World Keeper-Chapter 1233: New Challenges

Lifre pursed her lips, her true body sitting atop the mighty root at the heart of Olympus. For the last several weeks, she had noticed a rather alarming trend. More and more monsters had begun appearing in space with exceedingly high levels. It didn’t matter whether it was in Earth’s dimension, or even the younger new Metong homeworld.

Every few hours, she received an alert that such a powerful monster had appeared, and had to dispatch one of her clones to deal with it. Closing her eyes, she tried to think what could be the cause. From the point of view of the world at large, monsters with levels over five thousand were still nightmares beyond comprehension. Just their passing could destroy entire planets filled with life.

There were, admittedly, a few powerful adventurers of Fyor that were capable of dealing with these monsters. However, such people typically stuck to Fyor, devoting their lives to training to become stronger. Aside from them, even most gods would simply perish under the onslaught of such a beast.

What’s changed? Lifre thought to herself. From her perspective, this was clearly not a natural event. Something must have caused this to happen on some level that she couldn’t perceive.

Criminal activity? No, Lena made sure to deal with any truly threatening crime rings before they left. Void influences? No, the tree created by Julia and Chelsea didn’t let void monsters so much as approach the universes without getting slapped to death.

What other problems could have caused this… Lifre thought, before her brow twitched. I mean… that could make sense, maybe. Gotta speak to the boss.

With a subdued sigh, Lifre split off another clone, sending it down into Olympus. If her assumption was right, she’d need to practically root herself to this tree for the foreseeable future.

“Boss?” I glanced up, hearing Lifre’s familiar voice as I sat at my desk, going through the various reports that had come my way. I saw the slime girl poking her head through the door of my office. “Mind if I come in for a minute? Something I wanna discuss real fast.”

“Sure, Lifre.” I smiled, setting down the reports I had held and turning to face her. “What can I help you with?”

“Well, that’s part of the thing. I’m not sure that there is anything you can do to help. Not without having you permanently stationed in the Admin Room on Monster Watch.” Lifre chuckled, scratching the back of her head nervously.

When she spotted my confused look, she gave an awkward smile. “So, you know the whole problem of increased high-level monster spawn rates that we’ve been dealing with? I have a…theory for what’s causing it.”

“Go on?” I gestured, arching a brow and leaning back in my chair. I hadn’t been entirely sure what was causing this myself, and assumed that it was just a group of highly evolved monsters that had been caught roaming the stars after we expanded our territory. Though, judging from how Lifre was acting, it seemed she had another idea.

“Well…” Lifre took a deep breath. “I think that the system itself might be causing this.” She said, catching me by surprise. “If you think about it from a narrative standpoint, it makes sense. You’ve said in the past that the system challenges people, and gives out punishments if they exploit loopholes, right?”

“I might have said that at some point, it’s been a long time.” I said, thought nodded my head and waited for her to continue.

“Okay, just hear me out… I think that this is the system’s new challenge for us. Normally, at our stage, we would be challenged by evolved void beasts, alien civilizations, criminal uprisings, or major natural disasters.” Lifre began, but then shook her head. “Between the memetic barrier and the great tree, void beasts are a non-issue. If one of them happened to evolve in the wild enough to be a threat, we have an entire race of ‘void gods’ outside the tree to deal with them.”

“Alien civilizations? V-Day wiped out any hope of that by thoroughly destroying every form of life outside of the primary worlds. It’s theoretically possible for one to appear in the Metong homeworld, but that universe is too new for them to show up for quite a while, and the Metong have already spread throughout a large part of their starter galaxy.”

“As for criminal uprisings, Lena was probably very thorough in removing any potential threat before they all left. And natural disasters are even less likely, with how many gods we have capable of subverting them. In other words, all of the ‘normal’ challenges for our level have been removed as options.”

With a deep breath, Lifre concluded her explanation. “The system itself is in charge of monster spawning. The only way for it to provide a challenge for us is by throwing exceedingly powerful monsters our way. Monsters that match the power scale of those in the highest ranks of your people. Namely, myself and a few super-adventurers in Fyor.”

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“If this assumption is right, and these monsters are the system’s new challenge for us to overcome, we can make another assumption. The system won’t want this challenge to be overcome by just me, because that will remove the meaning of the challenge to begin with. It’ll be a loophole, and we know how much the system hates those.”

I nodded my head, a serious look on my face. “Which means that there will either be a gradually increasing amount of monsters, until you can’t handle them all yourself, or monsters will appear that can counter you.”

“Right.” Lifre confirmed. “If it’s the former, that would be for the best. We’d have time to prepare and set up countermeasures with the adventurers of Fyor, or even make more Origins to have on standby.”

“However… if it’s the latter, it will be a disaster. If I am sent out to protect a planet from a monster, but that monster has a power that counters me and kills my clone, the planet that I was protecting will be guaranteed to be destroyed.”

I nodded again, lowering my head in thought. “What is the highest frequency of monster attacks you think you can manage on your own?”

Lifre gave a somewhat awkward smile at that question. “If they were normal monsters, I could make my clones fully autonomous, and deal with hundreds at a time. However, monsters at this level require a higher level of energy for me to be able to handle, and I feed that energy to them from the root of the world tree. Which means I need an active connection.”

“My limit for active connections like that is five, before I start to lose performance in each one. And, given that I have one active clone at James’s lab, that means I can only handle four monsters at a time. Any more than that, and I would need backup to prevent the monsters from getting to their targeted planets.”

“Right.” To be honest, that was already quite a lot, and would give us plenty of time to prepare if the system did slowly ramp it up. “There are a few things that we can work on to resolve this, but I’d like to hear your thoughts, first.”

Lifre’s smile widened slightly when she heard that. “Well, we need to strengthen defenses around every inhabited world. That, or create a unified army capable of moving out at a moment’s notice to respond to these alerts.”

I thought about it for a moment, but there was still more we needed to be careful of. “At the same time, we need to make sure that, while the solution is effective, it doesn’t eliminate the threat at its core. Otherwise, the system will create a new challenge for us.”

Lifre gulped, hesitating slightly. “W-What is even left for it to throw at us?”

Thinking back, I had a somewhat bitter smile on my face. “Extremely powerful Keepers. Constant defensive missions. Or… natural Origin monsters.”

“Wait, can monsters even naturally be Origins?” Lifre’s eyes widened, apparently struggling to comprehend that. “Even if they have to create an entire universe just to be born?”

“It’s theoretically possible. Emphasis on theory.” I said with a shake of my head. “For instance, a monster could maybe be born or evolved in the void with such complete rules that it transcends the level of a void god, directly possessing a world inside of itself. On the other hand, we know that monster Keepers are able to cultivate Origins, so there is the chance that a monster could be born with the ability to create a universe. If that monster then gets a few lucky encounters, it might meet all of the requirements to become an Origin itself.”

“All of these possibilities could be arranged by the system. In fact, if your theory about this being the system’s challenge is correct, it’s entirely possible that some of our past defensive invasions were influenced by the system. Maybe we were having too easy of a time due to having hard counters for the challenges that the system had prepared for us, so it took the alternative of throwing us up against a difficult Keeper.”

Lifre’s brow twitched, and she let out a low groan. “In other words, we’ve got to be able to handle this, but at the same time, we can’t handle it too well. Otherwise, the system will just make things worse for us later.”

“Right.” I confirmed, before shaking my head again. “Also, as for how quickly the system will ramp up the attacks… that depends. If we continue to rely solely on you, the system will likely take that as a sign that we are trying to just use you to resolve the problem. Following this line of logic, it would start throwing monsters that you can’t deal with into the mix.”

“As long as we make active efforts to prepare sincerely, the monsters should ramp up more slowly. The challenge then becomes whether or not we can assemble a force capable of protecting the various planets within our domain before the monsters become too much for you to handle. If what you guessed at the start is correct, this should be the nature of the challenge that the system arranged for us.”

Of course, there was more to it than that, but that was the basics. For instance, there was a natural continuation from here. If we gathered a force to protect the various worlds, that would provide more room for corruption among the upper ranks of power. Dealing with this corruption while simultaneously handling the monsters that continued to appear was very likely the next stage of the challenge that the system had prepared.

“For now, you keep doing what you’ve been doing. I’ll make some calls to begin setting up the defensive army.” I instructed, and Lifre gave a quick salute, before dissolving into nothing in front of me.

With a sigh, I closed my eyes, thinking about who would be good to contact. There was one obvious answer, but I was worried whether or not using her would be considered a loophole as well. Thelsa had an entire army of powerful shadows, and could mobilize on her own near infinitely.

I’ll contact her for now, but ask her to be the general of the army, rather than the army itself. She’ll also likely have contacts among the higher level adventurers, and will be able to help train and command the army. As long as she’s willing to step out of the shadows, that is.