Sign, I Say!
"Sign, I say!"
Krrrrrumble!
"Got it! She's going down!"
The great warship, wrapped in blood from stem to stern, dropped out of the sky like a stone.
The one who had struck it down was none other than Titan — the golem whose single eye burned with a crackle of sparks. A colossal war machine standing a good two hundred meters tall, Golem Lover's magnum opus, one of the Three Divine Relics of Magic Engineering alongside the large floating ships and the Magitech Armor.
Robus wasted no time seizing the opening, sinking five more of the remaining mid-class floating ships in quick succession.
All that was left now were a handful of small craft — and that vampire.
"Everyone, attack! Titan, target the vampire!"
"Understood!"
The elders drew their weapons, and row upon row of defensive turrets switched to attack mode, training their barrels on the floating ships. Just as Robus's cannon shell screamed toward the vampire—
"...!"
SHRAAAAA!
A tide of blood surged across the skies of Proiden.
An ocean of it crashed over them, dyeing the heavens red in an instant, and thousands upon thousands of blood spheres rose spinning into the empty air.
And at the center of it all, its master.
Ilmacheonwang swept his mantle of blood around his shoulders and grinned.
"...Unbelievable."
─To pierce a Blood Calamity woven from the blood of a great king. So you at least know your fundamentals.
A flick of the hand.
At that single gesture, more than a dozen blood spheres hurled themselves at Ino-o, the one standing closest to him.
It all happened in the blink of an eye.
[Guild) LV.89 Ino-o has died.]
[Guild-exclusive buff is active. She will revive within 5 minutes, one time only.]
Ino-o was dead.
"...Unbelievable."
─And now? What do you intend to do next? Do you truly believe your strength can punch through this endless tide of blood?
"There's! only one way to find out!"
KUOOOOO!
Riding atop the Titan-class war machine, Golem Lover unleashed his power and brought the golem to life.
Titan was one of the Three Divine Relics of Magic Engineering. Waking a Divine Relic demanded an astronomical amount of drive energy — but Golem Lover could power it with a unique skill, one cursed with an agonizingly long cooldown.
TZWAAAAAANG!
A lance of blue light erupted from Titan's single eye and simply erased the spot where Ilmacheonwang had stood.
The blood seemed to oxidize and vanish on the spot, and Ilmacheonwang reappeared far in the distance with a derisive snort.
─Indeed, this body does find it a touch taxing as it is. That beam would prove dangerous if it struck me often.
"Obviously—!"
─If it struck me often, that is.
Thousands of blood spheres threw themselves at the Titan.
The blue membrane shrouding the golem held them off for a while — but not for long. The barrier shattered, and the spheres coiled around the machine like serpents.
Titan was mighty, but in the end it was still a masterpiece of magitech engineering.
There was no escaping the erosion of power.
At last the single eye that had blazed blue turned crimson, and the golem forcibly ejected the rider perched on the crown of its head.
"Wh-wha—?"
─Hmm. This thing has its uses. Perhaps even more use than the floating ships themselves.
"W-wait, we agreed you wouldn't do this—"
─Did I? When, exactly?
Ilmacheonwang chuckled and snapped his fingers.
The blood-drowned eye of the Titan flared with light, and—
"Ah."
Gone.
"Rafina, is it?"
"?"
Atop the tallest spire in the Kingdom of Proiden, I tilted my head at Robus, who sat across from me — the man who, weeping and gnashing his teeth, had just put his signature to an outrageous 99% discount.
The elders had gone berserk over the matter, screaming themselves hoarse, but every one of them who had resisted had already been wiped off the map by a beam of blood. Approval had been the only road left.
I set down my teacup.
"What makes you say that?"
"It's far too late to play dumb. Golem Lover already let it slip."
"Hmm."
Caught, huh. I'd assumed my sins were heavy enough that he'd have taken them to his grave — I hadn't expected him to blab.
"What is it you want? Have we wronged you in some way?"
"Nothing much."
Clink.
"With the Magic Engineering Guild's airships, the Great Cataclysm raids will go a great deal more smoothly. For everyone, mind you — not just for me."
"So we're expected to serve the greater good for free?"
"You knew the math already, didn't you?"
No matter how unique his hidden class, no matter that he held the single most critical item for the coming Cataclysm — a ferry-sized vessel commanding a price in the hundreds of millions was simply excessive.
Robus fell silent.
Let him stew on it.
To him, DeoEn was nothing more than a game. The airships were a tidy revenue stream, a badge of prestige recognized by rankers and top-tier guilds alike. Nothing more.
But.
"You can only keep selling them for as long as the game survives, no? If everything falls to ruin, they'll be worth exactly nothing."
"...Surely DeoEn won't be allowed to fall that far. They'll let it break just enough, then force a restoration in the end."
In the end, DeoEn was administered by someone sitting far above it all. So long as it occupied the position of a virtual reality game, it would never be permitted to perish completely.
But along the way, countless residents — and the world itself — would die.
"Whether that restoration extends to everything is another question entirely. Say this Proiden of yours gets obliterated by a World Boss and drowned beneath the waves. Do you genuinely believe it can all be put back?"
As far as I knew, several of the regions ravaged by last year's World Boss remained in ruins to this day. Land contaminated, no one willing to invest the restoration costs — abandoned where they fell. Fail to stop the Cataclysm, and such lands would multiply without end.
"......"
"So mass-produce as many airships as you possibly can."
"...Understood. When you've no choice, you cut your losses."
Robus bowed his head.
There had been no formal system mechanics involved, but in substance, what he and I had waged was a guild war. And having lost that war, the options remaining to Robus were pitifully few.
I taught him a raft of spells and functions to raise the ships' performance and security, then placed a few additional requests. The most important of them being—
"A transport... vessel, you say?"
"Bigger than a small-class, smaller than a medium. No cannons, no special systems — a ship specialized purely in defense and transport. Can you build it?"
"...Well, it's not impossible, but surely the cannons and functions would prove useful—"
"The ship itself matters more than any of that."
To operate inside the Kraken's domain — the sea — an ordinary ship was flatly impossible. It wasn't for nothing that Kraken was called the graveyard of ships.
Airships only resembled ships; at heart they floated upon the sky, which meant they could put up some measure of resistance against the Kraken's Territorialization.
"The more functions you pack in, the more tangled the circuits become, and the more mana it takes to bear their load. What matters is how long the users inside that hull can hold out."
"...Understood."
Scrape.
"You're leaving?"
"I've seen everything I came to see. I have other guilds to visit, after all."
"Yes. We'll deliver the shipments on schedule. With roughly five days remaining, I'd estimate one hundred ships should be feasible."
I descended the spire. No — before stepping out, I turned and looked back at him.
"...?"
"I'd advise against any more funny business."
"I'm afraid I don't know what you—"
"You knew all along. Why the ships are so easy to hijack."
By any sane measure — the ship's own creators, unaware that a mere infusion of power could steal it out from under them? After touring every ranker in the land to sell the things?
Robus's expression froze solid.
"A hidden class that exists exactly once in the entire world, yet the flaw is this glaring. You built them this way on purpose."
"......"
"So that, someday, you could take them all back and use them yourselves."
Dramatically amplify a ship's performance according to its rider's abilities — and then, when the moment suited them, seize control of every vessel they'd ever sold. After all, no one on earth could hijack those ships more easily than the people who built them.
And, incidentally, it made them cheaper to produce.
Of course, the guild would have been first in line when the hijacking began — but against anyone fluent in the transfer of mana, myself, Leo, and Ilmacheonwang included, that monopoly of theirs would never have held.
And if this ever came to light, the Magic Engineering Guild would weather a storm beside which today's chaos would look like a gentle breeze.
"...What is it you actually want."
"Like I said before — nothing much. Just keep the ships coming."
That was the full extent of the role the Magic Engineering Guild had to play.