Chapter 396: [Vol. 8 pt. 5]

Once the meeting was wrapped up, everybody decided to head on back to the docks together just for a bit of socializing. However, when they went outside, they saw the commotion of a crowd of players gathered around looking up at the tower. Some cheered, some held onto their bated breaths, and others took bets.

It was only when Fenrir looked up at the tower that he remembered what Saya was up to during the whole meeting.

Standing near the top of the tower with only a few obstacles and platforms left in her way was none other than a determined Saya with what looked like oil and scorch marks all over her.

“Can’t believe she made it past the fire trap!” one of the nearby observers said.

“I’d get it if she knew to expect it… but for somebody who has no idea its coming to barely react at all? Is she even human?” a different observer asked.

Fenrir and Nell opted for staying quiet when they heard that.

“And she didn’t slip at all when the oil was dumped onto her!”

“This girl is pretty amazing. Barely reacts, superhuman reflexes and grip – shame that her clothes aren’t more revealing. I bet she’d look pretty nice being all covered in oil if she had some less layers on.”

As soon as Nell saw Fenrir’s fists twitch, she grabbed onto his arm and looked up at him with a smile. She then leaned up and whispered into his ear, “Imagine how jealous they will be when she comes rushing over to you once she is done, my hero.”

Fenrir might not have liked hearing those men talk about Saya like that, but Nell had a point. Making them jealous sounded even better than trying to act like an overly defensive boyfriend who gets upset every time another guy looks at one of his girlfriends.

As for Saya, she was ready to try and make it to the next platform. It was a good distance above her and only had a thin ledge for her to grab onto so that she could lift herself up, and she’d need to jump as high as she could to grab onto it. To matters even more complicated, it had a slow spin to it. She’d be rotated away from the platform she was currently on after just a few seconds. After that, it was either pull herself up or fall to the very bottom.

“The player who engineered this really went all out,” Fenrir said.

“A player worth of commendation!” Nell added on. “Perhaps we could have them come to our town and build one for our residents? That sounds like it would provide a fun challenge for everybody! Though, perhaps with the added benefit of nets underneath it so they do not die when they fall from the top.”

“Good idea. Anybody who falls off this one,” Fenrir paused and looked around at all the spikes near the bottom of the tower, “isn’t going to have a good time.” He was far more concerned about Saya falling to her death and getting rather brutally impaled in front of everybody, but he had faith in her if she was already able to make it that high.

And now it was time for her to continue. After taking a few deep breaths, Saya leapt up and grabbed onto the ledge of the next platform! And surely enough, just a few seconds into trying to pull herself up, the platform rotated enough to put her over those deadly spikes below.

Many in the audience were back to shouting.

“No way she makes that!”

“C’mon girl! Show them how it’s done!”

“Take your time! Don’t rush it!”

Nell nudged Fenrir in the arm with her elbow and said, “My hero, perhaps you should join in on shouting encouraging words? I am sure that she would appreciate it from you far more.”

“I think I can do something even better,” Fenrir said before switching over to his thoughts. Hey, Pupaya. I’ll give you unlimited headpats if you can make it to the top, he thought.

“Ba-baka onii-wan! Don’t say something like that right now! And you’d already give me unlimited headpats anyways!” Saya shouted back at him inside of his head. “I swear if I mess up now it’s your fault!”

You’re too amazing to mess up. Relax and show them that this is nothing to you.

Saya went silent and still for a few moments after that, only breaking the suspense in the audience when she lifted herself up and jumped up onto the next platform.

The crowd went wild with shouting and cheering as Saya looked directly at Fenrir to stick her tongue out at him with blushing cheeks.

However, the next obstacle was the most terrifying one yet. All she had to do was jump over a gap… but the gap was protected by two swinging pendulum axes that would easily cleave her into halves if one hit her, and they swung in alternating directions with offset timing to make it even more difficult.

“How… how’d they even get that all the way up there?” Fenrir asked.

“We should have hired the creative mind behind this to make traps for our defenses against the serpent! The battle would have been much easier,” Nell said.

It wasn’t visible from the bottom, but the blades and swinging rods they were attached to looked to be coated in some sort of thin, electric field caused by some manner of magic or enchanted item. That meant Saya wouldn’t be able to simply jump up and grab onto the rods like she wanted to, or to stand on top of the blades. If she touched any part of the obstacle, she’d be electrocuted and fall.

It all came down to timing.

Timing that Saya had to get absolutely perfect if she didn’t want to be cut into two before falling onto impaling spikes in front of everybody.

But, realistically…

None of it was a problem. If anything, she was a massive cheater in comparison to humans, not that she could help it. All it took was a single glance at the swinging blades to calculate their exact timing and to figure out when was the best opportunity to jump. Every single part of the tower could be calculated from the very bottom of it. Of course, it wouldn’t have been a good show if she just breezed through it with no difficulty at all. Not to mention that it would have been extremely suspicious.

While it might have looked like she was mentally preparing herself to everybody down below, the truth was different. She could have gone at any moment. It was more fun, however, to think of the best way to finish.

After the swinging blades was a pole that she’d have to swing from to propel herself up and onto the next platform and then all that was left would be a relatively simple jump onto the very top.

She figured out what she wanted to do. Just like she saw in all the memories of Fenrir and his time with the Divine Brigade, she’d bring out a bit of flashiness.

First, she gave herself a bit of a running start and jumped through the blades while making her body perfectly horizontal! She landed with a roll on the other side and, while finishing the roll, jumped up to grab onto the pole sticking out of the tower! She moved as quickly as possible, swinging herself back and forth to build up momentum before letting go and sending herself upward. Next was the flashy landing that she wanted to stick, and then it was over.

But while she might have been able to perfectly estimate how to clear the tower from the ground… that only applied to all of its visible components.

That platform that she was meant to land on retracted into the tower, giving her nothing but the ground far below to crash onto.

But even if she was caught off guard, she still had a mental processing power far more capable than any human’s.

Saya quickly turned her head around to look for what she was supposed to do. That was when she noticed small gaps in the wall just large enough for somebody to fit their feet and hands into. She wasn’t expected to jump her way up the final portion, she was expected to climb it.

Despite having canid features, she swiveled her body around with the grace of a feline while tearing off the upper layer of her uniform, leaving her in only a shirt that was spared from most of the oil that sunk into the top layer. And with that top layer soaked in oil, she swung it onto the top of the swinging blades and hooked it on the edge of the nearest one. The jacket got a bit torn, but the more important thing was that it stopped her from falling to her death.

Those below in the crowd might not have been able to appreciate that she used the nonconductive, oil-drench jacket in order to protect herself from being electrocuted, but they definitely made sure to apprefciate everything else about her. Even those men who were joking around before about wanting to see her with less on while drenched in oil couldn’t praise anything but the sheer amount of skill displayed.

“Ah… my hero,” Nell said, her voice quiet and aroused, “I – I did not expect to find myself so excited by her display.”

“Considering that you’re obsessed with everything about her, it doesn’t surprise me,” Fenrir said.

Nell pouted a little. “I call sharing the bed with her after you do!”

“That might be a while.”

“Then hurry up!”

“I – I’d rather wait until she’s actually a part of our relationship.”

“Or, you could hurry up and claim her so that I can do so next!”

“You really like Saya, don’t you?”

“How could I not?! She is absolutely precious!”

“Well, I can’t deny that. Not that I would even try to.”

Neither took their eyes away from the tower as they talked. Doing so would have risked missing whatever Saya did next, and neither wanted to miss that. Nobody in the audience did.

It might not have been the flashiest maneuver, but she climbed back up her jacket and while looping it around to hands to prevent slipping. Then, when the moment was right, she jumped back onto the platform at the end of the swinging blades.

She looked at her drenched, torn jacket in her hands. “I should make them pay for this,” she said. “That’d be the tsundere thing to do, right? Get mad and make them fix it for free even though it was my fault? Being tsun has its perks.”

Once she resolved how to handle the jacket situation, she balled it up and tossed it down toward Fenrir. A few others tried to grab it, thinking that it was some sort of giveaway, but Fenrir managed to jump up and grab it before anybody else could while Nell clapped for him in the back.

Those who wished to catch it but failed looked at Fenrir with disappointed glares while Fenrir returned the exact same glare back at them.

Not that he could really blame them. If he was single and watching Saya be so cool before throwing down something that she personally wore, he’d want to catch it, too.

That aside, he had a feeling that Saya was developing a bit of a fan club even if that wasn’t her intention.

Back at the top, Saya looked at deceptive pole which had since stuck itself back out. The idea of taking a blade and slicing the pole off from its mount was tempting, but she had no blade to enact her revenge with. Instead, her revenge would have to consist of finishing the tower that it so desperately tried to prevent.

Saya jumped forward and grabbed onto those slots in the wall made for climbing up… and revealed the tower’s final trap.

It began to spin.

The sound of mechanical gears clanking and grinding each other could be heard from within the tower as the very top portion of it began to spin in a circle at a steadily increasing speed. This spinning also ended up shaking the entire tower, causing it to wobble from side to side. Nobody on the ground felt safe after seeing that and began to back away just in case.

And Saya definitely didn’t feel safe. She was clinging for her life to a scrap tower made of random parts that was now spinning and wobbling. “This isn’t supposed to be a horror game!” she shouted before steeling her resolve and forcing herself to continue. It was either continue or wait for the tower to self-destruct.

Through the spinning and shaking of the tower, Saya climbed up one slot at a time. The whirring noise and smoke that came from within the center of the top portion really didn’t help her faith in the maniacal construction. It did, however, make her climb even faster and eventually reach the top.

All that was waiting for her was a single, red button in the middle of the platform. She figured that she should press it before getting thrown off from the ever-increasing speed of the tower’s spinning, so, while clutching to the platform with her other hand, she reached forward and brought her curled fist slamming down against the button!

The tower’s whirring came to a slow stop as the upper platform slowed its spinning. A few moments after the total stop of the tower, a series of fireworks shot off from around Saya up into the sky for all around to see! Though, given that it was the middle of the day, they weren’t as visible as they would have been at night.

Saya could finally take a moment to breathe and relax to the sound of cheering from down below.

That was when she felt a downward drop and heard the internal mechanisms of the tower begin to fail.

“I should have expected this,” Marija said, still standing behind Fenrir and Nell with the other leaders. “Every contraption of that idiot fails in the end.”

“You call him an idiot, but he builds some pretty damn nice things,” King Cat said.

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“He builds things for suicidal idiots. Not that I can refuse this place is full of them.” Marija let out a heavy sigh before shouting to everybody, “I suggest you get back unless you want to get crushed!”

Nell grabbed onto Fenrir’s arm and looked up at him with worried eyes. “My hero! What about Saya? How is she going to get down?!”

“Onii-wan,” Saya said to Fenrir. “Take a step to your right then seven steps back, and wait there. If you need more instructions then that, then you don’t know me, or yourself, at all. Hmph.”

Hey, don’t ‘hmph’ me before I even have a chance to say something back, Fenrir thought in response and then looked at Nell. “Hold this.” He handed over the oily jacket. “Also, get back with the others. I’ll take care of Saya.”

Nell had no idea what the plan could have been, but she believed in the two and nodded before listening.

At the back of the group where everybody else was standing now, Anastasia, the blonde maid who just couldn’t get enough of humming and whistling, reached her hands out and said, “My lady, please let me hold that for you. It is dirty.”

Nell hugged the oily jacket to her chest and shook her head. “Absolutely not! This is Saya’s! I would never hand it over to anybody but my hero.” She even lifted the cloth up to her cheek and rubbed against it a little, causing the maid to blankly stare at her before taking a step back and realizing that she was better off continuing to hum instead.

As for Saya, despite having the shakiest ground she had been on yet, she stood up on the top of the tower and got into a position similar to that of somebody riding a surfboard. “I hope you’re ready, onii-wan. You’re going to look pretty lame if you mess up.”

You think I’d let my little puppy-sister get hurt?  You know I’d only allow that if you ask me to hurt you, Fenrir thought back.

“I-it’s not like I’d ever ask for you to hurt me or anything! Keep this up and I won’t help you make all those guys jealous!”

You knew – wait, of course you knew about that.

“Duh. I still know everything that goes through your thoughts.”

Stalker.

“Pervert.”

Another section of the tower collapsed under itself, allowing the rest of the tower to freely fall afterwards. Section after section hit the ground, bringing Saya closer and closer to the ground as she managed to maintain perfect balance atop the final platform. Her mind performed hundreds of simultaneous simulations and calculations to figure out exactly how and where the tower was going to crash, constantly updating her trajectory.

It would have been simple to ride the tower all the way down to the ground, jump off, maybe do a flip in the air, and impress everybody.

Instead, she positioned herself near the back corner of the platform facing away from the ground and waited. “Another two steps to your right.”

Fenrir nodded and listened. Got it.

When there was only a single section left underneath the platform Saya was on, the front half crashed into the ground in a way that rocked the back half up, essentially turning the top platform into a catapult that sent Saya flying off of it!

It still would have been an easy job to stick the landing, albeit maybe with a broken ankle or to, but that wasn’t what she wanted. What she wanted was something else entirely that depended on Fenrir being the cool, dependable onii-wan that she loved him being.

It helped that she gave him the exact position to stand in to maximize his chances.

Fenrir, knowing what he had to do, opened his arms and jumped forward to catch Saya!

She safely landed within his arms, carried just like a princess.

Nell could not have been more jealous. Not jealous that Fenrir was carrying somebody else like a princess, of course. She was jealous of Fenrir that he got to carry Saya like a princess. All she could do to try and get over her jealousy was to rub that oily jacket even harder against her face.

“This is extremely embarrassing, so you better appreciate it,” Saya thought to him.

Fenrir assumed that she must have just been talking about him carrying her like that… but then she leaned up and kissed him on the cheek while all of her growing fanclub was around to watch.

Nell was right. That was far, far better than getting upset with those guys who wanted to see more of her.

“Thanks for saving me,” Saya said in a delicate, feminine voice. It was so contradictory to her usual personality that Fenrir had to hold back a laugh. She saw that he wanted to laugh, though, and subtly jammed her elbow into his gut.

That elbow jab didn’t slip past Nell, though.

And that made her even more jealous.

Nell wanted to be jabbed in the stomach by Saya’s elbow, too!

“No problem,” was all that Fenrir could say, trying his best not to sound too pained from the jab as he set Saya down. He thought that would be the end of the fanservice, but he couldn’t have been more wrong. Saya hid herself behind his arm, hugging onto it and pulling it against her breasts. This allowed her to: one, hide what visible cleavage she had away from the prying eyes of her new fans; and two – well, as tsundere as she might have liked to act, she still enjoyed giving Fenrir all the fanservice that he could ever ask for. If anything, giving him fanservice was giving herself fanservice.

It was a fanservice loop.

As for the crowd, as jealous as they might have been of Fenrir, that didn’t stop them from cheering for Saya. All of the applause was quick to turn her cheeks red and cause her to hide even more of her body behind Fenrir, though.

“Well, I’m damn impressed,” Marija said, making her way to the front of the crowd. “Nobody has cleared that bastard’s jumping puzzles yet.”

“I – I get a reward... right?” Saya asked, poking her head out from behind Fenrir.

“That you do. I don’t think he’s online right now, so I’ll have to go grab it from his house. Hold on.”

Marija walked over to one of the houses within sight. Standing in front of the glorified shack of a house that had all sorts of other strange creations littered around its walls with unknown uses, Marija kicked the door open with enough force to send it flying while almost taking the front wall with it, too. After stepping inside for a few moments, she came back out with the prize that was described earlier: a straight, spiraled horn that had what looked like patches of glowing blue scattered along its length. It really did look just like what the earlier man described. A narwhal’s horn that somehow had the glowing lure of an anglerfish mixed into it. Though, the man described the creature itself as incredibly ugly. Those looking at the horn without ever seeing its source found that hard to believe given that the horn was rather beautiful on its own.

But despite how beautiful it was and the fact that it was a prize, Marija tossed it toward Saya with no care. Saya had to come rushing out from behind of Fenrir in order to catch it so that it wouldn’t hit the ground and potentially break.

Not hiding behind Fenrir made it easier for all of her fans to begin clapping for her and praising her.

“I-it’s really not that big of a deal,” Saya stuttered out to everybody.

To make matters worse for her, Fenrir sneakily stuck his head between her legs and lifted her up onto his shoulders so that he could proudly show her off to everybody.

“I hate you! I hate you! I hate you! I hate you so much! I hate you so so so so so much! Why?! Why would you do this?!” Saya frantically shouted at him in his head.

Because you’re my cute Pupaya and I feel like showing you off. Besides, you were a total badass. You deserve the praise, Fenrir thought in response.

Saya’s cheeks turned bright red as one of her hands took a very tight grip of his hair, making sure that he would feel at least some pain to make up for how embarrassed he made her.

Then when Nell went up to talk to them and to personally congratulate Saya, while wrapping her arms around Fenrir’s arm that Saya was previously wrapped against, the crowd’s enthusiasm died down a little bit.

Fenrir not only had their new favorite up on his shoulders with her thighs around his head, but he had another cute woman’s arms around his pressing her chest against him.

Even Marija looked jealous among all the other players of her village. King Cat gave Fenrir a smirk and thumbs-up, GG simply looked amused by the situation, and Rainbow Afro sighed. Fenrir didn’t expect the man with the giant, rainbow afro and rainbow ship to be the straight man of the group, but he was turning out to be that way.

He must have just really, really loved rainbows.

Then when the maids went up to join Nell, it looked as if they, too, were surrounding Fenrir.

“C’mon! What is this?! This lucky bastard has two women and maids?!” one of the crowd goers shouted while looking ready to tear out his own hair.

Fenrir had no idea what to do, but Nell did as she released herself from his arm and stepped forward to address everybody. She made sure to look over at the other leaders first for their approval. They figured out her intention and nodded.

Nell cleared her throat and equipped her maximum level royalty voice. “First off, I would like to clarify one thing. While me and the girl upon his shoulders may belong to him, these maids do not. They serve me.”

The crowd suddenly looked a bit less disappointed.

“Furthermore, they all already have a man in mind, and that man is not my dearest Fenrir standing behind me.”

The crowd went back to looking disappointed while Rachel tugged on Nell’s dress from behind and begged her to change topics in a whining tone.

Fortunately for Rachel, that was Nell’s intention. “Secondly, I have an announcement. I, Nehalennia, Chosen of the Western Serpent, Manasa, have been chosen to lead the union of our great villages. I know that many of you may not have ever seen me before and have no reason to put your faith in me, but I assure you that I will strive to do my best as your queen. As far as your daily lives are concerned, you need not worry about any changes. You will be allowed all the same freedoms that you have always had and you always will. My role will simply be to give a face to our alliance and to deal with foreign nations, as we have gathered the attention of this world’s greatest factions. Alone, we risk being conquered or absorbed into another faction that does not have our best interests at heart. United, we shall stand resolute and push back against any who dare to harm our way of life on this coast! So please, I ask for your support and trust. The stronger the bonds between our towns are, the greater our bulwark shall be. We have already conquered one of the world’s greatest serpents through our methods, so let us prove that there are none who may conquer our spirits nor land. Let us prove that cooperation and respect for one another are the undefeatable forces of our alliance.” She ended her speech with a curtsy.

Perhaps if her speech was less serious and formal sounding, some of the townspeople might have looked over to Marija to see if Nell was legitimate. However, Nell’s royal aura demanded authority – she demanded to be taken seriously.

There was also the fact that none of the leaders came over to stop her during the speech.

Either way, while it was a slow clap at first, Nell received almost as much praise and cheers as Saya did. Almost as much.

They might have accepted Nell as their queen, but Saya was still their number one.

“Makes sense,” King Cat said.

“And what is that supposed to mean?” Marija asked him.

“Think about it. Most of your folk here are men. Big, burly men playing all sorts of insanely muscular lizard men and other guys with scales all over their bodies. Up until now, they’ve been happy to do anything you say because you boss them around and dominate them whenever they don’t listen. In other words, you’ve got a bunch of men up here with almost no women around, and they all love themselves a good woman in an authority position. Whether they’re being bossed around by you or being led by a cute queen, it doesn’t matter. They just want a woman to be in charge of them.”

“I would smash your face into the ground if I could deny any of that.”

“I’ll buy you a coffee tomorrow to make up for calling you out for running a town full of submissive musclehead masochists who will gladly roll onto their backs for any girl who takes control of them. Deal?”

The longest sigh yet escaped Marija’s lips. “Deal.”

“Just be happy I’m not calling you out on being just like your boys. You’re probably looking forward to every single order our new queen gives yo—”

King Cat’s face became very intimate with the ground thanks to Marija hooking them up. She intended on them forming a long-lasting relationship with one another.

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