Lv.8 Gunslinger Lee Bok-dong [2]
"Where the hell did that bastard go?"
The mercenary office director bristled at Lee Mi-ri's interrogating tone.
I'm the king around here. Does she think I'm some pushover?
"The siege of Grat. Why? You going there? You can't just waltz in. We don't send just anyone."
The world of 4 Fantasy Online was smaller than the real one, but the distance to their destination was still considerable. The truck carrying the three men had a long way to go.
They had time to kill on the ride. Sitting in the truck bed with Lee Bok-dong, Gaon passed the hours at his leisure, assigning his attribute points and toying with his sword.
Lee Bok-dong, for his part, was hardly the type who enjoyed making conversation — which was precisely why, stuck alone with someone, he felt a compulsive need to speak first. He forced himself to sound interested and opened his mouth.
"Haven't seen that sword before. Looks pretty cool?"
Gaon grinned.
"You've got an eye. Adamantium-plated sword. Barely any of these on the market — I had to go out of my way to get my hands on one."
"How much was it? Wait — how much?"
"Ran me about thirty-eight hundred bucks."
Lee Bok-dong nearly choked.
"Hold on. A sword — not even a gun — costs almost four thousand dollars? And you actually bought it?"
"It's dirt cheap compared to the real world. Swords aren't popular in this game, that's the only reason it's this price. Do you have any idea how rare adamantium actually is? Buying an adamantium-plated sword in reality would cost you more than a few aircraft carriers. An Adamantium Armor? That's a national treasure gifted by a god — you couldn't buy one if you sold the whole country. Even Lord Hyungtun wanted one and never managed to get it on."
"Still..."
"It was a necessary expense. I want to go up against a Swordmaster, right? And Sword Qi — it's basically a monomolecular cutter. Doesn't matter how tough the material is. Iron, steel, whatever — it slices through all of it. Unless you're putting out Sword Qi yourself, a regular blade can't even clash with it. You need something like adamantium just to survive the contact."
Aircraft carriers, national treasures, Swordmasters — every word coming out of this man's mouth was something you'd never hear in ordinary life. It was sinking in that he truly lived in another world.
Lee Bok-dong fell silent, thoroughly cowed, while Gaon turned his thoughts to the battle ahead. A fight against a Swordmaster, inside the game.
They said NPC Lord Hyungtun might show up, didn't they?
He figured his odds were decent. Hyungtun was a typical human Swordmaster, wasn't he? A frail human with little experience and even fewer tricks. Swordsmanship didn't scale perfectly with years lived, sure — but compared to elf Swordmasters who'd been alive for centuries, even millennia, Hyungtun had to be weaker.
If I buff my strength with an ogre potion and throw Haste on top of that, I might even outclass Hyungtun in raw physical ability. The real problem is I'm critically short on mana, but I'll figure something out...
The truck stopped. They couldn't go any farther.
The surrounding plains stretched wide and open, military vehicles patrolling in every direction. One of them raced over and blocked the truck. The men aboard shouted.
"Halt! Move and we shoot. Names!"
They were keeping random people from approaching the battlefield. Gaon climbed down without protest.
"Gaon, Lee Bok-dong, Jijonmussang. We're already on the list, right?"
The man in the military vehicle checked some kind of roster, then nodded.
"Confirmed. Stick an ID marker on the truck and go on through."
The truck rolled on again, and they arrived at their destination.
A city lay ahead — on an entirely different scale from the starter towns they'd been living in. It was a proper city, the size of a real one, and it was sealed so tight a stray dog couldn't have snuck in. The surrounding highways were blockaded, and the city was ringed with trench lines. Behind those trenches rose the medieval walls built back when this had been an imperial city, now packed with floodlights. The players laying siege had installed them.
Even at a glance, the gates leading into the city were locked down tight. At a gate barely wide enough for a single vehicle, they were stopped for another inspection. Only after the soldiers verified their identities were they allowed through.
"Okay. Go on in."
After several more tedious procedures, they finally made it inside.
Is Lord Hyungtun really going to show up here...?
To Gaon's eye, the defenses were genuinely solid. Even a Swordmaster would be a fool to try brute-forcing his way through.
High-rises crowded the city interior. For an As city in the Second World War era, it was remarkably modern.
"This is... Grat, right? The British occupied it and poured money into modernizing it. In actual history, an independence movement kicked off, and the Earthlings were all killed or driven out. Once the city fell into native hands, the Earthlings have been trying to take it back..."
Gaon explained, but Lee Bok-dong and Jijonmussang couldn't have cared less about the city's history. They were just nervous — this was their first real job.
"We're assembling at the designated time. Those of you who arrived early, hold your positions..."
The three of them waited at the designated spot for the rest of the reinforcements to arrive. Time passed, and Earthling players began to gather.
One of them was a familiar face. A woman appeared at the assembly point.
"Oh, that bitch?"
Jijonmussang jabbed a finger at her, and Gaon's eyes went wide.
"Lee Mi-ri?"
Jijonmussang muttered.
"Isn't she a hobbyist? What's a hobbyist doing here?"
"What's a hobbyist?"
"That's what we call people who don't take this game seriously — just play it for fun. Types like her, swinging a sword around at a training hall. This is where you come to make money. Why'd she even show up?"
Games are supposed to be hobbies, though.
Gaon thought it, but didn't say it out loud. It would only piss off the two self-proclaimed pro gamers. He said something else instead.
"I think she's after me."
"Huh?"
"Like I said, she jumped me because she thought sparring with me would make her better. She still wants to improve, so she's probably looking to ambush me again."
"Why come all the way out here for that?"
"I offered to spar with her, but she didn't like it — said I wasn't showing my real skill. She probably figures if she jumps me in the middle of actual combat, when things are chaotic, she'll finally see what I can really do."
Jijonmussang got angry.
"Wait, weren't they supposed to keep random people off the battlefield? Did they give her a free pass just because female players are rare? That's hilarious. Look at her — she only brought a sword..."
Meanwhile, Lee Bok-dong was glaring at Lee Mi-ri. People who'd given up on ever finding love tended to turn hostile toward the opposite sex. Lee Bok-dong was no exception.
"Want to just kill her before the job starts?"
Gaon's eyebrows shot up.
"In front of everyone?"
"You can use magic too, right? Invisibility. You can cast it on other people, so if you put it on me or Jijonmussang, we could sneak..."
Jijonmussang, who had no interest in starting trouble, talked him down.
"That'd just cause a scene. Do we really need to do that before the fighting even starts? We don't even know if she's here to troll. Let's leave her be. We'll be covering Gaon anyway — if she comes at us, we shoot her then."
Jijonmussang's argument made more sense. They decided to leave Lee Mi-ri alone, and Gaon stole a glance at her face.
She looked depressed. Why? He didn't know, and decided not to worry about it for now. The battle was approaching.
Before long, all the reinforcements had assembled. A player who seemed to be a commander stepped forward.
"Thanks for gathering, everyone. Uh, skip the speech, yeah? Quick briefing: as you can see, we've pretty much already won. The artillery and the siege are done. Right now we're just pushing into the city and picking off the holdouts one by one."
Nearly everyone here had pulled every string and paid every bribe they could to get in. Uneasy that they might be getting played, someone asked:
"If we're winning, why'd you gather more troops?"
"If we just keep fighting, sure, we'll take the city. But we can't let the siege drag on. It's not just about burning through supplies... a Swordmaster could show up."
"A Swordmaster might appear?"
"Well... maybe. You can see we're in urban combat, right? It's a well-known fact that Swordmasters are basically invincible in city fighting. Historically, there've been plenty of sieges where a Swordmaster showed up and the attackers had to pull out. So we can't afford to drag this out just because we're winning. We need to finish the occupation as fast as possible."
The commanders issued various orders. So-and-so, gather here. Go there. And so on. Squad assignments wrapped up quickly. The sixty players present were split into groups of ten, each choosing a squad leader.
Squad leader wasn't a particularly popular position. There was extra loot in it, sure, but the fact that you'd take the blame if things went south made everyone shy away from the job.
In the end, Gaon ended up as his squad's leader. Someone who'd recognized him had shouted:
"Whoa, that's the guy from the video! He was insane! He should be squad leader, right? Everyone agree?"
The other players went along with it, and so did Gaon, whose mood had lifted at being called insane. And so Gaon's first order as squad leader was this:
"Shall we go fight, then?"
"Huh? Already?"
"The commander already assigned us our sector, didn't he? He said we need to take the city fast, so let's work fast. Come on."
The squad members were all thrown. Already? Right now? But Gaon really did get to work immediately. After a brief rundown of hand signals, he led his squad toward their assigned sector.
A street hemmed in by buildings. Gunfire cracked in rapid succession. A player unit trying to take the city was locked in a standoff with NPC As natives.
"Now we join up over there and—"
"No. No."
Gaon answered shortly, then sprinted forward, shouting for them to cover him.
Everyone else stood there stunned, but Lee Bok-dong and Jijonmussang knew exactly what was about to happen — and what they needed to do.
"What are you all standing around for? Cover him!"
The two of them raised their guns and aimed at the enemy. Meanwhile, Gaon was charging the barricade where the enemy had dug in.
The people watching that reckless charge went wide-eyed. Charging out alone like that should have been suicide — and yet, somehow, he didn't die. It looked like a protagonist charging a squad of stormtroopers.
The hail of bullets pouring toward Gaon all missed, or else the ones that should have hit him vanished with a sharp ping right in front of his face. Only a few sharp-eyed observers realized those were sword swings, and they stared in disbelief.
"Is he actually Kirito?"
As he kept running, Gaon tracked the enemy positions in real time. They were crouched at building windows, behind walls, behind the barricade. The ones who'd been leaning over the barricade to fire had already gone down — no matter how little of their body was exposed, Gaon's bullets didn't miss. Even the snipers in the windows weren't hard to hit while running.
After that, no more bullets came. Gaon just had to keep running.
Then, once he'd closed enough distance, a hand holding a grenade rose over the barricade. The enemy never got the chance to throw it or even pull the pin. Gaon put a pistol round dead-center into the grenade.
A boom. The area around it was obliterated, and Gaon vaulted over the barricade. A few more gunshots rang out, then silence. From the quiet, Gaon shouted.
"They're all dead. Come over!"
Gaon wasn't a real squad leader — just a makeshift one they'd slapped together. None of the squad members were going to snap to his orders. Sure enough, they all stood frozen, too stunned to move.
"Run!"
But Jijonmussang and Lee Bok-dong sprinted forward. The two of them vaulted the barricade. Three more gunshots, then complete silence.
Ten minutes later, the commander receiving updates on the urban combat got a report that made no sense.
"Point 12 is secured? Already?"
"According to the report..."
It was a report he couldn't believe. The commander went to the site himself to confirm. Sure enough, the place that should have still been a firefight had already been taken by allied forces.
"What the hell. How did they even do that?"
The commander walked up to what, until a few dozen minutes ago, should have been an enemy barricade. Orcs, dwarves, and the rest of the enemy all lay dead.