ShangriLa Frontier ~ Shitty Games Hunter Challenges Godly Game ~

The following happened shortly before Sanraku dragged Sigma towards the Crystal Nest Cliffs.

* * *

「Hey, so incidentally: what is the name of our Guild going to be like?」

「Just to let you know, if we don’t get any good ideas by tomorrow, we are going to go with “Alex-kun Cheering Party” as proposed by Kaizaki-san over here.」

「Y-Yeah, we…… we’ll be sure to keep that in mind……」

While she listened to the voices that came along with the light music, she closed her video feed and thought alone for a moment. At the current moment she knew everything that she wanted to know.

「………… This is going to be really troublesome.」

It was only a few minutes ago that she happened to receive an email with an URL attached to it, as well as a short message. And it was just a moment before she actually was getting ready to go to sleep. But it was precisely because the message seemed to have been written in a hurry and bore sights of clear frustration that the woman…… Towa Amane knew that it was not a simple introduction as it claimed to be. …… She then opened the video file, but after watching it a few times she could only arrive at one simple conclusion: this was going to be way more troublesome than she initially thought it would be.

「The Distributor Union, huh……?」

It’s troublesome. Really, really troublesome and really, really annoying. Distributors are, in short, celebrities with a great value to their names, and the fact that celebrities naturally have fans is a fact that is too familiar to Towa Amane, who often would appear at the cover of the magazines as a top model.

So what happens when this coalition of distributors declares that they will be on the side of the new king in the upcoming conflict……? The answer is simple: a mass outflow of human resources and manpower.

When it comes to the Guild system in ShangriLa Frontier, there is no such thing as the limit of maximum people that can form a Guild. Strictly speaking, it is correct to say that the maximum number of people can be raised inexhaustibly or that it can be capped as the number of maximum NPCs available in the game. But this also means that the capacity of the Guild that is going to grow in strength by accepting fans of distributors and content creators is going to be potentially infinite.

Not to mention that the fans of the gaming content creators are bound to be gamers themselves, and unlike various models and actors, it will terribly less difficult for fans and admirers of this particular category to stand on the same stage as their idols, or to even outmatch them when it comes to sheer battle power. After all, just by purchasing the same game software and connecting online, those people are going to make one of their lifelong dreams come true without a shred of a doubt. And since the purpose of this very event is to gather and attract as many people as humanly possible……

「Both the beginners, and the total newbies who would only just start the game…… No, there is a high possibility that many high-level players are going to flow into this particular camp like moths to the flame.」

While thinking about it, Amane operated the terminal to search for the three sets of content creators that appeared in the video.

GUN! GUN! Mercenary Corps. Approximately nine hundred forty thousand subscribers and counting…… A group of four content creators, their main activity range is online First Person Shooters. It seems that they sometimes do PvE in Co-Op play as well, but their main selling point seems to be the fact that no matter the opponent they are facing, they are always playing in a calm and composed matter, quite unlike other players who often act in a chaotic and unpredictable way. That’s why they can handle a variety of different situations with ease.

「They do not seem to be a bunch that would be good at stealth operations. But if they were to be utilized in some sort of a way, it would certainly be as frontliners, preferably using ranged weapons, right? At least that’s what’s closest to the FPS type of gameplay in this game that you can get. It would be quite annoying just to put them in a city and let them run amok……」

The fields chosen as the standard most favorite environments for FPS players are chaotic battlefields and highly urbanized areas. There is no doubt that they will suffer enormous damage if those guys would sneak into Thirdrema and wreck havoc there, especially since those guys would totally disregard their own reputation and karma.

「………Alright, next please.」

Limited Speed Express, read as Kai Channel. Approximately one point eighty seven million subscribers and counting…… A group housing one of the Professional Gamers by the name of Kaizaki Hayate, but that was the only name she was able to remember. He is a very influential person just like Katsu…… just like Uomi Kei, and he could be some serious trouble if he wanted to be. He is a gamer mostly focused on attacking who preferred to take care of things fast, preferably via a preemptive strike. But you would never be able to guess that from the impressions he was giving during his interviews.

As far as the performance of a single unit goes, it can be said that a Professional Gamer is the most powerful asset and most devastating weapon that a group could get their hands on. As for Amane…… No, maybe even Sanraku was prone to forgetting that Uomi Kei is supposed to be one of the best Professional Gamers in all of Japan…… Not that you would get that impression from looking at him. A good testament to that fact can be Silvia Goldberg, an American Professional Gamer who until meeting Uomi Kei had an undefeated streak going on for her for a few years straight, but now her win-lose ratio fell to about eighty percent. This was pretty unusual in its own right.

It’s really hard to actually compare those two to one another, but the fact that this guy has almost two million subscribers to his name is something that cannot easily be omitted. As long as this Professional Gamer is playing privately…… only when someone famous decides to play incognito, like Amane here, there can be no value to their name. But otherwise it is going to be quite the hurdle to overcome.

「…… Nnnhhh, this is starting to give me quite a headache!」

Then there is the All-Night Knights Channel. They have approximately four hundred fifty thousand subscribers and counting…… They seem to be a little less well-known than the other two groups mentioned above, but…… When you consider their in-game threat level, things such as name recognition and number of subscribers are irrelevant. Rather, the problem is that they have as many as almost half a million subscribers.

Those type of players are the ones who can cause the balance of the whole conflict or even the game itself to shift from one direction to another if they desire to do so. Not to mention that bringing the real life into the game is something that seriously breaks the balance to pieces. Now, Amane was the kind of a woman who would choose to separate her private life from her professional life, but there are moments in life where innocent wishes like that just cannot hope to be maintained. So she could just let out a sigh and mutter under her nose: “Let’s just hope that this won’t have all THAT great of an impact on my real life image……”