Ambush
That night.
After returning to Hotel Snark through the Tabletop Room, Solomon immediately pulled out the documents stored in his room.
What he read there—the information, its depth, its sheer value—far exceeded anything he had imagined.
It had been shocking at first glance, but after seeing Downtown with his own eyes, the impact hit even harder.
……All of this is just room service?
Ghosttown. A grey realm where the line between life and death blurred into nothing. In that place, a hotel for assassins whose business was mutual slaughter, all while being served by the dead.
A few facts became clear. The organization that ruled the underworld of Guild City and Hotel Snark were inseparable. In truth, the room service the hotel provided was essentially an extension of the organization’s power.
Whatever the organization’s goals were, Solomon could feel in his bones that they operated on an entirely different level.
Having witnessed the Biotech Guild’s grand hall—that fortress—with his own eyes, the realization only grew sharper.
Everything the guild was desperately protecting behind walls of metal pipes, gears, and clockwork mechanisms was written down here. Their intelligence network had the entire Biotech Guild splayed open like a book. Internal layouts, classified sectors, even their top-secret projects. To Solomon, it felt like he had stumbled into an unexpected feast of valuable scraps.
Even after finishing the current request, this information would prove useful in countless ways down the line.
They even have the secret passages from the original design that aren’t in use anymore.
Some of the routes were so forgotten that even the people currently working inside the Biotech Guild’s fortress had no idea they existed. Their details were written here in full.
The existence of such information wasn’t mere luck or coincidence.
It was proof that this world wasn’t one hundred percent unreasonable. A kind of promise. Success and failure ultimately depended on how well the player performed.
It was a promise guaranteed by the god of the game—something beyond even the organization or the Faceless.
Game Master…….
Solomon silently burned the blueprints into his mind. Again and again.
From that day onward, Solomon began the operation in earnest.
Just in case, he located an unlicensed clinic in the area that could treat serious injuries even in the dead of night and paid them a large sum upfront. The city was full of back-alley doctors who catered specifically to fixers and contractors.
Next, separate from memorizing the fortress’s layout, he shadowed Gilbert Graham during his external schedules, getting as close as possible.
He had no intention of making a move right then and there. The security was too heavy. He simply needed to burn the target’s image into his retinas with his own eyes.
……This is insane.
The man was a monster. There was no other word for it.
Gilbert Graham was a monster.
His blood-red body was swollen to the point of bursting, something no steroid injection could ever replicate. It almost looked like the muscle fibers were visible beneath the skin.
His legs, supporting that grotesquely massive upper body, looked comparatively underdeveloped—only because the torso was so inhumanly overbuilt. By any normal human standard, those legs were monstrous in their own right.
This had long surpassed the realm of bodybuilding. It was a hideously twisted giant, ugly and revolting.
It was hard to tell who was guarding whom. Every time the man moved, the security detail around him looked pathetically small.
Targeting him outside the guild is definitely going to be difficult.
No matter how he looked at it, this wasn’t an opponent Solomon could defeat in a straight fight right now.
That didn’t change anything, though. From the beginning, Solomon had never planned to fight him fairly.
Yet in a way, winning without fighting was the most difficult path of all. Especially against a monster like this.
As expected, the only option is to infiltrate the guild fortress directly.
The carriage pulled by two mechanical horses eventually carried Gilbert away. They weren’t living creatures but devices of meshed gears and wound springs that exhaled steam from iron mouths.
Solomon stopped by a general store one last time and completed some additional shopping.
By the time his preparations were complete, the morning of the third day had arrived.
Solomon ate a fragrant breakfast in the Hotel Snark restaurant while the stench of rotting corpses wafted through the air, then spent the afternoon wandering the Sixth District where the Biotech Guild was located.
As darkness deepened, he crossed the subway tracks of the Sixth District, which had already closed for the day.
The tunnels of the now-silent city subway were pitch black. Solomon leaned against the cold concrete and searched for the emergency evacuation route noted in the blueprints. A rusted iron door, dull and lifeless.
Just as the intel said.
He took out the oil flask he had bought earlier and lubricated the corroded hinges. After oiling them and turning the handle, a faint metallic scrape sounded.
Leaving the slight noise behind, he lowered his body and slipped inside. The passage was narrow. Metal pipes snaked along both walls like veins, endlessly venting steam.
After traveling some distance, he reached a dead-end wall.
Yet the steam pouring from the surrounding pipes pointed toward a ventilation shaft in the ceiling. It was too high to reach with a jump. Solomon pulled a small grappling hook from his bag and tied a rope to it.
Clang!
He threw the hook and successfully caught the vent. Forcing his body inside, he crawled forward like he was squeezing through a narrow cave, pushing himself along with his elbows.
Before long, the end of the shaft appeared. A grated opening allowed him to look down.
This was the descent point.
Solomon carefully peered through the grate.
……Damn it.
There were people below.
.
The number of spells Solomon could cast in a day was four 1st-level spells and one 2nd-level spell. His spell slots would not recover until after a full night’s rest.
Even though each cast had to be weighed carefully, he had no choice but to use them now.
Available Spell Slots
1st Level: 3 uses (⚀⚀⚀■)
2nd Level: 1 use (⚁)
Activating Darkvision, he confirmed not only the man directly below but another person not far away. The two were engaged in idle chatter while holding their positions. They were lightly armed.
They clearly weren’t going to step aside willingly.
No choice, then.
To make matters worse, the ventilation shaft was sealed with a metal grate screwed in place. He would have to remove it before he could drop down.
Solomon carefully applied oil from the flask and slowly, painstakingly loosened each stiffened screw, praying the metal wouldn’t squeak.
Once they were free, he gently lifted the grate cover.
Then he dropped without hesitation.
“Huh…?”
Shhhk!
The moment he landed, Solomon’s blade sliced down the guard’s back.
Tang!
The crossbow in his other hand fired. The bolt pierced the second man’s throat from several meters away.
Through the hole in his neck, air escaped in a soundless gasp that never became a scream.
Both strikes just now landed as clean ambushes.
There was no message, no visible proof. Yet he knew. It felt different. The sensation at his fingertips gripping the hilt, the feeling when he pulled the trigger, the aftertaste that followed.
It was like an invisible force was pushing him from behind.
After dealing with the two, he dragged their bodies into a room he had already marked with Darkvision. Then he cleaned the bloodstains from the floor.
The blood was cold. Strangely, he felt no guilt at all.
The area where Gilbert was located required several more security procedures before reaching the classified sector.
After crossing a corridor and ascending a floor, a strictly isolated entrance greeted him.
Solomon took out the lockpick set he had prepared in advance. Hook picks, rake picks, diamond picks—each designed to manipulate individual pins or sweep them all at once. There was even a tension wrench.
Lockpicking. A passive skill that came with thief-type classes. Spell Assassins were no exception.
On the tabletop, it had simply been a matter of declaring an attempt to the Game Master. Here, it was different. Just like killing someone.
Click. Click.
The thin metal tools moved silently between his fingers, probing the lock’s interior. His movements were confident, without hesitation.
This was no ordinary lock. It required considerable precision to open. Moreover, any forced movement would intentionally trigger an alarm.
Fortunately, thanks to Darkvision, the internal structure of the lock was completely visible to Solomon. It was far more complex than a standard mechanism.
Without the spell, opening it with only his lockpicking skill would have been practically impossible.
Luckily, Solomon had magic. And it wasn’t simply good fortune that he did. This was the true beauty of TRPGs.
Since I can see inside the lock with Darkvision, I should be able to open it with my lockpicking skill, right?
He had seen the Game Master’s migraine-inducing expression countless times whenever he asked that.
……Click!
Got it!
With a satisfying sound, the tumblers aligned and the lock released.
Beyond this point lay the area known as the classified sector.
Around that time, the duration of his first Darkvision ended. Solomon cast it again.
That used two more 1st-level spell slots. Two remained.
Available Spell Slots
1st Level: 2 uses (⚀⚀■■)
2nd Level: 1 use (⚁)
Two 1st-level spell slots left.
Solomon crossed through the classified sector where deep darkness had settled. The temperature was abnormally low. The air stung with moisture and the smell of unidentified chemicals.
Glass cylinders filled with scarlet culture fluid lined the walls. Inside floated organs and body parts that drifted unpleasantly. Some of the viscera looked abnormally enlarged, and swollen brains bubbled and twitched as if still alive.
Disgusting.
Fortunately, it was deep in the night and there were no signs of people. Most humans slept at night.
He still hadn’t been detected.
Following the blueprints etched in his mind, he crossed several corridors and sectors until he spotted a patrol guard moving through the darkness.
Solomon melted into the shadows like a chameleon and waited for the perfect moment when the guard’s back was completely exposed.
Thud.
A silent death. He hid the corpse in the darkness and continued moving.
After walking a while longer and tracing the mental map, the room labeled as the project lab finally appeared.
Gilbert Graham.
It wasn’t just Gilbert inside.
Several of the monsters Solomon had seen in the underground waterway were there too—restrained by unknown devices. Culture tanks containing monster organs and body parts were scattered throughout the room.
The man called Gilbert was manipulating the unidentified devices, examining the bound creatures.
This was magitech engineering.
His blood-red body had already surpassed anything that could be called bodybuilding. It was grotesquely swollen, looking like it might explode at any moment. Compared to him, bears or the monsters from the underground waterway seemed almost cute.
He was more monstrous than the monsters themselves.
A monster who never slept, even at this late hour, and lived only for his work.
Solomon silently stared at the man’s back for a few seconds. Then he moved.
Right behind him.
Hide.
The new equipment Maya had given him—the Nightweaver Coat—resonated like a living thing. Night and shadow slid down along the fluttering hem as if they were alive.
Only then did Solomon intuitively understand the minor spell woven into the coat.
The description of it being a cutting-edge tactical coat hadn’t been an exaggeration.
There was no sound of footsteps. No presence. Yet Solomon was there. The distance closed, narrowed, until he stood directly behind the monster who had left himself completely defenseless.
He was there. Right behind the man he had to kill.
Gilbert Graham’s massively developed blood-red trapezius muscles stared back at him like a goblin.
Even so, Gilbert remained completely unaware of Solomon standing directly behind him. Solomon adjusted his grip on the hilt. It was the Ghost Whale Bone Blade.
Special Dice
When attacking, roll this die to add bonus damage. When receiving an attack, the same rule applies in reverse.
The die was rolled. An invisible die.
But that wasn’t all.
Blade in the Darkness, activate.
Shhhk!
The unseen blade struck.