LV.23 Ranker Lee Hyun-woo [2]

He had set out to evaluate the man's skill. Instead, he was the one being evaluated. Lee Hyun-woo had not seen this coming in the slightest.

He stood there, stunned, and muttered under his breath.

"How did you…"

"Heard you breathing, that's how."

"My breathing?"

"I'm an elf. If I'd been a human Swordmaster, you might've actually gotten me."

The login point — the place Gaon currently occupied — was the interior of a small building. He had noticed the gunman hiding in the corner of the room long ago, and had been pretending otherwise. The plan was to wait for the ambush, put the man down, and then show off. Getting to show off exactly as intended felt pretty good.

Gaon allowed himself a faint smile, glanced at the round that had fallen to the floor, and said,

"BB pellets, huh? You could've used live ammo. How considerate."

Lee Hyun-woo clenched his teeth and bit the words out.

"We're actually allowed to use live rounds?"

"Of course you are. What, you want to come at me again with the real thing?"

"No. Not me. Someone else."

Someone else? There were more of them? The instant the words registered, Gaon went on alert.

Sure enough, the next moment the window shattered. A single bullet came flying through. Gaon knocked it aside with the sword in his left hand.

A sharp clang, and the round dropped to the floor. Lee Hyun-woo stared at it and muttered,

"He blocked that one too…"

Gaon, for his part, was a little surprised himself. Being a Swordmaster did not make bullets trivial. Sniping was, in fact, one of the few reliable ways to kill a Swordmaster. The only reason it so rarely worked was that Swordmasters almost never stood still in an exposed position long enough to give anyone a shot.

If he hadn't already known it was coming, that round would have been dangerous. Even so, he kept his face carefully bored.

From the gap between the bullet's arrival and the delayed crack of the gunshot, he calculated the sniper's position. Then, in a deliberately leisurely voice, he murmured,

"You took that from 1.1 kilometers out? Not bad…"

Lee Hyun-woo was past humiliation by now.

"You can tell the distance too?"

"Of course I can. Anyway, you said this was a test or whatever, right? So if I just run out there and beat down that sniper fellow, we're done here?"

"What? That's not exactly…"

In that instant, another volley punched through the wall in a dense swarm.

Gaon took it as the starting gun.

His lips moved.

With his MP vastly expanded, the limits of the magic he could use had expanded with it. He crossed a three-story height in a single blink.

Standing on the roof, he surveyed the surroundings. Figures he took to be on the same side as the gunman downstairs came into view — six of them, armed with expensive assault rifles. Those six would be Rankers as well, or people of that caliber.

And they were, without question, a group of genuine professionals. In the absurd instant their target vanished by teleportation, they did not panic more than they could afford.

"On the roof! Open fire!"

They found Gaon at once and opened up.

To fight a superhuman Swordmaster who could dodge or deflect bullets, you had to throw up a dense kill net — tight enough that batting aside a round or two would be useless, tight enough that there was nowhere left to step. The Rankers executed that fundamental perfectly.

Oh.

It really was a flawlessly constructed web of fire. In that moment Gaon judged that he had nowhere decent to dodge, and that swinging a sword around would not get him out of this.

He could have teleported clear. But doing so felt inelegant — as if he were solving everything with magic. With that thought, he took a different approach.

He cast Haste on himself, then fired the pistol in his right hand in rapid succession.

Four cracks — bang, bang, bang, bang. And then eight bullets fell to the ground.

The Rankers did not understand that he had shot bullets out of the air with bullets. They only registered, with a jolt of terror, that the target somehow was not dead.

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

"Fire again—"

They were lining up for another burst when Gaon shot first. He rapid-fired the BB gun he had taken from Lee Hyun-woo six times.

Six BB pellets found six Rankers. Hitting them was a given, so there was no particular need to confirm it.

Gaon called out,

"You're all dead! Got it?"

At the light sting of pain, the Rankers clenched their teeth and conceded defeat.

"Yes…"

In the middle of that, another sniper round came in.

A single bullet grazed Gaon's hair as it passed. The gunshot arrived after. He had anticipated the timing, and managed — just barely — to tip his head aside and let it go by.

So the sniper's the boss, huh?

Gaon grinned and charged toward that sniper, leaping from rooftop to rooftop, cutting across the city. A sniper whose position had been blown would not still be sitting there. He would already be moving, and fast.

It didn't matter. The city was loud, but not loud enough to foul Gaon's hearing.

Before long, Gaon was standing in front of the sniper who had been hiding in a commercial building, offering a greeting.

The sniper nodded with a vacant look on his face.

"Huh? Y-yes…"

A short while later, still dazed, the Rankers gathered in one place. The two who had originally contracted with them — Lee Bok-dong and Jijonmussang — joined the huddle, however awkwardly. Under ordinary circumstances the Rankers would have balked at teaming up with two people whose skills had never been verified. Having just lost to a single man, however, none of them had any pride left to stand on.

"Anyway, I've seen what you can do."

Lee Hyun-woo blinked at Gaon's words.

"Pardon?"

"You're solid, no question. Special forces, I'm guessing? I'll say it again — you're really not bad. You pass, easily. You've got what it takes to actually go after a Swordmaster."

The Rankers found themselves in the same position as Lee Hyun-woo. The tables had been turned completely.

Lee Hyun-woo managed a reply.

"Thank you for the compliment…"

"Don't thank me. I'm just calling it like I see it. So which Swordmaster are you going after? Gaon, right off the bat?"

"No. Lord Gaon is the final boss, so we'll take him later. The one we're going after this time is a different Swordmaster. Ban Ji-sung."

"Ban Ji-sung?"

"Yes, that's right. Lord Gaon…"

The register was a little too deferential. Gaon gave him a dubious look.

"Why are you calling me Lord Gaon?"

"Well, you do seem like a Swordmaster, so…"

"I'm not a Swordmaster, so just call me Gaon, yeah? Anyway — so you're going after Ban Ji-sung…"

As he said it, Gaon's face tightened. Lee Hyun-woo ventured the next words with care.

"Is there something about that you don't like? Ah — of course. From Lord Gaon's perspective, it would amount to going after a close friend of yours, so I can see how that might be uncomfortable…"

"I'm not that Gaon!"

Gaon snapped, and thought to himself.

They wanted to take down Ban Ji-sung?

He had, it was true, gone around loudly declaring an interest in fighting Swordmasters. So they had probably figured that going after Ban Ji-sung, who was a Swordmaster, lined up with Gaon's own goals.

The problem was that Gaon had no desire whatsoever to put Ban Ji-sung down.

Not because that Joseon man was his friend.

I've already beaten that pal Ji-sung more times than I can count…

In 1957, when Swordmaster Gaon returned from the other world at the end of his journey of trials, the historic elf did not come back alone.

Gaon had entered that other world with companions, and those companions had been with him on the return. They had not come back in the same numbers they had left with.

In that other world they had spent some two hundred years. For everyone who was not an elf, that was more than enough time to grow old and die twice over. The fact that a human numbered among those who returned with Gaon — and a Joseon Korean, at that — stunned the world.

Strictly speaking, that Joseon man was no longer purely human.

The centuries of desperate fighting in another world, the time spent battling sacred monsters and ancient gods who had lost their reason — those long years of hardship ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠had transformed the ordinary Joseon man's body and soul completely. The man who returned to Earth was an unaging demigod, a superhuman Swordmaster.

His name was Ban Ji-sung.

Ban Ji-sung discovered that in his absence his homeland had been divided. He sighed over that fact, then chose the South as the country he would return to — the nation that was no longer Joseon, but the Republic of Korea.

In that moment, Koreans felt chosen. They cheered, drunk on a national exaltation unlike anything they had felt before. As one Korean newspaper put it:

With Ban Ji-sung's arrival, Korea's future seemed vastly improved. A Swordmaster — a superhuman of that caliber — needed only to exist as a single individual to radiate an enormous presence.

Kim Il-sung, who had been taking a hard line, quietly sent South Korea a message of reconciliation and pushed for reunions of separated families. Nobody failed to understand that the dictator had been frightened by the sudden appearance of a humanoid asymmetric weapon in the South, and that he was worried that weapon might come north to take his head.

Even the Independence Reparations Korea had been required to pay Japan as the price of its independence vanished with the existence of a Korean Swordmaster. The United States paid them off in Ban Ji-sung's place, on the condition that he participate in the Vietnam War.

A monstrous debt that would have been paid down over decades, with interest, was simply erased. Some people still argue that this alone advanced Korea's economic growth by twenty years.

And so Ban Ji-sung went to Vietnam, and Koreans wrote up the subsequent course of the war as if it were some delightful sporting event. How magnificently the great Korean Swordmaster hunted down the Viet Cong. How effectively he crushed their filthy, wicked guerrilla tactics. Every time an article about Ban Ji-sung came out, Koreans were as buoyant as if they had knocked back a bottle of makgeolli.

Apparently it rankled that the Korean Swordmaster's surname was a naturalized name of Chinese origin, because when a television network ran a historically distorted program claiming that the Ban clan was a Korean ethnic surname dating all the way back to Gojoseon, nearly the entire population applauded the content.

In the end, a mere two years after the Korean Swordmaster was deployed, the Vietnam War concluded in victory for the United States and its allies.

Some people claimed that without Ban Ji-sung the war would have dragged on far longer, and that even mighty America might not have won. Many laughed at that claim even as they conceded that Ban Ji-sung's contribution had been enormous. Koreans, of course, believed it. They praised with genuine joy the return of the Korean people's greatest hero — now a world-renowned war hero, a champion of the Free World.

Ban Ji-sung did not share in that joy.

The Ban Ji-sung who came back from Vietnam was halfway mad, and he began to behave like a madman.

He started serial killing.

Which is to ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠say, he began slaughtering people in the streets at random.

The next day, Gaon, the two of them, and the Rankers began to move. The Rankers had vehicles of their own. Six trucks in total rolled out in tight formation.

Before even Jijonmussang's truck had set off, Gaon asked Yoeu a question.

"What about you, Yoeu? Coming along?"

"Nope-eu. I'll stick around here a bit-eu. Figure I'll look around the Earth camp some."

Having said that, Yoeu remained in the city. Watching him, Gaon thought,

This one doesn't cling.

The moment he sensed he might not be wanted, he peeled off without a word. Typical of an orc who had survived as a scrawny weakling among hulking brutes.

Gaon, meanwhile, was trying to figure out how he himself ought to play this.

Ban Ji-sung was a friend with whom he had shared nearly two hundred years of hardship. For Gaon, who had rarely had occasion to cross blades with another person, he was also one of the few opponents he had actually crossed swords with. Gaon still remembered the strange swordsmanship Ban Ji-sung had insisted on calling the Cheondun Sword Technique — which, in hindsight, had not been particularly practical.

He also knew how those exchanges had gone. He would probably win. He had won almost every time he had faced Ban Ji-sung, and it was thanks to that that Gaon had spent years believing his own swordsmanship was not inferior to that of other Swordmasters.

But if I actually go up against a Swordmaster and win, there's no way to hide that I am one. And these guys already suspect I might be Swordmaster Gaon…

Faced with a troublesome situation, Gaon did what any devout Great Warrior would do. With a pious heart, he offered a prayer to his goddess.

The goddess sighed. In the midst of that, Gaon put a question to Lee Hyun-woo.

"Ban Ji-sung's the worst serial killer in history. A complete piece of human garbage. From a Korean point of view, isn't it uncomfortable having that guy show up in the game? The families of the people he killed are still alive."

"Well, yes. And on top of that, in this game he shows up as some kind of hero — an independence fighter, no less…"

"Ban Ji-sung's an independence fighter in this game?"

"He's the Japanese army's designated bully. Goes around shouting 'Long live Korean independence!' while fighting Japanese troops."

The words pulled up an old memory for Gaon.

"Ah… now that you mention it, that was what Ji-sung always used to say. That he'd get out of there, beat the Japanese, and achieve Korean independence. That now that he was a Swordmaster, he could actually pull it off…"

As he murmured this, Gaon became aware of a peculiar quality in the looks he was getting. Lee Hyun-woo asked, carefully,

"Lord Gaon?"

"It was a joke, so drop the 'Lord.' I am really not that Gaon. Anyway, if that's true, this is actually a serious situation. A murderer who killed thousands is being packaged as some kind of national hero. Are Koreans really okay with that?"

"Well, no, they're not. That's why we need to take him out and remove him, isn't it?"

"If you kill him, is he gone from the game for good?"

"Probably. Hyungtun hasn't shown up anywhere since we took him down. People figure special NPCs like that vanish forever once you kill them once."

They were in the middle of this conversation when an engine note carried from somewhere ahead. Gaon caught the sound and said,

"There's a group coming in from over there."

Lee Hyun-woo looked through a pair of binoculars and his eyes went wide.

"You're right… they look like bandits."

"Bandits? NPCs?"

"No. Players. If they spot a small group, they swarm it as a pack and strip everything you've got."

"Scum, then. So is this a problem right now?"

"Not particularly."

"Looks like they've got about three times our numbers."

At that, Lee Hyun-woo grinned.

"Still just a bunch of nobodies."

Lee Hyun-woo and the Rankers proceeded to prove that confidence. They drove their respective trucks out in all directions and opened the fight.

Watching from his own truck, Lee Bok-dong was stunned.

The Rankers' trucks were not simply steel-plated. They were gun trucks with actual tank armor bolted on. Using those plates as fighting positions, they charged straight at the oncoming bandits and poured fire into them. The bandits came in on vehicles of their own, spraying bullets as they closed.

The result of the collision was one-sided. Every time Lee Hyun-woo fired, enemies went down — enemies who were distant, hidden inside vehicles, and moving at speed besides. Targets that were brutally difficult to hit. The other Rankers were no less skilled. Of every four rounds they spent, one or two found their mark.

The outcome was settled in moments: stopped vehicles, and the corpses loaded inside them. The Rankers talked it over without any particular feeling.

"These trucks'd fetch a decent price…"

"Ditch 'em, or what?"

"No reason to dump them. We'll call it in and have someone else sell them for us."

Even the division of loot was over in an instant. As if that astonishing victory had been nothing at all, the Rankers put their vehicles in motion again.

Lee Bok-dong watched the whole thing in a state of shock.

He had inwardly written them off after they had lost as a group to Gaon alone. Looking at them now, that had been a mistake. "Special forces" did not even begin to cover what these people were. Monsters, more like. And on top of that, they had an As-native suspected of being a Swordmaster on their side. With people like this, they might actually be able to ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠take down a Swordmaster.

That was the hope, at least. But things went sideways from the very start.