Golden Experience

Chapter 103: “The Seventh Catastrophe”

Rare ordered Sugaru to make preparations for airlifting infantry and engineer ants to La Colline. She had them scour the underground tunnels as well to make sure nothing got left behind. This would finally close the curtain on the entire La Colline situation.

Using [Summon Caster] to return to the capital, it was finally time to check out the forums.

“Hm, so there are six other known catastrophes aside from me.”

Since most of the information came from legends passed down within various NPC countries, she didn’t know how reliable it was. She wasn’t sure how trustworthy these lore players’ fact-gathering skills were, but it didn’t really matter either way. All Rare wanted right now was to confirm what information was being shared between the player and NPC sides, not determine the absolute truth.

And as she suspected, the number of catastrophes that the NPCs had identified was inaccurate.

This wasn’t based on anything in the game, but it would be natural to presume that an archdemon was diametrically opposed to an archangel. Similarly, the relationship between a demon lord and a spirit lord could also be antagonistic. Regardless of the truth, the leaders of the kingdom of Hiers believed that the spirit king favored them, which meant that it was possible that the spirit lord was assessed as a force that posed no threat to humanity.

In which case, Rare didn’t think a spirit king would trigger that “special being of calamity” or whatever system announcement.

“The developers probably made that decision—or rather, that setting. They surely didn’t consider how the NPCs felt about it…”

When considering Rare as the leader of a faction, the developers probably assumed that “the demon lord was antagonistic to the human faction.” This was obvious from the fact that her birth as a demon lord was announced via system message. So it was hard to believe that her own nemesis, the spirit lord, would have also merited an announcement as an enemy of humanity. Along the same lines, based on the prime minister’s description of the artifact’s effects, she could infer that the spirit lord and the archangel weren’t opposed to one another in the natural order. Which meant that when the archangel was born, it was possible that the human faction didn’t get an announcement about it.

This conclusion was ultimately an assumption or hypothesis based on a thought experiment, but if she happened to be right…

“That special skill that lets you receive world announcements—I think they called it an ‘oracle’ or something. The designation of catastrophes seems to be independent of it, though.”

Information sent via oracle is by and large about catastrophes, and probably only catastrophes that are considered to be forces working against the human faction. If that’s the way it was programmed, then she could understand the thinking behind it.

“I’d really like to somehow get my hands on a skill that lets me hear those oracles. If there’s a monster version of it, I want that too. If I could keep tabs on both sides, then it would be possible to monitor any future threats that could be a danger to me.”

If it were possible to get her hands on the skill in the capital, then she should have tried to find it; now, she regretted how things had turned out. She had learned about oracles from the forums, but by then most of the residents in the capital had already been killed. But speaking of oracles, they were typically related to religion. Since Rare wasn’t concerned about them at the time, she hadn’t paid any special attention to any temples or churches. Their members had probably been turned into undead already, and while their stats were probably about the same as when they had been alive, the same couldn’t be said for their skills.

“Well crap… From now on, if we find find anyone who seems religious, I should try to brainwash them instead of killing them. Once I’ve identified one of the two skills I want, that should help in the investigation of the other one.”

She didn’t know if there were any other cities in this country where there might still be someone left capable of receiving oracles. Since all the players in the capital had left for the border cities as soon as the event started, there weren’t that many who had heard about the catastrophe from Hiers NPCs. Other countries had people delivering news and sermons on street corners, but Hiers could have been restricting the flow of information since this disaster had risen within their own country.

“It’s impossible to exchange information with other countries in real time, after all… However, that won’t be the case in the future. There probably weren’t any here, but if a player were to become a knight and get more involved with a country’s administration, that country’s information gathering capabilities would skyrocket. It wouldn’t be unthinkable for some other countries to have already been informed that I’ve taken over the royal capital of Hiers.”

If someone was playing that way, then they probably wouldn’t make posts on the forums themselves. Just like Rare, they would simply leech information.

“I need to consider these possibilities moving forward. If cutthroat players like that have items like those artifacts at their disposal, I could end up being killed again.”

Because those players could try to manipulate the information being propagated online.

“I should share this information with my fr-friends… No wait, if she’s in combat then I might be bothering her. I should wait until she’s out of the country first… But maybe it’d be better to send it as soon as possible…”

In the end, no friend chats were initiated that day.

?

“The royal capital of Hiers is down, and so are most of the major cities in the country. For now, we should steadily expand our influence and use our forces to strengthen our foothold.”

Since they were still in the middle of an event and all, there was also the option of pushing further given the opportunity. However, while they had little need to worry about supplies at the moment, that didn’t mean they had the leeway to support a warfront multiple times wider either. Maybe they could do it if they just torched all the cities instead of conquering them, but if the humans just rebuilt them after Rare’s forces left, then there wasn’t much point.

“Ideally, we’d grow one of World Tree’s terminals in the center of all those cities, include some ants and treants, and turn those places into ruins overgrown with greenery. We could also raise animals and monsters for fodder.”

Rare needed to experiment first in order to determine if this plan was viable or not. Her original goal only went as far as turning the capital into a ruined city-type zone. And despite some hiccups, that goal had been achieved. Now she needed a new goal in order to determine how her forces would operate moving forward.

“First we need a long-term goal. How about ‘take over the entire continent’? This would naturally include the destruction of the other five countries in the process. That would pit me against the entire human-side playerbase, but well, if there are other players like Blanc out there willing to cooperate, it should be possible to not be outmatched.”

However, there was a lot of information that Rare didn’t want to be public, such as the fact that she was a raid boss known as a “catastrophe.” Putting aside whether their interests might be aligned, it would be risky even just to thoughtlessly make an offer. Also, there could be other players like Rare who started out with a human race avatar but started killing other humans; she needed to check whether there were any. Whether they could cooperate would depend on negotiations, but she could at least try not to antagonize them.

“As for a mid-term goal while taking over the continent, first would be taking over the entire kingdom of Hiers. I should define exactly what ‘taking over’ entails here, but… if I say we need to capture every city, there might be too many of them. In a normal war, capturing the capital would lead to their leaders capitulating, and we would force them to accept terms of surrender advantageous to us… but that won’t happen here since they’ve got nothing to offer us. Or more like, the ruler already ran off.”

It seemed that the spirit lord’s legacy or whatever was more important than the kingdom itself. It was an indispensable item needed to defend against not just Rare, but any of the catastrophes, so it was vital for it to never fall into the hands of an enemy.

“But didn’t he say that it wasn’t very effective against angels? On this continent, the only enemy they had to worry about was the angels, so why would they protect it so zealously? Is there maybe—”

—some other threat that only royalty were privy to. But if there were, then it didn’t make sense to keep that information a secret.

“If something like that truly existed, that only the royal family knew about, then in all likelihood only those in the royal family were told that they were the ones who deposed the spirit lord as well. If so, then those people were the biggest hypocrites.”

Of course, this was all speculation. Nothing that Rare conjectured would lead anywhere productive. What was important now was how she would handle the remaining cities left in this country.

“For starters, I need to test if this ant-and-treant city idea will work. If it will, then if we go to each city one by one and replace all the people with ants and all the houses with treants, then that would serve as proof of conquest.”

And in order to proceed with that plan, there was one problem that needed to be solved first: Sugaru’s reincarnation.

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