Chapter 5: Not a Curse
1
“Urrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrahh!!”
“Nice, good one! That’s an all-in bet times two!”
“The girl’s a smooth talker, huh, Chun Lu?!”
“I believe her skills are solid, though.”
Naturally, although Enchantress Youren had vanished from the combat arena, the battle hadn’t gotten easy. They were up against a Nue, a half-raid-rank magical beast. With Krusty keeping Enchantress Youren occupied and Leonardo dropping out for a showdown with Elias, Kanami and Coppélia had been left all on their own. There was no way they could match it.
However, the light of mana from the ferocious battle and the destruction of the landscape had summoned reinforcements to them.
“Faithful Blade!!”
“Never mind, just close on in, cover ’em!”
Chun Lu and a man who had the air of a seasoned warrior had appeared, and they launched a surprise strike on the flank of the Nue, which had gone on the offensive.
Kanami was a Warrior class, and Coppélia was a Recovery class. Even if the two of them had managed to buy time, they didn’t have enough attack power to take down the Nue. However, now Chun Lu and her companion, both level 90, had joined in. At this point, they probably wouldn’t lose.
“By the way, who’s this?”
“He’s Zhu Huan, the master of my guild, the Lelang Wolf Cavalry. We met up over there.”
“The Red King faction got taken out by a raid monster. As we tracked them, strange monsters like Eternal Moths and Moon Rabbits showed up, and things got real noisy. We thought this was a guild war, but it’s even nastier.”
“No eating stuff off the ground!”
Kanami landed a spin kick with a heavy thunk. She probably wasn’t thinking anything, but Coppélia attempted to support her based on a conjecture. Apparently, the Nue they were fighting now had fought outside as well, and the subjugation unit had gotten here by following the scars it had left. The leader of that unit was Chun Lu’s boss, Zhu Huan.
That had been lucky.
When it came to getting information here on the continent of Eured, Coppélia’s party, led by Master Kanami, had extremely few connections. To continue journeying through a social situation that changed from moment to moment, they’d been shown that they needed simple combat power—naturally—but that it was also vital to have the protection of information and to be affiliated with an influential group.
Kanami and the others (including Coppélia) and Chun Lu’s guild were mutually independent, so there was no guarantee their interests would always match up, but even so, it should be possible for them to cooperate on a certain level.
However, Zhu Huan had mentioned “the Red King faction,” and that warranted caution. If Coppélia’s memories were reliable (which they were), the word faction referred to a political community. From Zhu Huan’s tone, it was very likely they were either in opposition to or actively hostile toward the Lelang Wolf Cavalry, to which Chun Lu belonged.
In a case like this, according to Coppélia’s forecast, Kanami could get pulled into that conflict as well.
However, for the moment, there shouldn’t be any problem with putting the issue on hold.
She couldn’t deny it was possible they would bring some sort of future disadvantage on themselves by forming a common front with the Lelang Wolf Cavalry here, but it was clear that, at present, their direct combat power fell short by more than 80 percent. Coppélia’s calculating side thought they should accept support during this fight, at least.
Meanwhile, the side that had budded and grown during this journey felt, with something that wasn’t quite resignation or determination, that Kanami would get pulled into some sort of trouble whether they fought alongside the Lelang or not, and so she simply had to support her.
She certainly couldn’t say she had a lot of samples, but in the first place, according to the cases she’d accumulated in the course of their travels, the possibility of Kanami coming into contact with trouble was proportional to time, more than any other parameter. In other words, trouble occurred a set number of times per chronological unit, and there were no prior cases of being able to avoid said trouble through their own efforts.
The fighting grew fiercer.
On a raid where the teamwork between members wasn’t good enough, the most important thing was the main tank, who would take all the enemy’s attacks. The next most important thing was a Recovery class to support the tank. If they could absorb attacks from the target they were trying to capture, the possibility of sudden destruction was off the table, which gave them the leeway to think about the next stage of the battle: how much damage the attackers could inflict in the meantime.
In that sense, due to the participation of the Lelang Wolf Cavalry members Chun Lu had called in, the fight against the Nue grew more balanced.
In particular, Chun Lu and Coppélia were high-level dedicated healers, and their frontline support abilities were good enough to use even on raids.
At this point, even against the Nue’s tremendous electrical attacks, they weren’t using a strategy of desperate evasions that risked their resources. Instead, they’d very nearly built an organized defense system based on each class’s defense spells.
“Master. Enemy reinforcements sighted. Sixteen monsters approaching. Twenty-four seconds to encounter.”
“That’s close!”
“Reinforcements incoming! Keep your guards up!”
“They got all the way in here…!”
However, without giving them time to catch their breaths, new monsters began appearing in the large space. They were Moon Rabbits, vanguard physical-attack types, and Eternal Moths, flying monsters with status-corrupting attacks.
On asking, they learned that these monsters had abruptly flooded out of the foothills with enough force to blanket the land.
“The topography is complicated, and search parameters cannot be established. Requesting lenience.”
“That’s better than our bunch of tactless rubes!”
It was a total melee.
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