Golden Experience

Rare got a bit of XP from the knights she crushed earlier. However, the three players just now had given her absolutely nothing.

“That’s weird… Those three were clearly—well, two of them at least—stronger than the knights, I thought. Was there some reason I didn’t get any XP from them?”

She thought it over while going around storing Wayne’s left-behind items in her inventory, the drops from Yoroizaka. However, she didn’t have enough data to narrow down the possible reasons right now.

“Oh well, I can just think about it again the next time it happens.”

Having taken care of the few remaining players who made up Wayne’s group as well as the capable-looking knights, Rare once again [Summoned] a large number of adamantite soldiers as well as Sieg within the city. They ran around dealing with any knights or soldiers while doing their best to avoid destroying any buildings.

But first, there was something else that had to be done. And that was to find and neutralize the inns and any other possible respawn points.

The three players Rare just killed should have all died in the first battle as well. The fact that they had gathered back in the same place before she got back meant that they must have respawned in the capital.

Since she summoned living object and undead monsters, [Mental Magic] skills wouldn’t be very effective, but she had to be wary of soul stones now. Even if that guy couldn’t get any more, he did say that he had four left. Which meant that, in the worst case, up to four of her followers could be [Controlled]. Those four would require four of her other troops to handle, meaning up to eight units could be considered incapacitated for a short period of time. She had to be careful.

And that Gil player, he was currently quite powerful based on what Rare had seen. He might be at the same level as an adamanleader, or perhaps even stronger than one. Thinking back to the first event, she could infer that he must have put in quite a lot of work and earned a lot of XP. She evaluated the other players she had encountered in both events as the same. She couldn’t let her guard down around them.

“I need to bring down the capital, destroy this kingdom, and earn much, much more XP. After all, I could be attacked by any number of players working together. On my side, though, if I were to be defeated, my entire army would immediately crumble. Hm, coop play…”

Rare had never experienced it. At least not in this game.

“…I don’t have any… Wait no, I don’t have many friends…”

She wasn’t really jealous. However, simply from a rational perspective, in order to minimize risk, she was thinking it could be a good idea to find a single other player to have as a collaborator.

“…I wonder where I could even find a monster player. I don’t think they tend to use the forums very much…”

It would be nice if there were any players who enjoyed extravagantly crushing human cities like she was doing now. If she could add on another thing, they should also understand the advantages of pretending to be an event boss; it would be great if this person also got carried away acting out their mischief.

“Yeah, there’s no one out there like that. Maybe if I went to another country… Well, first I’ve gotta finish tearing down this country.”

After this, no one would be coming to the Great Liebe Forest anymore. That’s because the city near it no longer existed. The same was probably true for Treu Forest.

In which case, if Rare wanted to earn more XP, then she would have to turn this place into a city of death as planned, then she could wait for more prey to come to her. If the capital of a kingdom was completely swallowed up in monster territory, there was no way the surrounding countries would just sit back and watch. That’s why she was counting on news of this event to spread all across the continent.

<You can ignore any knights or soldiers on horseback. Let those ones escape. Ah, but if they’re just running away on foot, you may dispose of them.>

There probably wouldn’t be any messengers trying to escape on foot. Anyone they saw like that would likely be a simple deserter. For any proper knights, even if they were to escape, they would still die if their noble master were to be killed, so it was better for them to resist.

“All right, now where are the inns…”

The skeletal knights were scattered all around the city. Considering the size of the capital, a squad of adamantite soldiers by itself might not be enough, but Sieg’s [Summoned] skeletal knights were very plentiful. Since he clearly surpassed the standard maximum limit for [Summon], he had to have been using some kind of other skill to break that limit.

One piece of good news was that her followers’ followers, namely the ants and skeletal knights, automatically respawned one hour after Rare’s death. That meant the one-hour respawn timer wasn’t a cooldown timer, it was some other kind of variable. It was probably the “time during which a revive could be accepted.” If it was possible for someone to receive a rez during this time, then it would make sense to prevent automatic respawning from triggering.

It was in times of chaos that a person’s true nature would become apparent. A plump merchant pulling on his neighbor’s hand seemed to be trying to escape while what looked like a soldier pushed himself through the waves of people against the flow. The single constant Rare could see was that everyone wanted to get as far away from the skeletons as they could.

“The ones running are probably the residents. The ones who aren’t running are…”

Either knights who wouldn’t die, or players.

“There you are, Wayne.”

From up in the sky, it was easy to spot people acting differently from the masses. He was pushing through the crowd with Gil and linking up with the knights to stand against the adamantite soldiers and the skeletons. Which meant she could use the direction they came from to trace back to their inn.

“But this is the nobles’ quarter… It’s in the center of the city. Do they really have enough money for a room here…?”

It was too bad that Rare didn’t know where their respawn points were. She didn’t want to just go around smashing every building either; she wanted to preserve this beautiful townscape as much as possible. Her only option was to keep those respawn points in check without destroying anything.

“And in order to do that… I just need to have all the safe zones in the capital under my control, and then spawn camp them.”

So she needed more numbers. However, Rare and Sieg had both wrung out everything they could from their [Summon] skills. In other words, until it cooled down, she would have to work with what she already had.

“…Technically, if I just need them ‘under my control,’ I don’t need combat strength for that…”

Both Rare and Sieg had a way to increase their forces using temporary, expendible pawns: the “conscripts” generated from [Necromantic Barrier] and [Necromantic General].

“Leave combat to the soldiers, and use weak undead to clear out the buildings.”

Even though she would now stop searching for inns, Rare still had other work to do. Cast [Necromantic Barrier], turn the fresh dead into zombies, sic a squad of adamantite soldiers after Wayne’s party… If the zombies were hit by an unlucky ray of sunlight, they would immediately be purified, but thanks to the massive city wall, most of the city was currently within its shade.

She didn’t really care about Wayne himself, but that Gil player might have enough power to take her out. The only thing she could do was suppress them with pure numbers. And if they died, they would just respawn again somewhere else. She had to keep them alive until her forces finished taking control of the entire capital. Their encounters had to be skillfully directed so that they would keep fighting instead of considering suicide. Her forces hadn’t found him yet, but she also had to be careful of that [Mental Magic] guy. He could control up to four enemies at once, which meant he required multiple times that many units to neutralize, thus she would have to dedicate multiple adamantite soldiers just for him.

“Well, all I can do is leave it to them. As for me…” Rare looked in the direction Wayne’s group had come from: the center of the capital. “I’ve gotta take care of the nobles in order to put an end to the knights. No telling how many of them there are.”

There were fewer knights in the castle than Rare expected. As far as she could see, most of them were out in the city proper. They must have been ordered to prioritize the citizens, the lifeblood of the kingdom, over the nobles.

“I think that’s very noble of them, but… If the nobles themselves die, then the knights protecting those citizens will also die.”

Either way, the fewer knights there were, the easier it was for her.

<Your Majesty.>

“Eh?”

Standing before the entrance to the castle were Deas and Sieg. Sieg made sense; Rare had [Summoned] him. But how did Deas get here? The only one who could summon him was Rare, his master. She landed before them and inquired about just that.

“How did you get here, Deas? Don’t me you ran here, did you?”

Of course he couldn’t have. Well, she couldn’t rule it out completely. No, even if it was technically possible, there was no way. It had only been an hour since Deas had respawned.

<One of the skeletal leaders I [Summoned] was carrying him,> Sieg reported apologetically.

Rare had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.

<In essence, I was temporarily considered equipment for the skeletal leader, thus I was able to be [Summoned] along with it.>

Was this intended behavior?

“No, of course not. They’re definitely going to patch this during the next maintenance… They’ll probably fix it so that physically carrying a character doesn’t count as equipment…”

These follower NPCs had more or less obeyed Rare’s orders. That was a high-performance AI for you; it was able to find a loophole in the fuzzy commands she had issued. They weren’t inferior at all to real humans. In fact, it was possible for individuals with strong personalities to exploit fuzzy commands by contorting them to be interpreted in a way that individually benefited them. That must have been how this came about.

<As I am Your Majesty’s royal guard, I must use everything at my disposal to hasten to Your Majesty’s side…>

“I figured you would say something like that… Well, since you’re here, I am about to assault the castle. We shall proceed as three.”