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| Chapter 117 | Book 7 • Chapter 118 | Chapter 119 |
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Ignihyde Dorm
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You want us to venture out and recruit..."a high-end party roster for the overlord raid"?! |
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I can see your reasoning—the more dependable companions we have, the better. |
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If breaking the realm down from the outside risks seriously harming the people within it... ...then we gotta work from the inside. |
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Hm? Wait. If you make those "cheats" you were talkin' about, you'll be super strong, right? So whaddaya need companions for? You can just beat up Hornton yourself! |
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Excuse me. Devs have their own battles to fight. Product release doesn't mean our job's done! |
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I may be a genius, but I've never modified a spell this massive. There's a chance that my cheats will have critical bugs when I try using them. |
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And it's not like I can just release an early access build and wait for bug reports from players to roll in. We don't have that kind of leeway. |
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We're doing this live! Pushing straight to the production server! Failure means instant game over, no retries! |
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Meaning I'd be running an extra-hard quest to fight the overlord, all while ironing out whatever bugs pop up on the fly. You can't expect me to pull that off alone. |
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It's not like in movies where hackers just go clacka-clacka-clack and then slam Enter and everything's magically solved. |
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I barely understood any of what you just said... But basically, you want us to gather companions who can fight alongside us, right? |
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Uh... Yeah. That's the long and short of it. |
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...... |
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If this plan succeeds and the arcane realm is dispelled, what will happen to Malleus? |
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You can rest easy! ...In a manner of speaking. The damage Malleus sustains in dreams won't carry over to the real world. But if the real-world Malleus remains overblotted and demonstrates a readiness to fight... |
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We'll have to separate him from his Phantom and restrain him, making a battle inevitable. |
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So we may still have to fight against my liege in the real world... |
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It's p. standard for final bosses in RPGs to have two or three different forms, to be fair. If that plays out, my plan is to get in contact with Styx HQ and consider our countermeasures. |
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But we have to wake up from our dreams before we can start tackling that. |
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...Very well. We shall accept the role of gathering companions. |
| We got this. Teamwork makes escaping from the dream work! | Sounds like we're in for yet another bumpy ride... |
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Uh, except I can't actually go out adventuring with you guys. |
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What?! Are you givin' us the hard part while you hole up in your room? |
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L-look, there's a reason, okay? I'm pretending that I'm still dreaming and keeping up appearances so far... But someone did contact me from the outside. |
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I'm reasonably sure the Malleus GM in my dream is keeping a close eye on me. If i tried to jump from this dream to another, that could bring the real Malleus—the server admin—down on us in a flash. |
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You guys, on the other hand, have been on his radar from the word go. So you jumping dreams won't raise any extra red flags on Malleus's end, since he's already tagged you as a glitch in the system. |
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We couldn't ask for a more favorable setup. |
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Hold on. As I explained before, my magic doesn't let me target specific people's dreams. Whether the people we reach will be willing to join us is entirely up to luck. |
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Me and the others at Styx will help guide you to the proper target coordinates. We can't extend a technomatic pathway network across Malleus's entire domain... |
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But theoretically, it's possible to jump to the specific coordinates of a dream instance we've assigned an ID to. |
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Oh, that's very good to hear. Thank you, Ortho. |
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That said, the aether signal tracking we'll be using to designate and track targets is, well... "Still in beta," as the engineers would put it. |
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In the event of anything unexpected, there will probably be times we have to rely on you as the more veteran dream-jumper. |
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Certainly. Feel free to ask me for anything, and I'll do what I can. |
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I'll also be providing remote support to the extent that I can without getting caught. I've got my own dev work to do, though, so don't expect too much from me. |
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Is that everything? Then let us be off! |
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Whoa, uh... Hold up, Sebek. That armor you're wearing is gonna stick out like a sore thumb where you're going. Would you mind switching out your gear? |
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To what? This is all I have on hand. My dorm uniform's in tatters. I left it behind in Lilia's dream. |
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Uh, once again, this is a dream. Virtual reality. A world where everything runs on imagination. |
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? |
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The only reason you don't have your dorm uniform is because you PERCEIVE that it's in tatters and you left it elsewhere. If you imagine yourself wearing a brand-new dorm uniform, you should be able to automatically change into one. |
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That's a rather difficult thing to ask... Brand-new dorm uniform... Brand new-dorm uniform... HNNNGH! |
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Idia, us freshmen have only just recently learned the practical spell that lets us use magic to change outfits. It might be a bit much to expect him to expertly pinpoint and overwrite his outfit data when he doesn't have the real thing. |
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Does it work like color-changing magic? I haven't mastered illusion magic yet either. I doubt I'd be able to do this on the spot. |
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Really? It's like how your avatar model changes when you swap out gear in an RPG. I figured that'd be a snap to visualize... |
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Yeah, well, not everyone's a nerd like you. |
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Rgh... Okay, fine... In that case, I'll install an outfit-changing spell in your magestones. |
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| Chapter 117 | Book 7 • Chapter 118 | Chapter 119 |
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