After the brief upheaval, everything sank back into silence.
Since the [Depiction of Nature and Society] was a subspace that copied reality one-to-one, perfectly, nobody present noticed a thing out of place.
Though, in a certain sense.
A high-score BOSS who had just been bracing for a desperate last stand had screamed the name of a World Item at the top of her lungs, and then absolutely nothing happened around them.
That, in itself, was the biggest anomaly of all.
A soft rush of displaced air, the faint scuff of a landing, and Chris's figure resolved out of nowhere.
He didn't spare so much as a glance for the enemies whose fate was still unclear. He went straight to Nanase Tsubasa, Yotsuya Miko and the rest, confirmed their identities with the Controller, and only then let out a small breath.
"Senpai… what just happened?"
Nanase Tsubasa wasn't startled by Chris's sudden appearance. She just asked on reflex.
Chris glanced up at the sky and explained.
"The high-score BOSS tailing you had a World Item on her. It drags every enemy in a designated area into a subspace by force."
"From the look of things nothing's changed around us, but I'm afraid… we've probably already been caught and sealed inside."
Ryūji Kanzaki, who had only just gotten his breath back, pushed his glasses up, his face grim. "It looks exactly like reality… but this is still just an item. There's no way it can trap us forever in a world the same size as the real one. There has to be a way out."
Chris nodded in agreement.
"The Controller has an entry on it. The inside really is a one-to-one simulation of reality, and the holder can pick a hundred hostile environments to torment whoever's trapped in there."
"But if we can find one of the forty escape methods it randomly generates, we don't just get out clean. We also take ownership of the item itself."
"Forty escape methods…" Shiranami Chihiro blinked, then said with a touch of innocence, "That doesn't sound like bad odds. Feels pretty acceptable, actually."
"Chihiro…" Yotsuya Miko swallowed hard beside her and lowered her voice. "There's a hundred potentially lethal environments to go with it. And it's one out of forty, not forty ways out…"
"Oh, right… there's that risk too…" Shiranami Chihiro stuck out her tongue, then brightened again, cheerful as ever. "Still, way better than being sealed in for good with no room to fight back, isn't it?"
Honestly, after running into a freak who could shut down vampire powers outright,
Shiranami Chihiro figured her tolerance threshold had been dragged up to a ridiculous height.
Short of a rule-based kill that dropped you dead the instant you looked at it, nothing could really rattle her anymore.
Chris gave no opinion either way.
"Speaking of which…" He rubbed his chin, thinking aloud. "To keep those high-score monsters from sensing my ambush, I told Hayasaka and Karuizawa to stand by in the Mirror World when I came over… no idea whether they got dragged in with us."
After all, the other side had been holding a World Item.
Even with the invisibility the [Verde Card Box] granted her, Kei Karuizawa's Ripple training and combat experience were more than a cut below Chris's.
He could vanish perfectly by adjusting his own Ki. But Kei Karuizawa?
To be safe, he'd sent her to wait in the Mirror World with Hayasaka Ai.
Which, as it turned out, opened up another route through this mess.
"If they can move in and out of this world freely, maybe we can just use the Mirror World to skip class and walk out. The Mirror World is a special channel that links to the reversed world. Crossing space is baked into what it is."
Chris looked around at everyone. "And the reason Shiina and Amikura could feed you intel straight through the world barrier earlier is exactly because we were in the Mirror World."
With that, Chris dismissed the Demon Possession armor.
He flipped his hand over, and a bronze [Kamen Rider Odin] transformation card box appeared in his palm.
Nanase Tsubasa blinked at that, then very obligingly pulled out her phone and held the dark screen up in front of him as a reflective surface.
A flash of gold, and dark-gold Odin armor snapped into place over Chris's body.
His outline wavered, and he sank straight into the mirror of the phone screen.
Less than three seconds later.
Chris slid back out and dropped the transformation.
"Nothing?" Yotsuya Miko deflated a little at how fast he'd returned.
Chris shook his head and explained.
"They're still safe in the Mirror World. It's just that this upper-year exam seems to have force-spawned a lot of Intruder inside Ainz's Great Tomb of Nazarick."
"And the unlock condition for their exam is this: kill one of the Great Tomb's Floor Guardians, or… reduce the number of Intruder inside the Great Tomb to zero."
Chris spread his hands. "So Kei and Hayasaka are planning to use the Mirror World's stealth to go help rescue those Intruder."
"Kill a Guardian…"
Behind Chris, Kei Karuizawa, who had just leaned half her body out of the Mirror World's channel into reality, frowned at that.
"Speaking of which, didn't you already kill those two high-score monsters just now, Chris-kun? Why didn't I hear the Black Sphere announce the exam opening?"
Chris thought about it, then raised his arm and opened the Controller at his wrist.
When he saw that the three-dimensional projection had developed clear layers, and that a dotted line resembling "pathfinding guidance" had appeared along its edges, he raised an eyebrow.
Not because of the route itself, though.
It was what he cross-referenced against it: the S Points in his Black Sphere Watch hadn't gone up at all.
And in the real Great Tomb region, two red dots marked "Aura" and "Mare" had lit up again.
"Looks like… Nazarick has a resurrection method."
Chris turned it over in his mind. "Until they're killed for good, or the resurrection mechanism itself is destroyed, the system won't count them as defeated."
"Then there's no point in us staying here, is there?" Hayasaka Ai, trailing behind Karuizawa, put in at exactly the right moment.
Chris saw it differently.
He looked at the golden guide blinking on the Controller and spoke without hesitation.
"No. Take Nanase, Yotsuya and the others out."
"I'll stay behind alone, see whether I can follow the route to meet a specific escape condition, and take control of this World Item."
"Otherwise, if they keep using it to carve up the battlefield, it's going to be a real headache for Miyabi Nagumo and Kiryuin."
Nanase Tsubasa froze, instinct pushing her to talk him out of risking it alone.
But when she caught sight of the safe route marked on the Controller's radar in front of him, she swallowed the words.
As a junior who had witnessed Chris's strength with her own eyes, she chose to trust him.
The girl simply turned, her face solemn, to Kei Karuizawa. "Then… I'm counting on you, Senpai. We'll go find Miss Liana first!"
Kei Karuizawa shook her head. "It's fine. Leave it to us."
Just as Nanase Tsubasa's group stepped into the Mirror World to withdraw.
Meanwhile, in the Great Tomb of Nazarick.
After Shalltear Bloodfallen's betrayal and the loss of two Floor Guardians, the entire Great Tomb had gone to its highest state of alert.
Every detection and defensive spell ran at full power.
Under a net that fine, spotting the squad Nagumo had sent to rescue the Intruder should have been simple for the Great Tomb.
But there was a problem.
This group had infiltrated through the [Mirror World] and the [Kingdom of Shadows], special channels that forcibly linked other dimensions.
To be safe, the vanguard carrying Blank Card Boxes stayed curled up inside the Mirror World and never showed their faces.
They sent only the accompanying Dark Shadow Legion into reality, to snatch the trapped Intruder and haul them into the Kingdom of Shadows.
From there, either ship them out through the shadows, or carry them to somewhere with a mirror and slide them seamlessly into the mirror world!
A smooth little combo, and it genuinely caught the Great Tomb's Guardians flat-footed.
After all, who could have imagined it? A group able to infiltrate Nazarick without a sound…
taking a colossal risk to get inside, all to rescue a handful of irrelevant ordinary people?
Instead of using the chance to ambush the Supreme Being?!
It came down to a difference in how the two sides thought.
The Guardians reflexively made Ainz Ooal Gown's safety the absolute first priority, stacking defense upon defense, and in doing so neglected the prisoners held on the outer edges.
Still, once that first hole had been picked, the Guardians caught on fast.
They swiftly moved Tokinari Tsukishiro, their bait, along with the remaining Intruder, into deeper and better hidden areas.
Of course, the infiltrators' harassment barely rated a mention.
Set against the deaths of Aura and Mare, it was trivia.
"They were holding two World Items… and both of them died that fast, without even a chance to flee or call for help?!"
Inside the Throne Room.
Albedo stared at the Guardian status panel Ainz had opened, at the markers reading DECEASED beside Aura and Mare, her face pure disbelief.
Even for a Supreme Being, wiping out a pair holding two World Items in an instant…
As far as Albedo knew, probably only someone like Lord Touch Me or Lord Ulbert could have managed it!
On the throne, Ainz Ooal Gown listened in silence.
Inside, he was as shaken as Albedo, but the undead's inherent "forced calm" took hold.
Green light flickered across him, and his ruler's dignity returned at once.
He turned his gaze down to Demiurge, Cocytus and the rest. Every one of them looked braced for war.
Ainz considered for a moment, then spoke.
"Whatever has happened, nothing in this world can truly halt Nazarick's advance."
"For now… let us give our time to Aura and Mare."
"We need information."
With that, he raised a hand and invoked the Guild Master's back-end authority.
"Resurrect!"
A full billion gold coins drained away, and the two Guardians came back at full health.
Strictly speaking, resurrecting two level-one-hundred NPCs was anything but cheap.
But for a top-tier guild like Nazarick, which had hoarded an ocean of resources before YGGDRASIL shut down, the cost rounded off to nothing.
So when Mare and Aura reassembled in a swell of light, not a single Guardian present looked surprised. Every face carried the same fanatical certainty, as if this were the natural order of things.
Seeing the two of them still a little weak but otherwise unharmed, the relief spreading through the hall, Ainz let out a long, quiet breath of his own.
'Thank goodness… it seems they don't possess any means of truly deleting NPC data.'
If resurrection still worked, the situation wasn't beyond saving.
Which meant the priority now was pinning down the enemy's true strength.
"Aura. Mare."
Ainz asked softly, "Tell me. What exactly did you run into out there?"
Aura dropped to one knee at his voice. "Lord Ainz, I'm so sorry. We failed you…"
"We were under orders, tailing and observing those Intruder. Just as I decided they'd probably noticed us, and was about to pull out as planned,"
"Mare was crushed outright by gravity that came down out of the sky! I dodged by pure luck, but the space-slash that followed was too fast. I had no time to defend…"
"It slipped completely past your senses and your detection."
"…And it was a space-slash?" Ainz tapped a bone finger against the armrest of the throne and pressed on almost without thinking. "How does it compare to Touch Me's? Was there anything else useful you managed to detect about them?"
Aura bit her lip, her voice heavy. "As far as I could feel it… it was probably a match for Lord Touch Me's space-slash! As for anything else… I'm useless. My apologies, Lord Ainz!"
"They never once showed themselves, from beginning to end."
A prickle crawled across Ainz's bare skull.
If even Aura, the fastest and sharpest-sensed being in the Great Tomb, could be dropped that silently and that easily…
then if it had been him, caught unprepared, he'd hardly have escaped the same fate!
And that was Touch Me's signature technique, the one he could barely beat even fully armed and armored!
Just as the anxiety in Ainz peaked, as he began seriously weighing whether to simply seal every exit of the Great Tomb and turtle up, Aura offered something that almost counted as good news.
"However, Lord Ainz."
"The truth is, at that moment I had a chance to escape using the [Depiction of Nature and Society]."
"But I thought about it. That person is far too great a threat to the Great Tomb… so I gave up on running and activated the [Depiction of Nature and Society], dragging every living thing in that area into the item's space by force!"
At those words, every Guardian, Ainz included, looked at her with solemn respect.
After all, since arriving in this world, Ainz Ooal Gown had never once attempted to resurrect a Guardian of the Great Tomb.
How could Aura's willingness to embrace certain death fail to move them?
"Well done, Aura…"
Before Ainz could give her the praise she deserved, Aura pressed her lips together and added, worried.
"But the one thing I'm afraid of is this. What if the whole thing was a trap, deliberately baiting me into acting?"
"Or… what if that was some ultra-long-range strike we simply can't comprehend, and the caster was never inside the Scroll's range at all?"
"Lord Ainz, what should we do now?"
Ainz's mind raced.
A moment later, cross-referencing the intel he'd pulled from his memory search of Tokinari Tsukishiro, he spoke slowly.
"Whether or not it was the same person, the one who used something resembling a space-slash… I have some impression of him, from that human Tokinari Tsukishiro's memories."
"His name is Chris. He is the strongest of these otherworldly visitors, and according to the intel, he should not currently possess any precise ultra-long-range strike capability."
"As long as he stays sealed inside the Depiction of Nature and Society, more than half the threat to us is gone."
"Aura, your choice was exactly right. I am proud of you."
Just as the mood in the hall eased a little at having trapped the enemy's ace,
Demiurge stepped forward and pushed the glasses up his nose.
"Lord Ainz."
"Since our intel tells us they came here for some so-called 'trial,' and that there is a strict time limit…"
"And since their strongest combatant has already been stripped from the battlefield…"
"Then surely the safest course now is to raise the Great Tomb's defenses to maximum, sit tight in Nazarick and watch, and stall until their time runs out."
"Once they've burned through the clock, freeing our hands to deal with Shalltear's betrayal won't be difficult either."
To Demiurge's surprise, however,
Ainz shook his head and slammed the butt of his staff against the floor.
"Wait?"
"Demiurge, your caution is not wrong. But Nazarick's name was never built on scraping out a living inside a turtle shell!"
Ainz swept an arm out, imperious. "Nazarick's dignity will be insulted by no one!"
"Nazarick only advances. It never retreats!"
At that,
Albedo's eyes blazed.
Demiurge blanked for a beat, then his brain went into overdrive filling in blanks that were never there.
'I see! As expected of Lord Ainz! Shrinking back would only convince these unknown enemies that we are weak and easy prey, and they would harass the Great Tomb again in every trial to come! Only by showing them thunder, by making them hurt, can we win eternal peace!'
Demiurge bowed deeply. "My understanding is shallow. Your foresight leaves me flat on my face in admiration, Lord Ainz!"
But in truth…
The reason Ainz made such an aggressive call was simple, and crude.
It was purely because of Chris's appearance!
The combat power that man had displayed was flat-out illegal!
It had killed off every last shred of Ainz's hope of hiding until the exam ended.
After all, in the memories extracted from Tokinari Tsukishiro, these upper-year students were nowhere near the same overall tier as Chris's year.
If the upper-years were all that existed, Demiurge's suggestion would have matched his own thinking exactly. Stall and be done with it.
But now…
With someone like Chris in the picture, how many more lower-year students might be hiding among them?
True, in Tokinari Tsukishiro's memories,
Chris and his group had destroyed a hundred-and-eighty-point Godzilla by exploiting its weakness. There was a certain amount of cheap trickery involved.
But… a coincidence can happen once. Can it happen twice?
Before that, they had genuinely destroyed a two-hundred-point Darkness Devil!
Ainz Ooal Gown had plenty of pay-to-win items and no shortage of trump cards, but he had never believed himself an invincible being without weak points.
The Great Tomb of Nazarick, for one.
It was the home field that let them fight at their strongest, and by the same token it was their greatest soft spot!
Once the Great Tomb fell…
It didn't even need to fall completely. All it took was letting the enemy slip inside and reduce Nazarick's years of hoarded items, and the coin wealth that kept the guild running, to nothing…
and their resurrection system would no longer be something they could rely on as a matter of course.
And if it turned into a Sekiro run with zero margin for error…
that would be true annihilation.
Ainz decided that rather than waiting on an uncertain future and handing the initiative to someone else, he would strike first.
At the very least, for now, he could confirm the greatest threat, Chris, was sealed inside the Depiction of Nature and Society.
The Great Tomb had to move while this window stood open!
First priority: kill the "Mysterious Merchant" out there peddling items.
Even short of a clean sweep, cutting off this group's ability to upgrade and resupply mid-exam, and grinding down their manpower along the way, would be an enormous bargain.
As for his own losses?
The Great Tomb's treasury covered that, so long as the fighting stayed out of the guild itself.
So long as it wasn't a case like Shalltear's, forcibly seized and turned by some special World Item.
Even if his Guardians died eight or ten times over, with the Great Tomb's wealth he could resurrect them endlessly without so much as a wince.
Of course, whenever he thought of the controlled Shalltear, and of that still-unidentified item capable of controlling a level-one-hundred NPC…
Ainz kept his guard raised to its absolute maximum.
'So if the battlefield is to be set outside the Great Tomb… the magic arrays we prepared around the perimeter might be a fine option.'
Just as Ainz was working carefully through his next tactical moves,
Sebas Tian, assigned to watch Shalltear's movements through a magic water mirror, bowed and reported.
"Lord Ainz."
"Several humans in the same school uniforms as those Intruder are approaching the area where Lady Shalltear is stationed."
Sebas zoomed the image in. "Among them, that old woman in the robe… appears to be issuing some kind of order to Lady Shalltear!"
"She is very likely the one who took control of her!"
The red glow in Ainz's sockets flared to blinding intensity.
He surged to his feet, furious.
"So the rat who's been hiding her head finally deigns to show herself…"
"Shall I trigger the magic traps laid around the area at once?" Sebas asked respectfully.
Ainz nodded without hesitation, killing intent bleeding through his voice. "Naturally!"
"Any act that dares provoke Nazarick must be answered with thunder!"
As Ainz's words fell,
Demiurge, standing at his side, raised a hand and released without a flicker of hesitation the strongest spell he'd been holding ready.
"Tenth-tier magic… [Meteor Fall]!"
At that same moment.
On a stretch of open ground far from the Great Tomb.
Granny Kaire had just taken control of Shalltear through Downfall of Castle and Country and was preparing to give her orders, when something stabbed into Miyabi Nagumo's brain like a needle at the very front of the formation!
His Spider-Sense screamed, the alarm hammering pain through his skull.
He looked up on reflex, and saw the once clear sky replaced by a colossal meteor!
But knowing Ainz held multiple World Items and was himself a max-level mage with a bottomless spell list,
they hadn't been arrogant enough to walk in without preparation.
So apart from a handful of combatants serving as bait,
the overwhelming majority of the group had shadow ninjas hidden in the shadows beneath their feet.
The instant something unavoidable happened, the Dark Shadow Legion would drag them straight into the Kingdom of Shadows and out of harm's way.
As for why Nagumo, Kiryuin and a few others had no shadow soldiers assigned as insurance,
it certainly wasn't that they took Ainz Ooal Gown lightly.
The main reason was that they needed to stay on the front line and personally verify exactly what tier the enemy's destructive power reached.
That would serve as the baseline for every tactic they built afterward.
Except.
Zesshi Zetsumei, who until that second had been utterly unbothered and hadn't spared Nagumo's warning a thought,
looked up and saw the meteor blotting out the entire sky. And even the Slane Theocracy's self-proclaimed invincible godkin went blank with shock.
"Damn it!"
"What— what kind of monster casts magic like that?!"
Zesshi Zetsumei ground her teeth.
The overwhelming sense of imminent death made one thing clear: if she ate that hit head-on, surviving would still leave her half-dead.
Nagumo had no time to spare for her shock.
He crushed the [Pilot-Type Robot] capsule Chris had lent him earlier.
A burst of blinding white light.
Metal bones assembled at high speed around him, coiling into place, finally locking perfectly onto the neural connection ports on the back of his Gorilla Suit.
The next second.
A suit of armor over twenty meters tall stood in the middle of the clearing out of empty air!
Not a moment of hesitation.
He had the robot draw the high-frequency vibration blade at its hip and pushed the energy output to maximum.
It lifted an arm, and a bar of deep-blue sword energy tore straight up at the sky!
"Shhk—!"
Under Zesshi Zetsumei's stunned stare, the enormous meteor split cleanly in two!
Before anyone could feel a flicker of triumph at surviving the first crisis,
the second came right behind it.
Down from the heavens fell the killing move Ainz Ooal Gown cast with his own hands.
Super-Tier Magic… [Falling Sky]!
A top-grade area-attack spell whose power dwarfed [Meteor Fall].
The instant the magic circle spread across the sky,
in the flood of light,
not only the shattered halves of the meteor but the surrounding forest and terrain itself were permanently rewritten.
Zesshi Zetsumei's pupils blew wide.
This time she felt genuine, undiluted terror of death.
She started to shout, to order Granny Kaire to send the controlled Shalltear in as a meat shield.
But before the words could leave her,
Zesshi Zetsumei's movements, and the horror on her face, froze solid in that instant!
And not just her. The burning leaves, the descending beams of light, every last thing in the world dropped into gray, colorless stillness.
Fūka Kiryūin's work, obviously!
Against instantly cast Super-Tier Magic with that kind of coverage,
physical reflexes were useless. Even trying to run, almost nobody beats the speed of light.
Luckily, she had the Stand [The World].
And after evolving by absorbing Darkness Devil flesh, and turning into a spirit through the spirit crystal,
her time-stop limit with [The World] had long since broken the ten-second mark.
Otherwise she'd never have had the leisure to haul out, one by one, the support students the shadow soldiers hadn't yet pulled into the Kingdom of Shadows, along with Zesshi Zetsumei, Granny Kaire and the rest.
As for Nagumo, sitting in his mech…
Fūka Kiryūin glanced at the towering thing not far off and let out a helpless sigh.
"Sorry. You're too big a target, and moving you would waste too much time."
"All I can say is you're on your own… hope you come out okay."
Fūka Kiryūin offered a silent prayer.
Once she'd confirmed everyone who could be saved was clear,
she turned toward Nagumo's position and snapped her fingers.
"Time. Resume."
And so.
Zesshi Zetsumei felt a brief blur pass across her vision, and then she was already outside the Super-Tier spell's blast radius.
By the time she'd struggled back to where they had been standing,
what filled her eyes was blinding white light like a nuclear detonation, packing the entire sky and the entire earth.
But.
After several seconds, the light of annihilation guttered out and the dust thinned.
The Pilot-Type Robot still stood on the bare, blackened ground.
There was no shortage of damage to the frame. The once deep-blue outer plating was scorched black across huge stretches, and flames licked out of the joints.
But after Nagumo ran through a flurry of inputs in the cockpit,
the robot flexed one massive mechanical arm.
Clearly, damage on that scale wasn't nearly enough to stop it fighting.
And that scene,
seen by Ainz and the Guardians watching the whole battle through observation magic from inside the Great Tomb,
was staggering. Unsettling, even.
"How is that possible…"
Albedo covered her red lips in disbelief. "That was Super-Tier Magic, cast by Lord Ainz with any number of amplification spells layered on himself!"
"And it couldn't even land a fatal wound on that hunk of iron?!"
Short of a World Item, that was very nearly the heaviest single blow they could produce!
But fortune and misfortune lean on each other, and this was exactly that.
The Super-Tier Magic had failed to kill Nagumo.
Yet from Ainz's vantage point,
only Nagumo had chosen to tank it, alone at the center of the battlefield.
In a sense, that told him something else. Among these otherworlders, nobody else could take Super-Tier Magic head-on and live!
Furthermore, Nagumo's Pilot-Type Robot had eaten one Super-Tier spell, but whether it could keep eating an unbroken barrage of tenth-tier magic was another unknown.
The weakness had been found.
Which made the tactical choice very simple.
"Do not give them room to breathe!"
Ainz ordered without hesitation. "Burn the guild treasury's paid items at range. Sustained saturation fire!"
"Blanket them, and grind away every last bit of their fighting strength!"
To protect Nazarick, spending some out-of-print, irreplaceable treasures was a price he'd pay without regret!
However.
Just as Ainz steeled himself to bleed his vault dry,
Fūka Kiryūin's side hadn't been idle either.
Or rather, leaving Nagumo out there alone in a mech to soak up fire had been part of the plan from the very start.
With Hiyori Shiina running a god's-eye view and calling out positions,
how could they not know the Great Tomb had already laid traps around Shalltear?
So this seemingly reckless gamble,
beyond giving native NPCs like Zesshi Zetsumei a hard slap of reality and making them recognize how dangerous the enemy was, so they'd cooperate obediently,
was above all a perfect screen for Kiryuin and the others to infiltrate the Great Tomb through the Kingdom of Shadows and strike from inside!
They didn't imagine they'd pull the raid off on the first try, either.
But hitting either of two secondary objectives would make the whole play worthwhile.
First, freeing the Intruder imprisoned inside the Great Tomb.
Second, thanks to Hiyori Shiina's god's-eye view, they had already pinpointed the location of the Great Tomb's item vault.
And if the brainwashed Shalltear could serve as their spearhead…
Fūka Kiryūin figured making Ainz Ooal Gown bleed, badly, wouldn't be difficult at all!
As for this classic feint-and-strike,
the moment Kiryuin's group slipped soundlessly into the Kingdom of Shadows and off the front line's monitoring, Demiurge, who had been coordinating the whole board, caught the tell instantly.
"Lord Ainz, something is wrong!"
Demiurge adjusted his glasses, the very picture of insight.
"Shalltear and those humans who just vanished… the way they disappeared closely resembles the covert method used earlier to spirit away those low-level Intruder."
"I'm certain this is not an escape!"
"I'm afraid they intend to use the front line to draw our attention while they go after something else within the Great Tomb!"
Cold sweat broke out all over Ainz in an instant.
'What… they're raiding our base?!'
He cut off everything he'd been doing, swept an arm out, and let his voice roll through the entire Throne Room.
"Everyone, to your posts!"
"Be ready at every moment to receive these… guests who have traveled so very far!"
"Nazarick shall not be insulted!"
"Yes!"
Led by Albedo, the Guardians answered as one, killing intent boiling off them.
And at that same moment.
Chris, sitting inside the world of the Depiction of Nature and Society,
was on the surface trapped in a cage built by a World Item.
In practice, he'd been watching everything outside the whole time, through a system screen only he could see.
Watching the Great Tomb's crowd fall into disarray because Nagumo had tanked Super-Tier Magic,
Chris shook his head.
"The spectacle really is impressive, I'll give them that…"
"But strip out the instant-death effects and just count raw physical destruction,"
"and it's kind of nothing special?"
After all, in the Bone King's setting,
apart from World Items that touched the level of laws, and Super-Tier Magic that demanded enormous preparation time,
there wasn't a single wide-area damage skill capable of genuinely reshaping terrain for kilometers around.
Even Mare, hailed as the Great Tomb's finest at large-scale terrain destruction,
couldn't, in the original work, manage to wipe out one backward medieval city in a single shot.
If you really wanted to be strict about it,
destruction on this scale might not even match a single mouthful of Godzilla's Atomic Breath.
Mostly they propped up their reputation with flashy skill mechanics and pay-to-win gear.
Even the Bone King's "Death Finale" magic, in the side story against the Rotting Coffin Dragon Lord,
only wiped out the layer of zombie armor wrapped around the Dragon Lord, the part counted as a living body.
It never actually one-shot the thing.
Still, a mechanics monster is a mechanics monster.
Apart from Fūka Kiryūin, who had the immortality granted by the Darkness Devil,
the rest of them, without any resurrection gear, really would struggle to resist the Bone King's instant-death magic.
"But with Shalltear, the melee heavyweight who hard-countersthe Bone King, helping them pin him down and deal damage…"
"Nagumo's odds of winning a gang-up on the Bone King are actually pretty good?"
After all, in this real world,
in the middle of a furious fight, Ainz couldn't exactly split his attention to resurrect fallen Guardians the way a player would in a game.
And if a Guardian got focused down alongside him, no other Nazarick NPC held the authority to bring them back.
So in this world,
fate unknown was as good as dead, wasn't it?
Chris was analyzing the situation at his leisure when Hiyori Shiina, watching through the Mirror World's god's-eye view, shifted her gaze to him and spoke.
"Chris-kun…"
"President Nagumo and the others have already opened their first exchange with Ainz Ooal Gown."
"…Are you really not going out to help?"
Chris shook his head.
He gazed off at the deliberately simulated thunderstorm zone lying not far ahead of him.
"Me staying in here is actually the better outcome for them."
"They dragged me into the Depiction of Nature and Society, and then made no further move at all."
"Which means… they can't get a read on my strength, so they plan to simply use the item to seal me in here until I die."
"They're too wary to come in and face me head-on."
"But if I walked out now, sure, they'd gain my firepower out there, and the enemy would get to keep recycling this Scroll."
"And if it ends up being used purely to carve the battlefield apart and pick us off one by one…"
"Come find me once you actually notice things going bad out there."
"I intend to take control of this Depiction of Nature and Society first."
Hiyori Shiina fell silent for a while.
Rationally she understood that Chris's judgment was the optimal play, but the worry still coiled in her chest.
She let out a soft sigh and asked, "Will there really be enough time? Finding an escape route ought to take quite a while…"
Chris laughed quietly and lifted his wrist, showing off the Controller panel.
"Relax, Hiyori."
"This Controller cost me forty S Points, and it's probably the best investment I've made so far."
"It actually maps out the Depiction of Nature and Society' escape routes for me!"
"It can't predict what trials and traps I'll hit along the way. But a clear direction is more than enough for someone like me."
Chris tipped his head back, confident. "Soon… just give me a little more time."
"Right. How are Nanase and Hayasaka doing over there? Did the withdrawal go smoothly?"
Hiyori Shiina reported gently, "They're perfectly safe. They've already gone through the Mirror World to Miss Liana…"
"They're picking out items for self-defense right now."
At that, Hiyori Shiina said nothing more.
She swiftly shifted her viewpoint to where Kiryuin and the others were, and passed along Ainz's decisions and Chris's concerns in exhaustive detail.
And Fūka Kiryūin, already inside the Great Tomb with the World Item [Saint-Slaying Spear] Nagumo had bought in her hands, gave her red lips a slow lick.
Far from discouraged by Chris's absence, she broke into a grin of pure excitement.
"Since our junior Chris trusts us this much…"
"Then as his seniors, we absolutely cannot let the little guy down!"
— End of Chapter —
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