Roy had an absurd thought.
Ainz had fought tooth and nail through hardship after hardship to become unrivaled under heaven.
And then some massive dragon dropped out of the sky and, with a single breath attack, sealed him right inside the Great Tomb.
Roy tried to keep watching for a moment longer, when the dragon, as if sensing something, stirred awake from its slumber.
A roar!
There was no atmosphere on the moon, and yet its roar rippled outward through pure magical force.
In an instant, dust kicked up across the lunar surface, and the whole world shook without end.
Its stats were sky-high, unfortunately for it, but it still couldn’t see through to the World-tier item’s true location.
Who’s spying on me?
The dragon roared in fury, and when a stray meteorite came hurtling in from beyond, a single breath attack obliterated it completely.
This was the absolute confidence of something standing at the very top of the food chain.
Roy made an instant decision:
“Shut it down, now!”
Eve cut the All-Seeing Eye instantly.
The sensation of being watched vanished.
The dragon looked genuinely confused.
Somewhere deep down, it had sensed an intelligent presence watching it, and yet it had come up with nothing.
Was that just its imagination?
The dragon let out another roar, its mana sweeping outward across thousands of miles all at once, the true tyrant of this territory.
Still nothing.
Fine, then.
It would wait.
The enemy would show itself eventually.
The dragon grumbled a couple of times, then lay back down to rest, feigning sleep, waiting for its enemy to appear.
Except, thanks to Roy’s special skill, Time Observer, he’d already caught the dragon’s follow-up reaction.
Time Observer!
Right before shutting down the All-Seeing Eye, Roy had activated the special skill.
Now that was genuinely surprising.
Crossing over onto the moon was one thing.
Actually running into something sitting right at the door was another.
Was this the Dragon Emperor?
Or something else entirely?
Roy asked at once:
“Eve.
Did you get any readings on it?”
Eve answered immediately:
“Almighty, the dragon measures over thirty thousand meters in length, and its vitality is off the charts.”
“Even measured against a world boss’s HP pool, it’s an existence that far exceeds the standard.”
“There’s an extraordinarily powerful force contained inside its body.”
“A lot of the craters we saw weren’t caused by meteorite impacts at all.
They were caused by energy beams.”
“Judging by the mana fluctuations, its destructive power should sit above Super-tier Magic.”
“The fact that it could sense the All-Seeing Eye at all means it holds a World-tier level of standing.”
“That said, it never actually pinpointed World City’s location, which suggests it doesn’t have any comparable ability.
It can’t find where we are.”
“If we intend to destroy this dragon, we’d need to gather every elite from all nine cities at minimum, and even I would need to shift into War Fortress mode ahead of time.”
“The Almighty would also need to have World-tier items ready, to guarantee a decisive victory.”
“World City stands a real chance of winning that fight.”
“But I don’t recommend going to war right now.”
“Our intelligence is severely lacking, after all.
There could easily be many more powerful enemies in this world.”
Eve wasn’t underestimating the enemy.
For dragonkind, size meant strength.
A body thirty thousand meters long was off the charts even among giant beasts.
Fully extended, this dragon’s body ran roughly thirty kilometers.
For reference, the largest aircraft carriers ran about 314 meters in length. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
Which meant the dragon was as long as a hundred aircraft carriers lined up end to end.
A genuine colossus.
Roy knew the True Dragon Lords included one especially massive entity: the Heavenly Dragon Lord.
But the Heavenly Dragon Lord just flew through the sky.
Nobody had ever said it lived on the moon.
Besides, if the Heavenly Dragon Lord were really this size, the Platinum Dragon Lord wouldn’t be considered the strongest of the dragons.
Roy tried to recall dragons from legends in his past life, and even those were rarely anywhere near this big.
A dragon this size could double as a warship in Stellaris.
Wait.
Don’t tell him this was an Ether Drake.
Stellaris featured a certain space creature, one that could cross the void between stars and was capable of destroying entire planets.
In Stellaris, the Ether Drake was set at around forty kilometers long.
The size matched.
It was entirely possible.
Ainz’s whole power system had grown out of D&D, mixed with a dash of Cthulhu Mythos and mythological systems from cultures all over the world, a real hodgepodge, plus all kinds of mechs on top of it.
So it made perfect sense that something beyond comprehension might exist out in space.
Everything Roy had planned for before had stayed confined to the continent, and even in Ainz’s own original timeline, most of it never left that northwestern corner.
The whole continent hadn’t even been fully explored yet, let alone space itself.
The Eight Greed Kings had ruled the continent only briefly before their downfall.
Could their enemy have come from the sky?
An idea took shape in Roy’s mind, and he spoke at once:
“Eve’s right.
There’s no need to pick a fight with it before we’ve gathered enough intelligence.”
“Have the Governors stay on alert, and use the All-Seeing Eye around the perimeter of all nine cities.”
“If the area comes back clear, no enemies nearby, then send out Laplace’s Demon.”
“Steer clear of the dragon, and map out this planet’s geography instead.”
“At the same time, get the research team working on the basic physical parameters of this world.”
“Gravitational acceleration, the gravitational constant, the speed of sound, the speed of light, all of it.”
“As you command, Almighty!”
Eve immediately set the plan in motion, gathering every scrap of intelligence she could.
Roy let out a long breath, a little put out.
Sure, the crossing had gone smoothly, and he’d gained real power, but there wasn’t a moment’s peace to be had.
Going by the original story’s logic, where you landed after crossing over had something to do with the nature of your guild.
Ainz Ooal Gown was an undead guild, so it had ended up somewhere near the Plains of the Undead.
Roy was the World King.
Earth itself apparently couldn’t contain him, so he’d crossed straight onto the moon in one go, and run straight into something unlike anything ever seen before.
Whatever it was had extremely sharp senses.
Something as blatant as the All-Seeing Eye’s naked stare risked bad consequences, so better to switch to something subtler, Laplace’s Demon, and try that instead.
Not that Roy had any interest in throwing down against some unidentified creature the moment he arrived in a new world.
He needed to find the critical intelligence first.
The nine Governors’ reports hadn’t come in yet, and with Eve sent off on her own tasks, his personal maid, the Crimson Attendant Veronica, could barely wait to serve her master:
“Master.
Your orders.”
“Your most devoted servant is ready to head out at any moment, to probe the dragon for intelligence, or carry out an assassination, whichever you prefer.”
If Eve handled matters of state, then Veronica was the head maid, steward of daily life, the perfect attendant.
Her combat power wasn’t especially high.
Her build leaned mostly toward life-skill classes.
Only someone as absurdly resource-rich as Roy would ever burn a level-100 NPC slot on building a fully realized household steward like this.
Name: Veronica Capasia
Race Levels:
True Ancestor: LV10
God Ancestor: LV5
Class Levels:
Perfect Maid: LV15
All-Purpose Butler: LV10
Divine Attendant: LV5
Shadow Dancer: LV15
Dancer of a Thousand Faces: LV10
Assassin: LV15 Read this novel at novelping.com for the best experience.
Master Assassin: LV10
Night Terror: LV5
Race levels: 15.
Class levels: 85.
Total: level 100.
Roy wasn’t a power-maximalist.
He was a collector of rarities, and in that respect he and Ainz were alike: he’d rather gather up more rare species than dump everything into raw combat power.
In Yggdrasil, a vampire’s true form was genuinely hideous, a mouth bristling with needle-like fangs, limbs like some alien bloodsucking leech.
Roy liked Shalltear’s gothic-loli look well enough, but he couldn’t really stomach the true form underneath it.
So he’d deliberately modeled things after the original story’s own nation-toppling loli, Evileye.
According to the side material, Evileye carried both True Ancestor blood and a degraded strain of God Ancestor blood.
If not for her insufficient level and a mistaken build path, her growth potential wouldn’t have fallen short of Certain-Death’s at all.
So Veronica’s core backstory was this: a human who crossed paths with a vampire God Ancestor, was turned into a vampire True Ancestor, and finally, with Roy’s help, destroyed the God Ancestor and claimed its bloodline for herself.
This wasn’t something Roy had made up out of nothing, either.
Yggdrasil actually had a matching quest for it: the God Ancestor Cain Abel quest line, which rewarded the class-change item God Ancestor Blood Soul.
Except that particular God Ancestor bloodline wasn’t especially strong, so even players who obtained the class-change item usually never bothered using it.
Shalltear, for one, had actually had the chance to take on God Ancestor blood and never bothered, sticking to just the Vampire and True Ancestor races instead.
That was a common approach in the game.
Simply stacking races and classes on top of each other didn’t make you strong.
The right build did.
The vampire race had three tiers.
Vampire, True Ancestor, God Ancestor.
And it turned out God Ancestor had the worst cost-to-value ratio of the three.
Which was exactly why Shalltear had never unlocked the God Ancestor bloodline.
But Roy didn’t see it that way.
Because the New World’s rules weren’t necessarily identical to the game’s.
A higher-tier bloodline should, in theory, be stronger regardless.
And even if it wasn’t, well, she was just a maid anyway.
And so Veronica came to be: a perfect maid with every service skill maxed out, and the noblest ancestral bloodline the vampire race had to offer.
Beyond that, Veronica also stayed by Roy’s side as a bodyguard, guarding against anyone who might resort to underhanded assassination attempts.
The top-tier Assassin class, Night Terror, came with a special skill: Shared Fate, dragging an enemy down alongside you.
Veronica wanted to use Shared Fate to assassinate the Space Dragon on Roy’s behalf.
After all, she was carrying the World-tier item Blood Oath of the Erinyes.
There was a real shot at trading one life for another.
World City could always bring her back afterward.
The Space Dragon looked like a pure stat-monster, and Roy had countless mechanics of his own to deal with exactly that kind of threat.
But Roy shook his head:
“No.
There’s no rush to assassinate it right now.”
“The dragon isn’t an immediate threat.
Provoking it now would only bring bad consequences.”
“Come with me to the arena on the Sixteenth Heaven instead.”
“Yes, master.”
Veronica gave the order at once, instructing the arena to prepare a welcome.
World City was divided into thirty-three levels in total, drawn straight from the Thirty-Three Heavens of the celestial court.
Some floors had traps with real character to them.
The Sixteenth Heaven, for instance, ran on a one-on-one duel mechanic.
Any player who wanted to clear this floor had to face the guardian NPC in a straight one-on-one duel.
Nobody was allowed to interfere with that one-on-one fight.
Otherwise, the Arena King’s trap would trigger.
The guardian NPC’s numbers would multiply on the spot, and keep multiplying, until whoever interfered was wiped out.
As far as the mechanics Roy had put in place went, this one actually counted as one of the fairest and gentlest.
Roy wasn’t sure whether this particular pay-to-win trap even still functioned, but he headed to the arena anyway, to test out the abilities now at his command.
Even if it eventually came down to war with the dragon, he’d need to master these abilities first.
Start with Kingdom-Toppling Silver Bullet.