Is This Difficulty For Real?
Kyle tilted his head as he watched Tae-oh lying on the cot inside the barracks, chuckling to himself.
“Captain, what’s up? Did something good happen?”
“It did, you little shit. What, you don’t think it’s good?”
“I do. Hehe.”
More than the military achievements he’d racked up as a soldier, the thing floating right in front of Tae-oh’s eyes was a far greater reward. Four vivid red hearts sat neatly in the corner of his status window. He stared blankly at the clear markers hovering in the air above the barracks cot.
‘Holy crap… this is insane!’
Four lives. Back when he played it as a game, he hadn’t paid much attention to them. But now that it was reality, the psychological stability this fact gave him was far greater than he’d imagined.
Just think about it. He had four lives to spare. Even things that would end with a single mistake in the real world now gave Tae-oh four full retry chances. In that case, wasn’t there nothing he couldn’t try?
After experiencing hundreds of deaths and regressions, Tae-oh’s mentality had long since escaped the realm of ordinary people. At first, the suffocating pain and the horrific sensation of death had nearly driven him insane. But after enduring hellish training, he had finally grown strong enough to tear apart the Empire’s elite soldiers and even that massive War Wolf.
Now he felt like he was starting to adapt to this insane world. No, to be honest, he was actually starting to enjoy it.
Anyone who had played a Souls-like game would understand. The garbage UI, the complete lack of explanations, the sheer hostility. At first the controls felt like shit, the enemy patterns were unfair, and the game kept making you meet Lady Yudahi over and over again until you wanted to scream in frustration.
But after bashing your head against it countless times, figuring out the gimmicks, and slowly uncovering the strategies one by one, that damn addictive immersion took hold of you. The dopamine rush when you finally beat a boss was incomparable to anything else.
Only this wasn’t a game on the other side of a monitor. This was brutal reality where bones snapped and flesh tore apart. Tae-oh’s body shuddered.
The immersion had gone beyond the maximum and was now being experienced with his entire physical body. The chill when his throat was cut, the burning sensation of his organs melting when poison spread through him, every single detail was seared vividly into his brain. It was brutally, painfully real.
Tae-oh slapped both cheeks hard with his palms.
Slap—!
The stinging pain snapped his mind back into focus.
‘No, you stupid bastard. Get a grip. If you keep treating this like a game and acting cocky, you’ll really end up in the afterlife.’
Arrogance led to death. The hearts didn’t regenerate forever, so he couldn’t afford to waste his lives recklessly.
Alright. Then how should he proceed to move on to the next stage?
Tae-oh’s gaze drifted outside the barracks toward a soldier patrolling near the guard post.
Raymon. The spy planted by Knight Commander Valik, assigned to monitor Captain Carlo. And floating above that bastard’s head was a red heart.
He had to kill that son of a bitch to advance the board to the next phase.
Tae-oh watched the man’s movements for a moment, deep in thought, before a cold smile crept across his lips. No matter how much you thought about it, there were things you could never know without clashing with them directly. A gamer who collected data by throwing his body into the fight would always be the one to take down the boss, not some theory-obsessed nerd.
‘I’ve still got plenty of lives left, don’t I? Let’s just kill him first and think about it later.’
Information. That single word carried quite a lot of meaning.
In this barbaric world, it might seem like outstanding martial prowess alone would guarantee survival, but that was absolutely not the case. Information was the greatest weapon both in the world Tae-oh had come from and in this one.
Tae-oh already knew that killing the target would grant him a heart. And that information was a vital resource that could never be obtained unless the target actually moved.
Even if he failed, attempting something would at least let him record the target’s patterns and the surrounding reactions as data. So Tae-oh decided to run a few experiments at the cost of his own life.
First experiment. The cleanest and safest method.
It was assassination using alchemy, Tae-oh’s area of expertise. Fortunately, after raiding the forest in Sector 7, his backpack was overflowing with deadly poisonous herbs and Mana Stone powder.
Tae-oh crafted a Tier 2 lethal poison by adding the Mana Stone powder. ‘This should be enough to kill him.’
He then cleverly slipped the poison into the man’s canteen.
The result was almost laughably perfect. After finishing his meal and jogging around the training grounds, Raymon suddenly clutched his chest, foamed at the mouth, and collapsed without spilling a single drop of blood.
You have hunted a key individual.
The status window has been updated.
Remaining lives: ❤︎❤︎❤︎❤︎❤︎
With a clear ding, the number of hearts increased to five.
‘Whoa, fuck. Is it really this easy? Can you actually clear it like this?’
Tae-oh was inwardly cheering as he watched the scene through a gap in the barracks window when—
Bang—!
The thick wooden door of the recruit barracks exploded into splinters and flew off its hinges. Through the cloud of dust emerged Captain Carlo, his eyes bloodshot red. The usual sly, languid demeanor was completely gone.
“How dare you! How dare you poison my adjutant!!”
Blue aura erupted wildly from the sword in Carlo’s hand. A chill ran down Tae-oh’s spine as he hurriedly tried to explain.
“C-Captain! That’s not it, that bastard was a spy—!”
But before Tae-oh could even finish the sentence, Carlo’s figure blurred. In the next instant, he was already right in front of him.
“Shut your filthy mouth, you spy bastard.”
The aura-clad blade filled Tae-oh’s entire field of vision. An overwhelming speed that didn’t even allow a reaction.
Slice—
Tae-oh’s vision spun wildly through the air. The last thing he saw was his own decapitated body rolling on the ground before his first experiment came to an end.
‘Wait, what the fuck…? Were those two dating?’
“Huk!”
Tae-oh’s eyes snapped open on the cot. He gasped for breath and frantically touched his neck.
‘Oh, so the save point this time is right here.’
The hearts in the corner of his vision had returned to four. The heart he’d gained from killing Raymon had vanished when Carlo killed him. It was basically breaking even, but he had still learned quite a lot.
‘Haa… there really is no easy way, huh.’
Tae-oh sat down on the cot and rubbed his face with dry hands. The look of pure rage on Carlo’s face just now had been genuine. Why? For what reason?
After thinking about it for just a moment, the answer came immediately.
‘Goddamn it, they were actually really close?’
Another puzzle piece had been added. The reason Carlo had been acting so stupidly and just taking it—this was because Raymon wasn’t simply his adjutant.
“Friends… or something like that?”
If that was the case, then blindly killing Raymon clearly wasn’t the right move. Simply killing him wasn’t the answer. Then he had no choice but to move on to the next step.
Figuring out exactly what their relationship was would take too long. For now, he needed to confirm whether he could kill the guy under any circumstances. This time, the goal was to gauge the target’s own specs.
‘At my current level, I should be pretty strong, right? If I challenge him to a straight one-on-one fight, can’t I win?’
He had toyed with the Empire’s elite soldiers and had somehow managed to take down a five-hundred-kilogram magic beast. Honestly, if he chugged the Tier 2 upgraded potions, he didn’t think there was anyone he couldn’t at least put up a fight against.
That night, Tae-oh lured Raymon, who was standing guard on the outer perimeter, to the deserted area behind the training grounds. A clearing lit only by faint moonlight. Raymon stared at him with the same expressionless face as always.
“I wondered who it was. So it’s you.”
At Raymon’s dry voice, Tae-oh placed his hand on the hilt of his sword and spoke bluntly. After all, the note he had sent only contained the meeting place and the name Valik.
“I won’t beat around the bush. I know you’re an Imperial spy. Or to be precise, that you’re Knight Commander Valik’s dog.”
For a split second, Raymon’s pupils trembled ever so slightly. But the surprise lasted only a moment before an unpleasant smile curved his lips.
“I don’t know how you found out… but it would have been better if you had pretended not to know.”
Sring—
Raymon drew the sword from his waist. At the same time, a cold, bluish energy began to rise along the blade like haze.
“!!!!”
It was aura. The exact same energy he had seen from Captain Carlo. Tae-oh urgently reached for the smoke bomb hanging from his thigh.
But before his fingers could even touch the glass vial—
Tap—!
There wasn’t even the sound of Raymon’s body launching forward. All Tae-oh saw was a single flash of blue light in front of his eyes. It was on a completely different level from the War Wolf’s mindless charge. The War Wolf was large, so its trajectory was visible and its wind-up was long. But a human moving with aura was ignoring the laws of physics entirely.
Without any shoulder movement or preparatory footwork, the strike simply erased the space between them and arrived. Shrrk—
Only after his vision flipped upside down did Tae-oh realize he hadn’t even managed to draw his sword.
‘Fuck, what the hell is this? This bastard is insanely strong.’
From where he lay face-down on the ground, Tae-oh watched Raymon slowly sheathe his sword, which didn’t have a single drop of blood on it. This was the true power of a humanoid boss that combined overwhelming skill with aura.
With his body and head separated, Tae-oh’s consciousness was once again sucked into a deep abyss.
‘Goddamn it, is this difficulty even real?’