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Chapter 198: Reaching the Heavens Part 4 Part 2

This monster…… It was an octopus as well, so it felt like meeting Kutanid all over again. It had a bald head…… or more like a head-torso, surrounded by eight muscular and agile tentacles. It does not look twisted or menacing at all, it’s just…… It’s just a normal octopus, albeit much larger.

The difference between the two is that Kutanid was jet-black all over, while this thing only has black tentacle. Also, four of the eight tentacles of this monster are being chained to the ground with thick chains. What’s up with that?

A machine warrior stylized after a samurai, a black wolf that only attacks people in the dead of night, a golden dragon king (although that’s just a speculation)…… In comparison to all of the above, this thing looked rather…… normal. It was just an oversized octopus. Compared to that, even Weissash, a potential Unique Monster is more complex than this. I feel that this thing is trying to act intimidating, but it was not doing all that great of a job at it.

But no matter how hard I try, I cannot really feel even the slightest Kutanid vibe from this thing. Even Reaperorca from the city held much more boss potential than this thing. Is it because four of its tentacles were now shackled to the ground, pretty much unusable? At this rate it looks like we would be able to defeat this thing immediately…… So why?

「…… Hey, Emul? What’s your take on this guy?」

「I’d say that’s our opportunity to strike!」

Right, I see, I get it. But that’s a terrible idea.

「Everyone, listen up! For now we’re retreating. We need to revise our strategy for now.」

Hearing me say that, Akitsu Akane, Emul, Sickle, Alva, Nereis and Straude looked at me as though I just said something crazy. With that one exception, all of them were NPCs, imagine that. They may not be convinced, but I was sure that Rust and Mold felt it too…… That something in here was really not right.

With the NPCs somewhat dragging behind, we slowly exited the large chamber through the same door we entered. I was Making sure that nothing would jump at us at any last moment, and I was looking at the strange, Kutanid-resembling creature. It was dead in the center of a huge open space that looked like a baseball stadium, a creation that surely could not be natural. I was sure that an ability of some sort was used to create that space here.

「…… For now I would say that this get a ‘passing grade’.」

It might look as though we were running away, but I would like to call it more of a tactical retreat for now. And just before we left the chamber and the doors closed behind us, I thought that I saw something truly unnerving.

I could see it in its eyes with a horizontally shaped pupil. If that thing had a mouth, its corners would most probably be arching upwards right about now…… Yes, that’s right. This thing was looking down on us and laughing.

「I’ll be honest with you all: if we go in and challenge Kutanid right now, I don’t think we would have a one hundred percent chance ofwinning.」

「But why!? If we all go together, surely we can……!」

「Shut the fuck up, stupid sh*thead.」

BONK! With a pretty nice sound effect Straude kneels down while holding his head with his hands, and Rusts takes over the conversation.

「Our opponent here is a Unique Monster, meaning a monster that is bound by the shackles of the story related to it…… And although it is bigger than us by a huge margin, I think we might have a chance at beating it…… If it was not for that strange feeling.」

「Ah! Now that you mention it, there was surely something strange about it!」

Akitsu Akane, if nothing else I expected at least you to notice it as well…… It is quite enviable to be able to immerse yourself with your character so much, but immersion is not what we currently need here. Or maybe not, it might actually be good, since we have someone who thinks a little bit outside of the box here.

In the first place, we humans are a very fragile creatures. If you get down to it, even insects are far better than us, since all that it takes to take us down is some damage or poison for that example. Talk about fragile. But at the same time we have something that other creatures do not possess: the ability to learn and boundaries of common sense. And it is thanks to that ability to learn that humans can discern something as ‘within’ or ‘outside’ of the boundaries of common knowledge, and become wary of anything like that if need be.

But for all that we know, Kutanid has a way of surpassing even that. He can reverse anything, even reality itself. It is an ability that us mere humans cannot possibly hope to fight head-on just like that.

So why would you all even think that we has a chance against an opponent like that? Especially since we have a Vorpal Bunny here, a creature that is crazy strong, but should cower in fear of any creature that tops it when it comes to strength. Thinking about it calmly, the answer was more than clear here.

Apparently it was the power that the first form of Kutanid possessed. If I were to call it in any kind of way, it would be ‘Inversion of the Sense of Threat’. It sounds stupid, but it was too accurate to actually be just in my head. I was sure of it.

「But you do know that it is technically possible to influence the players in that way, don’t you?」

「Mold, do you happen to know about the people who were arguing against the implementation of the VR technology when it was first being introduced? Do you know what their arguments were?」

Nowadays it is true that a Full Dive VR system has been widely accepted by the general public, but it is also true that not everyone was on the wagon with the idea. There are those who tend to oppose the idea of VR invading their daily lives. There are also those, calling themselves ‘Realists’ who downright detest not only VR but all the forms of reality enhancing technology, arguing that it twists the perception of reality and tries to sell it as being better than the reality itself.

And while some of their arguments make a decent amount of sense, the vast majority of them makes you want to go like: ‘Well, maybe before you start yelling about the dangers of virtual reality, you should first go the psychiatric ward at your local hospital and get treated for differentiating between reality and fiction?’ That being said, I do realize that not all realists are stupid. At least not completely.

Some of them also argue that it is harmful for the human mind to constantly distracting itself from reality and its problems with the problems and passions of the virtual reality. And I can certainly see that.

「Speaking oof which, some people argue that a VR technology is nothing more but a glorified ‘Electric chair, but in different shape. Sending electric shocks through the brain and stimulating it in various ways outside of dreaming state is certainly not the healthies thing that you can do.’」

「More details, if you please?」

「If you know your enemy well, and you know yourself just as well, even if you end up fighting a thousand battles you will always be okay. And if you can’t find it in yourself to listen to what others have to say, then that means words are pretty much meaningless, am I right?」

Welp, not that I care all that much about that. But what I do care about is the system of ‘electric signals flowing through the brain’. I do believe that a certain guy once summarized it in a really nice way.

「What you see, what you feel…… It does not necessarily has to be true. Those may very well be malfunctions of the electric waves that are being sent to our brains. You can even think of it as that kind of state that you experience when you are dreaming or…… Or you know what? Forget about eighty percent of what I just said right now. It’s too scary of a concept to think about it that way.」

Now that Rust and Mold seemed to be in this at least half-way, I cannot help it but to try and approach the VR technology from a more of a philosophical side.

「What I wanted to say here was that, it is technically not all that hard to ‘misunderstand’ the player. And the player to ‘misunderstand’ things as well.」

「Sanraku, in this particular case I think that our overall situation is pretty much irrelevant. What we must do right now is to simply charge at Kutanid, we don’t have any other choice. But the fact that we do not know his true form yet is not making it easier for us……」

「A very concise conclusion, I must say. Thank you, Rust. I mean, this stupid sh*thead here…… I mean, isn’t it weird that a guy who’s been hiding under a fucking bed for almost a weak is all ‘I can do this! I can win!’ all of a sudden like that!?」

Well now I’m just full of regrets about all sorts of things…… If I knew that such a crappy gimmick existed here in the first place, I would have set the goal of attacking the castle on the very first day!

Consideration…… Yes, in order for the players to clear any Unique Scenario EX, what is needed is a considerable amount of consideration.

We have less than ten hours to find Kutanid, recognize what it can do, conjure a strategy and finally defeat it.