Chapter 330 - The Scheming God’s Apostle

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Dear Diary,

Today Master B took me to a place with a really big waterfall and made me cut it in half. It was really hard but then Lina showed me the trick. Master B says that I have to get used to being wet so I can get into people’s pants. I don’t really know why I’d want to do that. I tried asking mom but she just said it means Master B has to eat out of a doggie bowl. Master B made a funny face when he saw it and asked why it had dad’s name on it. Dad got so embarrassed his fur stood on end. I think dad might secretly be a dog.

Lia

___

Claire twisted her lips into a frown as she watched the soldiers engaged in practice. Two and a half weeks had passed since the events of the Ironclad Abyss, and the troupe was nearing the nation’s northernmost border. Since then, the remaining men had raided and survived not only the Maka’arak Ruins, an underwater dungeon filled with intelligent, man-eating beasts, but also the Nightless Jungle, in which there was never any time to rest.

Like the Ironclad Abyss, the former was carefully crafted by Griselda and designed to challenge each and every individual that wandered into its depths. But having been made by her soul sister, the latter was not nearly as kind. Rikael’s dungeon culled more than half of the participants. Considering themselves lucky to have lived through it, many of the survivors had quit the northern brigade right after.

All the candidates that had kept at it improved by leaps and bounds. Claire herself was the only exception. Unlike Arciel, who had the liberty of training with the equitaurs, she was stuck with no good way of grinding out her levels. The moon priestess’ training method was inapplicable. Alfred’s creations did not take her damaged circuits into account when evaluating her strength. Each one she fought was so far beyond her extant power level that they were simply impossible to overcome.

Her own progression was not the only problem that plagued her. Even with many of the troublemakers filtered out, it still appeared that someone was trying to sabotage the operation. The food storage was still being raided at random intervals. They had tried stationing guards outside of it, but somehow, the perpetrator never failed to sneak past them. Claire was almost tempted to pin the blame on Sylvia, but the fox vehemently denied her guilt. In the first place, it was not just the fish that were eaten, nor were food-related problems the only ones they encountered. There were an unnatural number of monsters between their various destinations, with many of them consisting of non-native species. The associated combat itself was hardly a problem, but the influx of aggressive beasts damaged the local crop yields and infrastructures, making it more difficult and expensive to acquire goods in the villages and towns they passed.

Claire had every intention of very slowly strangling the perpetrator when she found him, and it wouldn’t be long by the looks of it. Only twelve of the hundred or so initial candidates remained. She would be able to narrow it down to either one of five or one of seven once they picked their champions. And she was planning to track him down regardless of whether he was left behind.

“Maybe it’d be better to pick six just in case…”

She wondered aloud as she returned her eyes to the training grounds. Unlike Boris and Starrgort, whose staring contest was evenly matched, many of the spars and duels trended towards being entirely one-sided. It was a problem of compatibility. Different people were best at dealing with certain problems, and with that in mind, there were two different approaches to choosing their combatants. The first was to group the candidates based on their combat styles and select the best few under each umbrella.

Her father would most likely allow them to select the matchups as a way of expressing Cadria’s generosity and superiority, and having a wider variety of classes meant that they could be more flexible about picking the right people for each job. But there was a critical weakness to that particular approach—it assumed that their foes would opt for a fairly even distribution. And Claire highly doubted that to be the case.

Her father had decided to let the people fight over the positions themselves, which meant that they would be taken by all the best duelists. Coincidentally, most of them happened to be warriors, rogues, and their derivative classes. Allegra was the only pure mage that truly excelled at single combat, and the snooping that Claire had done in Rubia’s body had revealed that the Grand Magus had no intention of participating. That wasn’t to say that the Cadrian roster would be filled with meat-headed brutes. Thanks to her father, battlemages were still in fashion, the configurations and weaknesses of which were variable to say the least.

That was why she was tempted to go with a method akin to her father’s and simply choose the most powerful individuals regardless of their class groupings, but she couldn’t quite commit to it right off the bat. There was an itching sensation in the back of her mind, a concern that there was a better way to go about the problem without carrying everyone forward.

Alas, she had no time to arrive at it. She only had a few hours left to put together a list of the best candidates, as the council was to compare and contrast their choices later on in the afternoon.

A sigh escaped Claire’s lips as she scanned the various battlefields again. Everyone had an easily identified weakness.

Enrique was at both the top and the bottom of her list. He would surely prove himself to be a powerful asset if they could knab a corpse from the Langgjerns, but his possession technique was easily defeated. The corpses he borrowed were exactly as described—corpses. Being already dead, they were incapable of any sort of regeneration, and removing Enrique’s ability to draw out a body’s full potential was as easy as starting a bar fight the night before his duel. Her countrymen might have been putting on an air of fairness, but it was all just theatre. They were happy to exploit such underhanded methods away from the public eye.

They might have been able to overcome the problem by stashing the corpse up a mountain and teleporting it the day of. But not only did that method run the risk of defying Ftlizegarde and exposing their vector magic, it was still unreliable. A random monster could easily happen upon the body and scavenge it for dinner while the dwarf engaged in the necessary formalities. Using Enrique was a gamble; writing him off was the far safer choice.

She had similar complaints for many of the others. The class that Lana acquired in the wake of her ascension compensated for her lacklustre speed by allowing her to create a zone of domination. Inside of her domain, her perception and movements were sped up many, many times. She may as well have been invincible while she hung around inside of it, but it fizzled out as soon as she stepped out, and it required a few seconds of channelling to establish. More importantly, its static nature rendered it highly susceptible to area-based attacks. It was a major flaw that, by itself, was already grounds for disqualification.

Sophia was no better. Her body’s specifications eclipsed those of the other candidates, but mentally, she was always a few steps behind. Not only that, she was bad at paying attention to details—two major flaws that the lyrkress was unwilling to simply overlook. In the first place, one’s physical abilities were not the most important facet. That much was easily demonstrated by U’ula, who was coincidentally also written off Claire’s list. The priest was a talented apostle to the goddess of half-truths. His ars magna was an impossibly powerful ability that forced his enemies to answer his questions. Anyone that lied or refused to speak had their bodies bent out of shape by his goddess’ might. Against her countrymen, however, it would no doubt be sadly ineffective. Bearing the excruciating pain that resulted was well within their wheelhouse and their rapid regeneration allowed for them to undo its effects.

Compounding the already glaring weaknesses were a number of notable psychological flaws. Jules the clam was so lazy that he would rather let himself be knocked out than put in the necessary effort, Matthias was never serious from the start, and the royal guard’s commander was so self-appreciative that it impeded his progression.

Picking from the list was a nightmare; at the end of all her evaluations, Claire found a piece of parchment with all twelve names struck out.

One could certainly make the argument that she was simply being too harsh, but seeing the results of the enemy’s preparations, she could say for certain that it was a basic necessity. They needed someone with no obvious weaknesses. It was the only way they could take on a trained soldier two hundred levels up. But of course, such a person could not have possibly existed.

To pick a class was to pick a specific set of tradeoffs. It was possible to compensate for one’s weaknesses with one’s other choices, but a configuration that had all of its sore points addressed was even weaker than one without any shortcomings at all. All-rounders were susceptible to the rampant brute force employed by their specialized peers. It was only by acquiring rare, powerful classes and subsequently inflating one’s numbers that a lower-leveled challenger could mathematically overcome a higher-leveled opponent.

Some rare classes required knowledge or happenstance—it was only under specific conditions that they were unlocked. Being restructured by Alfred, for example, allowed for one to acquire Llystletein variants. Similar phenomena could be found even beyond the pervert’s borders by performing feats that the world could not simply deign to ignore, with punching above one’s weight class and impressing the gods among the most common. But for the most part, rare variants could be unlocked with diligence and effort. Simply dedicating oneself to a specific routine or way of life could earn the system’s acknowledgement, as was the case with Chloe’s most recent ascension. She had only managed to become something that was both a vampire and a succubus—a combination previously known by only three other individuals—because her everyday actions had deemed her worthy.

And that therein lay the problem.

They were up against the most diligent, warmongering nation on the continent. For the Cadrian people, strength was a necessity. There was no other way for them to survive the mana-rich, monster-plagued lands their ancestors had chosen to settle. Their armies were far more devoted to training and careful in the consideration of long-term improvement.

Even an ordinary soldier’s ability point gain was one and a half times that of their class tier’s average. They still felt short of the doubled gains provided by exceptionally powerful mutations, like those of the Llystletein variety, but they were still impressive enough to blow the ordinary Joe straight out of the water.

It was a discrepancy that left Claire anxious. She would have to figure out a way for the northern brigade to accomplish something absurd. If they simply followed Griselda’s plan, even if the allotted time was indeterminate, it was unlikely that they would ever catch up.

“Uhmmm, Claire? I know you’re worried, but you really don’t have to stress that much.” The nuisance sitting on the lyrkress’ head slid down her face and into her lap.

“I’m not worried.”

“Uh-huh, and I’m not a fox,” said the dog. “It’s not like it matters who you pick anyway, right? Everyone’s gonna listen to you as soon as you beat up your dad.”

“Even Flitzegarde agrees that it isn’t possible for me to defeat my father.”

“Oh, come on! Don’t be such a spoilsport. Just like, close your eyes and imagine what it’d be like to totally kick his butt. I bet it’ll make you feel better.”

Claire shuttered her eyelids and, at her pet’s behest, considered their relative battle prowess.

“What the heck!” cried the hat, after a brief delay. “I told you to imagine you kicking his butt, not him kicking yours, silly!”

“Stop reading my mind.”

“I’m not! I can’t read minds!”

“You’ve said that seventy-four times and I’ve believed it zero.”

“Wait, why the heck have you been keeping count!?” cried the fox “And what the heck! Aren’t we supposed to be best friends!? You’re supposed to trust me!”

“I will. Once you stop lying to my face.”

“There’s no point! It’s your fault in the first place! You literally see through everything I say,” complained the half-elf.

“I don’t see how that’s supposed to be my problem.”

“It totally is!” huffed Sylvia. “You don’t even need that stupid ability anymore anyway! You stopped being a noble like last year!”

“Considering you and your pranks, I’d say it’s well worth keeping around.” Claire scratched the fox’s chin. “And after all this is said and done, I doubt Father’s going to just let me roam free.”

“Ughhh, this again. It’s always the daddy issues with you,” grumbled Sylvia. “I told you! You just need to imagine yourself totally kicking his butt.”

“I can’t imagine what isn’t possible.”

“Stop coming up with dumb excuses and just do it!” The fox puffed up her cheeks. “Or I’ll get mad and bite you!”

Claire sighed. “Fine.” Closing her eyes again, she envisioned the impossible scenario of moving at a hundred times his speed and bashing her fist into his jaw until he eventually fell over.

“Finally!” said Sylvia. “I told you it would make you feel better.”

“Only a little,” said Claire.

“Now you just have to do it for real.”

“Not happening,” said Claire. “Do you remember what I told you about his ultimate?”

“You mean how it lets him nullify stuff and heal back up and stuff?”

Claire nodded. “It makes him practically invincible. The only way to beat him is to completely destroy him in close combat.”

“Can’t you just like, weaken him with an ultimate or something and then finish him off normally?”

“Unlikely.”

“Mmmnnn… well I don’t think it hurts to try,” said Sylvia. “And your realm seems like it’d kinda do the trick, maybe?”

“You mean the realm that I haven’t been able to cast since I ascended?”

“Uhhhh, yeah. That one,” said Sylvia. “Oh! I think I forgot to tell you but Al said he thinks he can probably fix you if you let him stare at your privates for a bit. But he didn’t think you’d agree so he didn’t even bother bringing it up.”

Claire twisted her face in disgust. “Absolutely not. Stupid, perverted fox.”

“What the heck!? Why are you calling me a perv!? It’s not me! It’s him!”

“I might’ve believed you, if you didn’t sneak into my bed and beg for a kiss.”

“T-that’s just ‘cause it gave me a cast of my ulti!” cried Sylvia. “A-a-and you said it was worth it!”

“It was.” Claire paused briefly. “Wait, just one?”

“Mhm. Al said one each.” She fiddled with her paws. “B-but one should be enough anyway. I only really need it for emergencies and stuff.”

“How inconvenient it must be for your ultimate to be locked behind Alfred’s whims.”

“Oh, come on, it’s not that bad. At least I don’t need to beg the gods to use mine.”

Claire pouted. “I’m going to pinch your cheeks.”

“There’s no point telling me after you’ve literally already started doing it!” cried the furball.

“Stupid fox.” Using her vectors to keep the hat’s face stretched, Claire tightened her grip on the fox’s midsection and returned her eyes to the crowd. The conversation had served as a decent break, but she couldn’t afford to stay distracted. They needed to choose their champions. As the only member of the brigade familiar with Cadrian standards, the brunt of the responsibility was hers to bear.

___

An old criocentaur stroked his beard as he silently walked through an empty corridor. His hooved feet echoed with every step he took, their kreatin bases resounding against the stone that lay beneath them. He could have easily suppressed their sounds if he wanted. After all, the man’s highest level class was delivered from the assassin tree, even though he feigned a warrior-like composition in front of the rest of the court. The deception was not one of a malicious nature, but rather a lie born of sheer necessity. There existed no such thing as an effective assassin that did not conceal his blade.

That particular creed was something that the man had gone out of his way to pass along. It, like his many secret techniques, had been driven into his successor and used as the core tenants of continued existence.

Even the most perfect mask, however, needed holes through which its wearer could breathe. And in Ephesus's case, those holes could easily be used to expose his parallel existence. Case in point, the man’s state of solitude. To walk through the streets alone at night was foolish, precisely because he was a noble with immense political sway. It was only sensible to proceed with a guard or seven in tow.

To venture about by his lonesome was to either state that he was a fool, which stood in direct opposition to his image as a particularly intelligent man, or to declare that he was capable of escaping any situation that arose. And despite the fantasies of many of the men that lorded over the court, a pure warrior was capable of no such feat. By spotting him all alone, an enemy spy could easily make the connection and deduce that he was hiding the full extent of his might.

It was a foolish move on all accounts. But one that Ephesus had made in confidence regardless. After all, he was known as the only criocentaur to squeeze his way up into the uppermost ranks despite not being a criocentaur at all. In fact, he was not even a he, but one of the few, undeniable its that lurked in Cadria’s shadow.

That much was made clear when the supposed goat entered its child’s domain. After phasing through a solid wall lined with layers of magical traps, the creature took off its lower half and left it on a rack. The two feet that remained each featured five toes of increasing size, almost as if to suggest that it was human. But a quick glance at its nether regions revealed that not to be the case.

After all, there was no such thing as a human with absolutely nothing between its legs. There was no phallus, no gonads, nor even a method by which such organs could be inserted. The creature’s crotch was perfectly smooth, despite being made of the same skin that decorated its upper half.

But of course, even that was a ruse. It could have easily taken off the top half of its body and revealed itself in its entirety, but Ephesus chose to do no such thing. Taking off one’s lower half was considered customary, but to remove the remaining portion would leave it to appear obscene.

“Welcome,” said the marquis’ child. Like the older counterpart it greeted, the younger lorturus was impersonating a nearly identical goat. Officially, they were father and son. Even though one one had asexually spawned the other.

“I am here for the usual report,” said Ephesus.

Its child nodded. “The Vel’khanese have finished with much of their initial training. The results are largely as you have predicted.”

“Good,” said the marquis. “Has your position been compromised?”

“Not in the slightest. I have been able to proceed with my observations undetected.”

“It appears that there is nothing but good news on all sides then.” Ephesus smiled. “The king has approved our plans for interference. He has even gone as far as gracing us with a carte blanche to do whatever it is we please.”

“I assume we proceed as planned?”

“Yes.” Ephesus twisted its lips into a sadistic grin. “Let’s put on a show that will entertain even the goddess of war.”