Strongest Gamer; Let's Play in Another World Volume 2

by Shinobu Yuuki

  So we were changing genre. I would be going from a survival game to a PvP labyrinth management sim. Nice.

  "All right then, it seems like we have our work cut out for us. We need to lure in some intruders, and then we need to kick 'em right back out."

  There was one final option, of course. Bribery. But that one could fail pretty spectacularly, so I didn't want to rely on it except as a last resort.

  "Mhm. And how do you think you're gonna get that many humans out here? Heck, how are you gonna get anybody to come to a labyrinth in the middle of nowhere like this? People only care about the ones at locations of conflict between humans and Daemons."

  Well, that hit a sore spot. The last time humans had invaded this area, they ignored the labyrinth completely and went straight for Milt. Maybe the answer really was to start aggressively raising livestock and farming fish.

  "Here's the thing. The labyrinth's purpose is to attract people, but nobody says it has to be humans. It counts if Daemons try to break in as well. And though repelling intruders is required, and killing intruders gets us points, nobody says we have to kill people to pass the evaluation, right? You with me so far?"

  "Sure, but you can't seriously be thinking what I think you're thinking."

  "I think I am. I'll lure in Daemons instead. We've only got six months, so let's split it down the middle. I'll spend three months building the labyrinth up as much as I can. Then, for the remaining three months, I'll lure in every hunter in Daemon territory with the promise of prizes, if they can make it through the whole dungeon. I'll rack up the points by repelling my makeshift intruders."

  In human territory, that sort of people called themselves "adventurers", but in Daemon territory they preferred the term "hunter". Anything like a labyrinth was typically under the Great Dark Lord's jurisdiction. Sometimes dungeons formed naturally, but those were few and far between. Adventurers didn't get a lot of opportunities to hone their skills. They were a sort of jack of all trades. They'd travel to distant lands and return with valuables and animals, or do detective work like investigating and settling disputes in cities. However, their main goal was to exterminate monsters. Monsters were common everywhere, and some of them were quite dangerous. Since hunting down monsters was their main purpose, the adventurers in Daemon territory came to be known as hunters.

  "That might actually work. You're right about the intruders clause not restricting you to humans, too. Whaddaya say, Karumi?"

  "If you can pull it off, it will satisfy the evaluation criteria. As long as you satisfy the conditions, it's completely up to you, as the labyrinth manager, how you do it. If all your intruders happen to be Daemons, then that's fine too."

  Karumi double-checked the conditions on her window and gave us the green light.

  "You're gonna need a prize, though, and a good one. The hunters are busy professionals. You're not gonna get them traveling all the way out here for a trinket, and you're not gonna pull a fast one on them; those guys are sharp. Maybe because they're so poor."

  I wondered idly if Suzu had been through a bad experience with hunters.

  "I'll use this."

  I opened up the lizard leather belt one of the villagers had made for me, took out a potion, and showed it to Suzu.

  "A diamond flask? So what? Sure hope the juice you've got in there tastes real good, or you're shit outta luck."

  "This is a Grade 6 vitality potion. Hunters are constantly putting themselves in harm's way, so I imagine a lot of them would love to have something like this handy, just in case the worst happens."

  "Whoa, whoa, hold the phone. Grade 6?! No freaking way! I mean, I don't want one or anything, but you could make a killing selling that thing!"

  Wow, that got a bigger rise out of her than I thought it would. That was almost as dramatic as Fez's reaction. I knew it sold for a high price on Tundra, but the herb I used for it grew like weeds all over Labyrinth #228, so I had trouble internalizing how special they really were. Maybe this was how farmers who grew high-quality crops and fruit felt.

  "Is it that valuable?"

  "Don't ask me. I live and work on this side, so I wouldn't know."

  Karumi wasn't going to be any help with this one, it seemed.

  "You bet your butt it's valuable! Even Grade 8 potions are valuable, and the market is flooded with them. If it's higher than Grade 8, it's both powerful and scarce. That's a premium product you've got right there!"

  She was practically bouncing on her toes.

  "Now wait just a darn minute. I heard there was a new labyrinth manager putting out the occasional high-level magic potion on Tundra a while back. That was you?"

  "Yeah, must have been. I cashed out a few on Tundra a couple months ago."

  "What the heck were they thinking, making that place a battle-type labyrinth when they had such amazing materials available?! If you had a production and storage labyrinth, you could meet your quota in a few days with top-notch potions like that! Seriously, give me a break here. Bleh, whatever. Anyway, that'll be more than enough to lure in your hunters."

  "Well, if you say so. Then I guess we'll run with the plan."

  Seriously, they were that valuable?

  "Now, what about a labyrinth guardian? You don't have any personnel, do you?"

  "What's a guardian?"

  "Uh, hello, you're obviously gonna need a big scary boss at the end. Like, what if they made it through the labyrinth and found you? They'd kick your tail! That's why you need a boss for them to fight at the end."

  "Is that how it works?"

  I looked over at Karumi.

  "...This should all have been written in the documentation you were supposed to receive."

  Karumi hunched her shoulders defensively.

  "And unfortunately, there's just the two of you here."

  Karumi seemed a little down about the sorry state of my labyrinth. After all, it wasn't as though she'd helped me find Ann. I'd had to build my own family.

  "So, sure, I need a guardian. But aside from me, the only person in the labyrinth is..."

  I looked down to Ann, who had been quietly listening to the conversation while clutching my sleeve.

  "What's wrong, Aoi? Oh, um, I should say hi, shouldn't I? Nice to meet you, Miss Suzu. I'm the manager's... family? My name is Ann. I'm very happy to be with Aoi!"

  Ann gave a little bow.

  "Oh, hello there. Nice to meetcha. Just call me Suzu."

  "Okie dokie!"

  "Aww, aren't you just the cutest little thing?"

  It seemed Ann's natural charm had already won over Suzu. I could relate to that. So you could see why I objected so strongly to making Ann fight while I watched from the sidelines.

  "We absolutely can't make Ann the guardian."

  "I wholeheartedly agree."

  "Heck yeah. I'd be judging you so hard if you'd suggested it."

  I was glad Karumi, Suzu, and I were all on the same page.

  "Okay, so tell me more about the expectations of a labyrinth guardian. What kind of training would they need?"

  "The main thing is that they need to be capable of putting up a powerful defense. Physical strength is the most important qualification."

  Some of the villagers were crazy strong, but none of them were familiar with fighting, so they were all out of the question.

  "They'll need to be sturdy, too. If a hunter puts your guardian completely out of commission, the labyrinth is done for. You really need someone with good defense and a high vitality stat."

  So an offensive unit wouldn't work. Made sense. If you thought about it like an RPG, when you were clearing out some dungeon, the boss would almost always be something tanky with a ton of HP.

  "And most importantly, they need courage. Guardians usually fight at a disadvantage: one against a party. This isn't a job for a coward. Even seasoned warriors can find it a bit much when the numbers are turned against them."

  Man, did I know anybody who could do this? The only one who came to mind was Fez
, the ex-mercenary wolfman peddler, but he'd said he couldn't take up the sword again.

  "All right, guess I'll add looking for a guardian to my to-do list, along with building up the labyrinth."

  "I can introduce you to some of the Daemon mercenaries I have connections with. They're a bunch of pansies when you get right down to it, though, so I can't exactly recommend them."

  "Thanks, Suzu. You've done a lot for me already. With your help, I know I'll pull through this."

  I offered her a humble thanks, bowing my head. I was sure I wouldn't have come up with this solution on my own, and I attached a lot of importance to thanking people who had helped me.

  "Aw, shucks, it's no big deal. I'm your mentor, right? Kind of what I'm here for, dude! And we've got a long road ahead of us, don't forget."

  Suzu blushed and smiled, trying to play it off. Her reaction was different from Ann's would have been, with her simple innocence, but it was sweet all the same.

  "Just call me if you need anything. I'm here to look out for you, and don't you forget it!"

  And with that parting shot, she hung up.

  "All right then. I've got to find an overseer for the construction, and that's not going to be easy. Karumi, can I count on you to scout out the capable hunters and figure out some way to entice them here to challenge the labyrinth?"

  "Yes, let me handle that. I know we're asking a lot here, but I believe in you."

  Karumi offered me a little bow and summoned a door, then opened it and returned to her office.

  ◇

  "Whew."

  I collapsed into a chair and took a sip of my now-lukewarm tea.

  "Karumi just turned my world upside down, and I'm still processing it. Ann, did you listen to all of that just now?"

  "Yeah. There's a lot of it I don't really get, though."

  "Well, that's fine. Good job sticking with us."

  "Mmm..."

  I put an arm around Ann, who was practically glued to my side like she was trying to protect me, and patted her head.

  Whether she was in kobold form or human form, she always had this soothing scent of fresh-cut hay about her.

  "Complicated concepts get easier to understand if you start thinking about them in gaming terms."

  Most people would look at something new in a game and make an analogy to something in the real world to understand it better, but truly hardcore gamers did the opposite, using their superior gaming knowledge to get better at real life.

  "Our victory conditions are clear: we have half a year to achieve a certain score and a certain level of dungeon. So, yeah, we just need to think of it as a management simulation game rather than as a survival game."

  It was in fact my job to manage this labyrinth, so it wasn't so much a simulation as, well, work. But the difference between the game of life and the kind of games I spent my life on was ultimately the tiniest of margins.

  "We have two things to keep in mind. First, it doesn't matter who we bring in. Second, we either need a lot of deaths or a lot of invaders to repel. Racking up deaths seems too difficult. Lots of work, time, and funds. The other path to victory looks tougher, but given the time constraints it's our only option. So, we'll be luring in and repelling invaders."

  If I bought obscene amounts of livestock and slaughtered them for meat, maybe I'd be able to pull it off, but it would definitely take too much time and effort. Even setting aside how expensive livestock had to be in this world, the logistics of getting so many of them to the labyrinth would have been a nightmare.

  "So, we'll run a plain old labyrinth where we lure intruders and throw them back out. Ann, you remember that game I had you play, Soul Collector 4?"

  "Yep. That was the one about turning a lousy magician into a powerful wizard who trapped people in his magic labyrinth, right? You told me it'd be good reference material, so I tried it out."

  "The Soul Collector series is a staple of the labyrinth simulator genre."

  You'd trap humans in your labyrinth and harvest their souls to grow stronger. Then you rinse and repeat with more powerful traps. Sometimes you even got a chance to sacrifice humans to summon a demon to help you out. One interesting angle was that you had to capture your prey alive. The soul left the body when it died, so you didn't get to snack on souls if your traps killed the humans.

  You got the most points by capturing humans without putting a scratch on them, but you could make the traps as fake-scary as you wanted. Planting the occasional sprung grizzly bear trap with a mangled corpse in it was a great way to send the humans screaming and running away through your labyrinth, directly into another trap. One crowd favorite was the honey trap, where a succubus mimicking a captured village girl would beg for help, enticing the intruders to go help her and be ensnared. Man, what a great game. If you really wanted, you could always soften up the intruders with some fire or electric traps, leaving them easy meat for a pitfall, but that wasn't very efficient, both because it was expensive to set up and because it gave you fewer points.

  I hadn't really explained any of this when I set Ann up with the game. I mean, I knew about stuff like that because the honey trap combo was a staple of the series, but she didn't have that background. I did kind of regret not playing it together and overseeing her after teaching her the basics, though. Ann was playing the PC remaster, Soul Collector 4 HD, so it would've been a new experience for me, too.

  I decided to check her save file. In only three days, she'd shown phenomenal progress. All the physical traps had been replaced with a variety of demon traps, particularly the succubi. Her labyrinth was a veritable crucible of lust. I felt a brief pang of regret for the loss of Ann's innocence. Gun Gust may have been violent, but it was pretty tame otherwise. The overall survival rate in her labyrinth was 10%, but for male adventurers it plummeted to only 2%. I resisted the urge to check the world leaderboards, but I had a feeling Ann would have been up there.

  It seemed she was a natural labyrinth manager. Still, I had my reservations about putting that to use. I didn't want her name going down in history as a villain. Raising Ann to be a respectable lady was going to be a rocky road.

  "I don't think those exact mechanics are quite what we're looking for, but at least the big picture is the same; we'll be building up a labyrinth, attracting and kicking out intruders, and fulfilling certain conditions within set time limits."

  "Aww, we can't do it like this? But the succubus ladies would practically do our job for us!"

  There was that pang of conscience again. I'd chosen poorly. I should never have shown her that filthy game.

  "Suzu will come in handy, that's for sure. There's no bigger advantage than an experienced ally."

  Even just having her there as an advisor made our chances of success much higher.

  "I never thought the tsarina would come to our aid."

  "Suzu's really that amazing?"

  "Yeah. She's so good at production and management, she's almost a living legend. She's had me on the ropes a few times."

  Actually, it was more than a few times. I'd struggled to stay ahead of the tsarina more times than I cared to admit.

  "A long while back, the tsarina attacked a city of mine with five times the troops I had. We somehow held off the overwhelming numbers through sheer guts, but the next day, she came back with ten times the troops I had! It was a nightmare."

  And that'd kept going, too. No matter how many times we beat them, they just kept multiplying. The thought still gave me the shivers.

  "It was like she'd built a summoning circle to the foot soldier realm. The tsarina was so famous, you'd have to look hard to find someone who hadn't heard of her, no matter what game you played."

  She drove off invaders with sheer numbers and overwhelming industrial might, rising through the ranks and establishing her tsardom of ice and steel. In every corner of the internet, people knew the name Belka. I'd devoted my life to games, but there was no question who was more well-known. I'd had a lot of rivals, but none who i
nduced nearly the amount of trauma that Suzu did.

  "Huh. So no matter how many you beat, she'd bring more the next day? That sounds tough."

  "Yeah, she's horrible to run into on the other side of the battlefield, but by the same token, she's a dependable ally."

  Unfortunately, our position didn't really play into the tsarina's strengths. Labyrinth #228 needed a lightning onslaught, with minimal time to build up our productivity. We couldn't afford attrition tactics or overwhelming our enemies. We had to do more with less.