Nanashi touched a panel on the kaiser frame’s side, which caused the frame’s cockpit to open up. As he prepared, the rest of us got ready too, using up some potions and snacks which gave temporary buffs to our stats. Speaking of buffs, the fact that Nanashi was piloting his robot meant that he wasn’t able to cast any buffs on Eilis or the rest of us. Of course, I could cheat, but I would be only cheating myself by potentially outing myself as an AI character, which was why I played mostly by the rules.
The single eye on the Kaiser Frame glowed blue, there was the sound of a fan whirring as hot air was pushed out of the heat exhausts on its slender looking arms and legs, finally the frame’s humanoid figure slightly floated off the ground as its wide metallic wings lifted off the ground briefly before whizzing up in the air blowing the vehicle it had been on off the ground.
“God fucking damnit, couldn’t he be more gentle!” cried one of the men who had also been thrown to the ground. As for Eilis, Peter and I just let our auras shield us from the wind, while Peter withstood the powerful wind with a barrier thanks to Laila.
The Kaiser Frame began its attack from the sky, nimbly avoiding the dragon’s icy fire-breath attacks. The summit of the mountain had, by time, been entirely blown off. The Frame tried its best to close the distance between itself and the monster’s heads. Although it had laser ranged attacks, these did not affect the white Dragon.
“Here goes nothing!” shouted Peter as he rushed for the entrance I had just opened. There was no time to waste; we needed to get to the World’s Egg before the Kaiser Frame’s energy ran out. Unfortunately, Peter was blown away by the white fire from the Dragon’s breath. The barrier he put up at the last minute did him no good. He was fast enough to push Laila out of the way, though.
The Kaiser Frame was keeping four of the five heads occupied, but that was not good enough.
“Hey! You can do better than that! Or come down and boost me instead!” shouted Eilis at Nanashi. Obeying her command, the frame pulled out a giant blue laser sword from its side and aimed for one of the giant monster’s heads diving all in without any regard for the damage it might receive, perhaps Nanashi thought he would lose a battle of attrition, nearly cleaving one of its necks in half, only to get caught and launched like a toy by another one of the giant heads. The monster bled blue blood, and the head attached to the neck, which was almost split in half, dropped to the ground.
“Nice one! Oh shit!” said Laila, only to be swept away by the monster’s tail. Her body hit the wall, and when the tail moved back, the only thing which was there was the last few disappearing pixels of her phasing out body.
The Frame flew back through its propulsion, but it had a broken wing and a mangled metal leg. Without any hesitation, Nanashi returned to the fray.
“This is useless!” whined one of the remaining members.
“Nothing is useless as long as I am here!” Eilis replied as her arrow attacks with curses of bad luck, repeatedly hit the giant target and thus helped Nanashi escape a few encounters with death.
The formations and plans we had set had totally fallen by the wayside, as there were not enough of us left to be called separate forward, backrow and infiltration groups. A few tried to open the entrance into the room the dragon was guarding, but the door didn’t bulge even to my and Celestina’s combined attacks. Why was that? As part of my plan to infiltrate the player body, I had kept myself as far away from the dungeon planning process as possible, leaving it to the Castle Academy’s students, so even I didn’t know what the hell that door was shut!
The battle was not necessarily proceeding in our favour. The Kaiser Frame took out another one of the heads, but it would soon run out of power if it wasn’t completely torn apart by then. It was already missing two limbs. Eilis and I were able to blind the eyes of another head by making use of Celestina’s time-slowing ability.
I was tempted to call Lain and ask her what the hell she was thinking when setting the difficulty for this level so high but there were more important matters to take care of now.
First of all, I needed to see what resources were available to us. The Kaiser Frame was still in the fray, but perhaps only for a few more minutes. The rest of the five of us only survived because of the Frame, but we were unable to do anything about the door behind the dragon. Even if we got there a few times, it would eventually send us flying back or crush us. Of course, I had tried to make a hole in the walls around the door but that didn’t work out either. The dragon wasn’t stupid enough to use its icy fire breath attack on the entrance it was guarding either. I connected to Nanashi on the Kaiser Frame.
I informed Eilis and the others of my idea, and although there were some protests by the Elites, Eilis shut them down.
“Nanashi, you go use that hulk of metal to blow open the entrance to the chamber. We will hold back the dragon somehow,” ordered Eilis.
Nanashi was immediately on the job, leaving us defenceless.
Immediately noticing what was happening, the White Dragon tried to attack Nanashi. Celestina protected him from the first hit with a time-stop barrier, and predictably, she was blown to smithereens by the dragon’s breath. It did delay the attack enough for the Kaiser Frame to dodge it still. I took this chance to plant to get behind it, since the dragon had turned in the other direction to attack the Kaiser frame, planting an explosive under its feet. On my way back, I nearly got crushed by the dragon and blown away by the explosives. Of course, they did not do much damage to the dragon, but it managed to slightly destabilise its footing and gave enough time for the Kaiser Frame to blow open the entrance to the inner chamber. The Frame soon lost its power, but Nanashi ditched it, only for it to be destroyed by the White Dragon, but I think he might have made it through the entrance. I didn’t see any disappearing pixels so that was an encouraging sign. The dragon was too large to pass through the entrance and the walls around the room and the door were immune to damage.
“I will take on the White Dragon’s attention. You go in, we need to have one member of the Elite faction and one member of the Populares faction.”
“Did you just want to say that line, or are you serious?”
“Just shut up and go before I change my mind!”
Eilis and the remaining Populares member ran into the entrance while I guarded their escape.
After I was sure they were gone, I disabled the limiters blocking and hiding my real “stats” which were all at level “∞” since, duh, I made the System, and just killed the dragon with a flick of my finger sending the dragon flying and turning into a cloud of disappearing pixels before even hitting any surface, leaving some nice drops which I was going to leave alone, as I was going to pretend to have died while fighting the dragon. Now, I didn’t usually cheat like this but it made no difference since the Dragon couldn’t reach the inner chamber anyway.
Next, I did what I really wanted to do and examined the entrance to the door. If we hadn’t brought the Kaiser Frame, then there would have been no way that we could have opened that door. I checked among the drops floating about from the monster’s corpse. There was quite a bit of stuff, enough to recuperate some of the losses of the expedition, but there was nothing that could have opened the door. In fact, what remained of it was still closed.
Was this a bug? No, Lain was a lot of things, but she wasn’t sloppy, especially not at something important like this. She would have made me aware of this in advance; I didn’t want to suspect my servants at this point, at least not without actual proof.
“Arthur, will you investigate this?”
I smelled foul play.
A small screen appeared showing Arthur’s face, well, his helmet anyway.
“Yes, master.”
But who could it be? The prime suspects were foreign countries that had already threatened Britain with sanctions, due to the British government’s refusal to just share its research. I doubted that any of the national opposition to the project had any teeth, as I had expected most of it was from people who liked to complain about change in order to appear wise and feed their ego. No, what was worrisome is that this might mean that someone had already infiltrated Castle Academy. This would be disastrous for me if true. Also, what the hell was Ryouta Kudou doing for us to be breached like this? I created a high school detective prodigy like him to deal with this stuff, so that I could have some peace of mind.
I shook my head to break myself out of this negative spiral.
Well, I had something else to do than wonder about this incident, and it’s not like I could come to any conclusion without any data. First of all, I needed to ensure that the World’s Egg was already destroyed. I turned off my visibility and my presence from my stat screen and headed down the entrance into the inner room. As expected, the players had gotten distracted over the other treasures, since they were actually more valuable to them financially than breaking the world’s egg. The only thing that they would get by breaking the world’s egg is the ability to use Augmented Reality in real life, but of course, that’s less exciting than the gold treasures and weapons which they could exchange for real money.
