The Art of Filleting
Standing before him was a sleek, silver-gray humanoid mannequin.
Staring at its egg-shaped head devoid of any eyes, nose, or mouth, one could easily mistake it for a faceless phantom.
A wooden ball-jointed doll... Yeah, that’s exactly the impression it gives. Matches the report so far.
Although it wasn't made of wood, its overall silhouette matched the descriptions in the Southeast Asia One Way Group dossier down to the smallest detail. There was no mistake.
Which meant...
Twitch.
The instant the guardian’s pinky gave the faintest tremor—
“Hup!”
BOOOOOOOOOM!
Musaeng threw himself aside with everything he had.
In that exact instant, the wooden cabin’s timber wall detonated into splinters. It was, quite literally, lightning speed matched with terrifying destructive force.
It wasn't as if he hadn't anticipated it. But this was only the 5th floor... Even if the entity had been summoned to fulfill a hidden condition, could it truly retain all of its original parameters?!
“It really kept all its stats?!”
It certainly did.
Had his attributes not been doubled by Steel Bone—had his Agility been a mere 20 instead of 46—his reflexes never would have caught up. He would have suffered an instant kill, eradicated by the very first blow.
“Kkwak! Count your blessings that there’s only one of them!”
“This isn't the time for jokes—!”
“Then I leave it in your hands, Kim Musaeng!”
Wahsh tossed out a quip, but tension was thick in his voice. Pushing up his black horn-rimmed glasses, his eyes and the lenses glinted in unison.
“Target identified. No matching data.”
Only after the billowing cloud of pulverized wood and dust settled did a synthetic voice ring out. Though it lacked eyes, a nose, and ears, its forward stare exerted a chilling presence.
“Commencing extermination per the Creator’s protocol.”
“Hey! Shouldn't you have said that before throwing a punch?! What if I was on Mama’s side, you bas—whoaaa!”
Musaeng contorted his frame with desperate force.
The guardian’s forearm whipped past an inch from his nose. The violent gale kicked up by its lunging fist blew across Musaeng, nearly sweeping his feet out from under him.
Getting shoved aside by backdraft was practically something to be grateful for. The instant the guardian planted its foot to arrest its explosive momentum, the floorboards shattered, spraying lethal shrapnel across the room.
A fraction of a second stood between life and death.
“Wahsh! Let me ask one more time! You really can't just shut down its system?!” Musaeng yelled as he bolted out through the ruined facade of the cabin.
Wahsh had clearly spelled out the hidden condition for the 5th floor: incapacitate the guardian.
The simplest approach was to damage its core until it shut down. But there was an even cleaner method: prevent the core from running in the first place. In other words, cut off the core's power supply using Wahsh's administrative authority.
“I told you already! That's a direct infringement of Administrator Authority! The bastards at the top would notice in an instant!”
Wahsh had already given that answer. While Musaeng spent twenty hours grinding stats against stone golems, their first idea had been firmly discarded.
Yet Musaeng had a specific reason for asking again.
“Then the other thing still works, right?!”
What was impossible remained impossible. But what about the thing Wahsh said could be done? Was that still on the table? Now that they were facing the guardian in the flesh, had anything changed?
“Kkwaaak!”
The yellow rubber duck gave a sharp squawk.
“Eliminating intruder. Eliminating intruder.”
Fwoooosh!
Refusing to let its target escape, the guardian charged out in pursuit.
“Good, that's all I need!”
Musaeng spun around to face the construct.
It was closing the distance at terrifying speed. Not gliding or teleporting, of course—it was pounding against the earth with tremendous physical velocity.
And Musaeng had anticipated this. He knew the guardian would emerge from that cabin, and that the fight would inevitably spill outside.
So what was the proper response?
CLANGGGGG!
To prepare the perimeter beforehand, obviously.
Concealed beneath sand and gravel lay a heavy, brutal contraption engineered with enough spring-loaded force to shatter a beast’s ankle: humanity’s most quintessential hunting tool—a bear trap!
“Locomotion impaired. Removing obstacle.”
The guardian lurched to a dead halt.
The hollow mechanical voice and utter absence of a scream made the creature eerie, but Musaeng was hardly one to freeze in fear.
“That trap held the boss of Dungeon 25 fast! You won't break free so easily!”
Laying a snare and baiting the target into it was second nature to someone who had spent thirteen years as a dungeon sherpa. There was nothing novel about it.
The real issue was what came next.
While the trap could bind a 25th Dungeon boss, to a construct meant for the 55th Floor, it was a minor nuisance at best. It would buy ten seconds, maybe five.
What could one accomplish in five seconds?
Certainly not complete incapacitation. Even if he drove Sreyken's Poison Fang into it, venom was useless against an inorganic body. Piercing the core directly might work, but...
“Hup!”
SKRRR-CLANG!
With a harsh shriek of friction, the fang skittered off the silver-gray hide, leaving only a shallow gouge. Penetrating deeply was out of the question. In that regard, no matter how sharp a poison fang was, it could never match a purpose-forged blade.
If the fang only scratches it, a sword would...
“Kim Musaeng!”
Wahsh shouted, snapping Musaeng out of his testing.
“Got it! Now for the real deal—!”
Musaeng refocused entirely on the construct. The test was done, and he had learned what he needed. Now came the execution.
“Interference with obstacle removal detected. Neutralizing interference.”
The guardian reached out to crush Musaeng, but he slipped under its grasp by a hair’s breadth. With its ankle locked in the jaws of the trap, its turning radius was compromised. Circling into its blind spot, Musaeng reached out.
What he held wasn't a weapon.
In the span of a single breath, he slapped something sticky between the seams of its joints.
“Now! Wahsh!”
Before anyone could blink, Musaeng produced a small pouch—the one plundered from Park Dohyun's squad from Korea One Way Group.
A compression pouch capable of reducing the physical volume of objects placed within.
※ Warning: Mass remains largely unchanged. This item does not store objects in a four-dimensional sub-space.
Designed by METAL RHINE
Musaeng yanked the drawstring open and shook it vigorously into the open air.
Everything packed inside erupted outward in a violent spray. An overwhelming avalanche of debris burst between them, completely blinding the space between construct and man.
“...Vision compromised. Identifying obstruction... dust... stone powder. Gravel fragments—”
Stone powder.
And not just any ordinary rock dust.
“—Identified as component materials of another creation by the Creator.”
It was pulverized golem stone—the very rocks Musaeng had spent twenty painstaking hours smashing, grinding, and powdering!
The guardian took less than two seconds to register the debris. Once the cloud settled, the smokescreen would vanish. Meanwhile, the trap it was crushing with one hand cracked, on the verge of splintering apart.
In roughly three seconds, Musaeng would have had to duel a fully mobile, uninjured guardian with his life on the line.
“Wahsh!”
Or rather, that would have happened—had there been no plan.
Wahsh's black horn-rimmed glasses flashed.
It was risky, but it just might work. Over the past twenty hours, Kim Musaeng had proved that when your life was on the line, mere notions of efficiency didn't matter.
“User ID of Sorcerer Maia verified. Accessing Stone Golem cores.”
And Wahsh intended to prove his own worth.
“Reboot!”
VZZZZZZZZT!
Not through Administrator Authority.
This was a backdoor route utilizing only Maia’s system credentials!
Instead of forcibly deactivating the guardian’s core, he was rebooting the stone golem cores!
Musaeng had stayed laser-focused on the real objective from the very beginning. His goal was never to kill the guardian.
It was to render it completely immobile.
And given its doll-like, ball-jointed structure, what would happen if he jammed golem cores into every major articulation of its limbs and turned them back on?!
WHIRRRRRRR!
With a rising vortex of air, the suspended stone dust began clinging to the guardian's body.
Creeeak, crk, crk...
“Foreign material intrusion. Foreign material intrusion. Component of the Creator's construct. Purging—”
As long as a stone golem’s core was active, it pulled matter toward itself to reconstitute its body. And right now, the body it sought to reform was fine powder. Brushing it off was impossible.
Worse still, Musaeng had wedged golem cores into the seams of its joints.
“Oh no you don't. Freeze!”
And the cores weren't the only adhesive at play.
As the joints jammed with dense rock grit and the guardian’s movements ground to a crawl, Musaeng squirted industrial-grade quick-drying dungeon sherpa adhesive into its neck, fingers, and every remaining crevice.
“Foreign intrusion. Purge failed.”
Its neck hardened. Its head ceased turning.
The colossal swarm of stone dust drawn by the golem cores didn't merely cover where the cores were stuck. It forced its way into the shoulders, hip sockets, elbows, knees, ankles, and every individual finger hinge.
GRRRNCH. CR-CR-CRUNCH!
The guardian was locked rigid.
Unable to twitch so much as a pinky, the silver-gray jointed doll muttered its final diagnostic:
“...No viable locomotion remaining. Commencing shutdown to optimize energy conservation—”
“Not so fast! Not yet!”
In that split-second before the core powered down—
Musaeng lunged forward, gripping the B-rank dagger he had poured his life savings into—the very weapon he had used to slay Sraken.
Having studied the One Way Group dossiers, he knew the exact position of its core. He had even scored the surface with Sreyken's Poison Fang earlier as a reference marker so he wouldn't miss.
Right here. Right now.
With a blade far keener than a blunt snake fang...
SHKKKKKT!
He gouged the core straight out of the guardian's body.
Wahsh’s eyes bulged behind his lenses.
Musaeng strolled over to the pile where he had stockpiled the stone golem cores.
The proud smirk on his face wasn't just because the plan he’d spent twenty hours scheming had worked.
“How did you do that, Kim Musaeng?”
“Do what?”
“How in the world did you carve out a guardian's core with such surgical precision?”
In his palm rested the guardian's core, pristine and without a scratch.
It was such a flawless display of technique that even Wahsh couldn't hold back his bewilderment, and executing it cleanly under live combat conditions filled Musaeng with immense satisfaction.
“I'm pretty good at filleting fish. Just applied the same principle.”
“...Fish?”
It was an explanation so absurd Wahsh couldn't even begin to comprehend it. Seeing the duck tilt his head in confusion, Musaeng elaborated casually.
“Yeah. Dungeon 13 drops plenty of fish meat. Do enough bleeding and scaling, and you pick up the knife work naturally.”
“......”
Wahsh chose to keep his beak shut. Pressing further would only give him a migraine.
...To apply that kind of absurd practical trivia in a life-or-death confrontation? What kind of human does that?
The terrifying thing was that Musaeng had pulled it off in the heat of battle. Even if the guardian was shutting down, anything could have gone wrong. Most would have smashed the core to ensure its destruction; who in their right mind carves it out intact to preserve its functionality?
“Man, that B-rank dagger really pulled its weight. Feels like I've earned back every penny.”
“Cut the chatter. Why did you bother salvaging it in the first place, Kim Musaeng?” Wahsh asked, eyeing his gloating partner.
Musaeng tilted his head, looking genuinely puzzled by the question.
“You're the one who told me: up to the 10th floor, things from the lower floors often serve as stepping stones for the floors above. So... well, even if that wasn't the case, walking away with an intact 55th-floor guardian core has got to be worth something, right?”
“...You... You absolute menace of a human. Kim Musaeng... you're...”
Wahsh was completely at a loss for words.
Musaeng just grinned, tuning out whatever sputtering followed, and scooped up the pile of golem cores.
All Golem Cores Collected.
Cores Collected: 38 / 5
Time Remaining: 00:33:37
Congratulations!
You have satisfied the clear conditions.
Stat Points +6
After twenty-three hours and twenty-seven minutes, the conquest of the 5th floor was finally over.
Now came the time to collect his rewards.