14. Melting Point (2)
14. Melting Point (2)
In mid-August, around the time Gaston visited the Monster Circus to treat Ella's amnesia, Anais was aboard an airship bound for Vegas, having departed from Florand. She was returning to headquarters after concluding negotiations with the branch managers of the southern provinces—men who had belonged to her uncle's faction. The internal strife within the trading company had already been decided in her favor. In Go terms, this move was the endgame.
Since childhood, she had been fascinated by games like chess and Go. Her illness kept her confined to the mansion, so she naturally gravitated toward contests fought on a board.
For his daughter's sake, Jeral Bergson had invited renowned players from home and abroad to tutor her. It was partly to comfort a child trapped indoors, but above all, he believed these mental games would sharpen the strategic thinking she would need when she eventually inherited the company. Her business acumen was not merely inborn.
"My Lady, this week's reports."
Even while in transit aboard the airship, she never paused in her work. She flipped quickly through the reports her butler handed her. They summarized the latest intelligence on the subjects she had designated. When she read the line "Baron Dosville: bankrupt from gambling debts, hiding from creditors while lodging at a cathedral in Rouge," she snorted.
Years earlier, she had taken Baron Dosville on as a tutor precisely to learn the games that unfolded in gambling dens. At the time, his card-playing skills had earned him a certain renown in society, and people said he was always holed up in the card rooms tucked into the corners of parties.
Unlike her other tutors, he was addicted not to the joy of the contest itself but to the thrill of winning money through gambling. When playing against the masters she had invited, Anais always adjusted her rhythm to match her opponent's style. Doing so drained their energy faster, and the sense of accomplishment when she crushed them was far greater.
She had faced Baron Dosville in the same fashion. Every game they played, they wagered real money. The magic of money was tremendous. Baron Dosville showed no mercy to a girl barely in her early teens; he attacked ruthlessly, without any handicaps.
Naturally, at first, Baron Dosville fleeced her one-sidedly. But in under two weeks, the situation reversed. He not only lost all the money he had won from her but every bit of his own capital as well, ending up deeply in debt.
Having witnessed him then, Anais was not particularly surprised to hear he had ruined himself through gambling. She felt a vindictive satisfaction at his downfall.
He had appeared as a plaintiff in the trial concerning Wonderstein. It was likely an attempt to vent his grudge over the years of hardship he had endured because of the debts he had accrued against the Bergson Trading Company.
Anais finished the report and handed it back to her butler.
"You no longer need to include information on Baron Dosville in the Grade 3 reports. Demote it to Grade 5."
She graded intelligence into five tiers. Grade 3 required weekly updates on the latest developments; Grade 5 meant information was merely compiled quarterly and need not appear in reports at all.
She decided she would no longer concern herself with Baron Dosville. His ruin was the most trivial of the spoils she had gained in this struggle.
The trial at the opening ceremony of the Circus Grand Prix had worked to her advantage in many ways. She, who had effectively been making her social debut after her long confinement, was able to make her name widely known across the whole of Charlotia. Moreover, she was able to place a considerable political debt upon the nobles who had stood against her. Most importantly, she had managed to weed out a significant number of the opposition within the company.
She had pardoned almost everyone who had sided with her uncle, barring the ringleaders. It was not out of magnanimity. Trying to annihilate one's opponents merely because they had opposed you was not behavior befitting someone who understood high society and Go. Gaining advantage mattered more than venting emotions through things like revenge.
War and Go were alike. It was enough if the power one held—whether military might, wealth, or legitimacy—was superior to the opponent's by even half a stone. With a clear winning position, one simply had to carry that relative advantage to the end by exchanging move for move without making mistakes. That was exactly the "endgame" of Go.
The negotiations she had conducted while touring the southern branches had been exactly that. She completed her endgame by taking from her opponents exactly as much as her power allowed, by forcing them to retreat exactly as much as the leverage she held permitted, and by placating them with exactly the kind of carrots she could offer. Without any large-scale purges, she had established a relative advantage in every branch that had been under Pierre's influence.
The work had gone eerily well. Pierre's side seemed to have given up on the contest entirely. Not only did they make no attempt to shake her endgame, they did not even try to snatch a stone that was theirs for the taking.
The branch managers who had been on her uncle's side had been frighteningly meek toward her. Anais, who had anticipated a blood-draining war of nerves, found herself utterly deflated.
Even so, she never let her guard down. She might have been tempted to win by an even larger margin when things were going so smoothly, but she silently focused on the endgame. She was no ordinary player—not one foolish enough to court variables through pointless greed when victory was already assured.
Having thus settled the chaos across all the branches, only one task remained: through the board of directors, she would oust her uncle, sue him for embezzlement and breach of trust, and seize every last share of his.
"Was my uncle really only this much?"
Anais sighed as she organized the report to be presented to the board. Her voice held her old hostility toward him, but also a note of disappointment.
Her butler, Bartel, could guess her inner thoughts. Whatever Pierre had become, he had been her teacher in the art of commerce. It was not strange for her emotions to stir at seeing him crumble so pathetically, without even putting up a fight.
"What made my uncle betray the company? Did he truly become absorbed in Voodoo Cult ideology?"
She had not found an answer to that question while touring the branches.
Bartel knew the question was not directed at him but was simply musing aloud, yet he answered, feeling a sense of duty to soothe her mood.
"Didn't the 'Hunting Dog' send word that he would be infiltrating the enemy's core this time? Might he not bring intelligence?"
Hunting Dog Mars was one of the fixers employed by the Bergson Trading Company and the most skilled person in intelligence gathering. He was also a vassal who had served the Bergson family since the days of Anais's father. Anais nodded. Indeed, there was a high probability that he would have uncovered a great deal about the Voodoo Cult.
"Come to think of it, a rite invoking his name should be held today, but as things turned out, it coincided exactly with the day of my airship departure. Prepare it as soon as I return."
"Understood."
She flew for twenty hours and arrived in Vegas. At the airport, the secretaries and guards assigned to attend her had already arrived and were waiting. The people who had accompanied her over the past two weeks swapped duties with them.
Among the guards who had come to meet her was Sir Porshu, a musketeer and vassal of the territory. After greeting his liege with a stiff expression, he informed her that something troublesome had occurred at her domain.
"Would the butler go and check on it?"
Today was the day the board of directors was convening. Nothing else could enter Anais's mind right now. She dispatched her butler to the territory and took a carriage to the company's headquarters.
"Aren't you too nervous?"
Despite her own weariness from the long journey, she noticed that her secretaries and guards were all unusually tense. They were likely nervous, unsure what the Pierre faction might pull on the day of the board meeting.
The people here had not been able to witness her negotiations with the branch managers in the south. They had only heard the results by telegraph. They seemed to assume that because she had executed her intended endgame as planned, the negotiations must have been fiercely intense.
"Don't worry. After today, the state of emergency will be lifted. Everyone will get an extra day off per week."
She suppressed her fatigue and spoke in a deliberately bright voice, prompting awkward smiles from her secretaries and guards.
Upon arriving at headquarters, Anais, with Sir Porshu in tow, went up to the floor where the boardroom was located. The hallway leading to the boardroom was more heavily guarded than usual. Thinking that the directors must have been quite frightened, she opened the door and entered.
"You're all gathered, I see?"
She greeted the assembled group warmly. But no answer came. Thirty-some pairs of eyes silently fixed on her. She could read the shock and revulsion in their gazes.
A chill hung over the boardroom.
Something was wrong.
Judging that, she tried to retreat quickly, but someone roughly seized her shoulder.
"Ugh—! S-Sir Porshu?"
Anais realized that the person holding her was her own loyal bodyguard and cried out in shock. The word "traitor" flashed through her mind. She screamed to summon the guards outside, but no response came from the hallway. Porshu twisted her arm behind her back and subdued her so she could not move.
"Wh-what are you doing, Sir Porshu! D-don't tell me even you...?"
Anais thrashed, shouting in betrayal. He was arrogant and prone to boasting, but she had believed he was loyal... But then she remembered that even the far more trustworthy Uncle Pierre had tried to kill her, and she gritted her teeth.
With both arms pinned, Anais glared at the dozen or so directors gathered around the table.
"Ha... ha... How can the entire board... You people... profit! What in the world were you offered...?"
She yelled, meeting each director's eyes as if interrogating them, but not a single one stammered out a weak excuse. Instead, their expressions rigid, they glared back at her with stern eyes, as if she were a criminal.
As she stood there at a loss, bewildered, the chairman's seat at the very end of the table swiveled around. It was her own seat—the seat of the company's manager and representative. But someone was already sitting there. Anais looked, startled, wondering if Uncle Pierre had come here.
But an even more startling person occupied the chair.
"Heh, surprised? I bet you never imagined it would come to this."
Anais froze at the sight and could say nothing. The person sitting there was none other...
"Mister Doppelganger?"
Than herself.
***
Title: TT3 Stage 3 Voodoo Cult, Field Boss Series - Doppelganger
Posted by: Torch Dancer
Hello, this is Torch Dancer.
As with all field bosses of the Voodoo Cult, the Doppelganger is no pushover if you rush in recklessly. The biggest issue is that because it copies the player exactly, the most basic strategy of the Tril Trillo series—where if your health and attack power fall short of the enemy's, you make up for it through skills and equipment to gain an advantage—simply doesn't work.
Moreover, the strategy of switching between knight, thief, and mage depending on the enemy type also fails against the Doppelganger. It attacks with a rock-paper-scissors affinity: if you bring out a knight, it switches to mage; if you bring out a thief, it becomes a knight; if you bring out a mage, it becomes a thief. That's why defeating a Doppelganger through conventional means is extremely difficult.
However, once you know the trick, there's no simpler fight than the Doppelganger battle. The Doppelganger copies the player based on the state you were in when you entered the boss stage.
In other words, before entering the boss stage, if you strip off all your equipment, drink the 'Skill Reset' potion you bought from Willie, and gorge on all the various spoiled food I've been telling you to save up and bring with you, the heroes you'll face will be in their underwear, groaning from food poisoning.
Once that happens, all we have to do is put our removed equipment back on, re-assign our reset skills, restore our health with potions, and then beat the daylights out of the half-dead, skill-less Doppelganger heroes. You can also easily complete the "Mage Who Cracks Skulls" challenge—which requires you to reduce a boss's health to 0% using Maya's staff swing—right here.
This boss fight lets you pull off several amusing scenarios using the Doppelganger's traits, a representative one being...