Capture Target

Please, sit down.

Normally I’d like to start with some banter or some flirting, but if you still want to hear my full story…  Well.  Sadly, I don’t think we’ll get too much fun sexy stuff today.  But, it’s needed, no matter how boring it may be!

So.  The two kings brought my companions to the royal palace.  They put all of us in a meeting room with a few people I didn't recognize, had all of us hold these weird chains, and then we started talking.

It was weird!  There was no blame and no flirting!

We just -- did what needed to be done!

…Though I did get distracted occasionally… Front King Masters was super hot.  Not that I realized what was distracting me at the time~  I only figured that out later.

…Anyway!

The Kingdom's kings had known something big was going on since the start of year 2, with the arrival of the second landmass and Takeo surrendering his claims to me.  They had quietly petitioned Modesty for an answer, and she had equally quietly replied to play along with the continuing Land Grab while doing their best to pretend nothing was out of the ordinary beyond, you know, the Land Grab lasting five years instead of only one.

…That is, Modesty told them to do that, unless I asked for the Atlantean key, in which case they should haul me in to have this conversation.

Ironically, the person that took all of this hardest was Takeo, who broke into cold sweat because he'd never found out about the 28th goddess cult, or Modesty's knowledge and interference, in any of his prior loops.

We talked all day, about too many things to go over right now, so I'll just focus on the most immediately important part.

The layout of the third landmass, and my original video game theorycrafted plan for year three.

I have a roughly drawn map of what would be added here -- this side is attached to the first landmass, on the opposite side of the second landmass.  It’s actually connected somewhat close to the minotaur village, which is rather important -- I’ll get to that in a bit.

You can see these three dividing lines?  Where they meet up, at this crater, is the center of the third land mass, and these lines are no-man's land.

The entire third land mass was embroiled in a constant, three-way war for supremacy.  You can roughly see what I mean by how these three equal ‘slices’ of land look so different.

Here, facing away from the first landmass and touching the continent, are the jungles of the Wildlands.  These regimented lands that conjoin with the length of the first landmass and a portion of the main continent are the Farmlands.  And this third portion that runs against the ocean, that looks more silvery than natural hues should, is where the robots rule.

And yes, by robots, I mean sexbots.

As a reminder, I needed to gain five specific blessings this year.  One from each of the three factions -- Wildlands, Farmlands, Robolands -- and two during my final goal.

Now, there are a lot of factors at play here; the theorycrafted plan I'd come up with back home involved far too much finicky timeslot and numbers abuse, but the basics of it were pretty simple.

Get the leaders of all three factions to like me, then lure them all into fighting over me in the center near the end of the year.  Use the Atlantean key to open up a hidden vault entrance to hide from the chaos, and then… something.

Of course, I say that, but it’s actually a lot more complicated.

Let’s go over the three regions one by one.

---

First, the Farmlands.  They were run by ‘Big Bull’, the largest and strongest minotaur that the Alchemical Corruption series has ever seen.

The farmlands were relatively peaceful, but highly regimented; everybody had a role, and stepping outside of your role was… frowned upon.  Cows were milked, horses pushed plows, things like that.  It’s full of animal boys and girls, all of the ‘farm animal’ variety.

There are massive barns full of cowgirls that get regularly milked, before lazing out in the fields and getting fucked by minotaurs.

Right here is the rather terrifying ‘Coo-Coo Clutch’, where the chicken harpies reside -- hey, I see you laughing!  I’d like to see you stay calm when an army of nesting hens and angry cocks that are humanoid enough to hold swords come charging at you!

Hrmph.

There’s the sheep pens, which are full of sleepy, dopey crafters and weavers… the pig stalls, which are full of wild man-shaped boars that you do not want to get upset at you… the dog house, where the farm's most dedicated soldiers live…

…A-ah.  Right.  That.

That pond.

That’s, uh.

It’s where the…

…

The Farmlands have a special kind of troop; they’re essentially saboteurs, who go into enemy territory and cause chaos.  Disrupt supply lines, spread false information, and generally cause havoc.  Those troops also live near the pond.

Those are the geese harpies.

They… just…

…D-don’t mess with them.

I’m glad to see from your expression that you understand just how terrifying the idea of a human-sized, human-smart, goose-mind-having harpy is.

I’ll just, uh, move on, now.

The Farmlands were the easiest of the bunch to walk through, and the hardest of the lot to claim.  You had to enter into an agreement with Big Bull, which usually required an annoying amount of money, and then you could start gathering materials.  Per area.  Which I would have to do… a lot of.

I also needed Big Bull to get into a romantic relationship with me.  Or, rather, I had to make him want one.  This required spending a lot of time with him, not succumbing to his amazing cock, and it required that I have the blessing of the goddess farms and cattle, Catalina:  [Human Cattle]

Which would require me to produce a lot of eggs, milk, and-slash-or fur.  I would need to literally become a productive barn yard animal, enough so to get a blessing based on it, and impress Big Bull enough that he would try to seduce me into being one of his personal cows.

And then, uh, not be seduced.

Which was actually the hardest part of that…

…A-anyway.

That’s the Farmlands.

---

Over here is the Wildlands

Whereas the Farmlands are tamed, the Wildlands are very much not.  They’re full of humanoid beasts and outright monsters that constantly compete over territory and resources.  The very plants themselves get in on it, with a lot of them more than willing to eat meat.

Unlike the farmlands, which are more ‘humans with extra bits’, the jungles are more… animalistic.  More primal, in a way.  Rather than 'humans with added animal bits'?  They’re covered with fur, feathers and scales, and they have more muzzles than faces.

There are a few factions that are more important than the rest… the Simian Alliance is one of them.  A bunch of apes and monkeys that are not usually as smart as humans, and yet are very, very annoying.  They jump around the tops of the trees and are more than willing to throw hard nuts and rotten fruit at you if you get too close, quickly fleeing out of your range if you try to charge them.

There’s the snakes and crocodiles, as well.  They don’t have an official name for their group, but they tend to work together, or at least, in the same area.  They are, in the right circumstances, the strongest individuals on the entire land mass.

I’m not joking.  If you try to hold a crocodile's mouth open, I will get you registered for emergency hand-related surgery, as you will not be the one that wins.  And for snakes, their entire body is muscle.  If they constrict around you, your lungs will not be the ones that hold out.

There’s others, of course.  From rhinos to ant-eaters to frogs, but when it comes down to it, there’s really only one force that's truly important.

Kaiser.

Kaiser is the strongest fighter in the entire game, with the only exception being the gods -- and even then, that’s only because they cheat by being gods.  Even if you had a character with an S-Rank combat skill, they still can’t beat Kaiser on their own.  They need a strong party backing them up, gear that is at least on par with fourth year, or a small mountain of consumables, to even have a chance. 

To do it reliably, they need all of the above.

Kaiser is the most hands-off ruler of the three; he mostly just occasionally joins a battle and makes it into a domineering victory before lounging back to his comfy rock in the jungle.

Thus, it was very important that I get him to desire my conquest.

I had to make him want to conquer me.

And the key to that would be a blessing from Raleine, goddess of monsters -- specifically, [Broodmother].

I would need to spawn several monster children in year three to get that blessing, and then use that to get Kaiser interested in me.  And then, uh.  Not get conquered and broken by pleasure for the rest of the year.

…Like with Big Bull, this would be the hardest part of the plan…

---

If you have any knowledge of how game maps are designed, the further away from the start, the more dangerous the area is.  …Usually.

In this case, in order to reach the Robolands, you had to pass through either the Farmlands or Wildlands; it had no connection to the Kingdom or the first landmass.  And it was the most dangerous of the three regions by far.

It was ruled by the Empirical Empress, a very haughty sexbot that was convinced she was the supreme being of reality -- barring only the gods.  

She was also the third landmass's warmonger.

The war between the three was active, and skirmishes regularly occurred, and that was mostly due to the tension that Empirical Empress caused.  Kaiser was the strongest individual combatant, but the Empress had the strongest forces.

Endless machines that were almost grown from the land, to serve her bidding.

She regularly pressured the other two, forcing them to fight back against her… and Kaiser and Big Bull could only ever have a ceasefire agreement.  The two were too different to accept anything else.

There are an embarrassing number of speeches in Alchemical Corruption 12 from the two of them talking about their philosophical perspectives as they relate to civilization, Kaiser espousing the freedom of the Wildlands and Big Bull monologuing about the order of the Farmlands… but both basically just boil down to ‘I really hate that guy’.

The enemies in the Robolands don’t tend to have enough personality to make them worth mentioning.  The only one worth keeping an eye on are the Sexbot Infiltrators, which will gladly sneak into any other group, and seduce and fuck their way into being moles and spies.

They’ve already infiltrated both Kaiser's and Big Bull’s forces.  According to Takeo, who specifically are sexbots actually changed every time loop, which was absolutely infuriating.  They kill and replace different people in every timeline!

That’s not to say there weren’t other scary forces, like the Techno-Dragon forces designed to fight Kaiser, the Artificial Trees that passively mine the ground of valuable minerals, the Bouncing Bombs that just roll around and blow up their foes… but those are all more ‘passive’ threats.

Sometimes big threats, like the techno-dragons, but still.  Passive threats.  They don’t go out of their way to attack unless you’re marked as an ally of one of the other two groups.

The only active threat was the Empirical Empress, and that’s because she can summon a robot -- any robot -- to her side every two turns.  This always results in a flood of Techno-Dragons.  Not fun.

For her, I needed to make her want to adopt me.

…No, really.  I did.  And in order to manage that, I needed [Technosymbiosis], a blessing from Roberta, goddess of technology.  It’s a trait very similar to [Perfect Host], just for technological add-ons instead of parasites.

This would be… difficult to pull off… but not impossible.

What was nearly, if not literally, impossible was succeeding with all three plans simultaneously in the space of a single year.

So, in summary, my theorycrafted plan was the following list:

---

1. In a single time slot, meet all three rulers.
2. Gain [Human Cattle]; start romance with Big Bull.
3. Get pregnant, show to all three rulers.  Do this one twice; keep the third time secret.
4. Gain [Broodmare]; start conquest from Kaiser.
5. Gain [Technosymbiosis]; start adoption from Empress.
6. Gain official alliance with all three rulers in one time slot.
7. Keep alliance from all three
8. Drag all of them to the center of the island and:
   1. Don’t Die.
   2. Get both [Romance Obsessed] and [Easy Prey] from the goddesses of Romance and Conquest, respectively.
   3. Hide in the ancient Atlantean vault, using the key I got from the royal treasury.
   4. Don't explore the vault.

While we couldn’t trust the events in Alchemical Corruption Twelve perfectly, we could still use them as a pretty solid guideline.  

And according to the game, in order to pull off this plan, there were around one-hundred thirty-one hundred separate events that had to occur, in perfect order, with the exact correct outcomes.  Including a modest amount of unavoidable RNG, which is to say, naked good luck.

My theorycrafted plan's solution for that was save-scumming.

That, obviously, wasn’t an option here.

The next issue was that very last step.

See, in Alchemical Corruption Twelve, when you trigger the vault event, the cutscene plays you hiding in the vault's antechamber. You get a choice to wait until the noise outside stops, or explore deeper into the vault.

If you just wait, then when you leave, the vault closes, stays permanently locked the rest of the game, and your run continues as normal.

If you choose to explore, then when you arrive at a big fancy chamber, there’s a quick cutscene that shows the party reacting in stunned shock to 'something' in the chamber.  Before the player gets to see what it is, three dots of white rapidly spread to cover the entire screen.  

You get a message, white text on black screen, marked as being from the chief god himself, about how he ‘thanks you’ for the ‘gift’ and wants to give you something in return, and then are immediately kicked to your New Game Plus bonus selection options.

None of us were sure what to make of it, but before the meeting could devolve into heated arguing about whether to explore the vault or not, Front King Masters pushed the conversation forward.

The topic was related to the biggest problem with my plan:

It treated the third landmass as a video game to be beaten.  When I came up with it, the people were all just bits and bytes, flags to be raised and events to be triggered.  

In the video game, there were no events of any significance on the third landmass after the third year ended.  Without the vault event, it was because the three regions were still all keeping each other too busy with warring and skirmishing to do anything else.

With the vault event triggering?

It was because the three leaders, and the majority of their regions' warriors and militias, all died in the bloody three-way pitched battle that the main character is directly responsible for.

…Sevens had told me that in most loops, I only start treating things as properly 'real' during year three.  In the better loops, I realize early into year three that I'm playing with people's lives, adjust my plans before anything bad happens, and things broadly work out.

Otherwise…

…I’m… just glad that I avoided that.  No wonder Takeo was so irritated with me…

This time, however, I'd already bettered myself.

And I had the Kingdom's two kings already coming up with ideas for diplomatic outreach.

We would move forward with the basics of my plan, but the primary purpose was different:  Instead of doing so to manipulate them into a fight, it was to give the Kingdom's diplomats a chance to do their work.

Best of all, the modified plan demanded I be just as much of a slut~