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Management must not have found any problems with this type of misdirection, so her suggestion was accepted. In fact, Rare had entered the event in order to gauge the progress of other players, and she hadn’t meant to show herself off. Rather, if she had wanted to show off all her cards, there wouldn’t have been enough time in the event to do so, something no one could have possibly fathomed if Rare stayed silent.

In addition, that Wayne guy released everything he knew about Rare on social media. He explained about Kerry, another player with the same appearance who had done nothing wrong and was obeying Rare, and a bunch of other stuff; since pretty much everything he wrote was completely wrong, she had no problem with it at all so she didn’t do anything about it. In the first place, even if she wanted him to correct anything, if she went ahead and reached out to him directly on social media, that might render all his hard work moot. The mastermind should stay silent. The only time she needed to confess was after she’d been cornered. Right: just like what she had done the other day.

Anyway, her plans were proceeding smoothly… Well, not that she was doing anything, but it had been a week since things had kicked off. Right now, more and more players were gathering at the Great Liebe Forest—she had only recently found out that was the name of this forest. The nearby city of Erfahren—another name she only just learned—was experiencing a surge of unprecedented economic prosperity as a consequence. It was as though they were preparing for war against the great forest. In other games, this many players would only gather around raid dungeons.

If all these players misunderstood that Rare obtained her strength within this forest-turned-dungeon, then she could consider her ploy successful.

To help sell the dungeon setting, Rare was actually playing another game, a dungeon management one, and bringing her experience from there over here. The engineer ants produced low-rank metal weapons and armor with materials from the ore vein, which were planted in the outer areas of the forest. If a player found one and took it with them, another item of the same quality would be hidden somewhere else. And it wasn’t only weapons and armor: low-rank potions; lumber, nuts, berries, and fruits from trees in the middle layer of the forest; monster pelts; and various other materials were strewn about at random. They were more than sufficiently stocked on supplies gathered from the middle layer nowadays; since it was a lot of trouble to have everything brought back to the queen’s chamber to give to the transporter ants, the ants who collected them were being told to just hang onto them. Scout ants were constantly tracking both the distributed items as well as player movements. Because there were so many players, they urgently needed to start producing more scout ants and form specialized monitoring squads.

After letting the invading players kill monsters (mostly ants) and collect treasure to their hearts’ content, the bloodthirstier ants like the cavalry and snipers would then kill a moderate number of them. This was what Rare realized: if ants killed other ants, they wouldn’t earn even a single point of experience. However, if players killed ants and earned experience, then those players were killed by other ants, Rare’s group could gain much more XP.

On the whole, players had around the same amount of XP going into the forest as they did after they died and came back, so they would want to adjust the kill timing a bit so that players ended up a little ahead. Trying to finely control the players’ power levels required precise calculations, and it was for that specific reason that she increased Sugaru’s INT so much. Because of that and [Enhance Follower], every ant’s INT had increased a bit, so they could work together to do those calculations. A fringe benefit was that it also raised the effectiveness of engineer ant acid. To be specific, they could now melt bronze. Even the weakest engineer ant would now be enough to deal with players wearing equipment made from bronze or the bones of weak monsters.

On a related note, Erfahren’s supply of metals from the Great Liebe Forest ore vein had been stopped due to the occupation of Rare’s group, but now it had been indirectly restored by putting it in the hands of players. As a result, the price of iron had dropped. However, what the players brought back was refined equipment… so much better than cast-metal goods that they stopped going to blacksmiths to buy gear. However, metal equipment did require maintenance, so the demand for blacksmiths didn’t completely disappear. Still, she heard that quite a number of blacksmiths ended up leaving town.

And who provided this intel? Remy. Now that the production lines were fully up and running in the great forest, Remy’s responsibilities as general manager had relaxed and she now posed as a wandering alchemist to sell low-rank potions and items in town. While players could find potions in the forest, they at least weren’t dumb enough to just go diving in without any from the start; on the contrary, some players had too many and wanted to pawn them off. While there had always been apothecaries and alchemists in town selling potions, they didn’t buy potions, so Remy was able to carve a niche for herself and became rather successful. There were a lot of players who wanted to sell their potions and buy one-time-use talismans and charms; they became her regulars and would come to her shop even when they had nothing to sell simply to stock back up on potions.

Since Remy’s shop was well-known among players, she would hear about any reputable players who had come to town. When those players went into the great forest, Rare’s group would butter them up by letting them find better equipment, then take payment in the form of XP.

Ever since launching the attraction known as the Great Liebe Forest dungeon, Rare’s XP earnings had gone through the roof. It was so efficient that they neglected the goblin and monster farms, resulting in overpopulation. Since they were around anyway, the ants lured them into killing players; the players were surely sick of fighting ants all the time, so it served to change up the routine, alleviate boredom. Goblins were as weak as engineer ants, but the farm-raised monsters were quite strong. Normally they could just be trampled by the sheer number of ants, but they were actually powerful enough that multiple parties of players wouldn’t be able to defeat them. It would be great if those players thought of them as midbosses or something and enjoyed the variety.

Sugaru was the sole administrator of the entire operation. With the support of the transporter ants, she would be able to handle most emergencies. If she needed someone with overwhelming battle power, she could recruit Deas to help her. When Kerry equipped Yoroizaka’s little sister, she was nothing to sneeze at either, but she wasn’t often away from Rare’s side.

And so, Rare had made a lot of free time for herself. She also had enough XP saved up for an experiment. Right now, she was just waiting for a report from Marion, who was out on business, so it was time to continue tinkering with alchemy.

TL note: Fun coincidence, when I picked a romanization for the name of the country, “Hiers” was at random, but turns out it actually is a German name. Now we also get the “Great Liebe Forest” (love) and “Erfahren” (experienced, learned).