Lv.8 Gunslinger Lee Bok-dong [4]
Just as he'd been told, crossbowmen were waiting. A twang, and the bolts came flying.
But in all of history, there had never been a Swordmaster felled by an arrow.
Gaon had known where and when those arrows would come even before they loosed them. Without breaking stride, he tapped a flying bolt with his sword, stopped it dead, and hurled it back with a pulse of telekinetic force. The bolt whistled along its original path and buried itself in a crossbowman's throat.
He knew full well how astonishing it looked. He kept running, batting another incoming bolt back the way it had come, and waited for their reaction. Would they be amazed? Would they panic?
No...
Gaon frowned as he looked at their faces. The reaction he'd hoped for wasn't there. Even when he knocked arrows aside with his sword — even when he threw them back and killed men with them — their expressions stayed blank. It was disappointing. Given how vividly the NPCs he'd met before had behaved, it wouldn't have been strange for these ones to react more dramatically.
The instructor was an NPC, but he was practically indistinguishable from a real person. Same with that guide NPC.
In the end, five crossbowmen went down to their own bolts, and Gaon closed the distance to the priest in an instant. He had his sword at the man's throat.
Someone stepped in his way.
"A duel, swordsman!"
A face so handsome it crossed into beauty, even for a man. Pointed ears. A Wood Elf swordsman.
Sword Experts are seekers walking the path toward becoming Swordmasters.
They hurl themselves into every kind of battle with nothing but a single blade. Not for profit. Not for glory. For the advancement of swordsmanship that can only be won at the crossroads of life and death.
They are, of course, masters of the sword — and the Sword Experts of As are especially formidable. The continent has no shortage of ageless races, and more than a few elf swordsmen have trained for centuries until they could bat arrows out of the air.
Meet them on an open battlefield and there is no great need to fear them. Even a swordsman with hundreds of years of training is just as equal before a bullet from a soldier with a few months of drill.
But if you meet them in a trench, or inside a building — anywhere close-quarters combat is frequent and the space is tight...
You might as well start repeating after me: you're already dead.
But even that vaunted Sword Expert couldn't stop Gaon from killing the priest who'd been his original target.
Gaon extended the sword in his left hand. The blade's path was so irregular it had no rules at all. His thrust slipped past the elf swordsman's guard and punched through the priest's chest.
"Goddess..."
As the priest died, Gaon cried out in his heart.
"Behold, O Goddess. Your Great Warrior has fulfilled your command!"
"Well done! That my Great Warrior faithfully follows his Goddess's commands always gladdens your Goddess!"
"I will follow any command. Please — just speak it!"
"Then I gladly issue one more: tonight, you will go to bed before midnight! You will fulfill this command as well and gladden your Goddess, will you not?"
Gaon did not answer.
Meanwhile, the elf swordsman remained silent. He showed neither grief nor rage that the priest he'd been meant to protect was dead. He simply did his job.
He swept a broad curved blade — a diagonal cut, powerful yet utterly refined. Gaon parried it far too easily, but the elf swordsman didn't flinch. Blank-faced, he kept pouring on a barrage of strikes.
Gaon lazily knocked aside the blade coming for him and thought, Oh. Not bad...
They were attacks that would actually take some effort to block honestly. Coming from a Swordmaster, that was extraordinary praise.
Meanwhile, the priest was dead — which meant they could now fire guns here. Lee Bok-dong and Jijonmussang, catching on, did their part. A staccato of gunfire rang out.
"Crossbowmen down!"
Jijonmussang shouted, and Lee Bok-dong echoed him.
"Crossbowmen down!"
And Gaon smiled with satisfaction. Now it really was just the two swordsmen — exactly the situation he'd wanted.
They said a master of the sword was a textbook of swordsmanship in himself, didn't they? Gaon, who'd been studying the blade of late, watched his opponent's technique with genuine interest. He took in every motion the enemy made — from the fundamentals, the thrusts and the cuts, to every combination that hunted for feints and counters. He could have ended it whenever he wanted, but he stayed on the defensive, letting their blades clash again and again.
And Gaon smiled. He smiled because he was enjoying himself.
A gunshot cracked, shattering that smile.
"Ah. I got him..."
A bullet to the head. The elf swordsman collapsed.
Gaon turned. Smoke was curling from the gun in Lee Bok-dong's hands.
"Hey, why'd you shoot? I was having a good time!"
Lee Bok-dong, who'd expected praise, stammered.
"It was dragging on, so I got nervous, and we could shoot now, so I figured I'd help... Sorry..."
Gaon almost got angrier, then stopped. He had once been a priest, and he'd spent some two hundred years counseling other people. Because of that, he was extraordinarily generous with anyone whose spirit had already broken.
"Mm. No. You did well. Hitting only the enemy while the two of us were moving around — yeah, you really can shoot."
"Ah, yes — I mean, yeah. Thanks..."
As Lee Bok-dong trailed off awkwardly, Gaon groaned inwardly.
I'd been thinking of suggesting to that Lee Mi-ri woman that she stop targeting just me and go hunt down Sword Expert NPCs like this one instead. Looking at this, that's not happening. Come to think of it, there were crossbowmen waiting earlier too... On a real battlefield, they wouldn't just leave two swordsmen to have a fair one-on-one anyway.
There were snipers on the floors above, they'd said. Clearing those out didn't take long either.
Ten minutes later, Gaon had heard the word already more than twenty times today.
"You're already out?"
The commander groaned, and Gaon grinned.
Jijonmussang asked in a rush.
"You held onto all our loot, right? Nobody touched it?"
"Ah, yes."
And with that, today's battle was over.
The commander gathered the troops and commended their efforts. Today, he said, the urban combat had advanced further than ever. At this rate, they'd have the city cleaned up and occupied by tomorrow or the day after. Given the city's size, the occupation value was high — there might even be a bonus.
As the gathered mercenaries cheered, a modest celebration began. Amazingly, gourmet food was fully implemented in this game. You could even drink, they said. As the man of the hour, Gaon had to accept toast after toast from everyone who came up to him.
"Is this guy actually a real-life Swordmaster? His name's Gaon, for one..."
"He's not!"
"He's really not? Seems like he is, though. If he's hiding his true strength, it's not too late to come clean and step into the light..."
"I said he's not!"
They were having a good time when the commander muttered,
"Speaking of Swordmasters — now that we've basically won, we have to be extra careful. We absolutely have to stop any night raid. All right, let's set the night watch rotation... You're all professional gamers, right? I trust nobody's logging out because they have work in the morning."
Then some woman muttered,
"They really just eat and game, huh? Motherfucking bastards."
Every eye turned to Lee Mi-ri. Looking thoroughly displeased, she flipped them all off with a face twisted in disgust.
Curses immediately poured out.
"Why the hell is that woman even here?"
Gaon answered Jijonmussang.
"Yeah. Why's she still hanging around? Normally she'd have logged out by now, but she's not even doing that. You didn't put her on night watch, did you?"
The commander picked that up.
"Are you insane? She's just got a sword — how would I put her on watch? If the perimeter gets breached and a Swordmaster shows up and we're not ready, we're all finished."
"So... you've prepared well enough that a Swordmaster can't get in? Security looked airtight. They wouldn't come through the sewers, would they?"
The commander answered that with full confidence.
"You think I wouldn't think of that? We poured concrete and sealed them. They can't come through the sewers."
"Then... tunnels?"
"Tunnels?"
"A Swordmaster can cut through granite or whatever with Sword Qi and just advance underground, right?"
"Uh... you're saying one person could tunnel several kilometers by themselves?"
"Probably. It'd take a very long time, of course, but it's possible. You should prepare for that too, shouldn't you?"
Gaon said it seriously, but the commander laughed as if it were absurd.
"Look, if they go that far, we can't stop them. How would we even stop that?"
"Couldn't you just fortify the city more thoroughly?"
"There's no point. The whole idea is to keep them from getting into the city in the first place, right? Once they're in, it's over. Don't worry about useless stuff and just do the night watch properly. Ah, Mr. Gaon, you can skip watch duty. You can log out, even. The MVP should get a good night's sleep, of course..."
But Lee Bok-dong and Jijonmussang weren't skipping night watch, so Gaon decided to stay with them.
Amazingly, even sleep was possible in this game. Lying down in the barracks, Gaon offered a prayer to the Goddess.
"Rejoice, O Goddess. That your Great Warrior is lying in bed and it's only ten o'clock is a miracle. I have fulfilled your command once more!"
"No — whether your Goddess should be pleased or angry that you're sleeping in a video game, I truly cannot tell. What even is this..."
Time passed in this game as well, and the night grew deep.
Players who hadn't logged out and were sleeping in the barracks took turns getting up for watch. There wasn't a trace of the slackness you'd see on a reservist overnight shift. Every watch was conducted thoroughly under the duty officer's supervision. The commander had truly done his best.
But doing your best might not have been enough.
The commander might have needed to wring a little more out of his brain somehow.
Of course, even if he had, there probably wouldn't have been a method.
In the dark of night, there was no way to notice the ground stirring in a corner of a city alley.
No way to notice the stirring ground collapsing inward, a pit opening up.
No way to stop the middle-aged man, armed with a single sword and a single shield, from crawling out of that pit.
And there was even less of a way to stop that sword from blazing, from burning a hole through the dark.
Kim Il-sung is over a hundred years old and still looks young, yes?
He claims the gods of As were so moved by his anti-Japanese resistance that they made him an ageless demigod. That's nonsense, of course. You know how much the gods of As hate the Reds.
As everyone knows, it's because Kim Il-sung is a vampire.
Breeding communist vampires was a core project of General Secretary Kasyad, launched to wrest leadership of the socialist world away from Stalin. The method is simple. You approach a dictator and a handful of his top generals with the promise of a longer life, put them in contact with a vampire lord under your command, and turn them into undead vampires.
That's why vampires are unusually common among communist dictators. Some, like Ceaușescu, were so proud of becoming vampires they launched entire character businesses around it. Others, like Kim Il-sung, hide the fact...
This is an extremely serious problem.
Vampires have a hierarchy, and it isn't merely a chain of command — it's magical. An order coming down from above is something a subordinate must carry out even if they'd rather die than obey. That's the level we're talking about.
So when General Secretary Kasyad issues a command through the vampire lord under him, Kim Il-sung has no choice but to follow it. Start a second Korean War. Drop a nuke on Seoul. Anything.
There's a reason the Soviet General Secretaries who refused to become vampires have been getting reappraised. There's a reason Premier Zhou Enlai is hailed as a martyr for assassinating Mao Zedong rather than let a vampire drink the people's blood.
When a head of state becomes a vampire, the country itself is as good as gone. It is something that must be stopped, no matter what.
Kim Il-sung — who, being a vampire, will never grow old and die — pouring money into that game in hopes of becoming an elf? That's him thrashing around, trying to break free of his superior vampire's control.
Of course he doesn't want to follow the orders coming down from above. Why would he? He's eating sushi and steak three meals a day as it is. Starting a second Korean War wouldn't even get him a fourth.
Anyway, now that General Secretary Kasyad has shown a will to go to war, the remote control for the North's nukes has as good as been handed to As's warmongers. That is what I mean when I say this is extraordinarily dangerous.
Kim Il-sung's efforts to escape those orders align with our own security interests.
Right now he's dumped so much money into the game he can barely cover the Korean People's Army's account fees, yes? We need to provide funding so those account fees can keep getting paid.
No — why is someone bringing up pro-North accusations? As you all know, I am an orthodox conservative who puts national security first—
I apologize. I got carried away.
I ask for the people's cooperation as well.
And to the chairmen busy dumping slush funds into that game even though they have no chance of winning — please restrain yourselves. I hear Korean users over there keep raiding Korean People's Army supply bases and celebrating like they've avenged the Korean War. Please, I beg you, stop doing that...