Apparently, the game staff had made edits to themercial footage to align with what Rare had proposed.
“A certain yer stumbled onto a way to dramatically power up, then decided to participate in the event and show off. This method was considered eptable by the game staff, and they thought it would be good advertising for the game, so they pped together a video to release publicly. However, that yer didn’t want to reveal the method to anyone and just holed up in the great forest.” Hopefully the way the video was cut orments on the video would lead to that kind of misunderstanding.
Management must not have found any problems with this type of misdirection, so her suggestion was epted. In fact, Rare had entered the event in order to gauge the progress of other yers, and she hadn’t meant to show herself off. Rather, if she had wanted to show off all her cards, there wouldn’t have been enough time in the event to do so, something no one could have possibly fathomed if Rare stayed silent.
In addition, that Wayne guy released everything he knew about Rare on social media. He exined about Kerry, another yer with the same appearance who had done nothing wrong and was obeying Rare, and a bunch of other stuff; since pretty much everything he wrote waspletely wrong, she had no problem with it at all so she didn’t do anything about it. In the first ce, even if she wanted him to correct anything, if she went ahead and reached out to him directly on social media, that might render all his hard work moot. The mastermind should stay silent. The only time she needed to confess was after she’d been cornered. Right: just like what she had done the other day.
Anyway, her ns were proceeding smoothly… Well, not that she was doing anything, but it had been a week since things had kicked off. Right now, more and more yers were gathering at the Great Liebe Forest—she had only recently found out that was the name of this forest. The nearby city of Erfahren—another name she only just learned—was experiencing a surge of unprecedented economic prosperity as a consequence. It was as though they were preparing for war against the great forest. In other games, this many yers would only gather around raid dungeons.
If all these yers misunderstood that Rare obtained her strength within this forest-turned-dungeon, then she could consider her ploy sessful.
To help sell the dungeon setting, Rare was actually ying another game, a dungeon management one, and bringing her experience from there over here. The engineer ants produced low-rank metal weapons and armor with materials from the ore vein, which were nted in the outer areas of the forest. If a yer found one and took it with them, another item of the same quality would be hidden somewhere else. And it wasn’t only weapons and armor: low-rank potions; lumber, nuts, berries, and fruits from trees in the middleyer of the forest; monster pelts; and various other materials were strewn about at random. They were more than sufficiently stocked on supplies gathered from the middleyer nowadays; since it was a lot of trouble to have everything brought back to the queen’s chamber to give to the transporter ants, the ants who collected them were being told to just hang onto them. Scout ants were constantly tracking both the distributed items as well as yer movements. Because there were so many yers, they urgently needed to start producing more scout ants and form specialized monitoring squads.
After letting the invading yers kill monsters (mostly ants) and collect treasure to their hearts’ content, the bloodthirstier ants like the cavalry and snipers would then kill a moderate number of them. This was what Rare realized: if ants killed other ants, they wouldn’t earn even a single point of experience. However, if yers killed ants and earned experience, then those yers were killed by other ants, Rare’s group could gain much more XP.
On the whole, yers had around the same amount of XP going into the forest as they did after they died and came back, so they would want to adjust the kill timing a bit so that yers ended up a little ahead. Trying to finely control the yers’ power levels required precise calctions, and it was for that specific reason that she increased Sugaru’s INT so much. Because of that and [Enhance Follower], every ant’s INT had increased a bit, so they could work together to do those calctions. A fringe benefit was that it also raised the effectiveness of engineer ant acid. To be specific, they could now melt bronze. Even the weakest engineer ant would now be enough to deal with yers wearing equipment made from bronze or the bones of weak monsters. On a rted note, Erfahren’s supply of metals from the Great Liebe Forest ore vein had been stopped due to the upation of Rare’s group, but now it had been indirectly restored by putting it in the hands of yers. As a result, the price of iron had dropped. However, what the yers brought back was refined equipment… so much better than cast-metal goods that they stopped going to cksmiths to buy gear. However, metal equipment did require maintenance, so the demand for cksmiths didn’tpletely disappear. Still, she heard that quite a number of cksmiths ended up leaving town.
And who provided this intel? Remy. Now that the production lines were fully up and running in the great forest, Remy’s responsibilities as general manager had rxed and she now posed as a wandering alchemist to sell low-rank potions and items in town. While yers could find potions in the forest, they at least weren’t dumb enough to just go diving in without any from the start; on the contrary, some yers had too many and wanted to pawn them off. While there had always been apothecaries and alchemists in town selling potions, they didn’t <i>buy</i> potions, so Remy was able to carve a niche for herself and became rather sessful. There were a lot of yers who wanted to sell their potions and buy one-time-use talismans and charms; they became her regrs and woulde to her shop even when they had nothing to sell simply to stock back up on potions.
Since Remy’s shop was well-known among yers, she would hear about any reputable yers who hade to town. When those yers went into the great forest, Rare’s group would butter them up by letting them find better equipment, then take payment in the form of XP.
Ever sinceunching the attraction known as the Great Liebe Forest dungeon, Rare’s XP earnings had gone through the roof. It was so efficient that they neglected the goblin and monster farms, resulting in overpoption. Since they were around anyway, the ants lured them into killing yers; the yers were surely sick of fighting ants all the time, so it served to change up the routine, alleviate boredom. Goblins were as weak as engineer ants, but the farm-raised monsters were quite strong. Normally they could just be trampled by the sheer number of ants, but they were actually powerful enough that multiple parties of yers wouldn’t be able to defeat them. It would be great if those yers thought of them as midbosses or something and enjoyed the variety.
Sugaru was the sole administrator of the entire operation. With the support of the transporter ants, she would be able to handle most emergencies. If she needed someone with overwhelming battle power, she could recruit Deas to help her. When Kerry equipped Yoroizaka’s little sister, she was nothing to sneeze at either, but she wasn’t often away from Rare’s side.
And so, Rare had made a lot of free time for herself. She also had enough XP saved up for an experiment. Right now, she was just waiting for a report from Marion, who was out on business, so it was time to continue tinkering with alchemy.
<strong>TL note:</strong> Fun coincidence, when I picked a romanization for the name of the country, “Hiers” was at random, but turns out it actually is a German name. Now we also get the “Great Liebe Forest” (love) and “Erfahren” (experienced, learned).