Beyond M-Eclipse: Easy Mode LIVE

———Lynda———

…Okay. I think I have gathered my thoughts on… everything? Ugh. My head hurts so bad… At least I can’t quite recount what happened when that arrow hit the ground. I think everything got incinerated or something, but I can’t register any pain, I think? Maybe I just forgot. The simulation jet lag is freaking brutal with such a high acceleration. What time is it…

Nine… fifty? Am I reading that right? We were in there for five days and… when did we even start? Even that detail is slipping through my mind. At least it just seems to be unimportant stuff that kinda fell out of my brain. I still remember the fight and the journey and all that.

I think the fact that none of us realized that she hadn’t used any healing items until that point was probably the biggest hiccup in that fight. Maybe we should’ve baited her into using it or something. Our strat of cycling in people to keep her at bay makes sure she can’t use them in the first place.

“Hey, Trener, where were you the entire fight? I swear you were there on the fifth day. I swear I saw everyone else fighting at some point.” Rousi asked and broke the silence in this weirdly silent classroom.

Trener maintained his silence while looking quite irritated. I don’t think we need any words coming out of his mouth with that reaction. How shameful.

Everyone is sitting in their seats, unsure of what to do or say next. I think most of us were wiped out by the time of the final attack.

“...We lost, right?” Trener asked with hesitation. I think most can infer from the mood of the classroom alone. None of us have even checked the final results yet.

“Badly.” I said in the place of all of us who were there at the end. It’s best to say that we burnt out all resources on the first phase of the fight, never expecting a second phase. “There really should be no world where one person should beat over two hundred, you know?”

“Whatever. Any of us with a brain know it’s not that simple anyway.” Histon said, clearly rather deflated. “Kroin. Can you explain it for the rest of the class? I’m tired.”

“I didn’t even survive to the end, I can’t provide anything insightful.” Damn it dude, play the smart guy this one time, can’t you?

“Useless…” Histon groaned out.

“How did you all even survive against her for so long? She was shredding buildings like nothing. I have no idea why you all try to shame me like that.” Trener suddenly spoke up like an idiot again. I guess it’s possible he’s not the only one who might have that sort of thought, but maybe don’t say it like that.

“We can all shred buildings, dude. Not a good comparison.” Histon spelled it out for him. That kind of feat is old-school at this point.

“Huh? Since when?” Trener asked, clearly very confused by the statement.

“A while back. The school’s training method can be draconian on some days, but it bolstered our power by quite a lot.” Kroin chimed in to explain. “Looking at it, it seems like the main point of the event was to put us in an unrestricted environment to fight without the fear of collateral damage. Competition is secondary, since no doubt not a lot of people realize that at full strength leveling a building is no longer uncommon.”

“Really? I never think of it that way.” Rousi chimed in.

“The intention was quite clear from the outside, they wouldn’t have made the metropolis the final stage of the battle royale, or litter a bunch of buildings in random locations otherwise.” Kroin explained. “Whoever organized it wants us to use our full strength, no strings attached.”

“So, Kroin, when did you die?” Before the discussion could continue, Rousi suddenly spoke up.

“...I was hit by a stray bullet from her scythe when it was in its auto-attack mode.” …Oh.

“...When was that even? She does that more than a couple of times.” Rousi isn’t really sure how to make fun of him for it, since there’s no way to gauge when he was killed during the raid.

Suddenly the screen in the front of the class lit up, showing the leaderboard, or more specifically the top twenty people based on the amount of points earned, with stats on placement and survival time.

“…That’s a lot of people dying at the same time?” Trener remarked. He wasn’t there so naturally he’s confused about the result.

“She nuked the entire map, so all of us basically died at the same time.” Histon explained to the guy who clearly died early. “No way to avoid it. I think it probably covered the entire playing area, so there’s no way to run away.”

“Really? Why didn’t she just use that from that start?” Trener asked.

“How should I know? Probably because she was playing around for the most part. Once we can’t keep up anymore she goes for the nuclear option.” Histon replied. “She ends it once she doesn’t find any challenge in it anymore.”

“...Hey. At least all of us get to the final day, right?” Trener spoke up after a moment of silence as everyone looked at the leaderboard.

Hmm… Looks like we can also check it on the website as well. We can only see up to twenty people’s results on the screen, so here we can look at it in more detail.

Looks like I’m one of the top earners, and the points gained are based more on how much we get instead of purely placement. I don’t think we have a place to spend them just yet, but with those items in the shop, it’s not hard to imagine.

Hm? Fiss lasted surprisingly long. For someone who seemed rather disinterested in fighting she lasted for a long while, though that could just be because she is staying away from the frontlines and only doing small attacks and nothing else. For all we know at some point a good deal of people just lost the motivation to fight, or don’t know how much they can contribute.

“...I remember that Lynda dealt significant damage to her at one point. Did anyone else do anything after I was killed?” Kroin asked. I guess he wants to analyse the fight and is just asking what the people in the class did for now. Who knows if we’ll get to review the full thing at some point.

“Luik managed to cut off her right arm, not that it lasted.” I answered. It was an impressive display, and it does help Jennla using that big destruction wave unobstructed, but it was sadly not enough. “Histon didn’t do anything, by the way.”

“The hell!? I was helping out!” He protested.

“You never get a good hit on her, do you?” I pointed out. It doesn’t help that his approach isn’t the most useful. We have other high stamina fighters to keep her in check. We lack more firepower than anything, and he notably lacks any big move to call his own. “You really should learn to get a finishing move one of these days. Just enhanced punches and kicks wouldn’t fly nowadays.”

“Said someone with a crazy good weapon!” He continued to protest. What does he want me to do with that? Not use it?

“All that aside, what do we do now?” Kroin asked, which is a pretty reasonable thing to ask when… Gosh, it’s so weird how more than four days passed for us but it’s not even two hours in the real world.

“Beats me. I guess we really can’t do anything but wait.” I said while scratching my head. As it is we don’t really know what would happen for the rest of the day. I bet everyone has a lot of questions like why did this even happen in the first place.

…We never really push her to use her full strength until that last moment, it feels like. Maybe if Seni hadn’t burned herself up in the last half of the fight then we would’ve been singing a different tune, but that’s ultimately a what-if. Same with if the other healer of that class and Karra are around to help. They just have to conveniently go out somewhere and not be roped into this nonsense like the rest of us.

*Ding*

“” The voice from the speaker rang out… Neat.

“Great! I really need something to distract me from everyone being miserable.” Histon is the first to get up from his seat before making his exit.

Everyone else also follows along without really saying anything. If we wanna keep complaining to each other maybe it’s better to do it over a table full of food.

*Zoom*

The scenery isn’t all too different from the last time it was refurbished as a place to party, though this time the lighting is quite a bit brighter. It doesn’t look like that bar is here today as well.

“Alright Glery, let’s go get something.” I said to her and she quietly followed me along to go get some food. It’s a buffet like last time, so we just go pick whatever we want in large amounts then go sit down and slowly eat it all.

…It’s weird how the state of our bodies in that simulation seems to have no effect on our appetite at all, but that’s also probably for the best. Who knows what would happen if anything carried over, maybe that would’ve caused a lot of problems when EX-VR hit the market. Just the jet lag alone was already quite a problem.

“Alright then. Are we gonna keep yapping about our failures?” I said to the one table with a good amount of people in our class sitting at. The usual people go about and sit at a table for one and two, and it also looks like everyone is flooding in to get something to eat and relax.

“I’m good on that front.” Histon replied before he began eating the large pile of steaks that seemed to be leaking oil. Should he really be eating those fatty cuts without anything to balance it out?

“...What was that silk thing?” Trener spoke up before began eating the stuff he randomly throw onto his plate.

“An Innate Ability of hers. It’s not a concept they teach us during the poorly disguised magic class, but think of it like a special perks or abilities in a game that make your character fight differently, making them distinct and unique.” It’s not really that complicated of a concept if you look at it through that lens, but… “Usually the potency of those Innate Traits are far beyond the normal output of someone who theoretically mastered mana control trying to replicate a similar ability, it’s logic breaking. Even if you could convert one unit of mana into a fireball, someone with an Innate Trait of ‘creating a lot of fire’ can create five with just that one point.”

“...How the hell would anyone even know that they have something like that?” Trener asked.

“That’s the fun part, you don’t.” Kroin interjected. “At most you discovered it by being pushed to rely on nothing but your instinct, or simply realizing it after many decades has passed. Some people have a trait such as absurdly long lifespan or even unlimited lifespan. It’s more than being combat-related.”

“Hmm…” Trener muttered to himself. “How rare is this anyway?”

“Very. It’s best to assume you don’t have it and be surprised later.” Kroin answered. “But as you can see, even something as innocuous as ‘creating silks’ can be abused to gain an advantage in a battle. It’s not strictly a combat-related ability, and yet it’s so deadly because of its efficiency and who is wielding that ability.”

“I would imagine that we’re not seeing even half of what she can do with that ability.” I pointed out. The last few minutes showed a lot more of what she can do, and those moves were certainly way flashier and deadly than anything she threw out prior.

“It’s really feeling like Emmie is all we can talk about.” Rousi remarked.

“What. You wanna talk about your journey there or something? I guess we can do that.” Histon chimed in. “Where do you wanna start with that? There’s many things to talk about, right?”

There’s certainly a lot we can talk about everything that happened in that game. It’s multiple days worth, you could say.