We waited in the sky thanks to me and the nano-chatte having to hold up everyone while flying as the demoness was pulverising the city below. The only thing we heard was her maniacal laughter and the cries of orcs. It didn’t matter how many of them piled in, they’d all fall when they got close to her.
“There.” Said the nano-chatte as one of its drones pinpointed the location of the second pillar. I began flying down in an area far away from the demon princess’s slaughter of orcs. Our personal goal during this mission was to level up. We could easily assassinate any adventurer and clear any dungeon in Korea, so the official mission goal couldn’t be our sole focus if we didn’t want to waste time.
“You three will go to the hive and kill all the orcs there while clearing the area. You’ll find the hive when you go north of the main pillar. I’ll make sure the demon doesn’t do anything stupid” I made the nano-chatte create a compass for them, which I threw at Anna. We needed to separate for optimal XP gain. I could earn XP from killing the adventurers trying to stop us from destroying the Hive, and the rest of my party could earn XP naturally. The demon princess would come with me because I didn’t want her to level up and become a bigger problem.
“Sure.” Said Anna as she caught my compass. I immediately flew away towards the mass carnage and charged through the cloud of dust and orc blood to grab the demon princess and carry her up.
“Hey! What’re doing? I was having fun.” She said as I continued flying up while she climbed my arm and made me piggyback her so she’d be more comfortable.
“You’re gonna have more fun against actual opponents. Since we’re the strongest people in the group, we have to deal with strong adventurers trying to kill the orcs themselves.” I felt bad as I told her half truths to her again and again. I could never be honest with her and say that she’s a danger to our group, or that I’m stopping her fun because we need to get stronger to not get destroyed by her when she inevitably gets bored of staying with us.
“You could’ve told me that before we got here so I wouldn’t have started fighting the green skins.” I sighed as I finally saw a group of adventurers look at my group going towards the hive, and start opening the gate in the wall to enter and stop my party. I flew right at them, creating a crater as I landed.
“Shit! The foreign agents are here.” The nano-chatte automatically translated everything the Koreans said in real time, which was another reason why the nano-chatte was the best. What was actually troubling was the fact that he called me a ‘foreign agent’. They probably had knowledge on me and my party.
“When are they going to stop trying to bring us down? These sub-humans deserve to rot on their fucking island instead of getting killed here.” Said another man. They didn’t call me a foreign agent because they knew who I was. America wasn’t an island. From what I knew, South Korea and Japan only cooperated thanks to both of them being in the American sphere of influence, so as soon as America was gone, the two regions would be at each other’s throats again, and so would their people.
“What’re they talking about?” The demon princess gets off my back and looks straight at one of the men covered head to toe in armour. He trembled as soon as the demoness looked at him and gave a hand-signal to the man opening the gate.
“T-They have a demon with them! Call the warlock!” He screamed in panic while the rest of his team tried running. The demoness wouldn’t let another fight slip through her hands, and jumped through the closing gate and straight at the armoured man. While she battled the group, I flew at the man who was closing the gate and glued him to the ground with a chunk of the nano-chatte’s nanomachines.
“I mean you no harm, unlike the demon, who I’ll stick on you if you don’t answer my questions.” The man shook as he looked at me. At first, I thought my speech wasn’t translated, but he was just slow to reply.
“O-Of course.” He said while regaining his courage. The nano-chatte could translate the actual words, but it couldn’t translate the meaning behind them, and his body language was telling me that he was confirming something to himself as well as to me.
“What is the group that’s been interfering with your efforts of creating a hive?” He looked at me with what I presumed to be a confused expression. I was leading with a question that would confirm I’m not part of whatever group they were racist toward.
“Your group.” He said.
“Don’t act like a smartass. Name me the group or nation or people you think are deliberately sabotaging your attempt to create more hives.” He chuckled to himself. He still thought I’m part of that group, so he thought the question was redundant.
“Every foreigner. Everyone is against Korea.” Oh. He’s that type of racist.
“Of course. Who’s the warlock?” I really only had two questions. He wouldn’t know where the number one Korean adventurer is, and I already knew why they were letting the monsters leak out into the world and barely even containing them, so that only left me with those two questions.
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“Your end.” How generic and unhelpful. I let the nano-machines eat him and spread from unconscious corpse to unconscious corpse to devour their XP.
“Robot? What’s this goo stuff?” She poked the nano-machines, who ignored her as I looked at the one person who managed to escape.
“Nothing you should worry about. You missed one of them. He’s in the trees right now.” I pointed towards him, but she shook her head.
“He’s a rogue, the most unfun people to fight. They just pop up out of nowhere and try poisoning you before disappearing again and waiting for you to die from the poison. You can never be relaxed while fighting them. It’s so unfair, and not in the fun way.” She said.
“I’m sure that won’t come back to bite us.” She scoffed as I said that.
“What could possibly happen? We’re the strongest!” I summoned my window to see that I was only two thousand XP away from levelling up. “Lemme see!” She grabbed my window and looked through all my stats. I felt the nano-chatte get startled.
“How can you grab the window?” The nano-chatte said out loud. The demoness looked at me with immediate suspicion.
“Why did you change your voice? Your normal voice is way better.” The nano-chatte mentally rolled their eyes as I chuckled at her.
“That’s just a separate personality of mine that forgot to not speak out loud to a person who didn’t know it existed.” I said as a veiled attempt to complain about what the nano-chatte did. “Anyway, it had a good question.”
“I just do it. Is there something special about being able to grab this thing?” She gripped it tightly and rotated it around looking for something suspicious about it.
“Nobody other than the owner of the window can touch it.” The nano-chatte said again.
“I guess I own it then.” The nano-chatte grew annoyed by her while I kept finding her responses oddly endearing.
“You don’t. Ian owns it.” Said the nano-chatte again, only for the demoness to already have a quick response prepared.
“I own Ian then. The window just confirms it.” I kept chuckling as the nano-chatte internally sighed and resigned itself back to lookout duty.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself yet. You don’t own me.” I make the window disappear and reappear in my hand, showing her how easily I could escape her ‘ownership’.
“Not yet. I’ll get to it eventually.” She said as the nano-chatte detected another person inside the city aside from my group. A Scarlet Emporium rogue trying to stay hidden while looking at me and the demoness. He froze and then teleported to the other side of the city the moment I looked at him. “Hello? What’re you looking at, robot?”
“The emporium is spying on us.” The demoness rolled her eyes before putting her arm around my shoulder.
“That’s my dad. He thinks he’s overprotective, but he’s just paranoid. He doesn’t like not knowing what’s happening to me. If he was really overprotective he’d have rescued me out of that hellhole.” I slumped back against the wall before the smell of rotting meat hit my nostrils. The nano-chatte redirected my face towards the left and highlighted the shadowy man in the trees. He must’ve been the warlock.
“Get ready. Their trump card is over there.” I pointed towards the warlock, and she immediately let me go to crack her knuckles.
“He can’t be that much trouble.” She said as the man approached us. His eye sockets were empty, and his guild emblem was completely different from both the Golden Guild and Scarlet Emporium. The emblem was of a skeleton with a rose in its mouth shushing someone. The man was twice my size thanks to his armour, and I could hear the heavy mechanical clanks as steam emanated from his body. The armour was a perfect mix of technology just advanced enough to be useful, but not advanced enough to be banned by the revifier, and magic.
“There you are. A demon and paladin. My two halves separated into people.” He walked forward, wilting the surrounding vegetation as the steam boiled it until reaching the open road. The demoness was already preparing to charge at him.
“Do you understand what he’s saying?” The demon princess asked.
“Yea. He’s just mumbling to himself.” I said as the demon charged. The man brought out his gigantic sword which was just as big as himself and clashed with the demon princess. They traded blows, but it was clear to me and the nano-chatte that he was finding a flaw in her fighting style. Before we could fire anything to distract him, he slashed through her block and threw her through several trees. She ripped one out of the ground and charged at him only to be sidestepped and smoke screened with steam he released out of his mouth. He grabbed the log and launched it away deep into the forest along with the demon princess who was holding onto it.
“Now, paladin, let’s test your skills.” Oddly cocky for someone who’s about to face the might of an angry demon who’s flying right back.