Infinite Dendrogram - Volume 17 - Chapter SS2

The B and the C

Gideon the City of Duels

“Huh?”

On a certain day after The Anniversary, Chelsea, who was lost in thought as she was stocking up on consumables at Alejandro’s store, saw a familiar, spectacled woman looking over the shields on sale.

The person considering the gear was none other than B3, or Barbaroy Bad Burn. Once the leader of the PK clan known as “Mad Castle,” she was now part of Ray’s Death Period, as though she was cursed to always join clans with sinister-sounding names.

Though, it’s not like Ray’s clan is focused on PK... Anyway, Barbaroy, huh? Chelsea thought.

To Chelsea, she was “an acquaintance of a friend” in a whole three ways.

She was acquainted with one of Chelsea’s sparring partners, Ray; fellow duelists, Kashimiya and Rosa; and an old real-life friend, Eldridge.

They weren’t friends, really, but neither were they complete strangers—but having so many shared acquaintances, each from a different angle, made it hard for Chelsea to gauge how close the two of them actually were.

She hasn’t noticed me and it looks like she’s seriously thinkin’ about what to pick, so I won’t bother her, she thought before shifting focus back to her own shopping and problems.

The thing on her mind right now was the promise she’d made to Juliet.

A new combat style that makes me more powerful than I used to be and more powerful than I am now too... Well, I already know the most obvious way to get stronger.

That was, without a doubt, getting a Superior Job.

The very reason why she’d come to Altar in the first place was to search for a Superior Job that was different from the ones she may have been able to get in Granvaloa.

Getting an SJ would let her finally break through the level 500 wall.

It’s not that easy, though, she thought.

Securing an SJ was simultaneously the most obvious and the most difficult way to grow stronger. For each job, it was a race that only a single person could win, and with nearly five in-Dendro years having passed since release, there were far fewer jobs available than there had been at the start.

The deaths of tians with Superior Jobs opened that job up to any capable candidates, but Chelsea couldn’t rely on that to get hers.

King of Blaze, Bug General, and King of Venom were opened up that way during the recent incident in Altea, but none of them synergize with my build.

As she pondered her predicament, the store was suddenly filled with commotion.

The cause of that was B3, who had used Instant Wear to switch to a huge suit of armor. Apparently, she’d only done that to see if the available shields were the right size, but it was scaring the other customers nonetheless.

...That’s her MVP reward. “Gunhammer Plate, Magnum Colossus,” I think.

Both Chelsea and B3 were prominent high-rank jobs that counted SJs among their friends, but that suit of armor was something that clearly separated them. MVP rewards had special skills and extremely high regenerative abilities, making many of them akin to extra Embryos.

Unfortunately, Chelsea still had none of them.

During her time in Granvaloa, she’d almost never encountered UBMs, and even if she had, they were the kind who’d fought from deep below the surface instead of her turf—the sea level.

However, securing an MVP reward now seemed like a far more reliable way to grow stronger than finding an SJ to take.

There’s been a change in the local monster habitats. That’s the reason why the Afforest was where it was. Maybe a UBM from some unexplored area wandered somewhere more accessible?

“...You know what? I’ll look around.”

Encountering and winning against UBMs required a good deal of luck, but luck wasn’t a problem if you simply tried enough times.

Having realized what separated her and B3—who was on the same level as her—Chelsea had found the path she would take to become the newer, stronger version of herself.