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“So the attackers are undead… What kind of monster is leading them? You went and found out, right?”

Riley had gone scouting per Kerry’s orders. These girls had truly become reliable.

“Yeah. I’m not sure exactly what race it is, but it was a skeleton that seemed completely different from Deas or Sieg. If I had to guess, it was something good with magic. It had a twisted staff and a dirty robe.”

The popular fantasy monster types that came to mind were liches and wights. Rare already had wights in her army, but she had never seen one in the wild. A magic-specced one would probably have high INT, and if it also survived from that ancient kingdom, then it might be willing to negotiate.

“Nah, it doesn’t seem that smart… Every night, it just has all the skeleton minions charge straight at the town, so it’s probably not thinking anything at all. Although, sometimes there are some skeletons mixed into the charge that seem weirdly good at fighting, so maybe it’s more clever than we think.”

“Weirdly good?”

“Yeah. Ones that specifically target the guards from this town and not the sellswords who are ‘players.’ There are a bunch of them, but whenever our group or the players try to fight them, they run away first, so none of them have been killed yet.”

That wasn’t something a commander who only ever ordered their troops to charge would come up with. Nor are some mindless NPCs going to deviate from their directives for no reason. In which case, they were probably monster players. She hadn’t met any other than Blanc yet, but if there were more than a few of them, then they were probably working together for the event.

Rare could probably get them to cooperate with her, but the more she expanded her network the higher the risk of information leaks. Blanc knew about her being the demon lord, but she had promised not to tell anyone. Plus, she still didn’t know the one piece of information Rare was most afraid of revealing: the fact that NPCs could learn to access their inventories. Compared to that revelation, how to get the [Subordinate] skill was worth nothing.

“Well, as our story goes, the only people here in this town are four beastkin players with no connection to the catastrophe, so you don’t need to make contact with them. I’m not uninterested in those players who are efficiently earning XP here, but that’s what this event was meant for in the first place. Riley, would you be able to defeat the monster leader by yourself?”

“Should be no problem with a surprise attack. During the day, its minions are mostly all underground, and the leader just rests in the shade of some trees, it doesn’t go hide in a cave or anything.”

Rare was almost certain that this undead mage wasn’t a player. If they were, then they should have been logging out in a safe zone. Even someone with too much time on their hands wouldn’t spend an entire day just sitting under a tree in a game.

“In the meantime, I’m curious where those undead players go. If you just search blindly for them, though, they might catch on to you first. So yeah, near the end of the event, in about five days, go take out the undead leader during the day. You don’t have to stay in this town anymore after that, so you can take Kerry and the others with you too. Once that’s settled… Hakuma and Ginka are already heading to the volcano, so you guys can go back to the great forest for a bit.”

“Understood.”

“Contact me after you’ve beaten it. Until then, just go about your business as usual, like uhh, selling potions, was it? And defend the town at night. You’ll be busy. Well, put in sufficient effort without exhausting yourselves.”

When she heard that it was a mob of undead, Rare thought there might be a possibility of them having connections to Deas, but after learning more about them, she didn’t believe they were. It didn’t seem as though all the undead being used for the event were remnants of the old unified kingdom.

Rare saw the catkin girls off as they went to defend the town then returned to the great forest.

＊

Back in the queen’s chamber, Rare sat herself on the throne to take a breather.

“It’d be nice if there were someone here to serve tea too.”

“If that is your desire, then I shall do my best to comply, but…”

“Huh? Deas, you can make tea?”

“I have never brewed tea myself, but I am confident that it is within my ability.”

“…Nah, it’s fine.”

Nothing good could come out of these types of scenarios. Rare stealthily checked Deas’s DEX, and while it was high enough that nothing disastrous should happen, that numerical value alone wasn’t enough to completely dispel her fears.

“Maybe I’ll make it myself. I’m familiar with tea ceremony, but I haven’t made black tea before.”

The only kind of tea Rare had ever prepared was matcha. It would have been nice to install a tea room here to display flower arrangements and perform tea ceremony, but in a cave like this, the flowers would quickly wither away. Plus, her aptitude at flower arrangement was not nearly as high as her skill in tea ceremony. She was somewhat self-conscious about that.

“Flowers, huh…”

The reason Rare didn’t put much stock in her own artistic sense stemmed from this. She probably internally exaggerated how poor her creativity was; both her real family and her instructors only ever had praise for her, but that wasn’t enough to counteract her own feelings of inadequacy. If she couldn’t acknowledge the value of her own works herself, she would never be able to solve this problem. A lack of talent could not always be overcome with hard work. In Rare’s opinion, this adage was even more true within the world of art.

“Well, whatever, none of that matters. Anyway, Deas, if it isn’t too hard for you… I wonder if you could tell me more about the spirit lord.”

Regardless of his past, Deas now served Rare. And the spirit lord’s legacy was one of the few objects capable of inflicting real harm on her. She was loath to make him dredge up painful memories, but she really needed to hear everything at some point.

“…Of course. However, His Majesty has already long since passed. There is no need for Your Majesty the demon lord to be overly concerned about him. The ones who committed those unforgivable deeds to you were unworthy of carrying his inheritance from the very beginning. And that is the injustice that must be corrected.”

Considering that the result of said correction would be Rare becoming the new owner of that inheritance, she wondered how the deceased spirit lord would feel about his legacy being passed on to his very antithesis, a demon lord.

“I appreciate your feelings on the matter. So what kind of powers did this spirit lord have? Was that item you call his inheritance truly something he created?”

“Let me think… I cannot say for certain whether or not he created it. However, His Majesty the spirit lord truly was gifted with overwhelming ability when it came to craftsmanship; he was the creator of numerous unique items.”

So he must have been a crafter-type NPC. He had earned enough XP through crafting to make it all the way to spirit lord. That wasn’t an impossible feat. With enough materials on hand, one could earn XP faster via crafting compared to killing enemies. Ignoring the fact that acquiring all the materials to do that would be even more difficult than simply killing stuff.

“But then again, it could work if you had follower knights or something and mained a crafter build. The followers would earn XP while collecting materials as well, and you would use the materials to earn even more XP. Doesn’t so too bad. [Subordinate] might actually be a must-have skill for crafters…”

It still wasn’t too late; Rare could try switching to that build even now.

“The spirit lord’s skill with his hands was wonderful in a different way from the splendor of his physical body. It is true that materials were mostly left to others to acquire, but he always went to gather the most difficult ones himself.”

Deas was starting to sound kind of creepy now, but Rare didn’t think that he was the only one who might talk about the spirit lord with weird sexual connotations like this. Anyway, “the splendor of his physical body” probably referred to muscles.^[1] Given that he was a spirit lord, that meant he must have originally reincarnated from a high elf to a living spirit. But Rare’s image of elves in this game made it hard to imagine one being muscular or skilled with their hands. Actually, her own starting DEX was too low to even learn [Disassemble]. Rather, the race that probably fit the bill was…

“A dwarf, maybe…?”

“Did I never mention that? I had heard that the spirit lord was originally a dwarf.”

“Hrm…”

So a dwarf could also become a spirit lord. Indeed, in real life, there were legends that portrayed dwarves as a type of spirit.

“I see, so even dwarves…”

Rare had completely assumed that he had to have reincarnated from an elf to a spirit lord. If it was possible to get there from dwarf as well, then the range of possibilities was much wider than she previously imagined. If the base conditions to become a spirit lord were expanded, that meant even if the chances were low on the whole, there was still a higher chance for another spirit lord to rise up and oppose her. She had no idea if any living NPCs had already reincarnated that far. There was a precedent, but said precedent had been the ancient ruler of the united continent, so at least it wasn’t an easy feat. But what about players?

“…Nah, nothing’s really different there either.”

This was because the most popular player races were elf, followed by beastkin, then human, then homunculus. Dwarves were down at the bottom along with skeletons and goblins. In this game at least, there was an overwhelming desire for your appearance to be pleasing to the eye, although not everyone felt that way. As an aside, it was interesting how the famous players were cleanly divided among the races. From a simple statistical perspective, there was a smaller chance of becoming famous when you were one of the more popular races. That said, there were probably people who purposely chose popular races so they started out more unknown, then strove to earn fame afterward.

“Thinking of it this way, even adding dwarves as another race that could become a demon lord or spirit lord, I don’t think there’s a significant increase in risk to me.”

While she had utterly no interest in dwarves before, she unexpectedly stumbled on some of their reincarnation paths.

“Putting it all together, the spirit lord reincarnated from a dwarf, which meant he had access to a lot of crafting-related skills, and among them there was one that could produce those OP items.”

In that case, Rare didn’t particularly have to worry about any more items like the Vein of the Spirit Lord being crafted in the future. It was hard to imagine a crafting-focused player becoming a spirit lord, and if any NPCs showed signs of going down that route, she could try to recruit them or, if that was impossible, have them killed. She could approach players in the same way; becoming a demon lord or spirit lord would require a massive amount of XP, so if she saw any rumblings on social media about an amazing elf or dwarf crafter, she could check them out then, if necessary, PK them to drain their XP.

“Thank you, Deas. The information you provided is very useful.”

“I am glad to hear it. If you are interested, I can also regale to you His Majesty’s daily muscle training regimen—”

“Don’t care.”

“In that case, what about the poses that most brilliantly showed off his—”

“Don’t care.”

Deas’s eyes, sparkling with excitement, indicated that he believed this information was truly essential for Rare to know. In which case, she really needed to start considering how to deal with him in the future.

^[1]: The spirit lord had always been described without gender in Japanese, but I just arbitrarily used male pronouns all those chapters ago so that the English read smoothly. Thus, I left out a sentence here that read “[Deas] probably wouldn’t describe a woman this way, so the lord must have been male. Which reminded [Rare], she had never bothered to ask about the spirit lord’s gender before.” I’m glad, though, since this means I don’t need to go back to all those old chapters and correct the pronouns to be female >.>

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