The people from the newly-manifested land of Sorcier, which had manifested just south of the Japan server, were strange to everyone. To Landers, they seemed almost bizarre as Adventurers sometimes, even though the Sorcieri claimed their land had no Adventurers. Their was something utterly... otherworldly about them, which probably made sense since they claimed to literally be from another world but... Well. Try as the might, the People of the Land couldn't quite put thier finger on what made the Sorcieri so strange.

The Adventurers, on the other hand, could say exactly what they thought was so strange about the Sorcieri. For one thing, they had no Name tags over their heads, or a Lvl. number. Not even so much as an HP bar! After all this time, of getting used to Elder Tale's UI, seeing people who weren't conveniently labeled was... well, strange. And strange that it was strange, since that should be normal!

It didn't end there , of course. Some subtle probing also revealed they had no Classes. Oh, they had 'classes', but it was the social construct of relative rank, and not a hard-wired range of abilities and stat growth. The ones called knights were so because it was their job, not because it was their Job. Normally, The Adventurers would have just shrugged it and thought that they were people who, despite being in this place, were pretty much normal people... Except for one thing.

Their items.

For some bizarre reason, ALL items of Sorcieri make, from things like spoons and handkerchiefs and random fruit out of trees, to clothes and weapons and jewelry, had an item description! It was brief and sparse, usually just naming the thing and what it was, but sometimes there was a brief paragraph of seemingly unrelated... lore, for lack of a better word. Sometimes if it was a weapon it would have a 'Skill' listed, and if it was a food it would state how it would restore HP or Stamina!

At first, it was theorized that this was all an imposed phenomenon, something that had happened to their products as a result of... whatever had brought them into Elder Tale with the Adventurers, just as things had later changed with Skill and Overskills with time.

And then they had met Lady Maria.

It had been... well, a 'joint military exercise' of sorts. Lander forces of Eastal, a small force of Adventurers of the Black Sword Knights, and what Sorcier had described as 'representatives of various Knightly Covenants and noted knights' had been brought together conduct mock battles. It was there that the Adventurers learned that Sorcieri did, in fact, have Name tags and HP bars, it's just they only appeared if you happened to draw aggro. The bar would suddenly appear in plain, almost understated text over the person's head, and for some reason they seemed to develop a red tinge.

And then Guild Master Isaac had challenged the woman in the long black 'dark, edgy anti-hero' leather coat, who had been looking at the proceedings with an attentive but bored look on her face...

"And then what happened?" Shiroe pressed.

"Look, I'm not making this up, okay?-!" Isaac insisted. "I swear, as soon as she agreed, boss music started to play, and I shit you not, a huge-ass Health Bar just... popped in. It had her name and eveything!"

"Over her head?"

The guildmaster shook his head frantically. "No! Like, you know how in some games you can tell you're in a boss fight because there's a health bar that's bigger than yours on the screen? And it's ALWAYS on the screen no matter how you turn the camera, if you can? Like THAT!" He gestured, drawing a horizontal line in midair. "There was a line there, and it was huge, and I know boss music when I hear it! Somehow, Sorcier has a FUCKING BOSS! And her boss title was fucking scary!"

"What did it say?" Marielle asked.

"Okay, I SWEAR I'm not making this up!" Isaac said. "It's seriously the name that popped up over her Health Bar."

Shiroe nodded. "All right."

Isaac took a deep breath. "Her Health Bar read 'Lady Maria Campbell, The Double Isekai Rom-Com Protagonist DLC Super Boss'."

Dead silence.

"We have DLC?" Roderick exclaimed.

"Is it weird it's the 'double' that terrifies me?" Sojirou said.