Wrecking the Database 18

Wrecking the Database 18

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Commissioned by Weise

Wordcount: 2500

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I don’t believe in miracles, blessings, or coincidence. Things like fate, prophecy, and other such things are all tripe best left to people who need it. Now, I’m not degrading religion, superstitions, and rites of passage. I think they’re fantastic ways to label people, easily discern who and what they are, and take advantage of them. If a person voluntarily labels themselves, hooks themselves up with levers freely available to the public, and makes themselves convenient, then I’m all for it. Social interaction is at its absolute best when you have a clear-cut set of things to avoid and things to do for another person. 

That said, I hate working with NPCs.

No relation whatsoever to the previous topic at all.

Absolutely none.

NPCs inhabit a world filled with individuals who seek out accreditation, accolades, and awards that’s too difficult to do in the real world. The real world happens to require more than just killing mobs, grinding, and spending insane amounts of time on a subject. Mastering a skill doesn’t matter, if you’re incapable of showcasing it to others, have opponents you can’t deal with, or are can’t have fun through rigor. In a world that caters to a person’s desire to be special, especially one that has other special people in it, there needs to be people who are incredibly, unfortunately not special.

For a human being, just being good at isn’t enough.

You have to better than someone else.

That’s where real accomplishment comes from.

Thus, Elder Tale’s NPCs are useless, save for scripted events, where the developers choose to grant them powers essential to plot. 

There’s another allegory to religion here, but I’m going to avoid it, just in case I’m an LN character who has an author that needs the widest viewer base possible. Gabarre, Author-san, please keep working hard even though you could be spending your time with your friends and making yourself a better person!

Anyway, back to the problem with NPCs. 

They’re limited unless under special circumstances, of significance to the story, or are intended to sell the game. The box art of Elder Tale, filled with glamourous, beautiful women of the Order, are naturally exceptional individuals beyond the norm. Those who are part of the story are chosen ones of a phrophecy in which players are supposed to be a major part of. And, finally, they exist to fill a plot hole as to why players should listen to Villager A instead of killing them. 

I’d expected them to have changed alongside the rest of the world.

The level caps had been raised. The Knightly Orders are nowhere to be found, so I assumed they were just put in by the Devs in-game to protect NPCs, while in the “real” world they protected themselves. People were cooking food, buying property, and the mini-towns, just to give quest givers places to live, were cities that were flourishing and being protected by guards. 

Thus, I assume that the NPCs were just like Players, but without instinctive knowledge of the system that governed their world.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Players remained players, while NPCs remained NPCs.

Between the two lay an abyss, a gorge, which couldn’t be surmounted.

The difference between and NPC and a Player wasn’t the fact that they had a single life, but the fact that they were inherently normal in a world that was meant to be the playground of the incredible and amazing. 

However, at least, I wasn’t completely wrong.

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Skill Development. 

I suspected that something along those lines existed, because of all that existed now that didn’t before, along with the lack of sudden influx of information. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that it was the lack of information regarding the origins of the myriad of changes that made me think such was the case.  

Paranoia, in essence, was the source of my clue. 

Along with, of course, the fact that there were People of the Land who obviously didn’t exist before.

My group of students were of different schools of magic. A Sorcerer, two Mages, and a Witch. They were different from one another in uniform, magic, and everything. That meant that these NPCs had skills and classes, even though they couldn’t access a menu, they were still able to train, develop, and become stronger. 

While I assisted them, trying to teach them to heal, I found their schools were old. Centuries old. Essentially, they were congruent with the development of the society of Elder Tale, since it was a society with magic that had to contend with monsters lurking in the wilderness, as well as Alvs, before they were exterminated by all the other races. 

So, if the People of the Land could develop things independently, why couldn’t the Players? 

Especially when the Players are supposed to be better and stronger than them in every way?

Even if it would be infinitely fairer of the People of the Land could change and adapt, while the Players could only pursue set classes and levels, with the bias towards Players… it only made sense that such was the case. 

This world was unfair in my favor, so I intended to find how I could abuse that fact, especially with hundreds of lives on my hands.

However, saying something like that is easy.

Actually, accomplishing it is another story. 

Is what I wanted to say, but it’s really not as difficult as I expected.

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The answer to all my questions came to me in a pop up. 

It was a shitty pop up, the kind that just interrupted me in the middle of whatever I was doing, and told me that I was being stupid, but was rewarding me anyway.

After an entire day spent training individuals in healing magic, coordinating an army, and as I tended to my mount, while running through the changes I’d have to do the next day, it came without fanfare and I almost closed it out of instinct. 

‘Congratulations, you’ve unlocked the Tyrant General Skill.’

If this were a shitty fanfic, where the protagonist spent whole pages describing their powers in rote detail, I would the whole text description to myself. 

That didn’t matter in the slightest.

What mattered was how I got it, what I would do with it now, and what I would do with it later.

The first part I can solve later.

The last issue can wait, too.

What mattered was, in the dead of night, after I called it a day… I could do something with my new Overskill that I couldn’t before.

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The medical tent was finally working as intended. Casualties that came out in one minute, walked out the next, and were given time to rest before being shipped back out to the front. All the supplies I put into motion, every plan I had set in place, and all the effort I put into everything was bearing fruit. 

At the simple cost of me having to become what I hated the most: a manager.

“Lightly wounded to the back. Heavily wounded to the front. If you can walk, you can set your own beds. Get to it!” With every order I gave to the People of the Land, my mana was being drained. However, it gave desired effects to the individuals I commanded. Buffs according to the role I gave them. Those I wanted to be healers enjoyed an increase in their ability to heal others. Soldiers got a little stronger and tougher. A single order to a single person costs very little on my blue bar, but it gave very little in turn to the person. “If you’re healed, get out, and get new orders! This place is for people who need help, not people who want help!”

It was a modifier for sections of an army. Not instant, massive results, but strategic increases. It wasn’t that I could take one person and make them achieve everything that I wanted, it was me expending my power to enhance what I’ve assembled, so that it could be put to better use. The buff I give is negligible if only for one person, but for a dozen people? Twenty? A hundred? The effect made itself known the more that received it.

All it required was power… and for me to be a target.

“You three, over there! Go rest! Tell the reserves to get in here. Next group, you’re taking a break in five minutes.” Coordination. Social manipulation. Orchestrating in order to achieve a melody. It made sense that I would gain this skill, because I put so many things into place via other people. Putting the court into order, having Yukinoshita speak on my behalf, and setting out to oversee a whole army that I brought to being… well, my new Skill demanded I do all those things for it to activate. “You’ll rest when you need to rest. Not a moment before, nor after, I say so!”

I wasn’t able to see the stats of the individuals under my command, but I could see their health values, as well as how much MP they had left. In battle, I’d be capable of coordinating attacks, counterattacks, and artillery with a glance, but here in the medical tents I was able to perform triage and utilize all my resources properly as fast as I could speak… and analyze the data myself. 

“Get the next convoy out. I don’t need you here. You’re a messenger, so go take your message where it needs to be!”

As far as cheat skills went, it was absolute shit.

“If I don’t have time for you, make yourself useful! Use your head instead of waiting for orders. If you want orders, go to the front, pick up a weapon, and throw yourself at the enemy! Otherwise, don’t be an idiot, and WORK!”

I needed a whole army to put it into play, and as I said before, it made me an obvious target. Granted, I had a build that let me tank and regenerate from attacks, but that was all I could do. All I’d be able to do, if someone wanted to kill me and cripple all the forces I commanded, would be not die before help arrived. 

“Get orderlies in here. It doesn’t matter if they don’t know how to use healing magic. If they can stop bleeding, clean wounds, and wrap it up, that’s all I need. My power will do the rest.”

Why couldn’t I get something cooler/better? I have to stand on a platform, have clear lines of sight, and then decide one what to do. There were no prompts, mistakes were completely possible, and I had to rely on other people. I could barely rely on myself, but my power had me giving others responsibilities and tasks that I wanted done! What the heck! Is this one of those powers that force people to develop? That’s a load of horseshit! That’s just a cheap way to force characters to change over time.

“I want bandages being boiled, torn clothes being turned into bandages, and everything that’s not needed out of here! If I find something we don’t need in this area, I’ll shove it up your ass!”

Good character development comes from people changing because they choose to change, not because they have to change! Elder Tales, if this is the game you want to play with me, with all these cheap tricks and shitty moves, I’ll only warn you once: I’m way better at being cheap and shitty than you are! I’m going to find every fucking loophole to this power I can, use it to my advantage, and not change one bit! Why? Because, fuck you, that’s why!

Hikigaya Hachiman will remain Hikigaya Hachiman, even in this shitty world with its shitty rules!

Though, I’m not going to lie, this new skill was better than having nothing.

…

I downed another potion to refill my Mana. It was a shitty potion. Common quality at best. It didn’t refill a percentage of my MP meter, instead giving me 100 MP. However, it was mass produced and easily available, due to the fact that NPCs could produce it. I also enjoyed being able to chug all I wanted, unlike the People of the Land, so I didn’t have to worry about my stomach becoming a balloon.

This isn’t that sort of story.

Nor shall it ever be that sort of story.

End of story.

Anyway, currently, I was doing my best to recover from my unwanted promotion to managerial status. There’re few worse jobs in the world that being a corporate slave, but overseeing them was easily worse. It wasn’t just the newfound responsibilities that irked you, but also the fact that you wished that people were just machines that did what they were told. People with ingenuity were just as bad as people who misbehaved, as they made more work for you, and essentially average, barely adequate people were the best for every job.

I’m saying that while you lose faith in humanity as a regular worker, overseeing workers makes you want to crush any faith in humanity anyone has.

In the end, all that mattered was rote obedience to achieve the intended goal… and I would’ve achieved my goal more easily if everyone just listened to me.

And, right on cue with my first step towards become a megalomaniacal supervillain in another world, without the justification of being betrayed and being on a quest for vengeance, Isaac decided to show up.

“You did something to the NPCs, Hikigaya.” That much was obvious, but I didn’t manage to retort. Why? Because I was so tired that I felt like curling over and dying, even as I downed more MP pots. Isaac, meanwhile, loomed over me in my tent. As expected of a Guild Leader of the hardcore gaming guild in the server, taking on the Goblin Invasion event was a cinch for him and his folk. “Explain yourself.”

I was tempted to lie, but I was sure that I’d expended a lot of the “faith” that Isaac had in me already, and I had no intention of making him my enemy. 

So, I told him the truth.

“I developed a cheap, new skill that’s for managing armies. I give minor buffs to everyone, that’s shit for one person, but good for masses of people.” Some people would’ve needed a better explanation, however for long-time Players, I just needed a single phrase to fill in the rest of the blanks. “So, while you lot are still playing an MMORPG, I’m now playing an RTS. Ha. Ha. Ha.”

Isaac was shocked.

I was sure that in his head there was an internal monologue explaining RTS for the audience, while he put it into perspective via his own experiences. 

While that cheap narrative trick was playing out, by body decided that enough was enough, and my MP pot slipped out of my hand, while my head made contact with the table I’d been leaning on.

Unfortunately, my recruited Hero Unit’s internal monologue and accompanying montage will have to wait until later.

Hey, wait, if I continue practicing this skill… can I really make people into hero units!?