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Chaos and Roseline arrive in Treve after dusk. Unlike Clermont and its state of high alert, Treve is peaceful, and as Roseline watches the tranquil scenery from inside the carriage, she breathes a sigh of relief. Apparently, the vampire’s influence hasn’t reached the neighboring towns yet. And it doesn’t look like their pursuers made it here before them.

Reassured, Roseline thinks about what to do next. Her opponents have seized control of Clermont’s upper echelon. There’s a high chance that the surrounding lords have also fallen into their hands, and more importantly, they don’t have enough military strength to retake the palace, so she can’t rely on them. Of course, this can also be said of the three dukes, including Duke Chartelle, but if the three dukes have also fallen into the enemy’s hands, then there’s not a single person in the country who she can turn to. There’s only a limited number of nobles who have enough military strength to retake Clermont.

Her original plan was to buy a horse at Treve and then head for Charante. But there’s another mode of transportation that can make it to Charante faster.

“Is something wrong?”

“No, it’s nothing. Sorry, Chaos, but can we make a detour?”

“I don’t mind, but where do you want to go?”

“The airport.”

The mode of transportation known as dragon flight. She purposefully excluded it from her plans, but the dragon flights might also be in service. With this in mind, she hurries to the airport.

The airport takes up a lot of space for the giant dragons to land. The dragons’ wing flaps and their cries make a lot of noise, so they’re usually located on the edge of town, and Treve is no exception. Unlike Clermont, the airport has few customers, so since it’s only a pit stop, there are no dragon stables. Sure enough, just as Roseline expected, there are no dragons in sight.

“The dragon flights aren’t in service?”

“Yeah, the last stop of the flight is Clermont, so if there are no dragons flying in from Clermont, there’s nothing we can do. Dragons hardly ever come to Treve in the first place, but there are no dragons flying from Clermont even to more distant locations. And there’s that rumor that guys who go to Clermont don’t come back. What the heck happened in Clermont?” the airport employee replies, grumbling about how he can’t make a living like this.

Clermont is the first and last stop of dragon flights, so it’s the origin of all routes throughout Commune. If they’re stopped due to being on high alert, then they can’t operate. Roseline expected this, but she’s a bit disappointed. She could get there in a few hours with a dragon flight, but on horseback, it would take a week at the earliest even if everything goes smoothly. And since there’s the concern of her pursuers interfering, if she’s unlucky, it’ll probably take even more time. It’s incredibly inconvenient for her, since she needs to meet with Duke Chartelle as soon as possible.

However, if she has Chaos’s carriage, that’s a different story. If she has this carriage which is faster than a war horse, she should make it to Charante more quickly.

“Hey, Chaos. Do you have any plans after this?”

“Nope, none at all. Originally, my plan was to look for someone at the Clermont Adventurer’s Guild, but in these circumstances, that’s impossible. So I have no idea what I’m gonna do now.”

“Then, do you want to go to Charante with me?” she invites Chaos, who wandered off somewhere while she was talking to the airport employee. Her distrust of Chaos hasn’t disappeared entirely. But at the very least, he isn’t a pursuer from Clermont, so if she has his help, she’s sure to be able to shorten her transportation time. And to Roseline, who is anxious about fighting, his strength is reassuring.

“Sure. I don’t have anywhere to go, so I’ll go with you,” Chaos nods after thinking for a bit. Roseline, who was disheartened at the thought of making that difficult journey alone, relaxes a bit. That may be the biggest reason she invited him.

“You will? Then, let’s leave as soon as we can!”

“You should probably hold off on that, it’s almost night. If you’re going to Charante, you’ll have to go through mountain roads. It’s dangerous to cross a mountain in total darkness. Why don’t you stay here for the night instead?” the airport employee, who was watching their exchange, interjects. But Roseline, who wants to hurry to her destination, is prepared to take some risks.

“We were just attacked a little while ago. I’d rather not get ambushed at night.”

“But…!”

“If you’re in a hurry, can’t we just up the pace?” Chaos makes a reasonable argument, not knowing the circumstances or noticing her impatience. Roseline tries to think calmly with a cool head.

No matter how strange that horse-like beast is, a horse is a horse. Even if they can run at monstrous speeds, travel will tire them, so they can’t keep running day and night. That means they would have to camp somewhere outdoors. Roseline, who lived in the palace, has never once done anything similar to camping.

“Alright. Then, we leave first thing tomorrow morning. I’ll make sure of it!” Roseline reluctantly agrees after weighing the various risks against the carriage’s speed and deciding that staying the night would be the better plan.

And so, Chaos and Roseline stay overnight in Treve.

***

After arriving at the inn and logging out, I think back on all that happened today.

It’s a good thing I met Rosa. Since I couldn’t find Alexia and Irene, I thought for sure I’d go back to playing all by myself, so meeting her was a huge help. Anyway, I wonder why she wants to go to Charante. I was planning on going somewhere else since this area is dangerous, so it was convenient for me. Judging by the map, Charante is farther away than Treve. When you’re just starting a game, you don’t have money and your means of transportation are limited, so it would be quite the distance going on foot. Doing that alone would be way too hard. Well, to be honest, my real motivation is just that I didn’t want to part ways with her now and go back to playing all by myself after I was lucky enough to meet her.

Even though this was the official release, Another World was kind of weird today, especially the weird event in Clermont. Why was even the Adventurer’s Guild closed? Treve was normal, but this would confuse the newbies who started from the official release. What the heck were the admins thinking?

And then there were those high-level monsters we encountered on the way to Treve. Monsters do tend to get stronger and higher-level the farther you are from Clermont. But I’ve never heard of monsters that high level appearing on the road south from Clermont. Well I have heard that there are a lot of new monsters added in Clermont, so I can’t deny the possibility that the spawn points got updated during the official release, but that’s still way too high level.

What are other players saying about this? If there’s this much weird stuff happening at a starting location, I’d expect a ton of criticism. With that in mind, I check the Another World forums, and as I expected, the reactions online are out of control. Yikes. Almost everyone is criticizing the admins, and there’s no trace of the mostly positive opinion they’ve maintained until now. …So everyone else saw that weird event after all.

Apparently, it’s called “The Evil God’s Invasion”, and it’s a large-scale event to celebrate the official release. It seems like this is the event that the “Something is happening in Commune?!” announcement that was posted near the end of the open beta was talking about. Just as the name implies, the evil god from the Another World setting is having his subordinate monsters rampage in a bunch of places in Commune, and there are even whole towns that have been occupied. The objective for this event is for the players to free those random towns from the monsters’ evil clutches. In other words, Clermont is like that because it’s been occupied by monsters.

Naturally, this is shocking to me. Seriously, It’s way too unreasonable. If we had upgraded our classes and gotten stronger, that’d be one thing, but what do they expect us to do if a bunch of level 1 players right at the start of the game have their starting location taken over by monsters?! Sure, Clermont may be categorized as a town, but at least exclude Clermont from the event!

Also, the event apparently started abruptly, and all the NPCs in the city suddenly disappeared. I probably logged in right after that. It seems like a lot of the players who picked Clermont as their starting location decided to delete their character and start again at a different location. When I logged in, Rosa was the only one I could find, but it looks like there were other players after all.

It probably takes a lot of work to deal with a large-scale event and the official release at the same time, but if they do something like this on the first day, there’s nothing they can do to come back from that. The players’ reactions will obviously be harsh. No matter how interesting a game is, if the admins handle it poorly, people will leave. But it really is an amazing game, so the last thing I want is for it to have a setback like this.

But anyway, the monsters are taking over towns, huh. We still don’t know how strong the monsters are or what the scope of it is, but these are monsters that can take over cities. There are probably a lot of them, and really strong ones. I wouldn’t be able to deal with them by myself. Hmm, I guess the only way to clear it would be to form a party– no, a guild.

When I say guild, I don’t mean the Adventurer’s Guild. Guilds are communities where players team up and form a group. This system may look the same as a party at first glance, but in reality, it’s different. You can’t share experience points and items gained from battles like in a party, but by being in a guild, you can receive benefits like “guild skills” that affect all players in the guild, and there are also quests that only guilds can attempt. A guild can have over a hundred people. In military terms, parties are squads and guilds are more like companies.

For example, there’s that knight group I encountered in the Treant Forest. That group was definitely put together by guild members. To fight a boss monster, you also have to fight the monsters surrounding it. A single party wouldn’t have enough people. In the first place, boss monsters themselves are so powerful that it would be difficult for a single party to defeat one. Multiple parties need to work together in an orderly manner, so these fights are usually centered around guilds.

From a solitary player’s point of view, it’s an impossible dream. Joining a party is hard enough. The reward is that you’re given the freed town as a territory. Along with that, you also get a palace and town tax collection authority, a function that allows you to collect money by putting taxes on item sales. In the future, there may be more battles between guilds fighting each other for territory.

In that case, it doesn’t seem like the sort of thing an individual can obtain. However, it looks like there are also rewards for players who participate in the battle, so maybe I’ll participate sometime.

First, we head to Charante. I hope we get there quickly.