New Star
A New Star.
Trash should be cleaned up by the person who finds it first.
I don’t know which dead netizen left those words behind, but they carry more than a little truth. It isn’t pleasing to the eye, and its mere existence nearby feels deeply uncomfortable.
‘Yes. Trash must be removed.’
Of course, I’m not kind enough to pick up every scrap of garbage on the streets I walk. On the other hand, I’m not wealthy enough to turn down the money that appears every time I clean some up. With our interests perfectly aligned, I simply did what any decent apostle should do.
Hunted Dark Cult Priest Kamon!
Hunted Dark Cult Black Knight Vargan!
Hunted Dark Cult Warlock Akines!
Exterminated the Dark Cult fanatics!
Good – Kingdom’s Peace completed.
Conquered Floor 12 ‘Temple of the Evil God’!
“Hmm. They’re all dead.”
If they were going to praise me as an apostle of God, they should have quietly died by this apostle’s hand. There were more fleeing fanatics than expected, and the underground waterways were a tangled mess, so I nearly lost a few. Without the Blood Seed I would have struggled to chase every last one down.
I could have handled the ordinary believers somehow, but the black knights splitting up to enter the sewers from multiple points would have been genuinely difficult to kill. A chronic weakness of close-combat classes, I suppose. Striking multiple targets at once is hard. In that sense, I once again realized the true power of the skill. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say the Blood Seed’s performance was simply outstanding.
At any rate, the blood dragons that had bravely bitten their enemies to death looked even more lovable now. Hmm. Maybe it was time to make them a sibling.
I was rattling the troll blood in my pocket and pondering that very question when a new message floated up before my eyes.
Good – The Never-Sleeping City of Sin, Somora
📍 Objective: Purge the evil from Somora, the city of never-ending night in the Arsene Kingdom, and restore peace.
🎁 Reward: Villain Discernment (Skill)
“Oho.”
A new job had arrived at the perfect time. An easy mission where cleaning up trash handed me a precious treasure—a skill. There was no reason to refuse.
Additional mission accepted!
Good – The Never-Sleeping City of Sin, Somora. Purge the evil from the city and restore peace.
For accurate mission execution, ‘Villain Discernment’ has been temporarily granted!
The pleasure of blood still lingered in my mind when a foul stench slammed into me, snapping me back to reality. I frowned and suddenly understood. The mission hadn’t appeared for no reason—this city was overflowing with filthy trash. Every last piece needed to be swept away.
Having made up my mind, I poured the troll blood into the pitch-black blood of the Dark Cult still drifting through the sewers. There was no better monster for destroying a city. I watched the giant bipedal creature bubble and boil upward, then gave it a name.
“From now on, your name is Godzilla.”
In a corrupted city, the dragon of destruction had manifested.
Sometimes overwhelming mass can make the mind go blank. It might have been a fresh chance to reconsider the concept of perspective, or perhaps it was simply the primal fear of something enormous. Ah, so this is what I was afraid of. How wonderful to realize one’s own ignorance even after becoming an adult.
In that sense, the people of Somora, the city of pleasure, were having their intelligence raised in real time.
KWAAAAAAAAAAAANG——!!
Every time the giant monster moved, an expensive building was reduced to pulp. It smashed structures with its hands and crushed fleeing people beneath its feet. No one even considered resisting. They had all witnessed the knight who had arrogantly boasted about guarding the chancellor turn into minced meat in a single blow.
“Uwaaaaagh! Somebody save me!!”
They could only scream and run from the monster. A bipedal horror had suddenly appeared, destroying the streets and killing people; fleeing was the only logical reaction.
Among those with especially sharp minds, some suspected that the pitch-black monster wasn’t destroying everything indiscriminately but seemed to be pointing at specific people before killing them. They wondered even as they ran, but they were too busy escaping to confirm it.
——UUUUUUUURRRRRRROOOOOO!!!
The monster roared and spewed jet-black flames. The chancellor who had been hiding inside the brothel, along with the remnants of the high officials, were wiped out in an instant. The streets of the never-sleeping city of pleasure—where every building had stayed lit even at midnight—were completely shattered and engulfed in black and red flames.
“……Ah.”
Markus, captain of Somora’s guard, remained on his knees in the middle of the street, watching the entire scene. In the span of a few moments he had abandoned the streets he was supposed to protect, the people he was supposed to guard, and the duty he was supposed to uphold. Everything had been incinerated in the blink of an eye.
His face, already haggard from the endless workload of the guard, looked as if it had aged another ten years. BOOM—BOOM—!
Yet somehow he was still alive. Markus blinked vacantly as he watched the giant monster that had already passed him by. He had been certain it would crush him, but the black beast had ignored him and chased after the fleeing citizens instead.
Seeing that life and death were decided by the pointing finger of the woman leading the monster, it seemed he had been chosen. Yes. He had received grace.
“……Thank you… thank you……”
Blaming or cursing a disaster like a typhoon or drought changes nothing. Some would surely curse it, but in the Middle Ages there were also those who worshipped such overwhelming catastrophes and found comfort in them. Faced with an overwhelming calamity, Markus shed tears of relief at simply having survived rather than resentment.
Additional mission completed.
Thanks to the great explorer, peace has been restored to the city of Somora!
Achievement unlocked!
As a reward, ‘Villain Discernment’ has been granted!
“Ugh, I finally finished killing them all.”
The city trash cleanup only ended around sunrise. If people had just stayed still, I could have gone shashashak and killed them with pinpoint accuracy. But they all screamed and ran in every direction I went, so picking out the ones who deserved to die took far longer than expected.
Tsk. Would it have hurt them to stay quietly in place and make it easy for me? They should have trusted the kind-looking me and stopped running. With the skill-enhanced senses of smell and sight I could tell them apart, but selectively killing only the trash hiding among ordinary people was genuinely difficult.
They kept screaming and fleeing as if I were the world’s greatest villain, so I almost died of frustration. I seriously considered just wiping everyone out but barely held back. After all, I am a citizen who loves peace in both the kingdom and the city more than anyone else. The system messages say so too.
Having returned to the shelter the moment the mission was completed, I immediately checked my character information.
It seemed the Dark Cult and the trash had been stronger than expected; my stats had risen slightly. A sweet result for cleaning up a city in a single night. Together with the achievement points that came from mission success, it was a satisfying harvest.
These gains were nice, of course, but the most important thing was the new skill I had obtained from this mission.
Villain Discernment.
It wasn’t for combat. If anything, it belonged to the detection category. A search-and-identify technique that let me sense an opponent’s evil deeds through sensory cues—seeing a red glow around their body or smelling a terrible stench. It was good to have powerful combat traits and skills, but something like this was also necessary.
Having spent my life climbing the Tower, I knew how troublesome it could become to accidentally kill the wrong person during a mission with complicated interpersonal relationships. The same went for discovering a traitor inside the same guild. When the time came that I had to kill one of two people, the choice would become far easier.
‘Besides, peace is nice.’
If I killed the villains I came across while passing by, wouldn’t the area stay peaceful for a while? If I could crush the seeds of evil that would plunge a beautiful world into terrible nightmares and flames of grief, I was willing to endure the annoyance.
“As expected, I really am kind.”
Smiling contentedly and nodding to myself, I drew blood from the air and created new Blood Seeds. A rabbit made from the blood of the black knight captain and a lion made from the fat chancellor who had screamed about who he was. It wasn’t quite goblin versus ogre, but it was finally time to settle an old curiosity.
Standing between them as referee, I grinned brightly and finally lowered my hand.
“Fight!”
Floor 30 of the Dimensional Tower—the middle layer. This was the stratum where true exploration began, and where the strongholds of countless guilds were located. Large guilds stationed thousands of members at their bases, sending them out on missions. When that many people gathered, both money and rumors naturally flowed in abundance. This wasn’t limited to new recruits or low-ranking guild members.
“Hey, did you hear? They say a Demon King appeared in the Arsene Kingdom and everything’s gone crazy over there!”
The guild master’s office of the top guild in the western continent, . The guild master, known for his fierce appearance and wild red hair, was receiving a guest today. In contrast to him, the visitor was a woman with vivid blue hair and a bright, cheerful face.
The guild master suppressed his usual temper and let out a deep sigh.
“Is that even a problem?”
“Hah, now that you’re the leader of a large organization, you need to pay attention to more than just fighting! Guild management, talent recruitment, all of it.”
“I’m handling guild management just fine……”
“Forget that! In that spirit, want to hear what I have to say? There’s a rookie whose name is spreading like wildfire these days.”
Seina Adsilin. The woman known as one of the Tower’s best-connected people and the Lord of the Blue Mage Tower. She was also a chatterbox who casually spilled information no one knew where she had obtained.
“Do you happen to know someone called the Undertaker?”
The Archmage Adsilin spoke with a smile.