“Ruler of the world, Almighty of World City, Your Supreme Majesty, please forgive your servant’s tardiness.”
Roy had only just arrived at the arena, hadn’t even had a chance to start testing anything, when the guardian of the Sixteenth Heaven, master of the arena, the undefeated War God Kagura Inori, flashed into view right in front of him.
She dropped to one knee, visibly wracked with guilt.
Before Roy could even answer, Veronica cut in with a reprimand:
“Kagura, you’re at fault here.
As administrator of the Sixteenth Heaven, one of World City’s key officials, you failed to be here waiting the moment I sent word.”
“What if the dragon had attacked just now?
What then?”
As All-Purpose Butler, Veronica could reach anyone in World City at any moment, and used that to relay Roy’s orders.
The moment Roy mentioned the arena, she’d notified Kagura at once, only Kagura had still been carrying out Eve’s first order, finishing up the overall alert status, and had completely forgotten how fast Roy’s teleportation actually was.
Instant travel.
By the time she rushed to appear, Roy had already teleported in successfully, and as far as Veronica was concerned, that was nothing short of dereliction of duty.
Far too disrespectful toward the Almighty.
“Yes.
Please, Lady Veronica, punish me as you see fit!”
Kagura Inori offered no excuse at all, but Roy waved a hand and said:
“My teleportation magic isn’t something any of you can match.”
“Just remember it for next time.
No punishment needed.”
Veronica couldn’t help herself:
“The Almighty is far too generous.”
“A dragon is sitting brazenly right outside World City’s front door, and a guardian couldn’t even manage her own time properly.”
“It’s simply unacceptable.”
Roy had no interest in undercutting Veronica in front of everyone, so he just smiled and said:
“Nika, you should start up a training program for them going forward, teach them what they need to know.
No need to be so hard on her.”
“I can see the arena’s traps are already active, and security’s already running its alert duties.”
“They just can’t juggle tasks the way you can, Nika.”
Veronica’s real gift was that, around the clock, she could sense exactly what Roy needed at any given moment and provide it.
That was a capability none of his other NPCs had.
What Roy really wanted was for his different NPCs to share skills with one another, and break past the level-100 ceiling entirely.
That way, the tens of thousands of NPCs he’d built would become a force that kept on growing.
Say, for instance, Roy went to the Hunter x Hunter world, and had every single one of them learn Nen.
That would be a force even more terrifying than the Chimera Ants.
Roy had no intention of ever fighting alone.
He fought as an army.
Veronica flushed slightly, delighted:
“Thank you for the praise, Almighty.
I’ll give it everything I have, teaching them properly how to serve you.”
Roy smiled and nodded:
“Good.
That settles it.”
“Kagura.
No punishment.”
“Open up the hardest arena setting, right now.”
“Yes, Your Majesty!”
Kagura Inori rose to her feet, her pair of demon horns catching the light, and quickly activated the strongest barrier available, wrapping the entire arena in it and switching out the terrain.
Kagura Inori was one of the very few in World City with a genuinely devout dedication to the martial path.
As guardian of the Sixteenth Heaven, she ranked among the top hundred even in a World City packed with masters.
Name: Kagura Inori
War Ghost: LV15
Mara: LV10
Class Levels:
Internal Qi Monk: LV15
External Qi Monk: LV10
Qigong Master: LV5
Martial King: LV10
Fist Saint: LV10
War God: LV5
Gladiator: LV10
God of the Arena: LV5
Asura: LV5
Race levels: 25.
Class levels: 75.
Total: level 100.
She was a pure combat build, a formidable gatekeeper-tier NPC, sporting a pair of demon horns and belonging to an extremely rare race: the War Ghosts.
An unusual race, born straight out of the battlefield.
They were the restless spirits of dead soldiers, whose battle-hungry hearts kept them tethered to the mortal world, transforming them into ghosts, hence War Ghosts.
Unwilling to move on, War Ghosts kept their ferocious fighting strength intact, and eventually banded together, one by one, to form the Land of the Dead.
The Land of the Dead’s commander, or rather, its single most exceptional War Ghost, was known as a Mara.
Kagura Inori was exactly that kind of War Ghost.
This was a class buried deep in the game’s hidden content.
A War Ghost could only be born on a battlefield where at least a million lives had died, and a player had to defeat one before the race unlocked at all.
That’s right, Roy had unlocked the War Ghost race right inside World City itself.
There’d been no other way to obtain it.
In terms of raw individual stats, War Ghosts and Maras weren’t dramatically stronger than Dragonkin.
Kagura Inori’s racial stats gave her only a slight edge at best.
What actually let her surpass a Dragonkin martial monk was her devotion to the martial path and her sheer hunger for combat.
World City had plenty of special classes that demanded brutally strict conditions to unlock.
God of the Arena, for instance, required a hundred thousand arena victories to obtain.
Even a player utterly obsessed with dueling would find that achievement almost impossible to reach.
Kagura Inori had earned that supreme honor purely off her record on the test server.
Roy looked over Kagura Inori’s data as she finished activating the strongest arena setting and bowed:
“Almighty, everything is ready.”
The largest arena setting came with its own small pocket dimension, sealing all power inside it perfectly.
Roy had no reason to worry about anything leaking out.
Activating this arena, though, did require one condition.
Two combatants had to actually fight before the arena’s rule-based power would formally kick in, though either side could surrender outright at any point.
Roy didn’t hold back.
He fired Kingdom-Toppling Silver Bullet straight at Kagura Inori.
Five, four, three, two, one!
The moment the countdown hit zero, the one billion gold coins Roy had readied vanished in an instant.
Countless magic circles bloomed across the sky above the arena, drinking in that massive haul of gold and forging it into terrifying projectiles.
Gold was one of the lowest-resistance materials for channeling magic, letting mana flow through it without significant loss.
Which was exactly why spellcasters loved gold and silver just as much as anyone else.
It was the magical world’s own hard currency.
Roy’s mind wandered for a moment, mulling over just how important gold seemed to be in every world he could think of, while the golden shells rained down with terrifying force.
They auto-targeted, locking onto the enemy.
Kagura Inori’s face lit up with excitement.
Come on, then.
She actually stood her ground at the center of the arena to meet that terrifying storm of gold, and yet it looked almost like dancing, weaving to dodge every bit of damage she could.
The golden shells rained down one after another, blasting the whole arena into a field of countless craters.
A full-power strike from Kingdom-Toppling Silver Bullet could level an entire town.
The whole dueling ground was blasted into a cratered mess, and remarkably, Kagura Inori actually managed to dodge through that hail of fire, keeping the damage to an absolute minimum.
Good.
The skill’s cast time was still on the long side, but Roy could burn through the casting window in an instant using his cash-shop items.
His own mana hadn’t dropped at all either, which meant his best-suited skill still carried its special properties intact.
All it cost was gold, and it could hit an opponent from every angle at once.
What was even more pleasantly surprising: all those golden shells stayed right there on the arena floor instead of vanishing, unlike how the game had worked.
Which meant Roy could recover most of that gold.
He wasn’t burning a full billion coins for nothing every time he used the skill.
Likewise, the skill’s actual destructive power had changed too.
In the game, Kingdom-Toppling Silver Bullet’s damage output had always been a fixed value.
There was some room for player skill, sure, but no player could ever literally dance their way through the gold shells to minimize the damage.
The whole reason Roy had come to the arena to test it out on Kagura Inori was to confirm exactly this.
An absolute king of the arena, a once-in-a-generation combat prodigy.
She could spot the opening in any skill there was.
There was no way this was some new online game, or even a brain in a vat.
Kagura’s speed alone made that impossible.
She could cover a hundred meters in a mere 0.03 seconds, more than enough to dodge every kind of golden shell coming at her with ease.
“Kagura.
How much HP did you actually lose?”
“Reporting, Your Majesty.
Roughly a quarter.”
Sure enough, a real chunk taken out.
Roy had run this experiment on Kagura before.
If she hadn’t managed to break free of Kingdom-Toppling Silver Bullet’s attack pattern at all, she’d have lost roughly a third of her HP.
Kagura Inori was an undefeated ghost-deity, comparable to Sebas in some ways, though her specialization ran along a different path.
Speed was her real strength.
HP and defense were never where she shined.
And yet, in actual New World combat, she could take four full hits and still stand.
For context, Albedo, the Great Tomb’s defense specialist, could withstand the strongest attacks at least three times, which counted as a special mechanic in her own right.
That didn’t mean Kagura Inori’s defense actually outstripped Albedo’s.
It meant dodging itself had become a factor with real, measurable weight.
Damage was no longer uniform.
In the game, a large-area skill’s damage value had generally stayed fixed.
You’d never see damage drop just because you dodged around inside the effect zone.
But reality didn’t work that way.
The same knife stabbed into the heart versus stabbed into an arm produced dramatically different damage.
As World City’s strongest War God, a living legend of the fighting arena, Kagura Inori was best positioned of anyone to dodge damage mid-combat.
Anyone who tried applying pure game experience straight onto reality was in for a rude awakening.
Roy could feel the surging power inside his own body, and yet he couldn’t command it with anywhere near Kagura’s precision.
Because when his NPCs crossed over, they instantly became genuine powerhouses, built on the game’s own design plus every scrap of combat experience their AI had distilled.
Forged through a thousand trials, tempered a hundred times over.
Roy, on the other hand, wasn’t like that.
Like Ainz, all he’d really done was cash in the power sitting behind his game account.
Which meant his first priority had to be turning all of that borrowed power into something genuinely his own, as soon as possible.
I need real combat.
A lot of it.