Finding the Culprit
"Kuaaaa…"
"……"
"Kuaaaaaa… mmm…"
Inside the Anti-Magic Iron Cage Lea had cast, Heurisk glared at the dragon sleeping in perfect, carefree peace.
The bars were already small compared to Lea in her girl form. Set against her true dragon body, they looked about the size of an ant. Which meant that if he slipped out quietly, no one would even notice.
"She really does seem to be asleep…"
Heurisk tapped the bars carefully.
Clang! Clang!
The sound was loud enough, but the utterly unbothered dragon just kept sleeping.
I can't use magic.
His hidden skill, Designated Return, was sealed — and so was even a basic Fireball. Apparently the cage carried a magic-suppression effect. For a mage like Heurisk, that was a catastrophe. He still refused to give up.
"Fuck. If I get out of here, my whole life turns around…"
While locked up, he went over every Legendary weapon, armor piece, and accessory he had stolen, one by one. More than ninety-five percent of them came with restrictions that made them unusable for now — but they were still the kind of items that could flip the entire game on its head.
If not for the magic-sealing cage, he could have smashed the nest to pieces and walked out right then. An Ogre Lord that had given players so much trouble? He could have cleaned one up alone without breaking a sweat.
If I can just get out.
Clang clang!
But a mage with no magic could do nothing except bang on the bars.
"I can't even log out…"
He was a prisoner, yes — but he was still, technically, mid-theft. Using logout as a half-assed escape would count as a failure, and he would lose every single item he had taken. Worse, logging out changed nothing. The moment he logged back in, he would be right back here. He would only lose the gear and still be trapped.
Heurisk ground his teeth.
Fifty years is insane!
It was basically a permanent ban. And creating an alt meant clearing a quest called Second Life — a nightmare of difficulty several times worse than most hidden quests. Even if someone offered to clear it for free, Heurisk had zero intention of quitting.
"Do you know how hard I worked to build this?"
Rank seven. Hidden pieces everywhere. Unique gear covering him from head to toe. And more than anything, roughly fifty guild members who followed him because they believed in him.
And I'm supposed to quit and start over?
"No. Absolutely not."
His guild had not been built on friendship. He had recruited purely on skill and gear. A guild master reduced to a pauper would not get a warm welcome. Even if most of the stolen items were taken from him, he had already sworn he would walk out with at least one or two.
Screeeech…!
"Urrrgh…!"
CLANG!
"Damn it!"
After a long, fruitless struggle to force the bars wider, Heurisk snapped and flung a blue sword across the cage. The blade radiated a mysterious aura — in a swordsman's hands, it could have taken an Ogre Lord's head in a single stroke. In Heurisk's, it was just a big, hard stick. And whatever the bars were made of, even a Legendary weapon could not bend them.
"Kuaaaaaaa…!"
"!!"
He scrambled to snatch the sword back up and checked on Lea.
"Cookiez… Hari…"
"…Just sleep-talking."
"Nya…mm…"
While Lea munched cookies in her dreams, Heurisk waited until things settled, then picked the sword up again.
Creak. Creak.
The bars still would not give.
Ask the guild for help… no. They would never come.
The rumor had almost certainly spread already — that Heurisk had been caught by a dragon and sentenced to an unprecedented fifty years. The longest sentence any player had ever received before this was six months. His was fifty years. Even as guild master, he did not believe anyone would come for him. If anything, they were probably cursing him out right now.
For poking a dragon for no reason.
They would be wondering whether they were next — whether they, too, would get locked up and effectively banned. After Heurisk's failed Designated Return, no one would so much as set foot near Red Mountain.
"…Damn it."
There had to be a way…
"Ah."
A thought struck him. He hurriedly opened his status window. Magic was sealed — but chat still worked.
"She looks so happy."
"Lea really does love sleeping."
"Maybe we've been bugging her too much this whole time…"
While Lea slept on and on, the players in the nest clearing continued their training in peaceful quiet. Haring still could not use her golem, but the crisis had passed, so she went back to casually browsing the forums and practicing her mana cultivation without much worry.
Time slipped by.
Tap tap.
"What is it?"
"Could we talk somewhere private?"
"? Okie."
Someone had tapped Haring on the shoulder. It was Yong-ba. She followed him a short distance away from the clearing and sat down. The arrangement might have looked a little awkward, but the players were not all clustered together to begin with, so it barely drew any attention. The three who had failed the trial were already sitting off at the far edge of the clearing.
"So what's this about?"
"As you know, an incomplete mana cultivation method was leaked to the Pro Gallery once."
"Yeah, it was."
The method only passers were supposed to learn had been leaked. It had been nothing more than a rough version pieced together from watching and listening at a distance, but from Haring's point of view it still stung a little.
I earned that through hard training.
And someone had just dumped it online. The gallery had gotten more active for it, and plenty of hot posts had gone up — but still.
Haring glanced toward the three failures sitting far off.
"It's one of those three, right? Why bring it up?"
"Doesn't it strike you as strange?"
"?"
"No matter how lazy Lea looks, there is no way the place should have been breached this easily. We already had a precedent a few months ago."
"True…"
Haring had thought the same thing. However much Lea looked like a little girl and however far her laziness had climbed past any reasonable limit, a dragon was still a dragon. She would never simply leave a treasure vault stacked with rare loot wide open. She had sealed it twice over, and only Lea and the players inside the nest knew that. MountainSpirit's old posts and experience alone would never have been enough to walk into the vault so easily.
"Someone fed them inside information?"
"That's my guess."
"It was way too planned. They even had people ready just to draw attention."
"The circumstantial evidence is solid… but I don't really want to bring it to Lea yet. We don't even know who the culprit is."
"And we can't just kick all three of them out."
One of the three failures almost certainly was the culprit. Between the mana cultivation leak and Heurisk's theft, an internal leak was basically confirmed. But the information had been spread anonymously, so pinning down which of the three was responsible was not easy.
"Could it be one of the people who left? One of those two, maybe…"
"Unlikely. The last person to leave has been gone nearly a month. The timing gap is too big for them to still be feeding inside info."
"Hmm…"
"I asked the other passers for their thoughts too. Everyone said they had no idea."
"Honestly, I don't really know either…"
Haring shook her head, looking tired. This kind of head game was the last thing she wanted. She would much rather just cultivate mana in peace and swing a sword around.
"What do you think, then? Just spit it out."
"…Honestly, I'm stuck at the same place."
Yong-ba was just as frustrated. He was an ordinary office worker who played games — not a detective. He simply liked dragons and Mafia games. Without directly interrogating the suspects, this was as far as he could go.
"For now, I plan to wait and watch. This is already the second time. Something will show soon enough."
"Mm… got it."
"Alright then."
Yong-ba and Haring returned to their original spots. The other players were still doing their own things in their own places. After a moment of thought, Haring chose not to go back to her old seat and instead settled near the three failures.
They were sitting together, probably because of their shared status as rejects, but they did not look particularly close. They had not been in the nest nearly as long as the passers, either.
More like they're stuck together by atmosphere?
One of them was fairly active on the gallery. That made Haring wonder if it might be that person…
Feeding inside information, though?
Leaking a mana cultivation method was one thing. She could not picture that person deliberately hurting Lea or the players in the nest.
I could be reading people wrong, though.
"Hooo…"
Haring half-lidded her eyes and kept up her breathing. The three players were clumsily practicing the half-learned mana cultivation method. If they passed, they would be taught the real thing — but unfortunately, none of them had even managed a quarter of a full nest circuit.
Then one of them looked up at empty air, clicked their tongue in irritation, and stood.
"Ugh, seriously…"
"What?"
"Nothing. Don't worry about it."
Where are they going?