Volume 4 Chapter 13.4

Dark lord A nodded at dark lord B, whose plan was to interfere with the earth Hiroshi stood on and turn it into a bottomless poison swamp. However……

「It seems that the origin was too shallow. He erased it.」

「Then how about I try making a large hollow to trip his feet up.」

「Can you？」

「I can try, but……」

Lord A found a strong resistance when he attempted to pour miasma through the earth, unable to accomplish his objective and stepping back.

「How was it？」

「The goddess blocked me. As expected, it is not easy to interfere from below with the feng shui so close.」

「Never thought that we’d get all the way here from Crest Cave……」

A and B found themselves grinding their teeth at this obstruction from Elza. These Visitors were really a pain in the knee to deal with time after time.

The lords had been in a fairly decent position in contrast to the goddesses when they turned Crest Cave into a dungeon. Casualties had only increased due to this killer dungeon, resulting in the pollution of the feng shui and reversing the tides by swapping the original ore with higher grade ore that was difficult to process. At length, the feng shui had been polluted to a satisfying degree.

This desirable outcome had only lasted for a single moment before the Visitors had raised refinement capabilities all around them with magic steel and mythril by making the new smelting furnaces, increasing overall productivity by a wide margin.

Once that happened, the previously increasing miasma had plummeted, and the lost advantage was given back to the goddess Elza. With greater-functioning equipment came a decrease in in-dungeon casualties and the dark lords’ influence dwindling.

As the lords recoiled from this strange introduction of technology, the Visitors launched an additional attack against Behemoth. It would have been bad enough one time, but then they had the gall to wait two more times for respawn to defeating it a total of three times, weakening the dungeon to an extreme.

Now there was no way to turn the tables. Reflecting on both Farlane and Darl’s defeats, it would likely become impossible to destroy the western region in this amount of time unless they pushed a decent plan through in the span of a hundred years. They could admit this, but it was still more than unprecedented to see the earth mother goddess gain this much power without a priestess.

「If it is impossible to impede them on a large scale…」

「We can only directly attack some sort of weak spot.」

「Weak spot, hm. Then maybe that male magician or that female who sings those atrocious songs.」

After trying this and that, the goddess had blocked them on all counts. A had given up on inflicting large damage when he realized this, and B nodded at him, looking at the man and woman guarded by the other three teammates. It would be more than just tedious to get rid of either of them.

One-third of all barolds had been defeated. Their second form took a lot of miasma, hence why they limited it to a few barolds. There wasn’t enough to go around, but it was still too quick to have this many barolds go down. The two main causes of this were the female’s songs and the one doing the actual damage, which was the male magician.

Honestly, defeating one or the other would not change the situation. If the lords truly wanted to take the Visitors down, they needed to get rid of the man in full plate armor. However, if they could have taken them down with these indirect attacks in the first place, they would have all gone down long ago.

After all, that full plated man took plenty of attacks full on unscathed that would normally KO a regular adventurer, intercepting any attacks that flew at the two in the middle without blinking.

「Considering their equipment, there is no guarantee of taking them down, but…」

「We just need to damage him a bit. Better than doing nothing.」

The two dark lords seemed to have decided their course of action. It was time to interfere with the ground under the middle teammates.

「Feel yourselves scream in agony as we pierce through you！！」

The dark lords yelled as they poured out a large amount of miasma. The next moment, the space behind Hiroshi’s guard was twisted where Haruna and Tatsuya stood and the ground protruded out as if to laugh at his efforts, becoming a spear lashing out at the two targets.

「They appear to be quite frantic now.」

Watching the dark lords begin their direct meddling, earth mother goddess Elza furrowed her brow as she muttered. It had been approximately 3,000 years since the evil gods had encroached on this world. Barold’s higher-ups, who had never revealed themselves, were now moving to directly show their hand. While surprised at this turn of events, she also couldn’t help but feel exasperated at the chain of events that had led to this.

「All things considered, their detour is diverging more and more from the rails……」

Elza recalled the process that lead to the lords emerging from the shadows. Ever since they had rescued Aearis in Wulls, these Visitors had solved one problem after the other in a bizarre fashion, the likes of which had never occurred from any other Visitor. Normally she would be embarrassed to rely on them for everything, but Elza could not deny that they were the ones who had given this world the opportunity to break out from its immobolization from the long war with the evil gods.

Having been trapped in Crest Cave for such a long time, Elza couldn’t help but panic, but the situation was actually getting better from this little detour.

「Now then, they really saved me more times than I can count, so how about I show them what a goddess can do.」

Unfortunately, no matter how many times they helped her out, the world’s system would not allow Elza to directly intervene. The gods of this world were only stage settings. Without those restrictions, they could yield infinite power and potentially destroy the world, but that also meant they were limited in dealing with enemies. This dilemma was very vexing, but there was no point in complaining about an established fact.

Elza couldn’t directly interfere with enemies or Hiroshi’s group, but she was allowed to interfere a bit in the feng shui. Conveniently enough, the two males of the group had begun delving into the realm of god skills. Tatsuya was a bit further off from mastering such things, but Hiroshi was plenty, as long as the opportunity presented itself. If he were to interact with the feng shui and expose himself to Elza’s power, it would be plenty easy for the trigger to activate.

The dark lords were meddling too much with the feng shui from a remote location. It wouldn’t be difficult to have Hiroshi and his friends help awaken her power by asking them to guard the feng shui as a pretext. Once she had control of the feng shui, Elza could thwart the advances of the dark lords.

「I’m very sorry, but anything past this will conflict with the restrictions. It is painful to not be able to help past this point, but if you can get through this, I will pay you handsomely.」

When the dark lords stopped their meddling, Eliza took the opportunity to move the feng shui as she whispered what sounded like an excuse, knowing full well the Visitors could not hear her. As a result of some moving around, the feng shui protected by the goddess rose very close to the surface.

「Please continue to give it your all.」

While maintaining careful watch to ensure there wasn’t any more interference, Elza threw the baton to Hiroshi’s group.

「Great Flare！」

Shooting out fireballs strengthened by Igreos’s power, Tatsuya burned up three barolds. The situation was moving in a decent direction.

「You thought you could get through！？」

「You’re a nuisance.」

Makoto and Mio intercepted the barolds swooping down from the sky. The next barold tried to take advantage of the opening-

「Git over here boi！！」

Hiroshi stopped his movement with one roar, which gave Makoto the opportunity to cut him up before he turned to ash and vanished.

「This is going so well that it feels wrong……」

「These barolds are too stupid.」

With a practically mechanical rhythm, the barolds rushed forward defenselessly. In the game, most monsters behaved this way, but for barolds to fall this far? This was just weird.

Sure, if barolds were being produced en masse, it was easy to believe why their attack patterns were so sloppy. The issue here was that mass producing them meant they could increase in number at any time.

Even more troubling than that was how whoever was sending out all these barolds had yet to directly show themselves. Since the team was convinced this was not the end of it, they had to refrain from using their coup de gras.

「There don’t seem to be any reinforcements, so if we just stick it out……！！」

The moment he was about to finish his sentence, Hiroshi felt a shiver down his spine. In a split second he had flung two of the barolds away, following his gut and activating Cover Move. Letting go of his heavy mace, Hiroshi moved to pull Haruna and Tatsuya to his side.

「Eh？」

「What？」

Haruna and Tatsuya let out perplexed voices after Hiroshi’s sudden action, suspending their songs/chants. After all, they couldn’t find any reason why he had to guard them, not from what they could observe around them.

「Out of my way！！」

Hiroshi kicked away another barold who had tried to find an opening, picking up Haruna’s whole body and then pulling in Tatsuya a bit further away. At the same time, or maybe one beat early, the space around them was twisted, the earth protruded, and two giant spears lunged for the two of them.