Chapter 133: The Second Assembly: Generals of Avarice
Just like last time, the assembly hall rose like a vast Colosseum, its concentric tiers vanishing into a thick fog. And at the very top, on the highest platform, hidden from view, Freya sat.
Below, the hall was alive.
Murmurs rose from every tier at once, mingling, swelling and then dying down. Groups had formed here and there; people leaned toward their neighbors and whispered behind their hands. Some laughed too loudly to hide their nerves, while others fell silent and stared at the top of the hall, where the fog grew thickest, waiting for something to happen there. And beneath it all, barely audible, ran the same name, passed from mouth to mouth.
Freya, for her part, wasn’t looking at any of it. Her eyes were fixed on a notification floating in front of her, one among the many currently on display.
[ 351/358 participants. ]
Even though we’ve only been here about two months, five idiots still managed to die, with all the help the system gives us.
And considering that her faction was surely the most violent and bloodthirsty of them all, made even more so by her sin of avarice during the last assembly in the subspace, she could estimate an average of about three deaths for each of the other factions.
That made, still hypothetically, around twenty deaths in total across all seven factions.
That’s a lot.
And it surely lent even more weight to the possibility that one of them had fallen under the yoke of this world’s natives.
Not that it mattered much to her. She never revealed anything truly important in her messages, and the same rule had to apply here: she would have to stay subtle. Not that she wouldn’t have been without the possibility of a spy, since she would have been far too afraid of a leak from some loose-lipped member anyway. So she would keep to the bare minimum.
And that suited her, because time here flowed more slowly than outside, but it still flowed. And time flowing meant less time for her rise in power. She didn’t have a second to lose, she knew it, and everything else mattered very little.
Her train of thought was cut short when the notification changed once more.
[ 358/358 participants. ]
She wasted no more time and forced herself to stand.
The disgust had been there since she arrived, extreme, and it hadn’t left her for a single second. She had managed to push it aside while thinking all of this through, but now she had no choice. She had to face it, show strength and above all show no weakness, as Calam... no, as Empress.
So she swept the notification away with a sure gesture and swallowed her disgust down to the deepest part of her being.
But it didn’t vanish. It kept gnawing at her from the inside, slowly and patiently. She could feel it squirming under her skin, burrowing a little deeper with every passing second, with the greedy slowness of worms that had settled inside her to devour her from within.
Her black silhouette looked down at everyone below who had turned toward her and was waiting for her words.
And she couldn’t stop herself from looking at their hands, all of them, their rings, their avarice.
The yellow eyes of her silhouette swept the entire hall, tier after tier, and inside it gnawed at her even more. She wanted to break free of this grip, this disgust, all of it. She simply wanted to kill them all.
No! Breathe, Freya... breathe.
She breathed slowly and calmly. No one saw it, since her black silhouette revealed nothing, and everyone took her silence for tension. They were waiting for her words, and with every second that passed under their faction leader’s new yellow gaze, the atmosphere grew a little more crushing.
At last, she managed to calm herself somewhat, at least on the surface. Then, in a voice as cold as she could make it, one that surely carried all the disgust in the world, she spoke.
"Congratulations."
No one knew how to react to that word, which clashed so violently with the tone in which it had been spoken. She didn’t give them time to think about it and went on.
"Congratulations to you. No, really!"
She turned her gaze away from the crowd, unable to finish her sentence, and began walking along her platform, eyes fixed straight ahead, trying to swallow her disgust.
Below, a heavy tension settled in. The words weren’t coming, and everyone waited for what came next to understand what all this meant.
When she was finally able to continue, she did so without wasting an instant, keeping her eyes far from the crowd, while her whole body itched and screamed at her to do something, anything.
Kill, for instance.
"Five of you are dead. Five who didn’t deserve everything they were given: the system’s help, the unique abilities, the quantimanas, everything the system has given us."
Her mind was on fire, working out what she should and could say. This much, at least, could be said. If one or more spies were already feeding information to the natives, then it had already leaked, since these were things everyone knew.
On top of these thoughts, the speech she was building on the spot, the itching, the pain and the disgust, came the reactions of her faction members, all at once. Her mind, which heard everything and recorded everything, began to boil.
Kill.
"So yes, congratulations to those of you who are still here. Congratulations on surviving, on growing your dungeons, on beginning to impose your dominion over your corner of this world. I mean it."
She paused for the briefest moment.
"Keep going. Take everything you can take, the land, the riches, the lives, and never let go of anything that’s yours. That is what’s expected of the members of MY faction."
Kill.
The itching grew stronger still, and her steps quickened to try to make up for it. Notifications appeared all around her. The very air began to warp, even in the subspace, and the silhouette with the two yellow eyes grew blurrier and blurrier in everyone’s eyes, trembling like a mirage in the desert.
"Disgus..."
She caught herself instantly, without anyone understanding.
"I have therefore heard of your efforts, through the system as it happens, and I will now name the faction’s four generals."
Kill. Kill. Kill. KILL.
She could feel she was reaching her limit and was about to literally explode. So she picked up the pace, both her steps and her words.
"In first place, we have Shoesize, congratulations to her. In second place, NoName. In third place, BunnyGirl. And in fourth place, BlackFlame."
A silence fell over the hall, then every head turned at once, searching the tiers for the silhouettes that bore those four names.
"Wait... Shoesize? First?"
"Seriously? That pervert, first?"
"This has to be a joke..."
"And BlackFlame fourth, the guy who spent all his time showing off in the chat?"
"NoName, though... who’s that?"
Murmurs broke out all over, some admiring, others envious, and a few whistles rang out from the back rows.
In the middle of one tier, a silhouette had slowly risen. Her hands were clasped against her chest, fingers interlaced, her head tilted slightly to one side, her gaze lifted toward the top of the hall and never once leaving it.
"First..." she murmured in a soft, almost dreamy voice. "Maid put me first~"
Her neighbors edged away from her without even trying to hide it. She didn’t see them.
"I knew it... I always knew it~" Her fingers tightened around each other a little more. "I’ll never let you down, Maid. Never, never, never~ Anything you want, I’ll do it~"
A light laugh slipped out of her, and her shoulders quivered with a pleasure she didn’t even try to hide.
"And there she goes again..."
"She was already like this in the chat, but in person it’s worse."
Two rows down, a silhouette turned back toward her with a sigh.
"Calm down, Shoesize. You’re scaring everyone."
"But I am calm, BlackFlame~" she replied without lowering her eyes from the platform, with a smile you could hear in her voice. "Very calm~"
BlackFlame opened his mouth, closed it, then absently raised two fingers to the bridge of his nose, in the exact gesture of someone pushing up their glasses. He obviously wasn’t wearing any. It took his neighbors a second to notice before a few stifled laughs rose around him.
"Did he just push up glasses he doesn’t have?"
"Let it go, it’s BlackFlame."
BlackFlame froze, slowly lowered his hand and cleared his throat as if nothing had happened. But his fingers went back to clenching his knee, and his gaze lingered a moment too long on the three names ahead of his.
At the other end of the hall, a silhouette sitting alone, away from the others, didn’t move an inch. A few glances turned toward it at the name NoName, curious and wary.
"Is that him?"
"He’s never posted a single message..."
But NoName said nothing, and the glances eventually turned away.
Lower down, another silhouette had made itself very small. At the name BunnyGirl, she had lowered her eyes to her knees, shoulders drawn in a little, visibly embarrassed to feel so many stares settle on her. She had rarely been seen in the chat and heard even less, and few had expected to find her there.
What no one in this hall knew, however, was that a large part of the mana she had generated came from selling purple pepper to Freya herself. But in Freya’s eyes, that took nothing away from her merit, quite the opposite. Building a real business and earning a loyal clientele in the inter-dungeon shop was a skill in its own right. BunnyGirl had more than earned her place.
Feeling all those eyes on her, BunnyGirl finally looked up. She rose gently, scratched the back of her head with a slightly embarrassed air, then clasped her hands in front of her and dipped into a quick little bow, her upper body leaning forward.
"Yoroshiku onegai shimasu!" She straightened up at once, cheeks flushed, and waved her hands in front of her. "Ah, um... please take care of me, I mean, hehe!"
There was a brief silence, then a few laughs rose from the tiers, gentler this time. Someone awkwardly returned her bow, someone else waved at her, and for the first time since the assembly began, the atmosphere in the hall relaxed a little.
At the very top, on her platform, Freya had stopped walking.
She hadn’t missed a second of the scene. The system automatically translated everything that was said, in the subspace just as everywhere else in this world, and it did so with such finesse that it didn’t just translate words, but intent. And yet that "Yoroshiku onegai shimasu" had reached them as it was, in Japanese.
So it hadn’t been a slip. If the system had let it through, it was because BunnyGirl had wanted it to come through.
The fake clumsiness, the little bow, the flushed cheeks and the embarrassed laugh had all been calculated, and all of it had landed at the exact moment the hall was on the verge of snapping. In a few words, she had defused the tension, passed herself off as the harmless, endearing little third place, and drawn every eye away from the only question that mattered: how had she ever gotten there?
Behind her black silhouette, where no one could see, a thin smile curved Freya’s lips. For the first time since she arrived, the disgust gnawing at her retreated a step.
That girl really is clever.