Drone (2)
“Almost there.”
The experience required to advance the Gallery had inflated to agonizing proportions with each subsequent tier, but at long last, the next level-up was right before my eyes. I paused my routine of casually tossing mana dango into my mouth, tore open the parcel that had just arrived, and pulled out its contents. Emerging from within was a sleek, pitch-black drone.
“Oh, it works. It really works.”
Whirrrrr.
The moment I pressed the power button, the four propellers kicked into vigorous motion, lifting the drone smoothly into midair. Even though it was my very first time piloting it, the controls felt remarkably responsive. Who would have thought that playing with remote-controlled toys during my childhood would pay off like this?
“Gasp!”
Just then, Penny, who had only just woken up, stumbled out while rubbing her sleepy eyes. The moment she spotted the airborne drone, she froze in her tracks. For a fleeting second, I wondered if the unfamiliar gadget frightened her, but her reaction proved to be quite the opposite.
“W-Whoa, that’s amazing! Where did you find that?”
Shedding every ounce of the haughty, mature facade she usually put on, she hopped over to my side in sheer delight. Her eyes sparkled with unfiltered fascination.
“This? Bought it from the system.”
“The system...? Is that like the Head Mod’s divine authority?”
“Well, something along those lines.”
“Incredible!”
Penny clung tightly to my back, her gaze glued to the hovering machine. After a few test maneuvers, the controls felt entirely second nature. Answering my inputs, the drone traced a swift, graceful arc around the room before returning to its origin and settling down onto the surface. Penny blinked several times in wide-eyed wonder, crept forward with delicate steps, and reached out to brush her fingertips against the chassis.
“So this is the Head Mod’s familiar...”
“A familiar? Wait, do those even exist?”
“Huh? You didn’t know?”
Penny whipped her head around, looking genuinely shocked by my ignorance. To my knowledge, though, I had never heard of mages in this realm trotting around with familiars in tow.
“I used to keep familiars of my own back then,” she offered casually.
“Wait, really? How?”
Penny was, after all, a Great Demon who had breached a dimensional rift. Wondering whether familiars were a standard fixture in the world on the other side of the rift, I pressed her for details. She smiled brightly.
“First, you wander around until you spot a demonic beast you like.”
“And then you forge a magical pact or something?”
“No. You just go down to it and ask nicely.”
Ask nicely? Setting aside whether a feral demonic beast could even understand speech, would it actually do someone a favor? The notion that they could communicate was startling enough. For a fleeting instant, I found myself wondering whether the Outside was perhaps not quite as lawless and savage as I had assumed.
“Demonic beasts can actually be reasoned with?”
“Well, obviously they’re pretty aggressive at first, but...”
“Mhm?”
“Once you reason with them properly, they willingly become your familiar.”
“Ah.”
Now I understood. Reason with them meant a thorough physical beatdown, and willingly become a familiar meant groveling on the floor just to stay alive. Come to think of it, because she usually acted like a harmless little girl around the bunker, I tended to forget that she was an entity powerful enough to tear through space itself. She hadn’t kept genuine familiars; she had simply crushed beasts beneath her heel and slapped a polite label on them.
“Aside from me, plenty of other demons kept familiars like that too.”
Apparently, it had even been a widespread trend. Deciding against giving a lengthy lecture on the principles of aviation and robotics, I merely nodded along.
“Well, I suppose it’s kind of like a familiar.”
After all, it obeyed every command, and it had become mine through an exchange of currency. Furthermore, modern technology relied on physical engineering rather than mana or sorcery, meaning it should function flawlessly even inside the magical fog. The only genuine obstacle was operating range.
“How am I supposed to transport this all the way to El-Ladh?”
A hobbyist drone had an operational radius of a few dozen kilometers at best; even military-grade surveillance units topped out in the low thousands. There was simply no way a standard civilian drone could cross the vast expanse between Kellierton and El-Ladh under its own power.
“Should I hand it off to an Assistant Mod?”
The thought of delegating it to Full-Health Elf crossed my mind, but I dismissed it almost instantly. Handing high-tech machinery to the elves seemed like a surefire recipe for the drone to take off and immediately plummet straight into the dirt. Just as I was wracking my brain for an alternative, an alert pinged in the administrator chat.
And of all people, it came from Godjukheup, who had kept a low profile as of late.
My instinctive defensive reflex was met with an unusually sullen reply. What was this? Blood wasn’t her objective?
Her subsequent message caught me completely off guard.
She was offering to handle it on foot. When she was deep in her blood-craving phase, she hadn't touched a single scrap of Assistant Moderator work. Was she finally returning to her diligent self from the old days?
Thinking that things were working out nicely, I fired off a quick confirmation. Just then, Felici—who had stayed quiet until now—suddenly chimed into the thread.
Come to think of it, Felici had a point. Soon-to-Die Vampire wasn't inherently lazy; whenever an imperial tyrant like Frederick showed up stirring trouble on a continental scale, she stepped in and handled it personally. Even so, she rarely bothered involving herself in minor local disturbances. Volunteering so eagerly that she almost seemed desperate did feel slightly unnatural.
Right on cue, Felici pressed her advantage, sounding like someone who had already figured out the entire puzzle.
“Ah.”
Was she feeling guilty about that whole confinement-angst-blood-addiction incident from earlier?
Regardless of their bickering, I wasn't particularly concerned.
“Dryer is a god, and I am invincible.”
As long as I possessed the horn gifted to me by the beloved fixed-nick Dryer, there was zero risk of being kidnapped unless I surrendered willingly. Whatever her motives were, if her intervention helped restore the Gallery to normalcy, wasn’t that a win for everyone?
About an hour later, an update arrived in the chat.
Caught one for now. The rift isn't generating the mist—these things that crawled out of it are the ones spewing it out.
“Oh.”
Progress had already been made. What was more, the discovery that the mist originated from monsters rather than the rift itself was significant.
“Looks like this will be wrapped up in no time.”
With an absolute cheat-code like Soon-to-Die Vampire stepping onto the field personally, I assumed the crisis was as good as solved. But right on the heels of that thought, another message flashed on the screen.
...Head Mod, they’re hiding.
The moment the toad beasts realized what was hunting them, the entire situation changed. Soon-to-Die Vampire could roam the mist unhindered, and there certainly wasn't a beast alive in that forest capable of standing against her. Because of that, the creatures had collectively chosen to scatter and burrow into every nook, cranny, and root across the World Tree’s domain. Bagging one specimen by sheer luck changed nothing when hundreds more were scurrying into the deep crevices of the woods.
Incinerating the forest was completely off the table. Even if the trunk had hollowed out over the centuries, the divine tree remained the divine tree. It was the living chronicle of elven history and the very anchor of their spirits. Full-Health Elf, who had been cowering meekly between the two apex Assistant Moderators, lunged into the chat in utter terror to stop her.
“Hmm, I didn’t anticipate the beasts playing hide-and-seek.”
A headache began to throb behind my temples. If this kept up, even Soon-to-Die Vampire wouldn’t be able to resolve it anytime soon. I couldn't physically travel out there to fly the drone myself, and handing the remote to an elf was a guaranteed recipe for the device being obliterated into scrap metal within seconds. Just as my brow began to furrow in frustration—
Right on cue, the sliver of remaining experience crossed the threshold, triggering the level-up.
“Assistant Mod Totem...?”
The name sounded a bit—no, exceptionally—bizarre. Yet up until now, the system had never granted a useless reward upon leveling up. Surely, this new function was tailor-made to solve my current predicament. Teeming with anticipation, I opened the skill details.
Allows you to utilize an Assistant Mod like a totem.
Casting Time: 1 Hour
“...What?”
The description was borderline insulting in its lack of effort. Still, that was fine.
“Only one way to find out what it does.”
As luck would have it, I possessed the perfect pushover of a blue elf slave—er, valued Assistant Moderator—ready for testing.
“Ugh...”
With her pupils losing focus, an elf knight collapsed onto the forest floor with a dull thud. Around her, several other knights were in identical states of helplessness.
“...We cannot venture any further.”
“The fog has crept all the way out here already...”
The Elad Forest was the ancestral sanctuary of the elves, a sacred territory guarded by the World Tree since time immemorial. Yet all of that had been reduced to past tense. The elves shuddered as they watched the pale, suffocating vapor encroach upon the gates of their capital, Eladrien.
“C-Captain, what are our orders?”
Though the elven knights were peerless combatants, no blade could cut through mist. Worse still, the mere act of entering its perimeter triggered rapid mana exhaustion, rapidly pulling anyone who breathed it into a comatose slumber. If an enemy had stood before them, they could have fought back; instead, the culprits concealed themselves so thoroughly that not even a shadow was visible.
Eliana stared at the Gallery interface with a conflicted expression.
‘If even the progenitor vampire cannot resolve this, there is nothing our blades can achieve.’
Just as she was about to decree a tactical retreat to report the grim situation to Queen Armion—
“Ah!”
“Captain?”
Eliana’s long, slender ears suddenly twitched, standing straight up like antennae. A bizarre sensation prickled through her body, radiating an unsettling foreign presence.
“This is...”
It felt as though an alien energy had seeped directly into her marrow.
1. Consent to Collection and Use of Personal Information (Required)
2. Consent to Vision Sharing and Feature Utilization (Required)
3. Consent to Receive Summon Notifications (Optional)
“Wh-What?”
A string of incomprehensible sentences unfurled directly across Eliana’s vision. Before she could even process the sudden emergence of the Gallery prompt, an alert arrived from the Head Moderator as if he had been lying in wait.
Eliana turned her gaze back toward the prompt.
No matter how one viewed it, the disclaimer looked outrageously suspicious. Yet Eliana relaxed her narrowed eyes, letting her doubts subside.
“He’s doing this to help us...”
Besides, she had already gifted him a bracelet braided from her own hair—a traditional elven proposal token. It was far too late to harbor suspicion now.
“Hmm...”
Every fiber of her warrior's intuition warned her that this was shady, but Eliana pressed the confirmation icon nonetheless.
“Hieeeek!”
The instant she confirmed, an indescribable sensation washed over her. A total lack of strength drained from her core, and her knees buckled, sending her collapsing straight to the earth.
“C-Captain!”
“Aigoo, see?! That’s why we told you to drink in moderation during daylight hours!”
“Y-You idiots...!”
Unlike the chronic louts among her kin, Eliana rarely touched a drop of liquor. She desperately wanted to bite back at the ridiculous accusation, but her trembling limbs and the leaden lethargy weighing down her throat prevented her from forming a proper sentence.
Whirrrrrr.
“Huh?”
A faint, bizarre spinning hum drifted through the stillness. When the elven knights spun their heads toward the source of the noise, they froze. Hovering right beside Eliana was an inexplicable object.
Not a single speck of mana radiated from it. Even though it had approached right under their noses, none of the seasoned warriors had sensed its arrival in the slightest.
Hovering peacefully in the empty sky, defying all magical laws, was a strange creature of polished steel.
It was a modern reconnaissance drone.