Chapter 203: It's okay, a small loss isn't a loss.

When Miyabi Nagumo called out to Hiyori Shiina, she had already stepped aside so Chris could run the same experiment as before.

"100 S Points…" Kei Karuizawa murmured. "That's… still within the acceptable range, isn't it?"

Hayasaka Ai nodded and picked up the thread. "If it weren't limited to one person per crossing, if it opened the passage in one go, a hundred S Points would be a steal. It'd be like adding Chris and the rest of us to their fighting strength out of thin air."

"What worries me is that it's a one-way ticket for a single person, and every extra body costs another hundred S Points."

Chris listened to the girls' analysis, thought it over for a moment, then said slowly:

"Realistically speaking, offering this much tactical support already goes above and beyond what anyone could ask of us."

"But if you're asking me to sit here and watch them die, I can't do it after all."

"Still, let's check both situations first. If it hasn't reached the point of no return, they still have room to clear it under their own power… and there's no need for us to barge in and rob them of the chance to grow."

Hearing that, Hiyori Shiina nodded.

She understood what Chris meant.

Real protection should never mean playing full-time nanny.

And it was exactly as Chris said.

Given the sheer number and point value of the monsters in the Great Tomb of Nazarick, dropping Chris in there alone against elites worth dozens of points apiece, grinding out 100 S Points wouldn't be hard at all.

But by now they had confirmed one of the rules.

No matter how many points you farmed inside your own exam hall, the difficulty boost the presiding god applied to the monsters stayed strictly limited. It would never hand out a completely unsolvable death sentence.

Take the "Ainz Ooal Gown" that Miyabi Nagumo and the others were facing right now. As troublesome as all those items looked, he was only worth 150 points.

And that was after they'd farmed a good eight hundred points in their previous exam!

By comparison, Chris had only racked up three hundred or so points back in the Chimera Ants exam hall, and what did he end up facing?

A full two hundred points of Darkness Devil!

A root-level existence, all but unsolvable without the right countering item!

On top of that, Miyabi Nagumo's group now understood the mechanism for handling "World Items," and they had the pilot-type mech Chris had left behind as a trump card.

If they could also strike an alliance with Granny Kaire, who held the [Downfall of Castle and Country]… clearing this under their own power really wasn't out of the question.

Thinking that through, Hiyori Shiina swiped rapidly across the screen.

Then she noticed that in the brief stretch of time she'd looked away to manage the other feeds, Miyabi Nagumo and the others seemed to have reached some kind of decision.

Where the Slane Theocracy's leadership and Granny Kaire stood, a mass of shadow ninjas had welled up out of nowhere, locked in a bizarre standoff with the Theocracy's elites.

Thankfully, most likely on an order from Akane Tachibana as commander, the shadow soldiers showed no intent to attack.

They didn't strike back. They didn't hurt anyone.

Even when attacked, they took the hits without evading, simply lurking there, as if waiting for something.

Stalling for time? Or relaying some kind of signal?

Hiyori Shiina's delicate brows drew together.

To leave nothing to chance, she quickly switched over to Miyabi Nagumo's feed to ask.

Once she got a definite answer from Akane Tachibana, Hiyori Shiina rubbed her temples, a headache building.

She turned her attention back to Granny Kaire's side.

After briefly explaining what the shadow soldiers were there for, she noticed the two people guarding Kaire closely.

One man, one woman, both with an overwhelming presence.

Even facing shadow soldiers you could never finish killing, neither showed a flicker of alarm.

"Granny Kaire, who are these two?" Hiyori Shiina asked, testing the water.

On the other side of the screen, Kaire pressed a hand lightly to her chest, an unhealthy gray pallor spreading across her aged face.

She caught her breath for a moment, then explained:

"They are the Captain of the Black Scripture and its Extra Seat, 'Zesshi Zetsumei.' The undisputed strongest of our Slane Theocracy."

"To deal with this Ainz Ooal Gown you speak of, they will accompany me and these ninjas…"

Kaire left the rest unspoken.

But with Hiyori Shiina's intelligence, how could she miss the subtext?

After all, she had nothing but her word to back her up right now, while Kaire was carrying a World Item capable of hard-locking Shalltear Bloodfallen herself.

Facing an unknown ally, the Slane Theocracy naturally needed its strongest bodyguards at its side as both deterrent and insurance.

Hiyori Shiina wasn't about to say a word against that.

With a powerful enemy right beside them, time was the one thing Miyabi Nagumo's group couldn't spare, and infighting at this exact juncture was unaffordable.

Still, in that short overlap of feeds, Hiyori Shiina picked up on something wrong in the old woman's voice.

Like the aftereffects of a grave wound, as if she might drop dead ahead of schedule at any moment.

'Is that… a curse? Or some kind of incurable, ongoing trauma?'

The girl ran the numbers fast.

Maybe she could suggest that Miyabi Nagumo's group buy [MC Milk] from the Mystery Merchant to scrub the negative status off Kaire.

Not only would it be an enormous favor, it would lay the firmest possible foundation of trust for the cooperation ahead!

Hiyori Shiina didn't hesitate.

She switched feeds and relayed the information at speed.

Chris, standing off to one side, took in every step of Hiyori Shiina's smooth handiwork, and of course saw straight through the girl's little scheme.

'All I can say is, sometimes you stick a willow branch in the ground without thinking and it grows into a whole tree…'

In the original story, Shalltear Bloodfallen had her health bar ground down by the Bone King and was finished off in the end, without costing Ainz much of anything.

A large part of the reason was that, before the World Item took full control of her, Shalltear had fought desperately and crippled Kaire, who died to the curse riding on that attack not long after she got home.

With the caster gone, there was no one left directing her.

That was what indirectly turned Shalltear into an ownerless field boss, which made everything the Bone King did afterward so much easier.

But now?

That little scrap of curse Shalltear left behind, up against a status-clearing item like [MC Milk], which belonged to the same "conceptual-tier mechanic" category…

That was a candle next to the sun. One gulp and the illness was cured.

If Kaire lived, then Shalltear, who already countered the Bone King, would no longer be a wild monster, and there'd be a healthy pilot behind her running micro-level control… exactly as Hiyori had envisioned, and honestly, there was real potential in that!

Chris glanced at Hiyori Shiina working the screens, and felt a quiet flush of satisfaction.

Hiyori was starting to show her own talent now… good, good.

Once he'd confirmed that the upperclassmen's situation was stable for the moment, Chris pulled his gaze away.

He turned his attention instead to the feed Amikura Mako had been watching, the one showing The Cabin in the Woods instance.

…

The Cabin in the Woods.

Down in the underground facility, in a wrecked surveillance corridor.

"Let go of me! You lunatics!"

The furious shout came as Nanase Tsubasa dragged the Director toward the elevator one-handed, hauling the woman who had released every monster in the place to run wild along like a chick out of a coop.

The woman still had her chin up, righteous indignation all over her face, not a shred of remorse for the insanity she'd just committed.

But with Nanase Tsubasa's blood-spattered face right in front of her, the Director's trembling legs gave away the fear underneath.

"Child, I know what I'm saying sounds cruel."

"But are you truly going to abandon the entire human world for your own selfish desires?"

"Sacrifice a handful, and save millions of families!"

The elevator rose while the Director panted out one last attempt at moral hijacking from the high ground.

Nanase Tsubasa let out a cold laugh.

She seized the Director by the hair and forced the woman to look at her, face blank. "Please don't confuse the concepts here, ma'am."

"We're not the ones abandoning humanity. You are. You people are the ones throwing humanity's safety away!"

"This is your fault! Let me ask you something. When Yotsuya and Shiranami turned up in this place as innocent bystanders, what did you do? What did you show them? What did you choose?!"

The Director's eyes flickered, and she argued back anyway. "No… that's because your sudden appearance disrupted our sacred plan!"

"The sacrifices we'd already selected vanished without a trace because of you. That counts as an accident—"

"An accident?"

Before she could finish, Nanase Tsubasa slammed her against the cold wall.

The girl pointed at the big surveillance screen on the console not far off, still lit, already reset by them. "Really? Then why don't you take a look at the footage?"

Forced to look, the Director saw what was playing on the screen and reacted like she'd seen a ghost. "This… how did you find our surveillance room so fast?!"

The mockery at the corner of Nanase Tsubasa's mouth deepened. "If even a fraction of you truly cared about humanity's future, you wouldn't have released monsters on our classmates the second they appeared, with no contact, no warning, and used them as chips for your betting and your entertainment."

"Stop making me sick with all this talk about saving the world. You're the real butchers here!"

Faced with evidence that solid, the Director went silent. Her mouth opened and closed, and no excuse came.

Ryuji Kanzaki, who had been waiting in the surveillance room all along, stepped out of the shadows.

He wiped the blood off his hands without much care, looked at the woman still putting up a fight, and impatience flashed in his eyes.

"Stop wasting words on her, Nanase." Ryuji Kanzaki took up the bad-cop role on his own initiative.

"Either we crack her mouth open and get the location of the passage to the other dimension, or we throw her out right now and let her fend for herself while we go ask people one by one where the archive room is. Either way, decide fast. We're on a clock."

The Director blanked for a beat at that, then latched onto something like she'd spotted a blind spot, and understanding lit her face. "Another dimension… you want to escape to some other world?!"

She jabbed a finger at Nanase Tsubasa and Ryuji Kanzaki and started laughing wildly. "My God, you really are demons out of hell… from the very beginning, you never intended to give your lives for humanity!"

"You just want to run away!"

Ryuji Kanzaki rolled his eyes at the deranged woman like he was looking at an idiot.

He turned his head toward Nanatsura Tsubasa. "Doesn't look like we'll get anything worth hearing out of her. Let's go. I refuse to believe that in a base with this many people, there isn't a single coward willing to talk!"

With that, Ryuji Kanzaki drove his foot up and shattered the huge one-way bulletproof glass in front of the surveillance room to pieces!

He made as if to step out over the carpet of glass shards.

In reality, this was nothing more than Ryuji Kanzaki laying down a show of force.

At its core it was one final round of psychological pressure on the Director.

Smashing that glass meant opening a straight path to the monsters outside.

It amounted to telling her plainly: refuse to cooperate any longer, and the things running loose out there would eat her alive.

In truth, if events had followed the movie's original course, this kind of pressure would have meant nothing.

The world was about to be destroyed by the ancient Evil God below, and as the executor of the sacrificial ritual, she'd stopped caring whether she lived or died long ago. What reason would she have to compromise?

Sure, you're all monsters with the Vampire Bloodline now. Very impressive. Very strong.

But that had nothing to do with her!

Everyone was going to be buried alongside the human race in the end, so they might as well all die together!

Yet cornered on the edge of death, human nature rarely holds up to testing.

Give a person even the faintest sliver of hope of surviving, and the human instinct to live becomes a terrifying thing.

When Nanase Tsubasa saw Ryuji Kanzaki smash the window out of nowhere, she was honestly a little confused.

But then her eyes flicked to the Director pinned against the wall, brows knotting and knotting again, terror of death and open indecision flashing through her eyes, and the girl grasped Ryuji Kanzaki's calculation in an instant.

Nanase Tsubasa smoothed her expression over at once.

Though covered head to toe in blood and looking like a demon of slaughter as she was, the woman would have had trouble reading any subtle change on her face anyway.

But if you're going to put on a show, you commit to the whole performance.

Nanase Tsubasa fell into step behind Ryuji Kanzaki, and at a volume that sounded like weary musing yet happened to carry perfectly to the Director, sighed:

"Haah… no telling how much longer until this so-called Evil God shows up…"

"Better safe than sorry. Let's turn Yotsuya into a vampire too. With an undying body, maybe we can last a bit longer under the Evil God's attacks. As long as we hold out until we find a way out…"

She hadn't finished speaking when she felt something wrap around her ankle.

She looked down. The Director, so full of righteousness a moment ago, had collapsed on the floor without a scrap of dignity, both arms clamped around her calf.

"That's right! You started out as ordinary humans too, but you've got an item that turns humans into non-human creatures! Even if this world ends, all you have to do is switch worlds and you'll most likely go on living… you really are demons, in the truest sense of the word!"

The Director's voice had gone shrill and warped with terror, but in the very next breath she changed direction, weeping as she begged:

"But… but I want to live!"

"I want to live…! I know who can open the passage to the other dimension! Just take me with you, and turn me into a vampire too… and I'll tell you!"

Nanase Tsubasa's mouth opened, then shut. Looking down at the woman groveling at her feet, she felt a strange stab of irony.

This was the noble soul who kept preaching about all of humanity?

This was righteousness for the sake of the human race?

In the face of actual death, they were greedier and more selfish than anyone alive.

Ryuji Kanzaki, who had never gone far in the first place, walked back over.

He looked down at the woman on the floor and wore the sour face of someone dragged back against his will. "What's this? Just kick her off and be done with it! Nanase, don't tell me you're going soft-hearted at a time like this."

Nanase Tsubasa wrenched her leg out of the woman's grip, her tone flat. "She says she knows where the passage is."

Ryuji Kanzaki raised an eyebrow, holding the suspicious, cold-blooded persona without letting the mask slip. "And why should we believe her?"

Terrified of watching this last chance slip away, the Director poured it all out like beans from a sack. "The moment the sun rises, the Evil God underground wakes up completely and this world is destroyed! There are only eight minutes left until sunrise. I would never gamble with my own life!"

"Please, take me with you! Otherwise you'll be stuck here and buried with this world too!"

Nanase Tsubasa frowned, seemingly weighing the pros and cons.

Ryuji Kanzaki looked down at the woman coldly and said, "Fine. Taking you along isn't a problem."

"But the [Stone Mask], the thing that turns humans into vampires, isn't with us right now. Since you say there isn't much time—"

"—then you'd better pray we can go get the person holding it and still have time left to hunt for an exit with you."

That got the Director frantic.

Finding someone in eight minutes? There was no way that worked!

She knew time was life. She sucked in a deep breath and simply threw down her last card. "The Hell Lord! The man on the monitors with the saw blade sticking out of his skull!"

As if afraid they wouldn't believe her, the Director added in a shaky voice, "Everything I've said is true! But… he's cruel by nature, he loves torturing people without end, and he's strong. He's in the top tier, right below the Evil God."

"So it isn't only me… if you want a better shot at surviving in a place like hell, you should turn every human still alive in this base into a vampire and bring them all along! Enough ants can bite an elephant to death. We're natural teammates now!"

This woman didn't just want to save herself. She wanted to raise a vampire army along the way, paving the road for lording it over everyone in the other world later. Her greed and selfishness were laid bare in that instant.

Nanase Tsubasa and Ryuji Kanzaki exchanged a long, silent look.

In the end, Nanase Tsubasa lifted her head and called out to Amikura Mako, a whole world away. "Amikura, did you catch that?"

"We'd like you to pass the word to everyone. And while you're at it, help us pin down that Hell Lord's location!"

Amikura Mako answered right away. "Got it! I'm on it!"

Hearing that girl's voice come from nowhere in particular, everyone in the corridor felt something settle in their chests.

For Nanase Tsubasa and Ryuji Kanzaki, it was because they'd finally found a way to break this dead end open.

For the Director sprawled on the floor, it was pure elation. She was convinced that her own cleverness had not only preserved the last spark of humanity, but had saved her own life on top of it.

Worst case, she'd start over from scratch in the other world!

Humanity had risen from nothing to begin with, after all.

As long as the will of humankind carried on…

That's what you call a small loss that isn't a loss at all! An absolute win!

____

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🔥 New history: DanMachi: Collecting Goddesses Right from the Start! — posted on The_Mikudayo