Dungeon Gacha Life Chapter 37

 Chapter 37: The Aihara Central Park Stampede

With more than 2,500 Gacha pulls, they had brought me an enormous number of Skills.

Naturally, plenty of those were magic-related. Things like the Great Fire Archmage I'd once seen show up as a pity-cap option.

Even short of that, there were SR-tier Skill Orbs. Plenty of chances to pick up offensive magic Skills like Fire Magic or Wind Magic.

As it stood, I could cast magic of every element there was. On top of that, I had a whole stack of pity-cap Unique Skills that made casting more convenient, like MP Cost Halved and MP Recovery Boost.

But I'd rarely had the chance to actually use any of it. They stand out way too much, after all.

Getting seen using them, even once, would be a headache. And besides, I didn't need magic to coast through anyway.

For those reasons, I'd kept a lid on using magic inside dungeons up till now.

But this time it's an emergency, a Stampede. The sooner this gets resolved, the better.

And I've got my disguise locked in perfectly. So, I figure it's fine to cut loose a little.

* * *

Let me just say this up front: a world with a +600 bonus on every stat is on a completely different dimension.

Having reached the skies over Aihara with my Unique Skill, Flight, I looked down at the city sprawled beneath me and gave the staff in my hand a light swing.

Under normal circumstances, casting magic should have demanded a fair amount of concentration, plus a system-mandated cooldown between casts.

But against a Status pumped this far past excess and a Skill set optimized to its absolute limit, common sense like that just literally dissolves into nothing.

What formed at the tip of my staff were fist-sized fireballs. And not just one or two of them, either.

Ten, twenty, fifty and in the blink of an eye, with well over a hundred crimson orbs packed the sky, they were scorching the overcast winter clouds with explosive heat.

"Go."

That single word was all it took, the countless scattered fireballs sprang to life as if they had wills of their own and all at once, began homing in on their targets.

For the record, the fireballs themselves were just the basic spell Fireball. I'd tacked on the homing behavior myself, using my Unique Skill, Magic Dominion.

Combine that with the 3D map of the Aihara area that my Unique Skill, Full Mapping, drew out in my head, plus Master of Scouting on top. Put those together and the rain of fire came down with pinpoint precision on every scattered pocket of monster presence.

About a hundred meters out, a High Orc lumbering down a city street took a fireball straight to the head. In the next instant, that supposedly needlessly tough hulk of a body was skewered and set ablaze.

All that was left afterward was a charred lump of meat on the asphalt and a massive scorch mark.

—Confirmed kill. 

Honestly, there was plenty of power there which was an overkill. I'd better tone it down a notch.

My Orb-boosted INT carried enough sheer, violent destructive power to erase Lower Level monsters in a single hit, let alone anything from the Middle Levels.

"All right, next one."

I cranked up Flight's output to reposition myself.

A tremendous wind pressure slammed into my robe as the scenery blurred past behind me in an instant. Under that violent acceleration, Lapis, still stuffed against my chest, patted at me silently in startled protest.

"Sorry, sorry, I wanted to get through this quick."

Moving at a somewhat more restrained speed than before, I locked onto every enemy my search picked up, one after another.

Packs of Lizardmen, clusters of Orcs, all the monsters that had spilled onto the surface, every time one entered my sight, precision-guided fireballs turned it into charred scraps.

The HP Barrier doesn't work on the surface. That cuts both ways as it's true for the monsters too.

What happens when raw flesh takes a direct hit from this much heat? Well, you can see for yourself. Burnt to a crisp. Yep.

It really hit me, then that I'd finally stopped being human, hadn't I.

* * *

At the edge of my vision, the state of the ground below caught my eye.

Police and Self-Defense Force personnel holding the defensive line and civilian Explorers who'd answered the emergency call-up and were fighting on-site, every one of them had come to a complete stop with their weapons still raised, in the face of the overwhelming firepower suddenly raining down from above.

They stood frozen, staring up at the sky, weapons still in hand. Their understanding probably hadn't caught up with what was happening yet.

Even from a distance, I could make out fear, shock and confusion all tangled together on their faces.

Fair enough. A national-scale disaster was in the middle of being one-sidedly wiped out by a single flying suspicious person, no wonder they looked like that.

Confirming that their attention was on me, I activated the Skill again.

Might as well let them all become witnesses to the "Mysterious Black-Robed Sorcerer". A completely different silhouette from a swordsman with a fairy in tow.

I mass-selected the remaining red dots on Full Mapping's display and optimized the output. Raising my staff, I unleashed another swarm of fireballs into the sky.

This time, it wasn't so much rain as it was the sky itself turning into a blazing wall and crashing down onto the earth, an absolutely unreasonable sight.

The swarms of High Orcs and Lizardmen crawling through the streets weren't even given time to flee, they were turned into charred scraps in an instant.

Overwhelming violence, trampling everything underfoot. The dazed stares of the people looking up at me.

"...Gotten be careful or I could get drunk on this kind of power."

As if answering the words that had slipped out of me, a gentle patting came from my chest.

...Well. Guess I'll be fine. I've got a noisy little someone I can count on, for that kind of thing.

A firmer pat, this time. I couldn't help but laugh.

All right. One more push.

I headed for the Guild near the source of it all, clearing out every monster that entered my range along the way.

* * *

The next day, the news was covering what had happened.

"Aihara Stampede Fully Suppressed by Mysterious Black-Robed Sorcerer!"

"Unknown S-Rank Explorer? Guild Sticks to 'Currently Under Investigation' on Identity!"

My phone screen was full of sensational headlines like that, one after another. On social media, a video, apparently shot from a distance, of a black silhouette in the sky surrounded by countless fireballs had taken over the trending page.

"...Knew this was coming, but man, this next part's going to be a pain."

Footage shot on someone's phone alone probably wasn't enough to identify me. My appearance was completely different and to begin with, all anyone had was distant, blurry video.

Sure enough, a bunch of attention-seekers online were already hinting that they themselves were the black-robed sorcerer. Meanwhile, influencers were just loudly pushing their own pet theories.

"The black-robed sorcerer's true identity is the man rumored to be Japan's strongest A-Rank!"

"Word is an overseas S-Rank was in Japan on vacation!"

Social media was a tangled mess of competing claims like that. For someone trying to keep his identity hidden, honestly, it was a situation worth applauding.

Even so, keeping the black-robed sorcerer's true identity under wraps for good wouldn't be easy.

The footage from every security camera scattered across the city. If someone actually cross-checked all of it, my suspicious movements were bound to show up somewhere.

Whatever organization had the authority to pull that off, probably some emergency Countermeasures Office, was almost certainly already deep into that analysis.

Which was exactly why I needed to get ahead of it and fast.