“Hey, hey, Wizardess! Do you think we’ll have to fight our way through similar stuff than we did in the classification round?”
“...I’m not sure, but it won’t be weird if we do.”
“Haaaa… No! I don’t want to! I hate it! We were lucky to survive that invasion, but who knows what’ll happen now! I only want to face normal enemies! Battle my way through lots of powerful enemies until we find the core and crush it! Like this! Wah! Hyah!”
Barbarian swings her axe around as if she were fighting an invisible enemy.
“But I don’t want to fight tricky enemies! Hey, Wizardess, don’t you have a way to solve it?”
She looks at me with expectant eyes and a puppy face. But she’s taller than me, so the puppy face doesn’t work.
“How many times do you have to ask the same thing… No, I don’t. Maybe we will find them, and maybe we won’t.”
“It, it can’t be…!”
She drops to the floor as she releases a desperate cry. I put my hand on my face in exasperation.
This Barbarian… Why’s she always behaving like a musclehead? She isn’t like this in real life, but she turns into a lost cause when she starts roleplaying…
I turn to look at Rogue, but he avoids my gaze by covering his face with the hood. The same happens when I look at Druid.
“Don’t look at me, it’s only you who knows how to reign her in.”
“I must add I hated that dungeon invasion too. I hope they don’t have too many monsters with poison resistance this time, or I’ll be quite useless…”
Why do you always leave this stuff to me? Sometimes, being the leader is too much of a hassle… I sigh.
“Ue, ua, haaa!”
Now, she’s making annoying sounds as she rolls on the floor.
My eyebrows twitch. You’re doing this on purpose, am I right? It’s a good thing I know how to make her stop.
“Barbarian, can you stop behaving like a child?”
“I don’t want to! And I’m not a child!”
I snort. “If you don’t stop, you’ll lose the chance to fight some enemies when they come…”
“Enemies? Where are they!? Bring them to me!”
Hoh, less than a second. It took her less than a second to recover from the mental collapse.
Look at her, wildly swinging her giant axe around as if nothing happened… You only need to say something about fighting enemies and she changes from a complete slob to an unstoppable killing machine.
She keeps looking around, searching for the ‘enemies’ I mentioned. And when she realizes there aren’t any, she furrows her brows and crosses her arms.
“Liar!”
“Call me whatever you want. It was the only way to stop you.”
Luckily, Rogue interrupts this useless conversation, and Barbarian focuses on the new topic.
“I know you said I was the most important asset in this fight, but you won’t leave me alone, will you? I don’t want to face those traps and random monsters by myself…”
Rogue is worried about his job in this match.
As the party’s scout, he’s usually in the most dangerous position, but this time is doubly so because he’ll work as bait too. It’s easy to understand why he’s worried even if I already told him we will be close to him all the time.
“When have we abandoned any of our members? Don’t worry, we’ll save you if they catch you! Also, we need you alive for our plan.”
“Yeah! We never abandon any of our own! I’ll beat anyone who tries to harm you!”
“I… I’ll do my best.”
He pats his chest, relieved.
“But still… I’m not sure your plan will work. Attacking all together and leaving the defense to the mobs… the more I think about it, the more doubts I have.”
“Really? You doubt my plan?” Rogue cowers at my question. He knows I don’t like to change plans after deciding upon one. “But you know my plans almost always work… Ok, I’ll listen to you if you have another idea, and I’ll adjust the plan accordingly.”
“N-no, no. It’s fine! I just wanted to make sure…”
“Are you ok with it? We can still make some changes.”
“Y-yes, I’m sure!” He enthusiastically nods.
Yeah, I already knew you didn’t have a better idea in mind. You’re just afraid of going into that dungeon, which might be full of random stuff, after we watched their replays.
“I don’t know if our monsters are going to defend the dungeon properly or not, but I sure feel relieved about going with the four of us together.” I think we all agree with Rogue. “It’s weird not being with you in a dungeon invasion…”
“Yeah! It was weird not having you nagging all the time at what I do!”
Barbarian laughs. Rogue and Druid look at me and her alternatively, not sure what to say.
“...”
Stop! Stop yourself, Wizardess! Don’t say anything about how many times you got a headache due to her impulsive roleplay during this tournament only because you weren’t there to stop her!
“Well, I too prefer moving with you all. This way I can better control everything you do.” I put extra emphasis on the ‘you’.
“Good for you, who’ll be together! But I’ll have to scout ahead, alone, and also try to bait the enemy…”
Rogue complains, saying he’s the only one who’ll have to be alone during this match.
But everyone knows he only does it because of his character and doesn’t really mean it, so we ignore him. It also isn’t completely true.
“You know we’ll be close by.”
“I know, but still…”
“Ok, ok… Don’t complain anymore, we decided to do it like this when we were planning the match, it’s too late to make big changes now.”
Maybe I should motivate them a little.
“When the tournament ends, we’ll return to our usual playing sessions where only we four, maybe with some support mobs, invade a dungeon together and roleplay. Look forward to it!”
They all display happy faces at my words.
We started to play this game to do some actual dungeon-delving roleplay, after all. Participating in the tournament was my whim. I wanted to show everyone how great my character is, and how great my plans are!
“But now, let’s focus on this match. I watched all their matches and came up with a good plan, I believe. We don’t need to play harder, but smarter.”
“I like playing smarter! The less effort I have to put into something, the better!”
Druid laughs at his own stupid joke.
“I don’t know about playing harder or smarter, but I like fighting harder!”
“Yeah, yeah, we know…”
I pat Barbarian’s shoulder a few times. Sometimes, the best course of action is to ignore the fools, or those that behave like one, and keep moving forward.
“...”
Rogue acts like he’s too cool to say anything, standing some meters away, with his arms crossed and his back touching the still inactive dungeon portal.
He likes to roleplay the ‘cool guy’, but then he sometimes breaks his own character by whining about something, like what he was doing before: whining about being the scout.
“10, 9, 8…”
The countdown until the match starts appears in everyone’s vision.
“Enough fooling around! We must focus now! I’m talking to you, Druid!”
“I know, I know… Uaaaaam!”
He stands up and slowly stretches, raising his arms up and then to the sides as he yawns. Until now, he was laying on the ground.
“Is everyone ready? Remember to follow my orders, and everything will be fine!”
Everyone nods and turns to the dungeon portal. At the same time, the countdown ends and the portal activates.
The match has started, but we don’t do anything yet. We’re waiting to see what the other team does first.
“Lily, I still think we should go and attack! Look, there’s nothing on the other side of this portal!” Clara raises her tentacle-fist high up and swings it to add emphasis.
Since we started to plan this match, she has insisted on going on the offense. It seems like, after defeating Makarel (or Marta, our older sister), who was the best player in this tournament, she doesn’t fear anything anymore.
“And I told you it’s too dangerous! They have one of the best players when it comes to planning the matches, it’s too dangerous to go without knowing anything!”
“But there’s nothing! We can go into it and invade their dungeon!”
“I said we’ll wait here for them to come! Don’t try to go alone!” Laura is forced to grab Clara before she can rush into the enemy’s dungeon. Hah, how childish.
How good it’s you and not me… I would hate to touch her champion so early in the match… Gross! Disgusting!
But you stopped her in my stead, so I have to thank you for it. Not like I’ll actually say it.
“Hey, look! Here they come!”
We all turn to look at where Ricard is pointing and we can see the Rogue guy sneaking into our dungeon.
At the same time that we look at him, he turns in our direction and immediately searches for an object to hide from our sight. An easy thing to do because of this room’s design.
“Awww… Here it goes our chance to know what he’s doing… Do you think he’s alone?”
“I’m not sure…”
It’s Laura who answers my question. In this match, we’re going to rely on her to take the decisions. She’s the one better suited when we are against another strategist-type player.
“See, Lily? This is why I say we go into their dungeon! If we don’t know about the enemy’s plan, we better strike first!”
“And I told you to wait!”
Clara struggles to get free from Laura’s grasp. How ironic it’s the other way around than you would expect given their champions.
“Mad Rat, do something, please!”
“Lemon, stop it! We decided on following Lily’s plans in this match, remember…?”
“Ok…”
Clara finally stops struggling and lowers her head. I’m not sure if she did it to get my attention or if she really wanted to invade the enemy’s dungeon.
“There he goes!”
Once again, it’s Ricard the one who calls for our attention. We look where he’s pointing and see the Rogue cross the passage and hide behind the next laboratory rack.
“Oh, come on! Why is he so careful!? Make some mistake already!”
Ricard elbows me before shutting me up. “You know they aren’t noobs at this. They might be the hardest opponents we have faced if we exclude Makarel…”
He’s clearly implying I should stop behaving like this. But I can’t! It’s part of the roleplay!
“Maybe we should hide ourselves too, so he doesn’t know where we are, or what we’re doing the next time he pops out of his hiding place.”
Laura says we should hide, to not give extra clues to the enemy. A good idea! Though you should have said it from the start… because now he already knows we’re all here.
…it’s a shame I didn’t think about it before he spotted us. It was a perfect chance to show my amazing leadership skills! And I lost this chance…
Let’s say something random to distract me from my shame. Oh, I know!
“Oh, right! Good idea! Nobody can play hide-and-seek better than me! Hahaha!”
We follow her instructions and find a place to hide. The next time the Rogue looks here, he won’t be able to spot us.
Oh, I almost forgot. Let me explain a little more about our current situation.
First of all, we’re in this extremely big room full of water canals, a labyrinthic layout, and lots of laboratory stuff that prevent anyone from moving freely. Yeah… It’s the same as my first boss’s room, except there’s no Minitaur Queen here.
The room’s also bigger than the one in my dungeon. In fact, it’s the only room we have in this match. We decided to use a single gigantic room, with three valid paths, one from each portal to the dungeon core.
In this way, we, who know the layout - unless we forget, we’ll see about it - have the advantage and can ambush them when and how we want. We also have enough time to look for a chance because the core is quite far away from any of the entrances.
Oh, and there aren’t moving platforms to cross the water canals either! They’re kind of random, so we couldn’t use them for this match because they could make the rule of ‘one path to the core for each portal’ invalid.
Under Laura’s suggestion, this time we’re focusing first on defense. We’ll wait for a chance to strike, kill one or two of them, and then… we’ll counterattack! We’ll put everything into attacking their dungeon and winning the match!
Well, attack with everything and everyone… except for Laura and a few mobs, who’re going to stay to defend the dungeon.
Basically, we’re going to use the home advantage to win the edge in this battle, and then switch who’s attacking and defending. Only that, by then, we’ll be ahead of our opponents and our victory will be assured!
It certainly isn’t something that goes with what we usually do, but Laura insisted on it. She said there was no way to secure the win with random stuff because of the Wizardess, and that we must have a solid plan.
Ah, how good it would be if the four of them come together… now that everyone knows I have the Grand Finale skill, there’s no need to hide it anymore, so I can use it freely. And if the four of them come, I can blast them at the same time with a little bit of luck!
I tremble in excitement when I imagine it.
I’ll redeem myself from the previous match’s failure, in which I blew myself up but didn’t achieve anything!
Tremble and fear me! The human nuke is going to strike again!
“Fufufu…”
I can’t stop myself from chuckling. Laura looks at me with a worried expression when she hears me.
“...are you ok?”
“Yes, yes… Just ignore me.”
Of course, I continue to chuckle, imagining our victory thanks to my Grand Finale skill.
Maybe, if we heeded Clara’s persistent insistence to invade the enemy’s dungeon, the result of this match would have been a lot different.
“Hey, hey, Wizardess! Do you think we’ll have to fight our way through similar stuff than we did in the classification round?”
“...I’m not sure, but it won’t be weird if we do.”
“Haaaa… No! I don’t want to! I hate it! We were lucky to survive that invasion, but who knows what’ll happen now! I only want to face normal enemies! Battle my way through lots of powerful enemies until we find the core and crush it! Like this! Wah! Hyah!”
Barbarian swings her axe around as if she were fighting an invisible enemy.
“But I don’t want to fight tricky enemies! Hey, Wizardess, don’t you have a way to solve it?”
She looks at me with expectant eyes and a puppy face. But she’s taller than me, so the puppy face doesn’t work.
“How many times do you have to ask the same thing… No, I don’t. Maybe we will find them, and maybe we won’t.”
“It, it can’t be…!”
She drops to the floor as she releases a desperate cry. I put my hand on my face in exasperation.
This Barbarian… Why’s she always behaving like a musclehead? She isn’t like this in real life, but she turns into a lost cause when she starts roleplaying…
I turn to look at Rogue, but he avoids my gaze by covering his face with the hood. The same happens when I look at Druid.
“Don’t look at me, it’s only you who knows how to reign her in.”
“I must add I hated that dungeon invasion too. I hope they don’t have too many monsters with poison resistance this time, or I’ll be quite useless…”
Why do you always leave this stuff to me? Sometimes, being the leader is too much of a hassle… I sigh.
“Ue, ua, haaa!”
Now, she’s making annoying sounds as she rolls on the floor.
My eyebrows twitch. You’re doing this on purpose, am I right? It’s a good thing I know how to make her stop.
“Barbarian, can you stop behaving like a child?”
“I don’t want to! And I’m not a child!”
I snort. “If you don’t stop, you’ll lose the chance to fight some enemies when they come…”
“Enemies? Where are they!? Bring them to me!”
Hoh, less than a second. It took her less than a second to recover from the mental collapse.
Look at her, wildly swinging her giant axe around as if nothing happened… You only need to say something about fighting enemies and she changes from a complete slob to an unstoppable killing machine.
She keeps looking around, searching for the ‘enemies’ I mentioned. And when she realizes there aren’t any, she furrows her brows and crosses her arms.
“Liar!”
“Call me whatever you want. It was the only way to stop you.”
Luckily, Rogue interrupts this useless conversation, and Barbarian focuses on the new topic.
“I know you said I was the most important asset in this fight, but you won’t leave me alone, will you? I don’t want to face those traps and random monsters by myself…”
Rogue is worried about his job in this match.
As the party’s scout, he’s usually in the most dangerous position, but this time is doubly so because he’ll work as bait too. It’s easy to understand why he’s worried even if I already told him we will be close to him all the time.
“When have we abandoned any of our members? Don’t worry, we’ll save you if they catch you! Also, we need you alive for our plan.”
“Yeah! We never abandon any of our own! I’ll beat anyone who tries to harm you!”
“I… I’ll do my best.”
He pats his chest, relieved.
“But still… I’m not sure your plan will work. Attacking all together and leaving the defense to the mobs… the more I think about it, the more doubts I have.”
“Really? You doubt my plan?” Rogue cowers at my question. He knows I don’t like to change plans after deciding upon one. “But you know my plans almost always work… Ok, I’ll listen to you if you have another idea, and I’ll adjust the plan accordingly.”
“N-no, no. It’s fine! I just wanted to make sure…”
“Are you ok with it? We can still make some changes.”
“Y-yes, I’m sure!” He enthusiastically nods.
Yeah, I already knew you didn’t have a better idea in mind. You’re just afraid of going into that dungeon, which might be full of random stuff, after we watched their replays.
“I don’t know if our monsters are going to defend the dungeon properly or not, but I sure feel relieved about going with the four of us together.” I think we all agree with Rogue. “It’s weird not being with you in a dungeon invasion…”
“Yeah! It was weird not having you nagging all the time at what I do!”
Barbarian laughs. Rogue and Druid look at me and her alternatively, not sure what to say.
“...”
Stop! Stop yourself, Wizardess! Don’t say anything about how many times you got a headache due to her impulsive roleplay during this tournament only because you weren’t there to stop her!
“Well, I too prefer moving with you all. This way I can better control everything you do.” I put extra emphasis on the ‘you’.
“Good for you, who’ll be together! But I’ll have to scout ahead, alone, and also try to bait the enemy…”
Rogue complains, saying he’s the only one who’ll have to be alone during this match.
But everyone knows he only does it because of his character and doesn’t really mean it, so we ignore him. It also isn’t completely true.
“You know we’ll be close by.”
“I know, but still…”
“Ok, ok… Don’t complain anymore, we decided to do it like this when we were planning the match, it’s too late to make big changes now.”
Maybe I should motivate them a little.
“When the tournament ends, we’ll return to our usual playing sessions where only we four, maybe with some support mobs, invade a dungeon together and roleplay. Look forward to it!”
They all display happy faces at my words.
We started to play this game to do some actual dungeon-delving roleplay, after all. Participating in the tournament was my whim. I wanted to show everyone how great my character is, and how great my plans are!
“But now, let’s focus on this match. I watched all their matches and came up with a good plan, I believe. We don’t need to play harder, but smarter.”
“I like playing smarter! The less effort I have to put into something, the better!”
Druid laughs at his own stupid joke.
“I don’t know about playing harder or smarter, but I like fighting harder!”
“Yeah, yeah, we know…”
I pat Barbarian’s shoulder a few times. Sometimes, the best course of action is to ignore the fools, or those that behave like one, and keep moving forward.
“...”
Rogue acts like he’s too cool to say anything, standing some meters away, with his arms crossed and his back touching the still inactive dungeon portal.
He likes to roleplay the ‘cool guy’, but then he sometimes breaks his own character by whining about something, like what he was doing before: whining about being the scout.
“10, 9, 8…”
The countdown until the match starts appears in everyone’s vision.
“Enough fooling around! We must focus now! I’m talking to you, Druid!”
“I know, I know… Uaaaaam!”
He stands up and slowly stretches, raising his arms up and then to the sides as he yawns. Until now, he was laying on the ground.
“Is everyone ready? Remember to follow my orders, and everything will be fine!”
Everyone nods and turns to the dungeon portal. At the same time, the countdown ends and the portal activates.
The match has started, but we don’t do anything yet. We’re waiting to see what the other team does first.
“Lily, I still think we should go and attack! Look, there’s nothing on the other side of this portal!” Clara raises her tentacle-fist high up and swings it to add emphasis.
Since we started to plan this match, she has insisted on going on the offense. It seems like, after defeating Makarel (or Marta, our older sister), who was the best player in this tournament, she doesn’t fear anything anymore.
“And I told you it’s too dangerous! They have one of the best players when it comes to planning the matches, it’s too dangerous to go without knowing anything!”
“But there’s nothing! We can go into it and invade their dungeon!”
“I said we’ll wait here for them to come! Don’t try to go alone!” Laura is forced to grab Clara before she can rush into the enemy’s dungeon. Hah, how childish.
How good it’s you and not me… I would hate to touch her champion so early in the match… Gross! Disgusting!
But you stopped her in my stead, so I have to thank you for it. Not like I’ll actually say it.
“Hey, look! Here they come!”
We all turn to look at where Ricard is pointing and we can see the Rogue guy sneaking into our dungeon.
At the same time that we look at him, he turns in our direction and immediately searches for an object to hide from our sight. An easy thing to do because of this room’s design.
“Awww… Here it goes our chance to know what he’s doing… Do you think he’s alone?”
“I’m not sure…”
It’s Laura who answers my question. In this match, we’re going to rely on her to take the decisions. She’s the one better suited when we are against another strategist-type player.
“See, Lily? This is why I say we go into their dungeon! If we don’t know about the enemy’s plan, we better strike first!”
“And I told you to wait!”
Clara struggles to get free from Laura’s grasp. How ironic it’s the other way around than you would expect given their champions.
“Mad Rat, do something, please!”
“Lemon, stop it! We decided on following Lily’s plans in this match, remember…?”
“Ok…”
Clara finally stops struggling and lowers her head. I’m not sure if she did it to get my attention or if she really wanted to invade the enemy’s dungeon.
“There he goes!”
Once again, it’s Ricard the one who calls for our attention. We look where he’s pointing and see the Rogue cross the passage and hide behind the next laboratory rack.
“Oh, come on! Why is he so careful!? Make some mistake already!”
Ricard elbows me before shutting me up. “You know they aren’t noobs at this. They might be the hardest opponents we have faced if we exclude Makarel…”
He’s clearly implying I should stop behaving like this. But I can’t! It’s part of the roleplay!
“Maybe we should hide ourselves too, so he doesn’t know where we are, or what we’re doing the next time he pops out of his hiding place.”
Laura says we should hide, to not give extra clues to the enemy. A good idea! Though you should have said it from the start… because now he already knows we’re all here.
…it’s a shame I didn’t think about it before he spotted us. It was a perfect chance to show my amazing leadership skills! And I lost this chance…
Let’s say something random to distract me from my shame. Oh, I know!
“Oh, right! Good idea! Nobody can play hide-and-seek better than me! Hahaha!”
We follow her instructions and find a place to hide. The next time the Rogue looks here, he won’t be able to spot us.
Oh, I almost forgot. Let me explain a little more about our current situation.
First of all, we’re in this extremely big room full of water canals, a labyrinthic layout, and lots of laboratory stuff that prevent anyone from moving freely. Yeah… It’s the same as my first boss’s room, except there’s no Minitaur Queen here.
The room’s also bigger than the one in my dungeon. In fact, it’s the only room we have in this match. We decided to use a single gigantic room, with three valid paths, one from each portal to the dungeon core.
In this way, we, who know the layout - unless we forget, we’ll see about it - have the advantage and can ambush them when and how we want. We also have enough time to look for a chance because the core is quite far away from any of the entrances.
Oh, and there aren’t moving platforms to cross the water canals either! They’re kind of random, so we couldn’t use them for this match because they could make the rule of ‘one path to the core for each portal’ invalid.
Under Laura’s suggestion, this time we’re focusing first on defense. We’ll wait for a chance to strike, kill one or two of them, and then… we’ll counterattack! We’ll put everything into attacking their dungeon and winning the match!
Well, attack with everything and everyone… except for Laura and a few mobs, who’re going to stay to defend the dungeon.
Basically, we’re going to use the home advantage to win the edge in this battle, and then switch who’s attacking and defending. Only that, by then, we’ll be ahead of our opponents and our victory will be assured!
It certainly isn’t something that goes with what we usually do, but Laura insisted on it. She said there was no way to secure the win with random stuff because of the Wizardess, and that we must have a solid plan.
Ah, how good it would be if the four of them come together… now that everyone knows I have the Grand Finale skill, there’s no need to hide it anymore, so I can use it freely. And if the four of them come, I can blast them at the same time with a little bit of luck!
I tremble in excitement when I imagine it.
I’ll redeem myself from the previous match’s failure, in which I blew myself up but didn’t achieve anything!
Tremble and fear me! The human nuke is going to strike again!
“Fufufu…”
I can’t stop myself from chuckling. Laura looks at me with a worried expression when she hears me.
“...are you ok?”
“Yes, yes… Just ignore me.”
Of course, I continue to chuckle, imagining our victory thanks to my Grand Finale skill.
Maybe, if we heeded Clara’s persistent insistence to invade the enemy’s dungeon, the result of this match would have been a lot different.
