felt the corporation was lying to them. Some had been feeling guilty for hurting the demihuman slaves. And though their thoughts varied, behind it all, one single wish united the group.

 

“Let’s gain enough strength to travel as fast as we can, then we can meet up with the Dark Bunny Lady!”

“””YEAAAAHH!!!”””

 

***

 

“So we meet again, my lovely little bunny! You might have gotten the drop on me last time, but I swear on my name, Calimero the Hero, that I shall put an end to your atrocities on this very day!”

 

Standing there was a young man around twenty clad in armor of glittering silver, with sparkling golden hair and blue eyes on a handsome face that looked to have known none of life’s hardships. He was twirling his overly-decorative longsword with his fingertips. He smiled, showing his teeth, white as if bleached, then pirouetted into a striking pose.

[Calimero] [Race: Human ♂] [The Idiotic, Perverted Blademaster]
[Magic Points (MP): 600/600] [Hit Points (HP): 350/350]
[Total Combat Power: 14400]

Only silence answered the man. They were in a forest to the north of the Western Continent, where, by all accounts, it should have been impossible for the two to have come across each other. The mango-lookalike fruit that Shedy had picked for her kins froze in an instant, then shattered in her grip.

 

This was not the first time she encountered Calimero.

It had started after she destroyed the Saplings of Torrann Caliphate and Savanhuit Republic. In the two weeks or so afterward, Calimero had kept showing up out of nowhere to interfere with Shedy’s worldwide quest time and time again.

 

“…hmph!” Shedy stomped the ground, propelling herself forward into a kick.

“Whoa!”

Calimero barely dodged it with a tumble, then stood back up in a single gravity-defying move. He flicked his bangs, as if brushing off the dirt, and showed her a smile full of white teeth.

“So intense, just as always. Do you want to meet me that much?”

A vein faintly popped on Shedy’s forehead.

 

Despite the two of them speaking the same language, she’d felt like Calimero had never understood anything she said. She’d attacked him, of course. She’d fully intended to kill him. Yet time after time, Calimero survived. Time after time, he showed up in front of her in the most unexpected places.

 

Calimero was a genius. The greatest genius of this world.

He had been born as the third son of a certain count. In a twist of fate, by three years old, he’d received a Hero’s Blessing from an elemental; by six, he’d defeated the knight leader of his country with swordsmanship alone; by nine, he’d seduced and eloped with the queen; and by twelve, he’d defeated the strongest swordsman of Yggdrasia to claim the title of Blademaster for himself.

He was the polar opposite to Shedy’s seriousness.

He, by dint of being a genius, had never had an attack hit him ever since he was born. He’d never suffered anything as uncool as a skinned knee, much less a wound. He’d never even come down with a cold, much less a serious sickness.

It was perhaps the reason why he’d never had any injury that Shedy’s [Causality Alteration] could latch onto. Even when she’d blown up the whole area to bury him alive, somehow, he still lived.

The genius was truly loved by the gods.

At the same time, his personality did not exactly endear him to many. Every time the Warrior saw Calimero, he gave a look of pure exasperation and sighed a sigh deeper than the ocean. Every time the Sage met him, she scowled at him in disdain, saying “don’t come any closer to me, halfwit.”

Calimero, the ultimate genius, only had a single weakness, if it could even be called one.

 

“Please stop doing bad things! I’ll come with you to apologize to everyone, and we’ll all live together in peace. I’ve already built a cute little rabbit house for you, right next to Linda’s and Lily’s place!”

 

There was a legend surrounding the Blademaster Calimero.

One day, he was invited to a dinner party at a certain royal palace. There, he had made advances on the queen even as the king was beside her; he had proposed to the princess behind them; he had seduced the feline beastman girl that the royalty was keeping as a pleasure slave, even as she was standing further behind in mute disbelief; he had tempted the royal pet, a female dog named Lily, to help delay the guards as he ran; and he had cajoled a mare named Linda to help him escape.

Calimero was a skirt-chaser. An inveterate woman-lover. Some said he loved women so much he would seduce anything, even a dragon, as long as they were beautiful and biologically female.

 

“WHOOOOAAAAHHH?!!”

Shedy blasted arctic mist from her hands, blowing away both the posing Calimero and the seventeen monsters currently running toward them.

She turned to blankly glared at the direction of Calimero, now nothing but a far-off silhouette, then tilted her head toward the monsters that were practically bouncing toward her as soon as they saw her. Meanwhile, she continued to pick some fruits and move toward the next country.

 

“Hah!!”

Several minutes later, Calimero broke apart the frozen ground and emerged.

“Oof, that’s cold! Hahahah, the little bunny sure is shy!”

In just a single instant, he had instinctively smashed apart the ground and warded off the cold with his magic. He suffered no serious wounds. He looked toward the direction his sword was pointing to on the ground.

“Alright, that way.”

The Hero Calimero cheerfully muttered. He began walking toward the direction where Shedy was last seen.

---

Previous Chapter | Index | Next Chapter

As the troll army lost their King — their overpowered patron that was a Dark General — they’d also lost their cohesion, and were routed by the army of Torrann Caliphate.

But they were trolls. Monsters said to have skulls as thick as the size of their brains. In just scant moments, they’d even forgotten the loss of their King. They got a few Troll Generals to be their new bosses and continued rampaging throughout the local region.

In the end, Torrann Caliphate, having lost their Sapling and their caliph, could neither continue fighting, nor could they deal with the chaos. The country was trampled under troll feet.

Well, if they had that Gold guy, they’d probably be able to hold on for a while.

 

“Ook!”

“Welcome back, Panda.”

He seemed tired after his trip. He didn’t climb on my shoulder, instead clinging behind my waist together with Blobsy. Panda did good work provoking and luring the Troll King, while Blobsy did her part too. I’d give them treats later.

Due to the rampaging troll remnants, the surrounding small countries had found themselves in quite the crisis. If only I could actually come for their Saplings…

I mean, there were tens of thousands of watcher drones flying toward those countries right now. The drones monitoring the Troll King must have seen me when I crushed him. The drones were transparent, but if I squinted, I could see them swarming like locusts.

I’d managed to deal with the Saplings of Torrann Caliphate and the Republic of Savanhuit, two large countries. I supposed that’s pretty good for the time being.

 

Anyway, the Troll King might have looked like an easy kill, but really, I was just a hard counter for him.

The Troll King had 36000 combat power. Thanks to Gold’s efforts, the monster’s magic points had been ground down by quite a bit. Even so, I probably wouldn’t win so easily if I fought him head-on.

It was the Troll King’s high-speed regeneration that had given me such a simple win.

.The Troll King probably had more powerful regeneration than normal trolls. And with the pea he had for a brain, he’d never fought with his defense in mind. He cared nothing for his wounds as long as they didn’t kill him. With just a peek, I already saw hundreds of thousands of nearly-fatal wounds in his past.

I just needed to use [Causality Alteration] on some ten-odd locations among them, turning them into the worst outcome possible, and that was enough to transform the Troll King into a lump of meat.

I had acted casual, but honestly, just that single attack of mine had already taken around ten thousand of my magic. If the Troll King had survived that, I’d have had a bit of trouble on my hand.

One of those nearly-fatal wounds had been dealt by that Gold guy. Must be karma. Maybe he was one of the Heroes?

So anyway, that was how I finished him off. It’d been a long time since I gained experience from a monster.

 

[Shedy] [Race: Bunny Girl] [Archdemon Lv. 14]
・The rabbit demon of Laplace. Trickster and guide of man’s fate.

[Magic Points: 71,000/71,000] 15,000↑
[Total Combat Power: 78,100/78,100] 16,500↑
[Unique Skill: <Causality Alteration> <Cyber-Manipulation> <Absorption> <Materialization>] 
[Racial Skill: <Fear> <Mist Form>]
[Simple Identification] [Human Form (Wonderful)] [Subspace Inventory]
[Dark Lady]

 

With this much power, I probably wouldn’t lose to most opponents. But there were still three Heroes, several remaining large human countries, and even interference from Earth to worry about.

I was fighting to fulfill the contract with the World Tree. To take revenge against the corporation, and to avenge my comrades who had been in the same boat as me, whose faces I had never seen.

But I had another reason to fight.

 

***

 

“So I heard our Dark Lady the Bunny had just taken down another country?”

“Torrann? Didn’t it fall because of the Dark General-class called the Troll King? I thought the NPC hero won, but not before the Sapling was destroyed?”

“Nah, that’s just the official story. I heard that at the time, the Temples weren’t allowed to intervene, so nobody traveled there. This is according to some guy posting on another forum outside who got his character deleted, apparently.”

“Oh yes, I know that story. If I remember correctly, he was the player who got arrested by the local guards for luring the Troll King toward Torrann, right? According to his whining, he had managed to escape during the Troll King mess, but then got put on wanted posters all around the world. The guy deleted his character in tears after that.”

“Wait, so it wasn’t a forced character deletion, but he did it himself? Couldn’t he just change his appearance and name or something?”

“You need to pay real money for that. From what I’ve heard, those players were middle-schoolers in real life. Their action to lure monsters to attack a whole city like this time was deemed ‘a disturbance to other players’, so they got slapped a fine of 200 bucks as a penalty to change character. They couldn’t pay.”

“Holy crap. At least it’s not account deletion.”

“Must be a right mess for those players who were basing in Torrann and Savanhuit.”

“So did they really see the Bunny?”

“The guy said a weird girl tricked them, and she turned out to be the Dark Lady.”

“That doesn’t prove anything.”

“But there was even an analysis website that concluded that if the Troll King really had 36000 combat power, then it’s very unlikely the Hero could actually win. Though on the other hand, the Bunny wouldn’t have a reason to do so.”

“More importantly, it’s seriously looking like there aren’t going to be any country to start your game in, sooner or later. What are the devs thinking?”

“I’ve heard that some players are beginning to move to the Central Continent. Some high-ranked players are volunteering to help the lower-ranked move.”

“Wait, we can teleport once for free, right? Maybe I’ll move to Central too.”

“You can’t bring anything beside quest items, though.”

 

“I suppose it’s about time to try it out…”

“Aaah, that thing?”

“Yepyep. That player event. Wanna join?”

“Yeah, ○○××○△××△, so…”

“Wait, what?”

“Oh, whoops, sorry. I’m censoring myself with ×○△×… don’t want ○○× to find out, after all.”

 

***

 

The fall of Torrann Caliphate and Savanhuit Republic had shocked the whole world.

The large countries had just jointly requested the three Heroes for the subjugation of the Dark Lady barely days ago. Countries worldwide had just begun preparing their armies and tightening security for the Dark Lady, and she had already attacked. She had won. Her victory might have been an ambush during the battle between a Dark General and a Hero, but it was still more than enough to deal a heavy blow to the pride of the large countries.

The Warrior said he had met with the Dark Lady during his battle with the Troll King.

According to the Warrior, just as he was about to lose, the Dark Lady had saved him, but it was more likely that she had simply seized the opportunity when the Troll King was busy with him. Even if that was the truth, the human governments still decided to recognize the deed of killing the Troll King to belong to the Warrior as a way to raise the citizens’ morale, but the Hero himself had refused. He had since disappeared.

 

“Really, the guy’s so uptight.”

 

Quarancinq, City of Magic. A large country in the Western Central Continent.

While the City of Magic only had a population of four hundred thousand, around the same as a small country, it and the Academy City of Cinqres were countries for scholars and researchers of all things magical, the holy lands for all magicians.

In the center of the country lay a castle, its spire rumored to be the tallest building in the whole world. The castle was both the royal palace and the world’s most prestigious magic academy. The headmaster of the Magic University, at the same time one of its instructors as well as the king of the country itself, could be seen strolling around and engaging new students in friendly chats from time to time.

But the spire, christened ‘Tower of Truth’, held its own dark secrets. In this City of Magic, magicians recognized to be top-class were offered a laboratory space in the tower. The Tower of Truth was where questionable research and inhumane experiments were being conducted, far away from the eyes of the wider world.

In one of those laboratories, a room so extravagant one could mistake it for a royal suite of a first-class hotel, was a beauty in her late twenties with hair as red as a blazing inferno. Wetting her scarlet lips with a sip of blood-red wine, she waved the glass in a light flourish to the man in front of her.

 

“So you came to me because the Warrior had disappeared?”

“Not so, my lady. Since the beginning, we at the Temples had already believed that you, the Sage, was the ideal person to come to for this plan.” A tall, brown-haired man replied with a dashing smile.

 

Marlene, the Sage.

With her vast magical capacity, the woman had mastered magic until the seventh rank when she was only in her twenties. She was the most powerful magician in this world, as well as one of the Heroes.

While her appearance was that of a quintessential fire mage, she was, in fact, well versed in all the elements. Her healing magic had cured tens of thousands of people.

Marlene had been the inventor of a new type of healing spell. All the royalty and nobility throughout the world clamored for her attention, but she refused them, saying it made no difference whether her patient was a king or a beggar, and she continued to prioritize her work as a Heroine.

 

“You said you were… Mason?”

“Indeed, my lady.”

“The terms of the Temple’s request for me included the development of a new spell by using the mana they supply, and the capture of the Dark Lady by said spell. Is that right?”

“The capture of the Dark Lady is not required of you. Please do so only if an opportunity presents itself. However, if you can preserve the brain and organs, or even keep the head unwounded, there would be a bonus reward for you.”

“Understood. How about you have a drink with me?”

“My apologies, it is currently work hours for me.”

 

The contract she had with the Temples required her to develop a new spell, and to acquire a biological sample of Whitehare, the Dark Lady.

And in return, for the next 50 years, the Temples would supply mana for her experiments, as well as help her acquire the subjects that had been getting less and less available recently.

 

Mason left. Marlene licked off the last drops of wine on her lips, then headed to her lab with a chuckle. She opened the door that led to the subject storage room.

The room was filled with good-looking boys, both demihumans and humans, all with limbs restrained. Eyes of anguish greeted her.

“I’m back. You’ll be having more friends soon. I won’t need to be as frugal with my experiments, I should think.”

Marlene cheerfully took out her torture tools, further sending the boys into the depths of despair.

 

***

 

“… damn her… damn her… damn her…”

Touze Caliphate had only a single large capital city. Outside of the farming district, its citizens all lived at the city, with the upper class and middle class of six hundred thousand living inside the enormous protective city walls, while the lower class of one million and two hundred thousand people lived outside the walls.

Outside the walls, in one of the lakeside resort villas of nobles, a young woman of nobility was standing in the garden, herself clad in a grimy dress. Again and again, she was stabbing her knife into a tree as if it was a voodoo doll.

Her name was Salia.

Her father was a knight officer. She’d been pushed into becoming the emperor’s bodyguard in the hope that her looks would attract him into taking her as a concubine, but the woman herself had welcomed it and made it into her own goal.

Yet the path to her dream had veered off-track ever since that rabbit beastman girl, Shedy, showed up.

Salia had been abnormally antagonistic to Shedy. Her twisted emotions had turned into sheer hatred, and at the battle of Xontdix, she had massacred the demihumans to soothe herself. Then Shedy had frozen the skin of her face.

She had been rescued by Xontdix’s knights just before the Dark Lady Whitehare gave her display of power. Her face had refused to heal completely even with the best spells, and combined with the insubordination she’d displayed in acting by herself, she’d been sent back home, away from her position, for her so-called ‘long-term recuperation’. Her father, the knight officer, had scorned her as ‘useless’, and had banished her outside of the walls.

The only people at the villa were her and an old caretaker couple.

She had people to serve her food and to do her laundry. But she continued to be a prisoner to her hatred of Shedy. She hadn’t been eating, hadn’t been bathing. She just kept on stabbing the tree.

 

The grass rustled with footsteps. Salia stopped. She looked up, glaring at the interruption, her face beset with uncontrollable twitches. Standing in front of her was a man with eyes in the same glare and a demented smile.

 

“Heyo. The name’s Brian. Wanna join me to take revenge on the Bunny?”

---

A/N: Factions surrounding Shedy:

• 1st faction: The Temples

The local headquarters of the Earth-based pharmaceutical and defense conglomerate, as well as the Developers managing the MMORPG. The anti-rabbit project had changed hands from the 7th research center to the 4th.

• 2nd faction: Regular Players

An enormous faction consisting of around three million people, but without unity. Most had no awareness of the truth. Some of the players had begun to act.

• 3rd faction: The Large Country Coalition

A worldwide organization to oppose the Dark Lady Whitehare and her assault on the Saplings. Perception of the Coalition differed depending on the region.

• 4th faction: The Heroes

Included the Warrior, the Blademaster, and the Sage. Officially, they had accepted the Coalition’s request to subjugate the Dark Lady as their mission, but no one knew their true thoughts.

• 5th faction: The Demihumans

People oppressed by the human race. Despite the destruction of the Saplings, some among them had instinctively realized that the Saplings weren’t gone forever. They had taken the opportunity to begin a resistance movement.

• 6th faction: The Dark Generals

There were three Dark Generals on Yggdrasia: the Troll King, the Orc King, and the Ogre Lord. They were embroiled in endless strife with many, including the human race and the Heroes.

• 7th faction: The Revengers

Brian, Salia, and others who had sworn revenge on Shedy.

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“…Whitehare, the Dark Lady!!”

 

Despite the barrier, the Dark Lady had shown up inside the city.

She was the culprit behind the rapid destruction of eleven World Tree Saplings, guardians of the human race. She had been declared the Dark Lady for her dangerous ideology. Together, the large countries had signed a request for the three Heroes, including Gold, to defeat her.

Her combat power was unknown. According to eyewitnesses and rumors, she acted alone. Some said she had frozen a whole city, citizens and all.

The Dark Lady had astonishingly white skin and hair, blood-red eyes, and were clad in a similarly-colored dress that didn’t leave much to the imagination. Those rabbit ears that could belong to no one else fit with what Gold had heard of her, yet seeing her with his own eyes, he thought she looked no different from a normal, slender, cute-looking young girl, if he ignored her demihuman characteristics.

 

“…ugh.”

Just as Gold was about to glare at the Dark Lady, his vision and his thoughts wavered for a fraction. She was declared the Dark Lady due to the threat she posed, but could the rumors have been exaggerated? How could such a tiny girl possess such power? Her bare arms and shoulders looked so fragile, Gold thought he could break them just by a squeeze.

Even with the experience and instincts he’d honed until now, he thought it impossible that she could be more powerful than the Troll King, the Dark General approaching this city. Yet another part of him, the intuition of a Hero who had received a Blessing from the arch-elemental of light, dared not challenge the girl in front of him.

 

She was no person. She was an unfathomable something in the shape of a person.

 

“Milord, please give the order!”

“We’d turn that demihuman girl into naught more than rust on our blades!”

But not everyone shared his intuition.

Even with the wealth of experience Gold had, it was the first enemy he’d felt such a strange dissonance for. He wasn’t even sure if the other Heroes could feel what he did.

“Wai-”

Before Gold’s raspy voice could finish the order, the youths of nobility, his Royal Knights, had already pulled out their weapons and charged at the girl.

“Foul demihuman!” “Die!”

For a brief instant, the young men of nobility had been mesmerized by the sight of the alluring girl of white, but once they understood their opponent was a demihuman — in other words, cattle — they immediately saw her as nothing more than an animal to butcher.

The white girl silently narrowed her eyes at the attacking men. In a gust of speed, she intercepted, her sharp claws piercing their hearts.

Dying gurgles, painful cries, and fearful shrieks rang out. She was too fast, too strong. She was tearing throats, crushing necks, and stabbing hearts so effortlessly, as if the men were balloons and she was the needle.

 

“S-STOOOOOP!!!”

Finally coming to his senses, Gold screamed, pulling out the greatsword strapped to his back. An aura of light surrounded him as he swung at the white girl. She took out a dagger in a flash, blades clashing in sparks and a shrill ringing of metal.

The girl immediately jumped backward after the clash. Her eyes slightly widened as she looked at Gold’s face. She discarded the dagger that was now nothing more than a handle, its former blade broken at the base.

“Damn you… Dark Lady!! Why are you doing this?!”

To Gold’s angry question, the girl named Shedy only tilted her head in response. She looked at the destroyed facility, then at the silent corpses of the Royal Knights, then turned back to Gold.

“Which one?”

“Everything!! Do you find joy in ruining the peace of this country? This world?” Gold shouted, enraged. Shedy just faintly frowned.

“…why would I enjoy it?”

“What?!”

“Whatever, it’s not important. By the way, are you sure you have the time to be talking with me?”

“Wha…”

 

The sound of something breaking rang from afar. Gold could hear faint screams of people.

 

“What is…”

“The barrier’s gone, you know? What’s protecting the walls? Even the lower-ranked trolls are coming. There’s only one thing that could be happening.”

Shedy bluntly said, her voice level, cold, and impassive. Gold paled.

The time Gold estimated the Troll King would take to reach them had stood on the assumption that the barrier was working normally.

One of the barrier’s capabilities was to cover all the space of a limited area like a castle, filling the air not unlike a hemisphere of water. But for larger areas like towns and cities, it could only cover the outer layer of the area in the form of a wall, or perhaps a border line.

This type of ‘membrane’ barrier had its pros and cons. The disadvantage was that like the railway barrier, once monsters slipped through a part of it, they were free to act on the inside unimpeded. On the other hand, the advantage was that the barrier was more focused, more powerful, and the bigger it was, the better the range for its monster-repellant effect.

In other words, with the size of the enormous barrier covering the capital, its repelling effect extended for several kilometers. It should have slowed the trolls down quite a bit.

Even if the Troll King moved on ahead of the army and attacked by himself, the barrier and the walls should be able to withstand his assault until Gold could get there.

But in the end, the city had met with the worst case scenario. The Troll King was going ahead while the barrier was destroyed.

 

“You sure you don’t need to go?”

Shedy slightly tilted her head. Gold held his greatsword in a death grip, teeth clenched tight.

If he left the Dark Lady here to head to the walls, the castle wouldn’t have enough defenders. The Sapling might be destroyed.

If he fought the Dark Lady, the walls would fall. With reinforcements still a long way away, the Troll King would easily overwhelm the garrison, and the trolls arriving afterward would then be free to wreak havoc among the citizens.

Either he believed that the garrison can hold on, or he put his trust into the Holy Knights of the castle.

Either he prioritized protecting the country and the caliph as royalty, or he prioritized protecting the people as a Hero.

“…fuck!”

Gold ran for the walls.

He didn’t know which was the right choice. Perhaps both Goldi, the royalty, and Gold, the hero, were wrong.

But he still moved. He moved as a man who wanted to save the townspeople, the children who had cheered for him with smiles on their faces.

And he thought he heard the faint voice of the Dark Lady behind his back.

 

“…correct.”

 

He must have misheard.

 

*

 

“Troll King!!”

 

Gold arrived at the battle in an express carriage. He saw a rampaging five-meters giant swinging around a humongous axe.

Just as he thought, it seemed the Troll King had gone ahead alone. He didn’t see any of the King’s subordinate trolls, but his opponent was still a Dark General. The garrison were hanging on by a thread. Every swing of the King’s battleaxe tore apart limbs and flesh of several soldiers. The garrison soldiers were attacking with everything they had, but arrows were bouncing off the Troll King’s thick skin, and flesh burned by spells took only a moment to heal.

The most dangerous thing about a troll wasn’t their enormous size nor their freakish strength. It was their regeneration.

[Troll King] [Dark General]
[Magic Points: 965/1200] [Hit Points: 4540/4600]
[Total Combat Power: 36000]

Could Gold win? He had less than half of the King’s combat power, no specialized equipment, and no old comrades.

“No, I must win…”

Around half of the garrison, formerly numbering two thousand, were either dead, or wounded and were retreating.

They needed to either defeat the Troll King before his minions could arrive, or they needed to hold on until the nobles came with reinforcement.

Both might be impossible. Or they might not win even with reinforcement.

All the same, retreat was not allowed for a Hero. The only choice for Gold was to fight, until either victory or death.

 

“Here I come, Troll King!”

His opponent replied with a roar.

 

Greatsword clashed against battleaxe. They were dealing wounds to each other, all the while healing themselves with spells or regeneration.

At first glance, they were equal. But even if Gold was barely managing with his speed and magic, he lacked power and support. His sword could not deal any critical wounds to the Troll King, yet he himself had received heavy blows, and every time he healed himself with spells, he was losing magic. Slowly but surely, Gold was being cornered.

Some among the garrison could still move and were aiding Gold, but they were soldiers with only a hundred, maybe two hundred combat power. They were wasting their lives without even managing to slow down the Troll King.

After some time, the battle moved away from the walls and into the urban area.

“Ugh…”

Bruised and bleeding, Gold still readied his greatsword. On the other hand, while the Troll King had lost some magic, most of his external wounds had healed.

It was hot. Gold didn’t know if it was because of his wounds, or because of his fatigue. So hot that sweat was pouring off of him, and his lungs were burning with every breath he took. As Gold brandished his sword, preparing to continue the fight, he noticed a kid cowering by the side of a house that looked like it could collapse at any time.

“…wha…”

Perhaps the little one hadn’t managed to evacuate in time. The kid was crying and rooted to the spot, perhaps out of fear.

 

The Troll King roared and attacked, taking advantage of Gold’s moment of distraction. He didn’t have the strength to block the attack with his sword. And if he dodged, it would hit the kid.

Gold howled. He wasn’t thinking. He just jumped at the kid, using his own body as a shield.

With his current condition and his defense, he might just die together with his protectee. Even so, Gold could not ignore the child.

 

But the Troll King bellowed, this time out of pain. Suddenly, blood spurted out of the monster, as if his old wounds had all reopened at the same time. His flesh twisted, his bones broke, and finally, his stomach ruptured from the inside. The herculean Troll King collapsed as a hunk of meat.

 

“…wha… what’s…”

Gold could only stare dumbfounded. And then his eyes caught the girl of white appearing from the bloody mist, herself covered from head to toe by the blood of the Troll King.

“…t-the Dark Lady…?! Why are you…?”

“No reason, really… If I had to say, well, I suppose it’s my reward for trying to save a kid.”

“Wha…”

Gold was bewildered. What was this girl? She possessed enough power to effortlessly put down a Dark General. She was sowing chaos throughout the world. She was the enemy of all. Why would she save children?

The blood marring her pure-white skin disappeared, as if absorbed into nowhere. Then Gold saw what she was holding in one of her hands. His eyes widened in shock.

“Y-you… that is…”

“Oh, yes, here, gift for you. Very obvious message, isn’t it?”

She unceremoniously placed it on the debris. It was the head of the caliph of Torrann, faintly frosted, face frozen in a rictus of fear.

“B-brother… then… the castle…”

“Fell. Nobody survived. Sapling’s gone too. You get it, don’t you?”

“Wha…”

Then this oppressing heat was due to the destruction of the Sapling?

The caliph was killed, the Sapling was destroyed, the castle had fallen. Torrann Caliphate would be no more.

Gold laid down the unconscious child. He put his bloodied hands on the greatsword he had dropped and pointed it toward Shedy, arms trembling.

“Why… why do you save children and do this?! Whitehare! Did you think nothing of this city?!” Gold shouted.

 

The Dark Lady killed people. Destroyed countries. Defeated a Dark General. Saved a child. He was thrown off balance by the contradictions and the cruelty she had shown.

Shedy tilted her head in puzzlement, then pointed at a nearby wreckage.

 

“…what?”

“If you hadn’t covered for the kid back then, they’d probably have been killed. But then, why did you not save her?”

“What…?”

Gold strained his eyes. He saw a woman, possibly a canine beastman, buried among the wreckage. She had long since drawn her last breath.

“A demihuman…”

“Isn’t she life, just like you? Why the discrimination? She was alive just a while ago, you know?”

“Huh…?”

From where Gold was standing, both the beastwoman and the kid would have been in his view. But Gold only saw a single person to save. The human kid.

“Demihumans… aren’t humans.”

“Really? Funny that. To me, humans, demihumans, goblins, they’re all equally life.” Shedy said, sounding like she was saying the most obvious thing in the world.

“You jest…” Gold let out a strained laugh, trying to wave off her words as nonsense, but somewhere deep inside him, he was disturbed.

He felt as if he’d just realized something crucial. He was the Hero who protected the world… but whose world was he protecting?

Gold was tongue-tied. He didn’t know how to give form to the thoughts whirring in his mind. Shedy looked at him coolly, then turned away.

“Well, if you don’t know, that’s fine. Farewell.”

“…”

In a daze, Gold could do nothing but stare at the Dark Lady as she disappeared in mist. Then he collapsed on his knees, sword clanging on the ground.

A few days later, the troll army was routed after having lost their leader. But Torrann Caliphate, now no longer possessing a Sapling, could not sustain themselves as a country. The Republic of Savanhuit to the south had also lost their Sapling. With the downfall of the two large countries, the small countries around them began to be slowly ground down by the remnants of the troll army.

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