Chapter 84: Chapter 82: Setting Out

Anala looked out over the assembled people. They…weren’t exactly what she was hoping for when it came to people who were going to help overthrow the Queen of Monsters, but they would have to do. As had been expected, they were people who were mostly from Earth. That meant that, on average, they were less experienced than Anala would have liked.

Not that Anala was much better, but she had things that let her bridge the gap, and she had been fighting her heart out against very strong opponents these past few months. These people…well, they had power, but they didn’t have enough, not enough to make a sizeable difference.

But that was what they had. It would fall to Anala’s party and Eve’s party to keep them from all dying to the first truly strong thing they encountered. Fortunately, Anala estimated that at least half of the strong monsters the Queen of Monsters had shown off in her broadcasts were dead. Those had been guarding the frontier towns, and Anala had made a point of being thorough when clearing those out.

There was always the chance that the Queen of Monsters had been holding back when she showed her army, but Anala wasn’t that worried about them anymore. In clearing the frontier towns, her party had gotten strong, far stronger than they had been at the beginning of the war. They had initially struggled with just one of those strong monsters, but now they were capable of easily defeating one, and, on rare occasions, had even been able to take down two at once.

The real problem was going to be the Queen of Monsters herself. Anala didn’t doubt that she was in a league of her own, head and shoulders above the rest of her army. If she wasn’t there was no way she would be able to command the army, not with the total control she displayed. Monsters weren’t like people; they wouldn’t bow to something weaker than them, and they wouldn’t even bow to someone stronger unless that thing was a person using a Skill or a monster that was far stronger than they were.

The thought intimidated Anala. The way she saw it, there were two options; the first was that the Queen of Monsters was simply so much stronger than everything else that they would rather die than disobey her orders. That was bad enough, but the second option was, somehow, worse.

That was that the Queen of Monsters was a person using Skills. Anala didn’t even want to consider that one; Anna was the best monster tamer Anala had ever seen, and even she didn’t have monsters on the level of what the Queen of Monsters had. She didn’t have anything approaching the same quantity of monsters, either, so the Queen of Monsters would have to be so ridiculously high level that she was able to tame that entire army.

That…surely couldn’t be the case, it became exponentially harder to level up as your level increased, and resetting your Class would be counterproductive when it came to taming such high strength monsters, as they would see you as weaker. Still, Anala couldn’t entirely rule it out, and that wasn’t something she liked.

Either way, one question had been growing in her mind as they took back the frontier towns. Why hadn’t the Queen of Monsters showed up in person? Any way Anala looked at it, she was far stronger than most of her army, so why hadn’t she done anything herself? This was especially true after people started reclaiming the frontier towns; the Queen of Monsters had begun to lose the war, and her presence was quite possible enough to turn things around, so…why not do so?

She had discussed the matter at length with her party and with Eve’s party, and they had eventually come to the conclusion that there was something else in play that they didn’t know about. The Queen of Monsters had to have a reason she was staying put, and there just wasn’t enough information to know what that was.

The prevailing theory among their small group was that it had something to do with how she commanded the army; perhaps there was some…artifact she had made, or there was some spot with extra dense Mana she used to control the monsters.

Anala wasn’t quite so sure. The High Arbiter had described the Queen of Monsters as a natural phenomenon, so it made sense for her to not need aid from an artifact or some weird power spot to exert her control.

Whatever the case, the Queen of Monsters seemed content to stay locked up in her castle, so that meant they had to come to her, which led right back around to this expedition. Were it not for the presence of Anala and Eve’s parties, Anala would have called it doomed to fail from the start, but…they were here, so it probably wasn’t going to be a total disaster.

“Alright you lot, listen up!” A man shouted, drawing the attention of the gathered adventurers. “As we all know, the governments are too short-sighted to strike back against the Queen of Monsters while she’s weakened! Are we that foolish?!”

“No!” The crowd yelled.

The man continued. “Are we going to sit back and let her gather strength again, so she can try and take our homes and our lives away from us?”

“No!”

“What are we going to do about it?!”

The crowd was less unified on this one. There were shouts of “kill the Queen of Monsters”, of “defeat her”, of put an end to this”, and all sorts of other things. The general message was the same, but it seemed people disagreed on the exact wording. It wasn't like they had rehearsed this, though, so Anala couldn’t blame them for it too much.

The man who was leading the chants stumbled for a bit, then rallied. “R-right, so let’s get out there, and let’s take back the world!”

The crowd roared in assent, and the man turned, marching down the makeshift road leading away from the frontier town, and towards the area they had projected the Queen of Monsters was hiding.

“Is he really the one who’s acting as a makeshift leader for this?” Eve asked dubiously. “He seems…weak.”

“How can you tell?” Raesn chuckled. “Did you identify him at all or are you just guessing?”

“He doesn’t have any scars.” Eve said. “Sure, you could get rid of them with magic, but most healing magic leaves some sort of scarring, and it seems pointless to get rid of them just before a big expedition like this. Either he’s been paying for expensive healing, or he’s been in the backlines and hasn’t been really doing that much real fighting.”

“You don’t have any scars either.” Bruce pointed out. “By that logic, wouldn’t you be weak?”

“Please.” Eve snorted, puffing her chest out pridefully. “We both know I’m better than that. I don’t get hurt that often in the first place, and Jameson’s healing magic isn’t most healing magic. We don’t really need to worry about scars like most people.”

“Then couldn’t that guy be in a similar situation?” Bruce pressed. “We have no reason to believe he’s weaker than us.”

“No, she has a point.” Jameson interjected. “I mean…have you seen anyone put in as much work as we have? Sure, we had to start holding back when a lot of people were around, so no one got suspicious, but even before that, no one else really stood out. It seems more likely that he’s weak to me. Well, that or he has more money than he knows what to do with, but that also seems kind of unlikely given the quality of his gear.”

“Can’t argue on that front.” Raesn agreed. “His gear is pretty shoddy. And he doesn’t walk like a man that’s going into a difficult war. He’s too confident for that; if he really knew what he was getting himself into, he’d be a lot more nervous. Now that I’m really looking at him, you’re right, he doesn’t seem like he’s that strong.”

“See? We were already basically going to end up babysitting this group, and with someone like that in charge it’s going to become even more of a headache than it already was.” Eve complained. “I’m of half a mind to slack when protecting him in particular, just so he’ll get the message and go home.”

“Don’t!” Anna said, swatting Eve’s arm. “What if he dies?”

“I won’t let him die, I’m just not gonna do anything until it gets close. Once he leaves, our jobs will become way easier.”

“I can’t say that isn’t true, but our jobs aren’t supposed to be easy.” Anala said. “If they were, we wouldn’t be here right now, we would have already defeated the Queen of Monsters. We chose to take this path knowing it was one that would be extraordinarily difficult, we can’t slack on work just because it’s a pain.”

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“Yeah.” Ava agreed. “Just think of it like training. You have to be extra careful when protecting someone, so it’s like…learning to focus your blows or something.”

“I don’t know if it works that way.” Anna said. “Especially since we’re handicapping ourselves anyway. That experience might not necessarily translate to us fighting at full force.”

“Even if it doesn’t, it helps to think of it that way, right?” Ava replied. “We’re here to try and protect everyone, and that includes people we don’t like. We can’t skip out on someone like him just because, it’s not right.”

Eve sighed. “Fine, fine. Doesn’t mean I have to like it, though.”

“You don’t have to like it.” Ava said. “That’s perfectly acceptable, so long as you do it. Besides, if he really is as weak as we’re thinking, then he won’t be here for long anyway. Once he realizes that victory won’t be handed to him on a platter, he’s going to chicken out.”

“I guess you’re right.” Eve grumbled. “Just gonna be hard until then.”

“We’ll treat you to ice cream after, does that make you feel better?” Anna said, smirking slightly as she bent down and patted Eve’s head.

“I’d be lying if I said no, but don’t patronize me!” Eve snapped. “I’m a grown woman who is fully capable of handling her problems responsibly, thank you very much.”

“But that doesn’t prevent you from being cheered up by things like that.” Anna said smugly. “And what’s wrong with that, huh? Why not just admit it?”

“Jameson told me about that time in third grade when you went on a field trip to the river.” Eve said flatly, eyes narrowing. “And I reserve the right to tell everyone else here about it.”

“Y-you wouldn’t.” Anna said nervously. “You’re bluffing.”

“So, you were at the river, and you were really interested in –”

“Okay, I get it, I get it!” Anna said, clamping a hand over Eve’s mouth. “I won’t make fun of you, just don’t tell anyone about that, okay?!”

Eve nodded, and Anna hesitantly withdrew her hand. “See, it’s not that hard.” Eve said. “All you have to do is treat me like anyone else.”

“Y-yeah.” Anna replied. “I got it.”

“We gotta get going.” Bruce said. “Everyone’s packing up and we’re going to be left behind.”

“On it!” Anna said, hurriedly standing up straight and beginning to walk away. “I’m going to go fetch the dogs, I’ll meet you at the gates in five minutes.” Tamed monsters hadn’t been allowed at the rally to cut down on the chaos of the thing, so Anna had had to park them a little distance away before she came.

Fortunately, they were well groomed and, if you didn’t look too closely, they could easily be mistaken for normal, if somewhat large, large dogs, so they were able to be left in an empty plot of land without causing any misunderstandings. Even if someone did realize they were monsters, they were very clearly collared and tamed, so it was unlikely that they would be attacked.

Not that Anala was worried for the dogs’ well-being. They were individually stronger than most adventurers around here, so Anala was more worried for the hypothetical fool who would attack them than she was for the dogs.

But that didn’t seem to have happened. Anna would have rushed away to deal with it by now if it had become a problem, so Anala put it out of her mind and began to make her way down the street with the rest of the group.

As they moved, she made a point of checking out the adventurers who would be participating. They were…alright, she supposed. As had been expected, none of them really stood out as anything impressive at a glance.

There were certainly people trying to look impressive, but that spoke more of their incompetence than anything to Anala. People were trying to use huge swords, or had incredibly flashy armor, or otherwise just looked ridiculous.

It was a problem that had long plagued adventurers, but it was especially prevalent with this group. Yes, the new system made it feasible to use that sort of stuff in combat, but that didn’t make it effective. There was effectively a ceiling on how good someone using that sort of stuff could be, and it wasn’t high.

It seemed she wasn’t the only one who picked up on that. “This is even worse than I thought it was going to be.” Eve said. “Seriously, haven’t these people realized that that stuff is garbage? How many of them are here just to look cool?!”

“Too many.” Bruce said, frowning. “I don’t remember seeing this many during the actual defense of the frontier towns, but I suppose we were mostly on the front lines, so we wouldn’t have seen people like this who aren’t really ready for actual combat.”

“I’d be willing to bet a lot of these people actually didn’t help in the defense.” Ava said sourly. “Probably wasn’t enough ‘glory’ for them or whatever.”

“Do you two have a history with these kind of people?” Jameson asked. “You seem particularly…unhappy with them.”

“We had to go through our fair share of them when we were ‘hazing’ the newbies.” Bruce explained. “The majority of these people were absolutely awful to be around. They were either playing up some sort of edgy character, unwilling to listen to actual advice, or generally incompetent. I’ve met like…three people who didn’t fit into at least one of those categories”

“Sounds about right.” Jameson replied. “I’ve only met a couple of them myself, but they didn’t seem like the best adventurers I’ve ever met.”

“You can say that again.” Eve snorted. “They’re worse than that leader guy. At least he had equipment that looked practical, even if it was low quality equipment.”

They continued their conversation for a few minutes until they got to what remained of the town’s gate, where Anna was already waiting. And, once they met back up, they set out in earnest, ready for the hard battles that were to come.