Clearing the Game at the End of the World
Chapter 144-145: Star Fall (27)

Inside the depths of the Blue Line Mountains, where powerful beasts and undead dwelled.

A female elf sitting on a tree branch and a short female human were conversing in the midst of an awkward situation.

“So, your conditions are that we humans reveal who we are, disarm ourselves, and wait here until tomorrow morning. That’s it?”

“For now. The only authority I have here as a Nalhim in Kaneran… or the Exiled Eleven Village to you humans, is regarding the village’s safety. If you all wish to reach your objective, then you will need to fulfill my requirements and then enter the village to talk separately with the Matriarch.”

The current situation needed to be clearer for Ydrasil. The humans were much too different from what she expected, and the meeting was progressing in a much different way than she thought.

Everything was weird, from the man who was being held back by his companions while the human girl delivered the news to the old human who was tied to a rope hanging from a tree while singing a weird song.

“….! …..! …?….!”

“Yes, Ariel. Humans are quite an… unpleasant and strange species. Do you think the ‘horrifying things’ that the elders talked about were referring to this?”

Crunch!

Comforting her elemental, which was shivering from disgust, Ydrasil closed her eyes.

She wanted these humans to leave this place as soon as possible. It seemed like until they left, she wasn’t going to be able to stop chewing on these tree roots.

Meanwhile, the confusing situation wasn’t that much better for Lucilla either, as she ran between Professor and Ydrasil.

‘This isn’t it. This isn’t the warrior party I was thinking of!’

Lucilla Aedran. She was what one would call a genius. At least, she herself thought so.

That’s because, since the first time she went out on a journey and opened her eyes up to the concept of trade at age seven, she has not once made a mad trade. Of course, there were times when she suffered losses or was betrayed and robbed of her trade goods, but by the time she was back at the Gold Geyser Guild Hall, she brought back a pile of silver coins on her cart as if nothing had happened.

So when she heard the words ‘Exiled Elven Village’ come out of the Warrior’s mouth, she decided she was going to join their party. Elves, an excessively closed-in race that does not even trade with anyone aside from air-type mages.

She didn’t know just how the warrior managed to find not even the relatively well-known Elven Forest but the hidden village of the exiled, but she just thought that there was some Warrior thing he was able to do and decided to tag along.

Because this thing reeked of money. Just like when she first met Roman in the guild storage, all beat up.

But what was this?

“Hey, Lucille! What did she say?”

“Ughhh… How long are you going to stay like this! You can just go talk to her yourself!”

“Heheh, sorry. Can’t do that yet.”

That so-called Warrior from the Light’s Order was a half-baked fighter that was useless against anything that wasn’t a mute, a monster that doesn’t die even after being shot in the head, and was even a ‘mage’ that was the number one client to avoid throughout all merchant guilds! Those whackjobs completely ignored the logic of the world, relying only on their crazy voodoo powers!

‘To think I invested in such a worthless product! A mage is an [Unpredictable] product that any proper merchant knows to avoid!’

And the result of her wrong investment was showing itself right now.

“Ohhhh! She! She is calling to me! Thy love which exists everywhere, yet nowhere! Anyone, let me go to her! Please!”

“Stop splashing water, Ottman! You heard the elf say that she was going to shoot you if you charged at her one more time!”

“Please keep your manners, you friend! You have already aged enough to know this. What has gotten into you!”

“Aldrich. Do you not see as a soulbinder? That this old body’s blue soul is shaking excitedly?”

“Yes, which is why I cannot eat properly right now! There’s only so much I can handle. This is… Uuurp! Calm down already!”

“Let me go—!!!!”

The educated and well-mannered old mage was blinded by the late-blooming love and turned into a ‘stereotypical mage’…

“Ohhhh. Wait a day completely unarmed, you say. That’s it?”

The man that’s called the Warrior of the Light’s Order was not only tied up in ropes but completely buried underground with only his head popped out, using herself as a means of communication between him and the elf.

“It’s a failure… I won’t even be able to get back the base price… to think I would make such a mistake…”

“Failure? What failure!”

“You wouldn’t understand!”

Lucilla snapped out and sat down on top of the cart.

“Ohhhhh! You must let me go! The ocean! My ocean is at last in front of my eyesssss—!”

Looking at the old mage squirming around hanging on the tree with the sunset in the background, she could feel her eyes water up a little.

‘Ahhh, if I could just get the original sum back. If I can return with my body in one piece.’

That night was one that made her desperately miss her kind and trustworthy guildmates.

Unlike Ydrasil and Lucilla, who were caught up in a flurry of chaos, the culprit, Professor, was actually pretty calm.

“The only thing she’s doing in a situation where there’s enough time to talk is buy time… Can they not deploy troops on us because they have another threat? No, seeing that they added sunrise as the time limit, the troops left the village for a moment. So the village must not be in that good of a state right now.”

It was unexpected. The requirements that the elf delivered through Lucilla.

First of all, they’ve already been in a hostile situation before, and since we’re carrying all of this church stuff, I thought we would at least be watched under heavy guard or even be sealed by all sorts of elemental spirit magic, but just wait?

“Isn’t it good that they’re not acting hostile?”

Professor shook his head at Lucilla’s question.

“We’re only five people, so there’s no reason for them to come out this cautiously. People with power usually come out bolder, and it’s the ones without strength that are cautious. Since the guys that are living in the middle of the Blue Line Mountains wouldn’t be weak, then there’s another reason why they’re not being aggressive. Either the village is in such an emergency that a fight against just five outsiders will critically impact them, or they’re busy. Or it’s both. Either way, it means bad news for us when the village we need to borrow a person from doesn’t have any extra people hanging around.”

“You… just got all of that from just that elf’s requests?”

“It’s just a guess. One that’s highly likely. It’s too obvious, to begin with. All that she said after coming out alone was, ‘Wait one day, please’. That elf probably isn’t even that old. Seeing that she didn’t say anything about hatred and that the moment she saw us. They’re probably the generation that was born in the village.”

When I answered while trying to spit out a bug that was trying to crawl into my mouth, Lucilla, who had been crouching down on the ground to be at eye level with me, made an expression that had a lot of mixed emotions.

“Un… predictable…”

“Huh?”

“A mage, monster, and now a tactician… What am I supposed to do with a product like this…”

“???”

Lucilla kept on saying something I couldn’t understand with a horrified expression that she had for some time now. Still, I just thought it was probably because the situation was pretty hectic right now and delivered my opinion.

“Anyway, it’s important that we express to them that we have no intention to attack. Go tell them that. We will accept their conditions, but we’ve taken one step back, so take that into consideration. We’ve just made our way from the Ray Line through the mountain range all the way here, and we’re incredibly tired and fatigued, and that we were more than capable of forcefully making our way through the barrier and invade an empty village and their peaceful homes in order to relieve that fatigue. And that it’s our side that’s holding back to maintain peace in this exchange.”

That should be enough. The first is to make it seem like we’re harmless to the elves, but we can’t make it seem like they can walk all over us. So right now, it’s going to be more than enough to seem decently harmless while appealing that we have power.

Mmm, I’m definitely sane right now. No, I feel even better than usual. Is it because I got further away from the elemental?

“Elemental spirit of water… It was an unexpected trap.”

I thought of several things that could have happened when we met the elves, but the current one wasn’t one of them.

[Seduction! And not even a human, a different race, but a seduction through something closer to a natural organism than a living thing, and it actually works! Hey vessel, don’t you think that, like, you’ve sort of lost some things that make you human?]

‘Shaddup.’

[No, seriously! I was pretty surprised, but it didn’t have any effect on you or your consciousness. You had your hold on your consciousness tight enough that I didn’t need to step in at all. So it means that a puddle of water can’t affect the player itself. But it isn’t just a physical elation that happens when you use Blood Armor, either. How do you describe it? A sense of accomplishment? Achievement?]

The good thing, first of all. It wasn’t like something new was being created on a consciousness level like when Hyde first appeared. And it didn’t feel forceful either. But it wasn’t just an overwhelming pleasure either. How do I put it… it’s like my mind’s floating around like a cloud. Like a drug that isn’t addictive and doesn’t have any side effects.

[Isn’t that even scarier, then? You know that one tale. The wind and the sun making a bet over who can take more clothes off the man. It looked like you were about to take off not just your own clothes but your skin for her.]

‘It’s still better than Ottman, though. Then would I have acted like that if I was Level 5?’

[Eugh. I’m not jelly of your magic anymore. Not gonna learn it.]

Seeing how Hyde was aggressively waving his hands in disgust, I must have been pretty darn embarrassing.

After barely managing to get away from the elemental with the help of Hyde and the other party members, I looked into the relationship between mages and elementals.

==========

- Speedwagon : Pay up.

- professor : thx

==========

When I read into it, it was simpler than I thought.

Mages are incredibly attracted to elemental spirits that are the same element as them.

Mages boast that they know more about their specified element more than everyone else in the world. To mages who basically fall into something that’s beyond denial of reality but closer to schizophrenia about their element, elemental spirits are basically an individual close to their ideal state.

What’s the reason why water mages claim that they are the lover of water and fire mages claim they are the courter of fire? It’s because they really believe that. Their example is a literal explanation that they are able to live their entire life in satisfaction just by studying that element.

Since elemental spirits are created when the purest of energy from that select element transcends its original form as nature and is formed together with a will, so to a mage, it’s only natural that they look like the thing that they’ve spent their entire lives looking for.

So that’s why a mage completely loses their control and falls in love when they see an elemental with the same element as they study.

On the other hand, elementalists hate mages with an extreme passion. To be exact, the elemental hates the mage.

The elementalist is someone that communicates with elementals. The elemental can feel what the elementalist feels, and the elementalist can feel what the elemental feels.

Now, let’s talk about today’s victim, ‘Ariel (Water elemental. Female. 60 years old)’.

Normally, the water elementals don’t care when a human looks at or touches them. Even if it’s considered female, that concept was only formed for the communication between their elementalist. Their base was still water. It was just like how a river wouldn’t feel disgusted just because someone dipped their hand in the river water.

But if that said person was a water mage, a wacko that’s using their entire life just to understand and study water, that story changes completely. Even if they’re touching the water just like anybody else, a mage is able to touch the essence of the water based on their understanding.

It was similar to this in the example. Someone was walking down the street when they sensed a creepy stare and turned around, only to see some madman with dozens of cameras with huge lenses and all sorts of professional filming gear, an x-ray, and a full-body 3D scanner drooling in the mouth as they stare at every corner of the person’s body and spams down the shutter on the camera. sᴇaʀᴄh thᴇ Nʘvᴇl(F)ire.nᴇt website on Gøøglᴇ to access chapters of nøvels early and in the highest quality.

It was like if you met someone that knows all of your secrets and information that you didn’t tell them, with it also being updated in real-time.

The elemental didn’t like the fact that not only was someone that wasn’t an elementalist staring at them with such a perverted eye but also hated the control mages held over the element with the trick called ‘awakenings’ that basically refused to comply with the forces of nature, and these feelings were transmitted to the elementalist as well.

So, to an elementalist, a mage was…

==========

- Speedwagon : In incredibly skilled expert pervert stalker. Basically something on those lines.

- professor : dayum.

- Speedwagon : Das scary man….

- Highwaynachoman : To think that they made macho man Gyosu Park that runs around the chaotic battlefield into a hydrophile pervert. This the power of GG, the number one mental disease causer in the world….

- BDSM3rdOpenRecruitmentCandaditeRep : No…. Our hero, the Dome’s Savior, Gyosu Park can’t be such a foolish person! The Leader of BDSM that’s supposed to lead us with charisma and strength can’t be a waterphile! NOOOOOOO!!!!!

- Jokass : Yikes. The red pill must have been too much for him. He was a young kid too, what a shame.

- Guns_N_Blood : The truth always comes with pain, young boy.

==========

“Ugh, this garbage game. Well, since it doesn’t affect my mind, it’s just an automatic reaction, right? Something like a mage’s penalty? Just purely an in-game feature?”

==========

- Speedwagon : Nobody knows. Nobody plays mage to start with, and anyone that does have an extremely low chance of meeting an elementalist, and even lower for one of the same element. Do you like water outside too?

- professor : mmm

- Speedwagon : Fr? Well, there aren’t any elementals outside so it shouldn’t matter too much, but it’s sure that you’re too connected to the in came character right now. Chill it down a bit. Don’t always get that mush injected and go eat some actual food.

- professor : Alright.

- Speedwagon : And check pm when you go out.

==========

I unconsciously let out a sigh. I only went this far because I’m only a Level 2 mage. Looking at Ottman, the old man’s tied up to a tree with a sack over his head like some person about to get executed, and he’s still singing that weird serenade. It looked like he was more strongly affected by the elemental’s charm(?) because he was much more awakened to water mana than me.

Well, I got the hang of what I should do next time now that I’ve experienced it once. But the effect it has on reality… I’ll need to think about that problem again later.

But he needed to sort out some things on this side first. Turning his head away from the chatroom, Professor asked Notum, who was keeping an eye on him buried in the ground.

“Do you think Ottman will be back to his senses by tomorrow morning?”

[I’ll bet my left index finger that if you let him go tomorrow morning, Ottman’s gonna go crawl on all fours and beg the elves to accept him into the village.]

“Gwurgh. He would sell us out if they were the enemy.”

“But I’m fine now. Maybe if we give Ottman some time…”

Notum shook her head if there wasn’t the slightest chance of that happening and pointed toward Borka and Ottman.

“Arghhh! Ottman! Stay still, can you? Please!”

“Let go! You cruel being! Elemental! Please, take me to the next level…!”

There was Ottman, his entire body covered in water and using it to push his body toward the elf’s direction, and Borka, who was drenched and pulling back on the rope that was so tight it looked like it would snap.

“Gwurg.”

“Yeah. You don’t need to tell me.”

It looked like we had to take Ottman out of our formation when we went to meet the elves tomorrow.

“Hey, Borka! That one’s from the church, so it won’t break easily! Just hang him up and sleep!”

“W-won’t that be too hard on an old human? Shouldn’t we let him out at least when he’s sleep…”

“The only thing hard here is his d**k! He looks like he could make a triplet right now! He’ll calm down when he tires out! Just tie him up to a tree and come sleep.”

Looking at the elf’s requirements, it was going to be a tiring day tomorrow, both physically and mentally. Everyone’s tired, so they need to rest well.

Including me.

Ding—!

Camp : Blue Line Mountains (Campfire / Shelter / Companions)

Do you wish to log out?

“Yes.”

The moment I closed my eyes, a blinding light filled my vision.

Pshwooo—

D-d-d-d-dk!

The familiar sound of the game pod opening. Gray cement walls. The musty but homely smell of the shelter. The moment I stepped out, it felt like my racing heart had calmed down a little bit.

“Erraaaagh! I’m sore! I’m back home, sweet ho—”

Creeee— boomp!

“Huh?”

I stretched out my arms without much thought, but with the feeling of something catching on the tip of my hands, I heard the sound of metal getting crushed.

Clang, cla-clang—!

The game pod lid. The lid caught on the left arm that was stretching out fell down helplessly to the floor.

Kkkrgk.

Scraping down on my palm with a finger, I could feel the hardened shell that I had forgotten about for some time.

“…Of f—ing course.”

He’s been out for the first time in a while, and it was already off to a rocky start.

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