Krusty, Tycoon Lord

by Mamare Touno

  They’d been repeating this cycle for a while now.

  Even worse, apparently Enchantress Youren’s attacks had the same HP absorbing ability as the Scarlet build, which was practically a synonym for Krusty. As she attacked him, at the same time, she was gradually recovering the damage he’d worked so hard to inflict. It wasn’t so efficient that she’d be unscathed in no time, but it was apparently possible for her to reduce the damage she’d been dealt. Enchantress Youren’s HP simply had more volume than it should.

  Krusty currently had a handicap, so he couldn’t be called strong.

  However, all that was separate from winning or losing.

  The very fact that he could think this sort of thing as he fought probably counted as proof.

  There are things I’ve grown able to see, too, hmm?

  Krusty was picking up on the intentions of the Enchantress, who was probably one of the invaders who had targeted this land. It might have been a more advanced understanding than what the Round Table Council members had, tied up in Akiba as they were.

  In short, she and her kind were usurpers.

  They were an alien species who had come here with their sights set on the land’s overflowing mana. They wielded paranormal powers, and their combat abilities made them equal to raid monsters. They were intelligent, and they were after Theldesia.

  Krusty sensed this was what colonialism under the great European powers from the Age of Exploration through the discovery of the New World must have been like. He didn’t think he was that far off the mark.

  They probably had enough military might to make this world do whatever they wanted.

  However, as Krusty swung his ax, he wore a smile like a starving wolf.

  He didn’t spare a thought for victory or defeat. He didn’t have to.

  I need accessible resources.

  Invest them.

  He visualized a gate in the center of his chest, then commanded it to activate.

  The impression Krusty had was of the gate to a magnificent temple with round, Doric columns. Behind a marble door covered in carvings lay a spring swirling with liquid light. If Krusty fed it with his memories, it would generate a rainbow radiance.

  The name “Mnemosyne’s Taboo” surfaced in his mind. This technique apparently converted memories into energy.

  The units of energy were minuscule, so it was impossible to express the efficiency of the exchange, but from Krusty’s perspective, it was more than enough. All he had to do was feed in a teaspoon of the taste of a martini at a boring party, for example, or the feel of a muffler that had been unexpectedly wrapped around him on a footpath beside an Amsterdam canal, or the gaze of a relative who’d glared at him in annoyance, and he’d get several thousand, or several tens of thousands, of MP.

  Krusty immediately switched from Taunting Shout to a large-scale range attack with Onslaught.

  In Elder Tales, MP was a high-rarity resource. When you weren’t fighting, you could recover it rapidly without much trouble, but during battle, you only recovered a few dozen points per minute… And that was at Krusty’s level, with his equipment. In a battle where you didn’t have support from an Enchanter or a Bard, it was a resource that barely recovered at all.

  That precious resource filled his body, flooding in through the micro-gate in the center of his chest. Its speed was on the order of several tens of thousands of points per second. His MP didn’t fluctuate from its maximum, but because the amount of excess recovery alone was more than the amount he was consuming, it looked as if it wasn’t falling below the maximum. Not only that, but a rainbow-colored shimmer radiated from his entire body, reinforcing major elements in combat—everything from attack power and defense to his special skill recast times.

  The sharp blade, which he swung with enough momentum to burn the air, inflicted steady damage on Enchantress Youren.

  Hardened tentacles and the weapon Krusty wielded clashed twice, three times.

  The damage per second he was inflicting wouldn’t have been possible for a Guardian in the days of Elder Tales, and the Enchantress’s beautiful face warped in astonishment.

  “What are these slashes?!”

  “A parlor trick.”

  Condescending tone in hand, Krusty charged, not hiding his ghastly smile. He sealed his opponent’s resistance with a mighty close-range attack like a body blow, then shifted into a rush, in which the attack itself acted as defense. Under these circumstances, he didn’t have to worry about running out of MP. He had all the fuel he could ever want.

  The Enchantress froze up, startled, for just a moment. Then she desperately began to defend herself.

  In this situation, the whole of the battle was simultaneous attack and defense. They couldn’t use skills like Parry or Evade. One had an enormous ax, the other had countless tentacles that sprouted from her sleeves, and they both slammed attacks that emphasized the quantity of blows into each other. The only thing you could call defense were the attacks they launched at each other. Attacks that weren’t shot down struck their opponent.

  With blood trickling from his cheeks, Krusty cheerfully threw himself into the center of this raging storm.

  Under his hands, Enchantress Youren was being annihilated, a problem being solved. Possibilities were converging on the result of victory, or of defeat. Each step on that route was pleasure. Right now, Krusty was on the verge of obtaining a new result.

  “Why, why?!”

  However, there was someone who wasn’t happy about this.

  It was Enchantress Youren, with whom he was trading attacks.

  She ground her teeth in frustration, then turned her practically defenseless back on him. It wasn’t that her soft, feminine curves had made him hesitate, but a momentary gap opened up in Krusty’s fierce onslaught. He’d grown wary of an unknown counterstrike.

  Sure enough, the Enchantress did strike back.

  With a sticky sucking sound, a huge wave of gray tentacles burst from below Enchantress Youren’s feet, undulated, and closed in.

  However, they weren’t headed for Krusty.

  They angled away, rushing toward the shadow of the rocks, charging toward Hua Diao—who was standing as still as a sculpture, looking blank. In the midst of time that seemed drawn out, Hua Diao tried to scream something.

  Block the attack.

  I can’t.

  Take the damage for her with Covering.

  Out of range.

  Reflexively, Krusty tried to protect her, but it wasn’t possible.

  Guardian strategies for protecting companions were mostly built around controlling aggro, and their abilities regarding protecting friends from damage directly were far below those of Monks. If Kanami had been here, things might have gone differently, but she was nowhere in sight. During their ferocious fight, they’d kept moving, and it had divided the battlefield.

  When his eyes met Hua Diao’s, she looked apologetic. The next instant, she was covered by a surging gray wave like a muddy torrent, and she disappeared from view.

  Martenfolk were noncombatant demispirits, and for one of them, the damage was too great. It could be nothing but fatal.

  However—

  —Gumon the wolf dog leapt in like a meteor.

  She must have summoned up all her abilities in order to come running. With the impenetrable defense of her agility, it would have been easy for her to avoid Enchantress Youren’s attacks, and yet, in order to save Hua Diao, Gumon exposed her defenseless side. The Wise Wolf had made a clearheaded decision, and she chose speed over self-preservation.

  Even though the price was her life.

  With a light of deep understanding in her eyes, even as she shed a shocking amount of blood, the wolf took the nape of Hua Diao’s neck in her mouth, sped back to Krusty’s feet in a single leap, and set the girl down. She gave a low, satisfied groan and lay down herself.

  And then she became bubbles of gently shining rainbow light.

  The world is brimming over with the difficult problems yo
u seek.

  Your world, your problem, is easy because you aren’t looking for treasure.

  I think those around you would be happier if you were a little greedier.

  Those with abilities should have intense desires to match, don’t you think, Milord?

  He heard a calm voice.

  The bubbles rose toward heaven, and what remained was a woman’s severed arm, with slim fingers. It was wrapped in a piece of a D.D.D. uniform and had been cut off near the shoulder. It was ’s arm.

  3

  Having completely absorbed Gumon’s life, Enchantress Youren had recovered her health drastically, and she smiled sweetly.

  Krusty’s HP was down to just 8 percent.

  In contrast, Enchantress Youren’s HP was over 60 percent, and still rising.

  The gap was great enough that she could feel sure of her victory. Even if he’d managed to gain nearly limitless MP through Mnemosyne’s Taboo, with no means of recovering his HP, Krusty had no way to turn the tables at this point.

  “That was astonishing.”

  “…”

  “I doubt you remember, but I would expect no less from the Adventurer the Supreme Deity and the Heavenly Mother wanted for her nephew. —I’ll ask again: I don’t suppose you’d surrender to us?”

  “Are you telling me to play at being a sheepdog?”

  “I promise you the most fortunate of canine lifestyles.”

  In response to this, his expression still cool, Krusty smiled.

  The woman was funny.

  Had she noticed she’d confessed to talking to a dog?

  Or maybe she had wanted to believe it was actually the other party that was the dog.

  Even answering her properly seemed like too much work.

  “The tiger-fanged Bucaphi, Genius of Witches, wasn’t it?”

  “?! Don’t tell me your memories have—”

  With a light click, some sort of piece fell into place. At the same time, the flow of his blood sped up, accelerating into a raging torrent. With the thrill of understanding in his eyes, Krusty smiled fearlessly.

  The reality of something being “stolen” had closed the circuit.

  Pushing a mental arm through the gate up to its shoulder, he groped through a rainbow ocean as warm as his viscera. The true identity of the heat that made his breath tremble was a complicated emotion. It was amusement, and also irritation. Delight and anger were there together.

  The feeling was hard to put a name to, but it definitely did have heat. Keeping the emotion just as it was, he began to take them back, ripping them free.

  “The curse—! What happened to the curse that bound you?!”

  “It hasn’t been lifted.”

  As Krusty had sensed, there was still a negative status on his translucent window.

  SOUL DARKENING CURSE.

  NATURAL HP RECOVERY IS SUSPENDED.

  HP MAY NOT BE RECOVERED THROUGH RECOVERY SPELLS, OR THROUGH FACILITIES OR ITEMS.

  THE TELECHAT FUNCTION IS SUSPENDED.

  MOVEMENT ACROSS SERVER BOUNDARIES BECOMES IMPOSSIBLE.

  MEMORIES ARE LOST.

  However.

  “It doesn’t say I can’t retake the memories I lost.”

  As he’d said, a new condition was added, the words seeming to bleed into existence.

  The Enchantress looked pale and dismayed, and Krusty sent her a savage smile.

  Through the gate, he retrieved the memories that had melted into rainbow colors. Once he’d retaken them, it also became clear why he’d chosen those memories and released them. Krusty had foreseen that he would take them back.

  He’d been sure he would recover them, so he’d offered them up as collateral.

  Because he’d known they would come back someday, he’d relaxed and temporarily deposited them elsewhere.

  When he was caught up in Calamity Hurts’s rampage in the mountains near Seventh Fall, Krusty had landed on Mount Kunlun, a solitary island that floated in a distant rainbow ocean. On that island, he’d met the grotesque witch Bucaphi. She had wanted him to become her vassal, but he had refused, and as a result, he’d been hit with a bad status that robbed him of nearly all his combat power, then banished into the wilderness of central Eured. Even the memory of his encounter with Bucaphi had been taken from him.

  That was what lay behind Krusty’s arrival in this land.

  However, those memories were back in his hands now.

  They’d been accompanied by memories of the chaperone of his noisy guild, his precocious little sister, his reliable aide, and the reckless slacker princess. As this information flowed in, filling the gaps, he gave a little smile that was different from the one he’d shown the Enchantress.

  He’d been unable to hold back a wry smile at his own romanticism.

  Even if he’d had memories and connections, the benefits he could gain from them were limited. Still, Krusty didn’t have the sort of temperament that took delight in giving up part of himself.

  He also understood the cause of the hostility that blazed inside him.

  He’d already faced off against the enemy’s leader on Mount Kunlun. Now that he’d retaken his memories, he knew this clearly. As far as he was concerned, the bewitching woman who’d held him in contempt and had brazenly shown up to take him was already a target for annihilation. He had absolutely no intention of forgiving her.

  Papus—this woman, Enchantress Youren—and the Queen Mother of the West, Bucaphi: Everyone who had risen against Krusty and his memories was an enemy. Now that his memories were clear, her true name was displayed in his status window. Apparently, that was the limit of her mimicry.

  It was likely that Enchantress Youren and her cohorts were connected to the mystery of the Catastrophe.

  They probably had useful information on the current state of the world.

  However, that wasn’t the tiniest speck of a reason for letting them live.

  “Simply regaining your memories does nothing to change the situation!” she shrieked.

  “That’s right.”

  …But so what?

  Krusty hadn’t taken any notice of the situation in the first place.

  The important thing was producing a conclusion. That, and the motive for seeking it.

  Compressing the distance between them, which was already the space of a breath, he swung his ax, now scattering rainbows instead of blood. The motion surpassed even Adventurer limits, and if Nyanta had been watching, he might have sensed something similar to Kazuhiko in it. However, right now, Krusty was trembling with the joy of birth, and he wielded his blade like a song.

  He instinctively knew where Mount Kunlun was.

  It was on the horizon of heaven, somewhere Krusty couldn’t currently reach.

  However, his enemies were there, and he’d resolved to destroy them.

  Therefore, he should be able to sink his fangs into the place.

  The enemy: That had been the thing he’d given up on ever obtaining in his lifetime, what he’d grown tired and endlessly weary over.

  The people who’d whispered “Give up” to Haruaki Kounoike might always have said it out of kindness, but they hadn’t loved him deeply.

  However, Krusty had been told to seek people who would adore him. By his little sister, and by Takayama, and by Riezé. By Koen and Richou, too. Now that he thought about it, Kushiyatama had said it as well, long ago. With the resolve of someone throwing herself into the flames, Raynesia had shown that she was looking. Even if she understood that her own abilities wouldn’t be enough, that stubborn princess hadn’t given up on wanting.

  Krusty had given up his expectations for those around him, but even in the knowledge that they might rip and fall away easily, she’d clung to them. That hadn’t been weakness. It had been nobility.

  That night, Krusty had witnessed that nobility.

  If he was going to adventure, then what situation could be better than this one, where he’d been transported to a foreign country? Enemies and companions, obstacles a
nd treasures were a solid reality in this vast, white land.

  Now that he thought about it, Shiroe and Isaac, and even William, who’d left for the north, had all attempted to make their mark on this world.

  Right now, Krusty was emphatically free.

  The feeling infused the joints in his arms and legs with the sort of energy that made him want to set off running immediately.

  Of course, he’d have to return to Yamato. D.D.D. was a comfortable place. It was his treasure, even if he hadn’t been aware of that. He had no intention of letting it be taken from him.

  However, in order to get there, it looked as if he’d have to defeat all his enemies…or maybe someone would come to get him before that happened.

  Possibly she’d been overawed by the colorless rage that had quietly accumulated inside Krusty: Enchantress Youren issued an order in a carrying voice. A froth of iridescent bubbles gathered in what had been empty space, and a swarm of giant moths appeared from it and attacked him.

  “That’s nothing—”

  He slashed through them.

  At this point, his enormous two-handed ax was so light it might as well have been made of paper. Actually, Krusty’s very limbs were filled with inexhaustible energy, and they massacred his enemies just as he wanted them to. As if he’d shed his skin, even the air currents felt fresh, and his sharpened nerves picked up the enemy’s movements easily.

  “The forces summoned from the moon are limitless. Even if you are beyond the bounds of common sense, how do you plan to oppose numbers like these? On top of that, your life is already a lamp flame, guttering in the wind.”

  Impatiently, the Enchantress issued rapid-fire invasion orders.

  The Moon Rabbits attacked, comically, their fat bellies wobbling. Krusty drew several of them to himself at once, then knocked the pestles they brandished away, sending them flying.

  Even as he operated the micro-gate, with exquisite focus, Krusty closed the distance between them.

  Half a step, then another.

  His Demon Ax, from which heavy sounds issued, finally inflicted a deep wound on the Enchantress’s tentacles.