Roy had spent a full thirty years laying the groundwork for this day.
From the moment he was reborn into this life, he’d lived with constant care.
A life like that was never as easy as it looked.
Roy had learned to enjoy solitude, and could endure loneliness better than anyone.
Just as Arthur had once said, Roy could hold out thirty years for a single goal.
What kind of ambition, what kind of hunger, did that take?
The Sigma family only ranked as lower-to-mid-tier among the elite, but compared to ordinary people, the temptations on offer were beyond imagining.
If Roy had just been willing to throw money around, he could easily have lived a life of decadence, drowning in wine and women.
His third brother, tens of billions of dollars in debt, still swapped girlfriends weekly.
And Roy, eighth son of the Sigma family, had still been a thirty-year-old virgin before the crossing.
A genuine wizard, in every sense.
Because he knew exactly what had happened to Fifth Brother, who’d stolen someone else’s girlfriend, only for the boyfriend, a hacker, to hijack a robot and put a bullet through his skull.
In a way, it had all been Second Brother’s own scheme; Fifth Brother hadn’t even known the woman already had a boyfriend.
Though, knowing the Sigma family’s usual standards of decency, he might well have enjoyed it regardless.
So Roy had turned down every temptation the outside world offered, and became something of a legendary shut-in within the noble circles.
Set against the Immortal class’s staggeringly long lifespan, what was a mere thirty years of patience?
Barely a blink of time.
That was exactly the kind of ruthless discipline Roy had.
Even though he counted the Great Cat Kingdom’s resistance members as genuine friends, he felt no rush to go find them.
With an Immortal’s lifespan stretching out ahead of him, that was something he could do at any time.
So he simply gave Eve a single instruction and went right back to familiarizing himself with his own body and classes, working through them methodically from low to high.
First up was Armed Merchant, a fairly pure life-skill class, the kind players used mainly to shuttle goods between worlds and turn a profit.
The one thing worth mentioning about it was a trait called Armed.
It let a player equip nearly any gear at all and still receive the full equipment bonus.
The logic being, a merchant out on the road needed to be able to pick up a weapon and defend himself.
In Yggdrasil, though, this counted as a genuinely garbage choice.
Yggdrasil’s whole class-building philosophy always favored specialization over being a jack-of-all-trades.
Take the spellcasting system, for example: casters split into Arcane, Faith, Spirit, and Other disciplines.
Try to learn classes from all four schools at once, and none of your casting tiers would ever climb very high.
Even at level 100, you still wouldn’t be able to cast Super-tier Magic.
The same held true for weapons.
Shalltear, for instance, had Valkyrie (Spear), while Certain-Death had Degraded Valkyrie (All-Rounder).
Even without the degraded version, that all-rounder build still wouldn’t have matched the raw combat boost Shalltear got from specializing.
So why, then, was Brynhildr, the strongest of the thirteen granted by Roy’s Valkyrie’s Hall of Heroes, built as Valkyrie (All-Rounder)?
Because she’d been built off a boss template, not a player one.
No telling how many players had seen Brynhildr’s all-rounder build and copied it themselves, only to fall straight into that trap.
But Roy was still perfectly satisfied with Armed Merchant.
It meant he could wield any artifact at all and still get its full effect.
Ainz, on the other hand, couldn’t do that.
Without a warrior class, he couldn’t normally use any warrior-type gear at all, and had to rely on switching through Perfect Warrior instead.
That kind of mid-combat switch took a non-trivial amount of time, and could occasionally open up a fatal gap.
In the original story, Shalltear lost to Ainz partly because of his full set of divine gear, but also, frankly, because she was genuinely careless, letting Ainz stall for time again and again.
Roy obviously wasn’t about to bank on every enemy being as careless as Shalltear.
In real combat, he kept swapping weapons to sharpen his own combat instincts, and managed to give Kagura Inori some genuine trouble because of it.
But that was as far as it went.
The gap between them in close combat was simply too wide.
Roy’s class build fell, by rights, under Caster: Other.
Not unlike the Specialization category in Hunter x Hunter’s Nen system.
Anything that didn’t fit the first three categories got lumped into Other.
A caster with unimpressive stats and next to no real experience had no realistic chance of beating World City’s own Undefeated Ghost-Deity in a straight brawl.
Kagura Inori held herself well back, handling him with room to spare, and could even point out the wasted motion in his weapon switches, helping wake up his body’s own muscle memory.
It was true, much like how Ainz’s own combat instincts had sharpened somewhat after a handful of fights in the New World.
The new body granted by crossing over already carried a certain dormant combat awareness of its own.
All he had to do was absorb it through actual fighting.
Even so, before any rigorous training, Ainz had embarrassed himself plenty of times in combat.
Take, for instance, the original story’s fight between Ainz and the level-31 Wise King of the Forest, where he took a hit from its tail straight to the back.
Characters like Gazef Stronoff and Brain Unglaus in the original story never had especially high levels, and yet they were genuine powerhouses in their own right.
A warrior forged through a thousand trials was never quite the same as someone who’d struck it rich overnight.
That was the real gap between them.
It was as if Roy had swallowed some fruit of destiny whole, and was now digesting it bit by bit, until it dissolved completely into him.
A crack.
Under Kagura Inori’s training, Roy could feel himself closing in on his own ceiling for close combat, and fast.
At the very least, he wouldn’t go down easily anymore.
However much power you actually held, your combat strength would match it, once the two were properly aligned.
To keep from getting bored, Roy kept switching up the content of his training.
Once he’d gotten a solid feel for Armed Merchant, he quickly moved on to his second class: Gold Dominator.
This one was interesting in its own way.
It came with a special skill: control over gold.
It sounded a bit like Magneto, or maybe closer to a Devil Fruit user with power over gold.
He could manipulate gold of any kind to launch attacks on an enemy.
In particular, he had the Incredible Golden Orb, which he could summon at will to unleash all kinds of attacks.
Kagura Inori took it upon herself to advise him:
“Almighty, if you liquefy it, you could try coating your weak points, or even fabricate false openings to lure an enemy into attacking.”
“As for a standard combat approach, you could bury gold underground and skewer an opponent in an instant.”
Kagura Inori’s combat experience ran deep enough to keep sharpening Roy’s fighting strength without end.
With the right mechanics behind him, Roy really could obliterate Kagura Inori outright.
But he had to account for one scenario: what happened when the mechanic itself failed.
Plenty of mechanic-dependent bosses turned into a complete joke the instant their mechanic stopped working.
Roy had cashed in the mechanics themselves, sure, but he couldn’t afford to rely on them alone.
If a mechanic ever failed, he needed to be able to just grab a weapon and go toe-to-toe with the enemy.
That was exactly where Kagura Inori’s value came in.
Before long, he’d gotten a solid handle on Gold Dominator’s abilities too.
Roy skipped past World Merchant, World’s Richest Man, and Chronicler, and moved on to training with Observer.
Observer, by its nature, didn’t really call for much training at all.
Its whole core was about lowering his own presence.
Ainz had a ninth-tier spell, Perfect Unknowable.
Its effect was to completely erase the caster’s sound and presence, detectable only by someone with a Thief-type class’s perception.
Roy’s own Observer carried a similar effect.
When he activated Observer’s trait, others found it genuinely difficult to sense he was even there.
It looked, on the surface, like a wasted, garbage class choice, but it actually hid a real effect underneath.
Specifically, it lowered an enemy’s chance of landing a hit at all.
Untargetable.
On its own, that reduction wasn’t especially significant, but fortunately, Roy had an artifact for it.
The Incredible Combat Cloak.
Wearing it let him activate a stealth trait, making him extremely hard for an enemy to target at all.
In other words, a good number of Kagura Inori’s attacks against him simply missed outright.
What Roy actually wanted to test was exactly how that kind of “miss” would play out under real-world conditions.
Trial after trial, Roy kept building a solid foundation for real combat.
The same went for Space Traveler, Fate Chanter, and Time Observer.
The training carried on.
***
As time wore on, even Kagura started to feel the strain.
As the arena’s own undefeated ghost-deity, months of straight fighting wouldn’t normally have laid a finger on her body.
But Roy was different.
She had to stay fully alert the entire time, guiding His Majesty’s combat experience across every possible angle.
Teaching, not actual fighting.
Which drained Kagura Inori far more than any ordinary battle would have.
But this glorious task, serving the Almighty directly, wasn’t something Kagura Inori was willing to hand off to anyone else.
Even if it meant fighting to the death.
Another three days and three nights of fighting wouldn’t have been a problem at all.
Instead, Roy simply said:
“Let’s call it here for today.”
“I need to bathe and change.”
“Huh?”
Kagura Inori froze, stunned, only to find Veronica already waiting nearby.
“Master, the bath is ready.”
“The water’s exactly the right temperature.”
When did you even have time to prepare that?
Kagura Inori’s jaw dropped, unable to believe it.
Veronica said, with more than a hint of superiority:
“His Majesty’s training could branch into a hundred different possibilities.
Being ready for every single one of them is what a truly competent subordinate does.”
You still have a long way to go.
I alone am the Almighty’s finest subordinate.
Not even Eve can match me on this.
As Roy headed off toward the bath, Veronica trailing close behind, Kagura Inori was left standing there with an expression of pure frustration.
Dammit.
Next time, there’s no way I’m losing this one.
The arena’s little contest had ended in Kagura Inori’s defeat.
***
World City, the Bath
Roy actually had plenty of scrolls on hand, including magic specifically meant for purification.
It wasn’t really meant for everyday bathing, though.
It was for countering attacks from monsters like slimes.
Aberrant races tended to rely on filth, corrosion, potent poison, and every manner of similar attack.
Purification magic was meant for that kind of situation.
Still, Roy preferred to relax the old-fashioned way, in a proper royal bath.
After all, he’d always known how to enjoy life, even back in his old one.
Give anyone a few million dollars a month in living expenses, and they’d figure out how to enjoy themselves fast enough.
Roy soaked in the hot spring while Veronica knelt beside him, giving him a massage.
Want.
Wanted it badly.
Wanted it desperately.
Wanted it more than anything.
Master.
Would you like your servant to attend you tonight?
Whatever manner you prefer.
Fierce, or gentle.
Would you like it as dessert after the meal, or as the main course itself?
Veronica, the vampire race’s highest tier and bearer of the God Ancestor bloodline, wanted for nothing more than to be the World King’s bedchamber maid.
Much as she longed to go further, a Perfect Maid had to keep her own desires carefully hidden.
Everything deferred to her master’s wishes.
Her own desire could only ever exist in step with his.
Roy wasn’t in the mood for that right now.
He let out a long breath, easing the mental fatigue of the day.
The bath itself was soothing, charged with a certain suggestive tension, genuinely stirring.
Roy let himself enjoy Veronica’s attentions, and within moments, every trace of physical and mental exhaustion had melted away.
Her massage technique was flawless, leaving him feeling almost weightless.
Who else got to be waited on by the highest tier of vampire there was?
In that regard, at least, the title of World King was well earned.
Roy dozed off for a short while, until Eve’s message came through.
“Almighty, the first intelligence report has been fully compiled.”
“Shall I report it right away?”