The Golden Experience Point [Part 1]

Chapter 73: "Overrun"

The first person to notice the invasion was a player casually leaving town. He yelled something, after which sellswords flooded out of the gate one after another. Rare was too far away to tell what they were saying, so she descended a bit and used the [Light Magic] spell [Camouflage] to ensure she wouldn't be spotted as she got closer. The [Camouflage] spell shielded the target from sight using light. There was a noticeably unnatural refraction if you looked at the camouflaged object from different angles, but unless you knew there was something there to scrutinize then there wouldn't normally be any reason to do something like that.

"Ants! I knew it! The event monsters for this city are the ants from that forest!"

"I heard it would mainly be undead, but we can't just turn a blind eye to the monsters native to this region either! They've got compound eyes, after all!"

"Uhh... Anyway, there was talk of there being an undead boss monster in the forest, so we might get undead too!"

"It might have been hard inside that dark forest, but out here in the sun, an undead boss is probably weaker! Also, we've got tons of players here, and when the city is being attacked then the NPC sellswords will probably also help out, so we could probably at least keep it from getting in!"

How wonderful it was to see players having such a good time.

"Dammit! Why are there monsters attacking the city...? Nothing like this has ever happened before!"

"It's probably because those newbies kept going to the forest and pissing them off! Those bastards!"

The angry yelling probably came from the NPCs. The "newbies" they referred to were clearly the players, but this invasion wasn't their fault. However... Since Rare was in fact doing this for them, and the administrators had set up this event in the first place for players to enjoy, then from a certain perspective it really wasn't wrong to blame the players.

"—How confusing. Well, whatever, we can just say it's all because of the players. In that case, they should pay for their sins with their lives. Let's start off with cannonfire. I'd have wanted to keep them in reserve for siege purposes, but since there don't seem to be any defenses to worry about, we have time to wait for the cooldowns. All right, load shrapnel rounds!"

<Load shrapnel rounds.>

Sugaru responded from the queen's chamber, now operating as the command center. When she repeated the order, this also communicated it out to the artillery ants. Below Rare, those ants stopped in place and bent so that the tips of their abdomens pointed forward.

"What are those...? They look different from the regular ants."

"Are ants supposed to do that? That looks more like what scorpions do."

"Or like, doesn't that look bad? Feels like they're going to shoot something, doesn't it?"

"Don't be stupid, they're ants. They're just—"

"Fire."

<Fire.>

Instantly, every artillery ant produced a loud boom from its abdomen gun barrel, and the projectiles they fired made a beeline for the sellswords in front of the city gate. The shells exploded before the gate, raining fine buckshot on the hapless victims.

"Ag—"

"Gue—"

The sellswords could only watch blankly before being turned into minced meat without having a chance to utter even a single word. Shortly after, the remains disintegrated entirely. Some of the bodies didn't disappear; those ones must have been NPCs. Rare's forces didn't have the expertise to kill only players with shrapnel bombs, so their only choice was indiscriminate fire. One or two rounds of buckshot wouldn't do much damage, but there was an excessively large number of artillery ants compared to enemy sellswords—after all, if they only did a small amount of damage, then the answer was to shave down their health by blasting as many rounds into them as possible. If someone could completely nullify the damage, then they would have to use another type of attack, but there didn't appear to be anyone like that out here.