The battlefield was dark, as it was deep in the night. Though it wasn’t that bad either, since large parts of it were already burning, giving us enough light to see around.

And on top of that, the dwarves wore red capes that glowed in the dark—a measure to avoid friendly fire even in the off-chance that things got confused in the chaos.

"Don’t fall too far behind, or we might get bombarded!" I shouted to the girls.

It wasn’t really necessary, since the cannons usually fired far ahead of us. However, there was still the off-chance we might get mistaken for monsters moving through the shadows. Better to say it and be ignored than not say it and have someone catch a cannonball to the face.

Thankfully, since the dwarves had already begun engaging the monsters, it didn’t take us long to arrive at the front.

Now that we were close enough, the monsters became visible too.

The ones before us right now seemed to be polar bear-like monsters. Bodies standing at five meters tall, with sharp claws and thick, heavily muscled limbs. However, that’s not all.

Their mouths were half-rotting, revealing sharp, yellowed fangs behind lips that didn’t quite close properly anymore. Their eyes were bleeding, and the right eye of each one had double the eyeballs than normal—stacked, misaligned, weeping constantly down their matted fur.

They were abominations. Not at their worst yet, not by a long stretch, but already wrong enough to make the stomach turn at a glance.

To me, this is quite a familiar sight.

’So this is where those eyeball monsters start...’

I gripped my flag and drove it into the ground.

I made sure the dwarves nearby were also within the effective range. Not that they would receive any buff, but it meant the girls could move freely between them without worrying about the buffs getting cut off.

Right now, we had no Ram, no Gwen, nor Sunny.

The three were guarding the rift down at Edogawabashi Station, and since they were stationed there, they couldn’t be summoned here.

Technically I could force a summon, but that would leave their bodies at the rift as lifeless dolls. If only we could split their processing power half-and-half... but that seemed impossible with the current system.

"Watch out!"

As I was zoning out on those thoughts, Miyabi suddenly shot forth, waving her katana in a fluid motion.

In one swift move, she swung her blade against one of the giant polar bears that was about to strike a dwarf who had been overpowered and driven to the ground.

"Sakura Sword Style: Falling Petal!"

Her sword suddenly changed—its edge dissolving into flowery petals for a brief, beautiful moment before they tore through the monster like razors.

50!

48!

Critical!

78!!!

When it passed through, roughly a hundred small damage notifications popped up in a cascade. Each petal had its own hitbox, and each dealt damage equal to 5% of her actual damage output.

This one skill alone dealt 500% equivalent of her maximum damage—and that was even without crits factored in.

"What a powerful skill..." I couldn’t help but sigh.

My Berserker class before had burst skills too, but at best the total damage reached 300% of my base at most. Compared to this Shogun’s low-level skill, it was just embarrassingly weak.

Class rarity really did change things fundamentally.

Of course, that was mainly the reason why I had invented—no, discovered—the combo system. Without those damage multipliers through interrupts, I wouldn’t have been able to keep pace with anyone running a proper UR class in direct damage comparison, nor would I survive long enough and kill the last boss.

Other than solid defensive skills like "Last Stand"—which causes me to take zero damage until its duration ends before releasing all accumulated damage at once—I was basically running on combo techniques the entire time.

Anyway, Miyabi’s one strike had cleanly taken off the bear’s head.

Fatal damage, first try.

"Wait, they’re weak?" Eri, who had watched as even Kiki one-shotted the monster she saved a dwarf from, gasped. "Isn’t this weird? Shouldn’t they be much stronger than this?"

"They are powerful." I clarified. "It’s just that their HP was already low after tanking several volleys from those."

I pointed up at the wall, where the endless bombardment from countless cannons never paused. Each volley could reduce a monster’s HP by at least 10%, and they had been firing since before we arrived.

The reason Miyabi and Kiki could kill these things in a single strike was simply because there wasn’t much health left to kill.

"At daybreak, we’ll hunt them in the field. You’ll see how powerful they truly are then."

Just like that, Eri and I stayed at the back, watching over everyone.

Eri would occasionally heal dwarves that were running low on health, before either Miyabi or Kiki would swoop in to finish saving them.

This way, the two of them were slowly becoming heroes in the dwarves’ eyes—names being passed around behind gauntleted hands, nods exchanged between bearded faces.

Unfortunately, the favorability earned this way was fixed per character, not split across the whole party. This was also another reason I wasn’t actively engaging.

Letting those two collect all the favorability was better than splitting it three ways and diluting everyone’s standing. And the quests here didn’t require much favorability for me or Eri anyway—just what we’d earn for participating in this defense would be more than sufficient.

If we needed custom weapons or armor later, we could just ask either of them to place the order on our behalf. We were all in this together, after all.

"Haaap!"

There were moments where Miyabi got too worked up and killed monsters before the dwarves even reached the point of genuine danger, but to my surprise, it worked in her favor anyway.

"Follow the Shogun!"

"Don’t let the goddess hog all the glory!"

"Everyone, prove your worth! Show her the will of Evergloria!"

Even though she wasn’t saving them at the critical moment, her favorability skyrocketed regardless!

"So there’s that method too...!"

Kiki, watching the shift in Miyabi’s side of things, nodded to herself with the quiet satisfaction of someone whose gamer brain had just finished processing a discovery.

As a veteran, it hadn’t taken her long at all to figure out what had occurred.

Raising favorability across many dwarves at once was better than raising it one by one!

Simple—a display of absolute strength capturing those bearded old men’s admiration all at the same time. One done by demonstrating that Miyabi’s every strike ended the fight before it could drag on.

Given her absurd damage output, combined with the flag’s buff, even a half-HP bear died in one stroke without question.

Kiki, of course, moved to replicate it immediately.

Rather than relying on raw damage skills, though, she focused on buff stacking first—raising her numbers high enough to imitate Miyabi’s performance in her own way.

Her Martial God class had a mountain of skills that could push her defense or damage in either direction, after all.

"Yin for Yang! 200% defense to attack!"

One of them was called Yin For Yang—a skill she had just gained after advancing.

The buff was modifiable, able to transfer defense into damage and vice versa, and could even be pushed into negatives down to -100% of the relevant stat.

This way, Kiki dropped her defense to -783, which meant she was no longer paper armor—she was a glass cannon with an active downside. Instead of reducing incoming damage, her defense now added to it! One clean hit and she was dead!

Of course, she could also do the reverse instantly, converting damage to defense instead.

And since the skill had zero cooldown and zero mana cost, activatable at any moment, it was perfect for someone with professional-level control and reflexes like her. 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

Though right now she still had to call it aloud to activate, once she internalized it, it would be a genuine force to reckon with. Hit hard, take nothing—the perfect offensive-tank.

It was a style that could only work if you were fast enough to never get caught in the wrong configuration, and Kiki was exactly that kind of fast.

After that, two goddesses were being praised by the dwarves from both directions.

One was cutting monsters down in a single fluid slash.

The other was beating them to a pulp, dropping HP to zero in under a second with a single burst.

One was finesse. The other was pure, unambiguous violence.

Seeing the results, I couldn’t help but smile wryly. "They’re way too good at this. Almost as if they were born to be idols or something."

With the two being so gung-ho about hunting, the 500 monster kill requirement from the quest filled fast. And as soon as the target was met, the remaining monsters—as if suddenly changing their collective minds—turned tail and retreated into the dark beyond the firelight.

"The monsters are retreating! We won!"

"Praise the Goddesses! We won without a single casualty thanks to them!"

"Glory to Evergloria! Glory to the Goddesses!"

Both Miyabi and Kiki looked like they genuinely wanted to keep fighting, but there was no escaping the encirclement of excited, chest-high dwarves pressing in from every side.

Like an impromptu handshake event, the two had no choice but to stand there and receive the endless praise, unable to take even a single step in any direction.

Just judging from the dwarves’ reactions, there was no doubt those two had maxed out the affection meter for all of them in one go.

"Talk about being a cheat..." I sighed.