Something Was Wrong

A voice called for me while pounding violently on the door.

It sounded urgent… but still, yeah—edited characters mostly only ever spoke combat shouts, so with just a voice, I had no idea who was who.

While I was thinking something that carefree, Lynferia—who had been kneeling beside me—stood up with her face bright red.

“Quiet, you idiot! That is disrespectful before Fels-sama!”

Lynferia flung the door open and roared at the person outside. It was pretty intimidating… but whoever was out there didn’t seem to care at all. A loud voice immediately came back.

“Ah, Lynferia-chan! Is Fels-sama in there?! It’s bad! It’s ridiculous!”

“Calm yourself! Marie! You stand before Fels-sama! What happened?!”

“It’s an emergency! Everyone’s gathering right now!”

Lynferia shouted again, but the girl called Marie didn’t seem bothered in the slightest.

“What was it, Marie? What happened? Calm down and tell me.”

When I asked, the girl turned toward me with a bright smile.

Marie… and red hair.

She was a girl shorter than my chest, with a childlike face. She wasn’t wearing armor but a robe-like outfit, which made it clear she was a mage. With red hair, her favored element was fire.

When I created edited characters, I set hair and eye color so you could tell their favored element at a glance. Lynferia, for example, had blond hair and gray eyes, so she was best with light, and her next-best was ice.

Marie had red hair and green eyes, so she was best with fire, and her second-best was wind.

Once the number of characters started growing, if you didn’t establish rules like that, you’d have to check stats every time you formed a party, and it was a pain.

Marie explained what was so terrible, swinging her small body around as hard as she could.

“Fels-sama! The town, it—it’s gone! It’s not there at all! It wasn’t destroyed or anything! It’s like it was never there to begin with! Outside the gate is just grassland!”

What did that even mean?

I wanted to blurt that out, but I held it back and looked to Lynferia. She’d come down from her rage, but now she clearly looked confused.

“Marie, what do you mean? The town… disappeared?”

“Yes! Everything’s gone! There’s nobody there either!”

“Impossible!”

“It’s true! When Kamila-chan went to the town to announce your return, there was nothing there!”

Marie was panicking, but Lynferia looked like she had no idea what was happening either.

But a town disappearing… what did that mean? The white country was supposed to have a castle town right outside the castle… I’d walked it in the RPG part. There was no mistake.

And now it was grassland…?

I didn’t understand the situation yet, but… we needed to move.

“Marie!”

“Y-yes!”

“Send word to close the gates immediately! If anyone is outside, recall them to the castle at once! And have everyone prepare for combat!”

“Yes!”

Without even watching Marie sprint off, I spoke to Lynferia.

“Lynferia, I want to see it with my own eyes. Guide me to the top of the wall.”

“Please wait! I will have it investigated, so Fels-sama—”

“Lynferia, I need to confirm it myself. Guide me.”

“…My apologies! At once!”

When I repeated myself, Lynferia obeyed.

Watching Lynferia’s back as she led the way, I organized my whirling thoughts.

This was the world of the game I’d played to death, Sword and Legions… Lynferia, Marie, and the characters who had gathered in the Audience Chamber. The items in the Treasure Hall… all of it matched my memory.

If Marie was telling the truth, this was the post-clear world. And yes, I didn’t know anything about post-clear beyond what the ending narrated… so maybe it wasn’t impossible for an event like “the town suddenly vanished” to happen.

…But unless it was a bad ending, the ending narration should have been about prosperity, or centuries of peace… something like that.

Had there been a Legions 2 that came out without me knowing? No, impossible. There was no way I wouldn’t know… So what was this situation…

No. Thinking wouldn’t help.

The fact that I was even here like this was already bizarre… so maybe one or two towns vanishing wasn’t that strange…

But if the town was gone… that meant there were system-level problems too.

“…Fels…-sama… did you… hear…?”

A voice suddenly spoke from behind me…

And I managed to turn calmly without flinching—barely—making me a true Overlord.

“Ururu. I’m heading to confirm it now.”

I spoke without stopping. The person who addressed me naturally fell into step beside me.

Her name was Ururu. She was about as tall as Lynferia, but extremely slender. With black hair and silver eyes, it was clear she excelled in darkness and illusion.

She was also my nation’s Minister of Foreign Affairs.

“…I’ll… scout… ahead…?”

“Wait. I want to confirm first.”

“…Understood…”

Ururu followed without another word. She spoke like this, but she was still a proper Minister of Foreign Affairs.

In Legions, the Minister of Foreign Affairs wasn’t about diplomacy at all—she was the top of scouting and assassination… basically the head of the spy apparatus. No negotiations. When you acted, you acted to kill.

Anyway, diplomacy aside… what I needed to know urgently was—

“Lynferia, Ururu. Do either of you know the current reserves of mana stones?”

“I-I apologize. I do not have that information.”

“…I don’t know… Should we… call Ilmitt…?”

“…Yes. I don’t know what’s happening, but we need to know our mana stone count. Can you handle that?”

“…Leave it… to me…”

“Ururu, we will escort Fels-sama to the northeast wall.”

“…Acknowledged…”

With that response, Ururu’s figure slipped away—gone.

I blinked and looked again, but she was still gone.

In Legions, Speed was largely fixed by class. You could reinforce it with equipment, but it wasn’t something emphasized to that extent.

So Ururu vanishing just now… wasn’t simply “she was fast,” right? Her scout class probably had the highest Speed in the roster, but… there was no way she was so fast she literally disappeared…

Then again, even in the game, scout-types had an effect where they seemed to vanish, so maybe it was just that.

The world was full of mysteries.

I stood atop the wall and looked outside.

The view through the crenellations—those notches in the wall—was exactly as Marie had said: grassland.

“There was not a trace of the town.”

“Yes… Even from how the grass had grown, one could tell there had been no buildings here for a long time. There is not even a road… only grassland.”

A grassland with absolutely nothing… There were plenty of maps like that for warfare, but… at minimum, the main castle and town always came as a set. Even for the white country’s capital.

“There were no monsters either… From what I could see, it did not seem dangerous.”

“Yes… but the terrain itself was completely different from yesterday… What in the world…”

Yesterday, huh.

For them, had there truly been a town “yesterday”? I couldn’t ask that… but right now, I had to deal with the reality in front of me.

“Then we have no choice but to send out the ‘diplomats.’”

It was a refined name, but in practice, it was a group that basically killed anything they came into contact with. And their job also included taking information unilaterally without contact.

“However, avoid engaging in battle. We don’t know what’s happening. Information gathering was the top priority.”

“…Understood… I’ll… depart… immediately…”

I’d meant that as instructions for Lynferia, but at some point Ururu was back beside me. She accepted the orders and vanished again.

…This Minister of Foreign Affairs was bad for my heart. If I weren’t the Overlord, my heart might have jumped right out of my mouth.

“Fels-sama~, sorry to keep you waiting~”

Despite saying she’d kept me waiting, a woman in a robe approached with a strolling pace that was almost Overlord-level leisurely. She didn’t look like she was hurrying at all.

“Ilmitt. I’ve been waiting.”

This mellow, unhurried woman was Ilmitt, the Minister of the Interior.

Her long light-brown hair rippled in waves, giving it a heavy volume. And she carried chest armor that very slightly surpassed Lynferia’s—an offensive capability that tended to steal the Overlord’s gaze. Her eyes were red, indicating earth and fire affinity, but unlike Lynferia and Ururu, she wasn’t a combat specialist.

She was one of the few pure backline support characters in my nation.

“Yes~ What did you need~?”

“Sorry to be abrupt, but tell me the stored amount and the production amount of mana stones.”

The mana stones I’d been concerned about were one of the most important resources in Legions.

You needed them for everything.

Shopping required them. Enhancing characters required them. Summoning troops required them. Casting spells required them. Developing and repairing equipment required them. Maintaining facilities required them.

If you ran out, you basically couldn’t fight, which meant a straight line to game over.

Those all-important mana stones replenished at the start of each month… and there was no other way to obtain them.

Managing mana stones well was the first step of beating Legions.

“Understood~ First, the stored amount is~ about one hundred million~”

“One hundred million…”

So it was basically the cap. In the game, the maximum mana stone storage was 99,999,999.

Even so, it wasn’t a comfortable number at all.

Once war began, characters formed units and summoned troops.

A unit consisted of three characters, and you could deploy up to one hundred times the sum of their Leadership values. If you had three people at Lynferia’s level, that single unit would exceed thirty-five thousand troops… but summoning just one soldier cost one mana stone.

And you deployed three to ten units per battle—meaning, at minimum, one battle required roughly one hundred thousand to nearly four hundred thousand mana stones just for troop summoning.

Once summoned, troops couldn’t be converted back into mana stones, and you couldn’t bring them to the next battlefield—they were disposable. You could stockpile up to the cap through repeated carryovers, but even one hundred million could vanish in an instant if you started enhancing characters.

So more important than reserves was monthly production.

“And also~ production is~ zero~”

“…Zero?”

“Yes~ There will be~ no mana stones gained next month~”

You had to be kidding…?

We’d unified the continent. Right before the ending, monthly production should have been in the millions… and now it was zero?!

You increased monthly mana stone production by conquering enemy bases and building mana collection devices in towns and villages, or by clearing dungeons and placing a collection device at the deepest point.

For dungeons, production was fixed per dungeon, but for settlements, production scaled with population. Specifically, you could increase monthly production by spending mana stones to raise a town’s level.

And now it was zero?

“Were the mana collection devices destroyed?”

“Or… the entire continent may have become like the grassland before us~”

“All towns vanished across the continent…? Not just towns, but dungeons too…? What even happened… Ilmitt. What about this month’s facility maintenance cost? I don’t need details—just the total.”

“Forty-five thousand~”

That was the most relieving thing Ilmitt had said all day. A maintenance cost of forty-five thousand meant only the facilities in this castle were being counted.

If maintenance for the facilities I’d built in other towns and forts were also included, things would be far more dire… but we could still manage.

But what was the cause? Everything vanished despite unification…? A continent-wide uprising? No, even then, moving entire towns was impossible… and there wasn’t even a castle town around the castle anymore…

I stared at the grassland stretching out before us.

If we were getting no income not just from towns and villages but also from dungeons… then either the mana collection devices had broken… or the towns had vanished the same way the castle town had…

If there were even traces of destruction, it would be simple—but there weren’t. Which meant the only conclusion I could draw was…

“This… wasn’t the world of Sword and Legions?”