Fortunately before they could kill anyone, copies of Rina appeared above the battlefield’s skies in order to protect the student. I breathed a sigh of relief. The one dependable subordinate I had was the one that I had not created. I looked at Rina who was as calm and emotionless as ever.
Arthur took in a long breath in and then let it out slowly.
“Remember that as soon as we clear this mission. You are dead.”
Saying so, Arthur headed towards the battlefield which had expanded to the whole island rather than the constricted passageways of the tower where they would have faced the monsters in some kind of order.
“I hope you are satisfied with turning me into the villain father. It’s okay I would do anything for you.”
Lain blew a kiss seemingly at no one in particular before she flew off towards the battle.
Most of the AI NPCs at Castle Academy were non-combat students, and so the plan was to set up a base camp before entering the tower, and then wearing out the monsters in the tower through waves of student attacks, while saving the strength of the combat students for the final boss. Now that that plan was thrown away, as the combat students had to defend the non-combat students along with the Student Council.
“So what are we supposed to do?” asked the Farmer. “It’s pretty clear already who’s the strongest here. I will vote for the maid as the champion.”
“Huh,” Keaton complained. “Isn’t that too quick? the boss hasn’t even shown up yet.”
“Besides, isn’t she just the starting tutorial NPC?” commented a yellow haired woman.
“That’s true,” retorted the Farmer. “However, the winner will be decided by who can do the most damage overall. That combat maid can attack multiple small-time enemies at once.”
“Yeah, but isn’t the starting tutorial npc usually a goddess or a princess or someone important, not just a maid!”
“Yeah, I always thought it was weird. It must be someone’s fetish. Would you take a fetish character seriously?”
“Hey! Look! Is she glaring at us?”
“That’s just your imagination. It’s just an NPC, and not even an expressive one at that. Look, she’s just looking at our direction expressionlessly… without blinking at all..! That’s not concerning at all! She can’t even hear us haha! Well, enough about the maid, aren’t you people going to consider anyone else, that little girl in armour looks surprisingly strong… Look at her wield those swords like boomerangs taking tens of mobs at once! What do you make of that old man?”
The conversation hastily turned away from Rina, and after a moment she turned away and started looking at the other group.
“Old man? Me? Oh, please call me the Farmer. Yes, that’s also a good strategy.”
“Well, we can always change our votes at the last moment. But what do you think, leader?” asked Peter Keaton.
What I thought was that it was pretty odd that this player going by “The Farmer” had first lucked out during the battle with the White Dragon and now had made it to the Senate, which means he had beaten a boss even stronger than the White Dragon. Of course, I could look at his player data if I wanted to, but since I was pretending to be a normal player, I wanted to avoid a verbal slip where I revealed that I knew something about a player, which I couldn’t possibly have known. It’s not like I needed to know anything in order to do some trick to beat any of them rather than using plain old, boring overwhelming power.
“What I think, is that we should rely on the wisdom of the crowd, which means that each of us should vote without asking anyone else for any clues.”
The farmer looked perplexed as did most of the group, except for Celestina who couldn’t even hear me and just looked worried for her fellow students and so was intently paying attention to the battle rather than to our conversation. Maybe I should have made her a bit more ruthless, no you cannot trust ruthless people, like me.
“But the other group will be discussing things even if we guess the answer individually. Won’t they get stronger.”
