Chapter 085: The Uncrowned King (Patreon)

Hearing Dragon God Orsted ask this, everyone turned to look at Rudeus with curiosity of their own.

Come to think of it, for safety's sake he'd never actually explained much of this to the others before.

Thinking it over, Rudeus smiled. "Actually, I should explain summoning magic for a bit — it's something you've been researching all along too, Shizuka."

Nanahoshi Shizuka nodded. "Yes, because I want to get back to my original world."

Rudeus smiled. "Right. Normally speaking, summoning magic falls into two categories: beast summoning and spirit summoning."

"Beast summoning works through a magic circle that calls forth highly intelligent monsters. You pay some kind of price, and afterward you can command them."

"Of course, it's not limited to monsters. As long as it's matter that exists in this world — or even matter from another world — it can basically be summoned. The one absolute taboo is that you can't summon a person."

"That's exactly what Shizuka is working on right now. Dragon God Orsted's regression teleportation was also developed based on this same principle."

As Rudeus explained, everyone nodded one after another.

Rudeus continued. "By comparison, spirit summoning is completely different from beast summoning. Spirit summoning uses mana to create the existence of a spirit — it's essentially magic that creates something out of mana, not unlike ordinary spellcasting..."

Just as he said this, Eris couldn't help but cut in.

"I've read some books before," Eris said. "A lot of them say spirits exist in a world of nothingness — that summoning a spirit means calling it out of that empty world."

Rudeus smiled. "That's not quite right. It isn't a world of nothingness — it's nothingness itself. From the very start, spirits were never things that truly existed. They're a kind of program, set up beforehand."

"Er, 'program' might not mean much to you. Think of it more like a puppet, designed in advance. Based on the summoner's knowledge and preferences, a matching magic circle gets created, and from that, a matching Elemental Sprite is born."

"Yeah — an Elemental Sprite is basically a puppet with absolutely no emotions of its own."

Hearing this, Eris nodded. If Rudeus, the one actually using them, said so himself, then the problem must have lain with how those old books explained it.

Seeing that Eris had no more questions, Rudeus went on.

"So, working from that same design, I wrote my own summoning program for Elemental Sprites — I created ones that can share my spells with me."

"Then I grouped them, several to a cluster, and scattered those clusters across the sky. By now there are trillions upon trillions of them up there — enough to blanket the entire sky."

"For the people who matter most to me, I've also set up dedicated monitoring systems. The moment anything unusual — any creature or object — shows up nearby, it triggers an alert straight to me. From there, I decide whether or not to act."

"Put simply, aside from anything underground, pretty much the entire world is under my strict surveillance. It's also my answer to Hitogami's far-sight."

"That's roughly it. So when I just now picked up on something happening around Roxy, I struck immediately and killed the Nether King on the spot!"

By the time Rudeus finished explaining, everyone present couldn't help but gasp in amazement.

Just hearing it described was staggering enough — striking directly at a target on the Demon Continent from that kind of distance.

And more than that, the entire world lay under Rudeus's watchful eye. Calling him this world's uncrowned king wouldn't even be an exaggeration.

Even Dragon God Orsted felt a chill of dread at the thought.

A global defense network fusing surveillance, vigilance, and offense into a single system — if he'd ever had to face an enemy wielding something like that... honestly, it wasn't even worth imagining.

In a sense, Rudeus had become a miniature Hitogami all his own.

Compared to everyone else, Nanahoshi Shizuka — who'd grown up with modern knowledge — understood better than anyone just how terrifying such a global defense system truly was.

Back on the Blue Star she came from, countless nations had poured resources into researching systems capable of full global coverage.

[Author's Note: Please give some flowers (votes)!]

They'd all wanted to fuse surveillance, vigilance, and offense into one seamless whole. Under that kind of absolute power, an enemy would already have lost before it ever made a move.

But even after all that research, no one had ever truly achieved dominance over everyone else in any real sense.

Yet here Rudeus stood, having already reached — fully — that very height.

No wonder. No wonder Senior Rudeus had no interest in returning to his original world.

Aside from having no family left there, here he was an absolute, supreme being who could summon the wind and command the rain at will.

Putting herself in his position, Shizuka knew that if she had that kind of power, she wouldn't want to go back either.

She pressed her lips together. "Right now," she asked carefully, "is it just global laser weapons?"

Rudeus blinked, puzzled. "What do you mean?"

"Right now," Shizuka pressed, "can you, Senior Rudeus, deploy those dangerous weapons of yours over long range?"

Hearing that, Rudeus nodded in understanding.

"Not yet, actually," he said with a smile. "I've been busy researching the Dragon God's Blessing lately, and since I haven't really needed it, I haven't bothered building that capability. That said, I've already fully mastered nuclear fusion weapons, and I've got teleportation circles completely down too. Combining the two would actually be pretty simple. If I get some free time later, I'll probably add that feature."

Nanahoshi Shizuka nodded, dread creeping through her.

Deploying weapons across the globe back on Blue Star required cumbersome booster rockets. Here, in this world, all it would take was a simple teleportation circle.

Which meant an attack could strike an enemy silently and fatally the instant it launched — and it could hit every corner of the globe at the same time.

It was — it was genuinely terrifying. Truly, far too terrifying.

Watching Nanahoshi Shizuka's stricken expression, Dragon God Orsted frowned. "What did Nanahoshi mean just now," he asked, "about deploying dangerous weapons?"

The others, too, turned to look at Rudeus with no small amount of curiosity.