Golden Experience

The first person to notice the invasion was a player casually leaving town. He yelled something, after which sellswords flooded out of the gate one after another. Rare was too far away to tell what they were saying, so she descended a bit and used the [Light Magic] spell [Camouflage] to ensure she wouldn’t be spotted as she got closer. The [Camouflage] spell shielded the target from sight using light. There was a noticeably unnatural refraction if you looked at the camouflaged object from different angles, but unless you knew there was something there to scrutinize then there wouldn’t normally be any reason to do something like that.

“Ants! I knew it! The event monsters for this city are the ants from that forest!”

“I heard it would mainly be undead, but we can’t just turn a blind eye to the monsters native to this region either! They’ve got compound eyes, after all!”

“Uhh… Anyway, there was talk of there being an undead boss monster in the forest, so we might get undead too!”

“It might have been hard inside that dark forest, but out here in the sun, an undead boss is probably weaker! Also, we’ve got tons of players here, and when the city is being attacked then the NPC sellswords will probably also help out, so we could probably at least keep it from getting in!”

How wonderful it was to see players having such a good time.

“Dammit! Why are there monsters attacking the city…? Nothing like this has ever happened before!”

“It’s probably because those newbies kept going to the forest and pissing them off! Those bastards!”

The angry yelling probably came from the NPCs. The “newbies” they referred to were clearly the players, but this invasion wasn’t their fault. However… Since Rare was in fact doing this for them, and the administrators had set up this event in the first place for players to enjoy, then from a certain perspective it really wasn’t wrong to blame the players.

“—How confusing. Well, whatever, we can just say it’s all because of the players. In that case, they should pay for their sins with their lives. Let’s start off with cannonfire. I’d have wanted to keep them in reserve for siege purposes, but since there don’t seem to be any defenses to worry about, we have time to wait for the cooldowns. All right, load shrapnel rounds!”

<Load shrapnel rounds.>

Sugaru responded from the queen’s chamber, now operating as the command center. When she repeated the order, this also communicated it out to the artillery ants. Below Rare, those ants stopped in place and bent so that the tips of their abdomens pointed forward.

“What are those…? They look different from the regular ants.”

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“Are ants supposed to do that? That looks more like what scorpions do.”

“Or like, doesn’t that look bad? Feels like they’re going to shoot something, doesn’t it?”

“Don’t be stupid, they’re ants. They’re just—”

“Fire.”

<Fire.>

Instantly, every artillery ant produced a loud boom from its abdomen gun barrel, and the projectiles they fired made a beeline for the sellswords in front of the city gate. The shells exploded before the gate, raining fine buckshot on the hapless victims.

“Ag—”

“Gue—”

The sellswords could only watch blankly before being turned into minced meat without having a chance to utter even a single word. Shortly after, the remains disintegrated entirely. Some of the bodies didn’t disappear; those ones must have been NPCs. Rare’s forces didn’t have the expertise to kill only players with shrapnel bombs, so their only choice was indiscriminate fire. One or two rounds of buckshot wouldn’t do much damage, but there was an excessively large number of artillery ants compared to enemy sellswords—after all, if they only did a small amount of damage, then the answer was to shave down their health by blasting as many rounds into them as possible. If someone could completely nullify the damage, then they would have to use another type of attack, but there didn’t appear to be anyone like that out here.

“If their objective is to protect the city, then our goal is to destroy it. I bear no grudges against them, but, well, it’s the same in any game: defeat enemies for no other purpose than to get XP.”

Rare offered a token moment of silence, then commanded her forces to load the next round of shells. They had wiped out the sellswords in front of the gate, but they needed to be ready to shoot the next wave that would come out. Normally, while the enemy was in disarray, she would want to send in the infantry ants to fight inside the city since that would cause more damage, but this was a good opportunity to try the high-explosive rounds as well. She looked forward to seeing how powerful they were in a siege.

The players may have felt differently, but the NPC guards seemed to lose all will to fight after seeing the last attack, so they closed the gate and tried to bulk up their defenses.

“Nice. Once it’s completely closed, attack the gate. Also, I’d like to see if we can break the walls, so shoot some explosive rounds at it too.”

<I understand.>

After the gate finally closed, the city of Erfahren had retreated into itself like a turtle to maximize its defense.

<Fire.>

The artillery ants bombarded the gate. Unlike the shrapnel shells from before, these high-explosive shells wouldn’t explode until they hit. These shells were produced specially to behave kind of like HESH rounds^[1]; when their tips were squashed, they would adhere to the surface of the target. Immediately afterward, the magical material inside would ignite.

These shells were crafted to “attack from the inside” if they couldn’t destroy walls directly, but these walls were apparently a lot more brittle than the shells were; the tips weren’t getting squashed at all, the shells were just getting embedded in the wall and exploding like that to open up huge holes. Since the gate was made out of wood, after a single bombardment it caught fire, and soon it could no longer function as a gate.

“Awww. Well, of course this would happen.”

Maybe catapults would have been sufficient for this invasion. Given how things were currently progressing, if she could have ordered bombing runs with soldier vespoids carrying artillery ants, the city could have been reduced to a flaming pile of wreckage in the blink of an eye.

“Well, I’ll have to save that for next time. Anyway, once we’ve taken care of the wall, send in infantry and shock troopers. The shock troopers will take point with their flamethrowers, and the infantry can clean up whatever’s leftover.”

<Understood.>

At Sugaru’s command, the assault ants and infantry ants on standby next to the artillery ants left the formation to surge over the rubble and into the city. Many guards had been blown away with the city wall and gate, but the ones that survived along with sellswords who were probably players ran over to block the ants.

“Even if they’re monsters, they wouldn’t bomb their own allies! Let’s take care of them in melee combat!”

“If we’re up against ants, then we’re already used to them! If we hold them off here, then our mages can fry those bombarding ants!”

Since ants were the ones primarily “entertaining guests” in the great forest, many sellswords did have experience defeating them. However, assault ants couldn’t be used in the forest, so they had never faced off with players before. This was probably the first time these players had ever seen them before. In other words, it was a fantastic chance to teach them the difference. As the sellswords got closer, the assault ants calmly pointed their abdomens forward, then greeted them with a stream of fire to the face.

“GYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!”

“Wh-Wha—! AAAAAAAAAHHH!!!”

It didn’t matter whether they wore metal or leather equipment—the sellswords burned to death all the same. The assault ants skillfully controlled their weapons, sweeping them back and forth in a fan shape, letting their flames scorch everything in range. The combustible gel they sprayed took a while to burn off, so any sellswords who weren’t hit directly still took damage from the quickly rising temperature.

The mage-looking sellswords tried to extinguish the fire using water- and ice-type spells, but there were just too many ants. It was like trying to put out a bonfire with a squirt gun.

“Heh heh. Well, this is entertaining in its own right, but just spamming flamethrowers doesn’t feel like they’re living up to their role as shock troopers. They need assault rifles or something… or maybe not. You can’t really charge while holding up a gun.”

In the first place, this wasn’t that kind of game. With regards to infantry units, combat tended to be close range with bladed weapons in a world like this. Basic military tactics dictated that infantry went to the front lines while snipers should support them from the rear. However, if Rare did that, then she wouldn’t have been able to test out the assault ants’ flamethrowers.

“In the end, I think this probably worked out for the best. They did well.”

The mages in the back gave up on putting out the fires and shifted tactics to just attacking the ants themselves. Since the remaining enemies could only attack from range, they wouldn’t just stand there glaring from behind the wall of flames. The assault and infantry ants stepped back to let the artillery ants that were hiding in the shadow of the wreckage of the city walls bomb them from above. Because of the rubble, they had to fire at a high angle, but with vespoids sighting from a higher elevation, the economical shrapnel rounds easily shredded the mages apart. The remaining enemies hiding behind buildings had two options: either be cooked alive by the heat from the flamethrowers, or be blown apart along with the buildings. The ants were also learning on the fly, improving their coordination with each other while efficiently advancing their battle lines.

This side of the city had completely stopped functioning. The guards had been completely wiped out, the sellswords and players were no more than corpses, and the residents were fleeing in a panic, having never even contemplated the idea that their city wall could be brought down. The ants had been directed to kill any character that posed a combat threat, but the regular citizens were designated as unimportant, so they were ignored. Their goal was to level the city, not kill its people; any deaths were simply a byproduct of accomplishing their primary objective.

Around when the ants’ invasion neared the city center, the lord’s knights appeared. However, they were far too late by any metric. Even if Rare had withdrawn her soldiers that instant, the destruction was too severe; the city could no longer be reclaimed.

“Ah, it’s because the lord’s mansion is near the middle. Rather than them coming out to repel us, the knights are only here because we’re approaching what they’re really protecting.”

^[1]: High-explosive squash head