Chapter Three

  Ulbert couldn’t resist. It wasn’t part of the spell. Nobody could hear him but himself. It was utterly pointless. It was useless. It wouldn’t mean anything to the beastmen down below who gawked up at him while he hovered in the air, laughing as the ball of demonic energy grew larger and larger as it hovered above his hand. But still.

  He said it.

  “Kamehamehaaaaa!” He shouted and launched the whorling ball of magic energy down the company of beastmen. This was the fourth group in a week. And still nobody had survived even a middle tier attack. Nobody survived to even let the others know there was danger.

  But as the group below fell screaming and writhing, trying to cast off dark energies that wrapped around them like tentacles and melted away the flesh from their bones and turned the ground black with death… it wasn’t hard for Ulbert to figure out that the Beastmen knew that something was going on.

  ‘Entire units don’t go missing without somebody catching on eventually.’ He reasoned, and they were definitely trying to figure out what it was.

  The companies he’d encountered were now fewer in number, most had at least one magic caster, and they were more spread out. Sometimes for a day or two, Ulbert would even linger in place, invisible until someone came to check out what happened to the group to go silent, and eliminate them too.

  ‘If I really want to try something out though, I should attack a city… try some advanced magic, maybe summon up a group of demons. Ohhh… yes… yes yes yes!’ His goat tail wiggled a little, ‘I wonder if there are any humans left in there?’ He pondered, there was a city not far from here, at least not far in terms of flight. He could reach it within minutes.

  ‘I wonder what the human survivors have been saying?’ That question was yet to be answered, but at most, if not all of his visits to the beastmen, there had been at least a handful of human survivors, sometimes more, by now word had spread that ‘the game has changed’. It wouldn’t mean anything to the locals, but if an Yggdrasil player heard it? ‘It might get them to seek me out.’ Though whether that was good or not would depend on the player. ‘It’s fairly unlikely that we’ll end up murdering each other, but even so… of course if I ended up here, maybe the others?’

  It was impossible to know.

  So hints it was and he’d worry about the details later. His wings beat against the air and he inhaled the scent of freshness, cleanliness, within an unpolluted world while he raced toward his first large target. [Aspect of the Devil, Greater Astral Claws] He activated his skill as soon as he came within range, and paused in midair while those beastmen set to the previously dull task of guarding it against assault, lost their minds and called for aid, their wild gesticulations were the opposite of fierce. If anything, the only word that came to mind for him was ‘Pathetic.’

  “Die, worms!” He roared and slashed his hand down in a single sharp gesture, for a moment nothing happened. ‘Did it not work or…’ His brief doubt was shattered a moment later as great wide dark beams shaped like claws ripped through the stone walls like a hot knife through butter, and they shattered with the same ease a child had in kicking over a sandcastle.

  The stones crumbled and beastmen screamed until their screams were cut off beneath the wave of rubble.

  The cries that died were replaced by fresh, living ones as beastmen rallied to the scene, first thinking some disaster struck, until they saw the goat-headed demon in his black and red cloak, and knew that while a disaster had struck… it wasn’t of the natural sort.

  Ulbert stretched out his hand and pointed toward the path within the city. [Summon minions] He said, and down below, a hoard of imps mounted on hellhounds appeared. There were few, only a hundred or so, more than there should have been by Yggdrassil rules, but that difference aside, he estimated their level to be about twenty-five or thirty, while the beastmen seemed to average about level twelve, with their only real advantage being racial bonuses to strength, dexterity, or both. Plus their natural armor, claws, and teeth. Strong opponents for a novice player, fodder for anything else.

  But they did look very fierce.

  “Kill.” He said, and the hellhounds howled and imps cried out in glee as they charged toward the opening he made for them. They could have been summoned just inside the wall if he wished, but… Ulbert mentally shook his head. ‘There’s just something so much cooler about watching them charge into a breach in a wall…’

  Flesh and fur flew with screams of pain and a rain of blood while the sky above began to rumble as if it were applauding Ulbert’s slaughter. The first drops of rain didn’t fall until after the desperate attempt to plug the gap in the wall began to crumble. ‘They are brave, I will give them that.’ Ulbert acknowledged the courage of the beastmen as they tried to win by drowning the imps and hellhounds with their own blood, desperate clawing, biting, scratching, one after another giving their life to reduce the invaders by even a fraction of their strength.

  ‘Getting my hands dirty over and over isn’t really the sort of thing I should be doing personally… but I do want to try some more magic…’ As he toyed with what spells to use, he picked out individual targets. A lionman fell with a wail as his blood caught fire inside his body.

  A cheetahman tried and failed to ignore the pain as his tail began to burn and his entire body became like a candlewick for a flame that no magic they had could extinguish.

  As the rain intensified and the thunder rolled, one spell came to mind, the very reason he was considered a World Disaster, and what made him one of the most dangerous players in Yggdrasil. [Grand Catastrophe] [World Disaster] [Melt] he cast the supertier spell and circles of bright blue whorled around him as the moments of waiting ticked by, the spell would take time to cast, but it didn’t matter. There seemed to be no players capable of interrupting him, let alone threatening him.

  The pouring rain turned pools of blood into little rivers that ran between the cobblestones, following the little downslopes wherever they led, and then the spell was done.

  The impact of the spell on the beastmen wasn’t quite immediate, but it was close, as they struggled to form new defensive positions, wearing down the invaders by weight of numbers in a fight they would inevitably win if their courage held… for all the good it would do them, they bore up under the rain. It was a mere annoyance.

  Until it wasn’t.

  The drops began to burn and hiss like acid against the flesh as Ulbert’s power, to create disasters in the world, manifested itself and the rain burned through fur, flesh, and even eyeballs where they struck.

  The storm of rain was now closer to a storm of arrows that the beastmen could not bear. Screaming only opened their mouths to take the rain in there too. Tongues and teeth began to dissolve, and they turned to flee for shelter. However it wasn’t a light rain, it was a storm, and every raindrop was a fresh wound deepening the one the last raindrop before it struck. As feet and legs dissolved down to the bones and bodies lost the means to flee, the wounded fell in droves, howling at the cruel sky as their bodies melted while they were still alive.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Ulbert looked around, the storm was spread far, far beyond the city itself, and this would be happening everywhere this single storm hung. A twinge of guilt came over him, ‘Animals and humans caught in this won’t be better off… but it won’t last, at least. And as long as they can get to cover, it will be fine.’

  The slaughter storm lasted until the last drop fell and the sun finally peeked through the clouds as the dawn began to rise. And only then did Ulbert project his voice over the city and call out, “Those who emerge, those who survived the night, emerge from where you are hiding, and I will permit surrender! Anyone still hiding, they will be hunted by my demons until none remain. You have three minutes to decide, and gather in the city center!”

  It did not take the full three minutes. Though he did cut them a little slack, as they gawked at the bones of their comrades. It was funny, in a way. Almost no corpse was completely defleshed, rain after all, didn’t really care, so there were bodies with chunks still clinging to bones and others that were half defleshed, and half intact as they died before getting all the way undercover. Perhaps if they were lucky, passing out from the pain rather than enduring it all.

  There were fewer than sixty surviving beastmen, mostly of predator races, most of them with deep wounds, missing eyes, burn marks that went deep into the flesh… they were the ones who fled early, or for whom safety was closer at hand than it was for others.

  Ulbert lowered himself, but did not land on the ground, he floated toward them instead, they bowed their heads, their former pride was gone from them, their tails, those who had them, drooped. “You will leave this Kingdom. You will return to your own land. You will tell your comrades that if I’m still finding beastmen in this Kingdom in one month, my next stop will be your capital city. And that will only be the first one I visit.”

  “Now go. Run. Run far. Run fast. And never let me see you again!” Ulbert bellowed and pointed toward the gate, he privately muttered his astral claw spell again, and the far gate shattered into rubble, opening a path to the east for those who gave in.

  The beastmen scrambled to flee, even those who limped to surrender, managed to muster a run for their lives now that they were sure they had them back, and they were unwilling to risk the loss again.

  That left only two problems for Ulbert. He looked over his shoulder, out of the hundred pairs that were summoned, there were thirty remaining, “Go, hunt down all remaining beastmen in this city, and when you find humans, release them and tell them that their savior is in the center of the city.”

  The pairs scattered, the sharp noses of the hellhounds made the work quick and easy, surviving beastmen who remained in hiding, died where they hid, whether it was inside the sewers, or under beds or stairs, or other places that had failed to hide the human occupants before them.

  And a few at a time, humans began to trickle into the center of the city to meet their rescuer.

  Always Ulbert told them the same thing. “Go elsewhere, and tell all that you meet, that ‘The Game Has Changed.’

  “So what exactly do we know about this ‘Game Changer’ hero?” Queen Draudillon asked while she drummed her fingers on the council table. “He hasn’t sent any request for a reward. Nor has he taken over territory. He seems to have no interest in anything but hunting beastmen.”

  “With respect, My Queen, isn’t that good?” Her minister of war asked, “We’ve begged the gods for a hero to rescue us, we begged our neighbors for aid, we even considered reaching out to the new Sorcerous Kingdom for help. Now we have it, and we want to look a gift horse in the mouth?”

  “My father used to say that if you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, you end up with a lot of hard mouthed horses in your barn.” The Queen said and stopped drumming her fingers, her hand lay flat on the table while the other rested in her lap. “If we had a clear motive for all this, we’d at least know how to respond, what gift to offer… what reward… but we could just as easily take this for a new threat as a new ally. After all, if one man can drive off the entire beastmen army by himself? What can we deny him?” The Queen asked, and the question, for her, had a very personal dimension to it.

  Until the coming of the Game Changer, her nightmares flitted between the beastmen barging into her castle, and that pervert leering at her and telling her to lie on her back in her child form. No matter which way she turned, she and her country were fucked.

  But then in the last month… the beastmen drew back, fled, or died. Sometimes there were bodies remaining, other times there was nothing but a blackened area of dead ground or a crater… but when she had witnesses from human rescues, they described the absurd.

  ‘A goat headed demon said ‘The Game Has Changed’ and thus he’d gained the name, ‘The Game Changer’. But what exactly he meant remained a mystery.

  Her historians and bards spent weeks tearing through records to find out if he was an ancient spirit, or a summon, or a monster with a history in her land, or any land, and found nothing. Drawings of him depicted absurdly flashy black and red clothing, a top hat, a goat head, sharp claws, and sometimes great bat wings, while other times, not.

  While he hadn’t harmed any humans, rescuing them seemed to be an afterthought, and he showed no other care for them beyond liberating them from their cages and passing on his cryptic message. Questions from adventurers were no more illuminating.

  And all the Draconic Queen felt with each new accomplishment and each new unanswered question about the Game Changer, was an increasing level of frustration and anxiety.

  But on the other hand?

  Since the first full city was freed and well over a thousand humans were allowed to go free, he’d been dubbed a saint by some, and a new god by others.

  And more importantly… The beastmen really did start to pull back. No new raids were reported in the better part of the last week. “Whatever this one wants, maybe we just have to be patient, wait for him to finish what he’s doing and then he’ll come to us?” Draudillon suggested it with a tentative hope.

  “Perhaps, your Majesty… perhaps. But please,” her war minister suggested, “take just this one moment to be happy… we prayed for a miracle, we got one, it’s alright to be happy about that much.”

  And for the first time in the better part of a year, the Queen let her lips form a smile.

  Ainz looked back on saying his farewell to Neia Baraja. It was a surprise that she hadn’t actually chosen to go with him, but with her eyes lit up with fanatical devotion… to a degree that reminded him too much of the guardians, he had a distinct feeling she would be very busy on his behalf where she was.

  The whole plan that Demiurge had enacted was a troubling experience from start to finish. But even so, at least it was over. Just what he planned to do about that troublesome paladin, or the devoted archer, he could only guess. But for at least a little while, he could rest and relax, leaving the business of managing those affairs to Demiurge and Albedo.

  And for once, he was right. Still, he tried to do the proper thing and read over the reports that were brought to him. The one called Philip made Ainz’s skin absolutely crawl. ‘But he was the one Hilma chose as a tool, and Albedo approved it, so it must be right… even so…’ He shivered, the whole air about the man, even in writing, just screamed ‘slime’.

  It was for that reason that he set those notes aside as soon as possible and instead read other reports, it had become his habit lately to read things brought by observers and other sources ‘before’ Demiurge or Albedo could turn them into formal reports, and these little bits and pieces of information were kept smuggled into place where they wouldn’t be noticed amidst the other stacks on his desk.

  In this way, whenever they got the original copies and turned them into their own formal reports, Ainz could ask preprepared questions that made him seem more insightful, or ‘guess’ things about them before they were said, thus keeping up his image as an all knowing and competent boss.

  For the most part, this worked quite well, they would marvel at his deductive skill and he had some risk free ‘good boss points’ from them both. But this time… he was given pause.

  ‘The Game has Changed? The Game Changer? Burning rain, fire… a goatman demon…’ The one drawing was crude, but the descriptions were spot on.

  ‘Ulbert Alain Odle… could that really be you?!’ Ainz wondered as a wild hope flared in his breast. It wasn’t impossible. At least as far as he knew. ‘I ended up here, why not others?!’

  That was the rub in the nubbin, how he’d come to be here meant he had no idea if it was possible that the others would as well, logged on or not, or it might not be him, just his ‘avatar’? It was a question that often haunted the mind of Suzuki Satoru, ‘Am I myself in my game Avatar, or am I just a remnant of the player, and the real me either died in his chair or got up and went about living my… his life, oblivious to the transference of a copied mind to this body?’

  The question was unanswerable, but that didn’t stop it from keeping Ainz staring up at the ceiling at night when he was alone and lying on the bed in his room.

  This, however, did change everything, or maybe it did… if it was him. ‘I’ll have to make this a priority one investigation… I just need a proper excuse…’ And that thought was one that would keep Ainz quite busy up until he saw Albedo again.