Achievement Rewards
Won-goo fought to keep the laughter from bubbling out of him. Sharing an achievement notification was fine among crew, but that was where he drew the line.
Even with people he worked alongside and trusted, his rule was simple: some things simply didn't get disclosed.
Because of that, he'd kept his conversations with the crew to a minimum ever since they'd come down from Mt. Yuhyang.
Normally he was the type to put everything on the table and hash it out together, wasn't he?
Grrrrowl!
A few Taildogs had actually survived the inferno.
The moment Won-goo stepped back, Hyun-seong and the rest of the crew moved in without being told. The handful of Taildogs left hardly needed him at all.
After all, they already had a track record of bringing down far nastier prey.
While they handled it, Won-goo withdrew and checked his reward.
'So the thousand-Taildog reward is pretty high-grade too.'
Being a regressor didn't mean he knew everything.
Won-goo had come back from the far-distant future to the past, and in doing so he'd lost a great many memories along the way.
The reason he knew as much as he did about the early days of the apocalypse was largely thanks to the warhammer he carried.
Turnon's Warhammer.
An item with an indestructible option and that unusual property that weakened whoever it struck.
When he'd first acquired that warhammer, the bandages wrapped around it had been layered thick with memory-transfer magic.
There had been enough information in there to leave Won-goo—who'd gone back considerably reinforced—reeling in confusion for a solid week.
And even that hadn't contained everything about the apocalypse's early days.
The achievements were the same way.
He'd known that achievements existed for each type of monster, but of those, only a tiny handful were ones he actually knew about.
If the Taildog achievement had simply been to mindlessly slaughter as many as possible, he would never have stopped hunting midway through.
'Well, better late than never.'
The rewards were as follows:
1. Necklace of the Canine God.
2. Nightmare Dagger.
3. A-One's Tinted Glasses.
The Necklace of the Canine God summoned one of the countless canine gods.
Canine gods were beings of a higher order—not even classified as monsters.
One might mistake them for gods of dogs, but they had nothing to do with dogs at all.
It was simply that when they manifested in the material world, their forms happened to resemble canines.
Different in origin entirely, and their power was of a completely different order from any dog—a higher being through and through.
An item that summoned such an entity could, on its own, serve as a devastating single trump card.
And yet Won-goo did not choose it.
If he'd known nothing about that necklace, he might have. But Won-goo knew it well.
The crux of it was that there was no telling which canine god would answer.
If he'd been able to choose the god himself, he would have picked the necklace without hesitation.
Summons could be collared and controlled for a set period of time, after all.
Even if fine-grained control was beyond it, at minimum it could be commanded like a summoned beast.
But certain canine gods would annihilate their summoner on the spot for the sole offense of having called them.
It was practically a trap card.
That said, even one of those ill-tempered gods would lend its power if you could just withstand its opening attack.
But this was still the apocalypse's earliest days.
The real game hadn't even begun yet.
At this point in time, not a single survivor alive could withstand a canine god's assault.
That would hold true even for Number Four, the one presumed to be Neo-Mason.
In other words, the thing was best described as a roulette-summoning bomb.
Hit the jackpot and it was a windfall; roll badly, and not just the summoner but the entire crew could end up as a canine god's dinner.
Won-goo didn't care for gambles like that.
The Nightmare Dagger was a dagger bearing the nightmare's curse—a mere scratch left its victim unable to sleep properly.
Unless the target had a seriously high mental stat, they'd be put through absolute hell, which made it a fairly good item, all things considered.
You might even call it an item that forced your enemy to spend coins on their mental stat.
But it, too, was an item limited to the early apocalypse.
Meaning its shelf life was painfully obvious.
Once survivors with thirty or more coins poured into their mental stat started cropping up everywhere, it became utterly useless.
Give it a little time, and the thing was demoted to a mere auxiliary for other mental-attack items.
Give it more time still, and it was written off as junk—fed into item enhancement or sacrificed as fodder.
Assuming achievement rewards were never granted twice, choosing it would be a terrible waste.
So Won-goo chose A-One's Glasses.
The A-One were a incorporeal, psychic species living on a world without form.
A-One's Tinted Glasses was an item that let its bearer borrow a sliver of their computational power.
Worn in combat, it displayed simulations of how the coming fight would unfold.
It even calculated the probability of variables.
It would tell you, say, which routes your enemies planned to move along and where you should position yourself accordingly.
Seen up to that point alone, A-One's Tinted Glasses didn't look especially impressive.
Being able to predict that much didn't mean you could beat an enemy you had no business beating.
And yet Won-goo picked the glasses as his reward.
The reason was simple: A-One's Tinted Glasses was a set item.
There were countless items tied to the A-One, and they weren't the kind that merely granted stat bonuses for owning multiples. They enabled all manner of synergies—and chief among them, A-One's Hat paired beautifully with the glasses.
An item that transmitted the simulation footage from the glasses straight into the retinas of his teammates, in real time.
Beyond that, there were a great many items bearing the A-One name, and more would be appearing regularly going forward.
Like the Nightmare Dagger, it was an item that would see little use once time passed—but its shelf life was far longer than that one's.
Best of all, the A-One series made excellent hand-me-downs for the rest of the team.
Every crew had non-combat support types, and since those A-One items could be passed to them, there was little need to worry about expiration dates.
You have selected A-One's Tinted Glasses.
With his reward chosen, he set about wrapping things up.
Now came the turn to harvest the unexpected windfall: the Taildogs' tails.
* * *
After reclaiming the Taildog tails, they combed the apartment thoroughly and confirmed there were no monsters left inside.
"Put in a good word for us about finding a decent spot, would you?"
"Got it. I'll tell them to look hard."
Won-goo's crew moved off toward where Fresh was.
Jeon Hye-ji, along with the other curious crew members, drifted to Won-goo's side.
But Won-goo drew a firm line with a hand signal: now was not the time for conversation.
The crew asked nothing further.
"What's wrong with her? Why's she like that?"
When they got back, Yeongyeong was in full panic mode—staring into empty air like a person whose soul had left her body, trembling all over.
Eyes turned naturally to Fresh.
Fresh threw his hands up at once.
"I didn't do a thing, Boss Gong."
"Then why's she like this?"
"Fire. She saw the big flames go up and turned into... that."
"Ha... so it's a headache all over again."
Trauma, born of standing at death's door in a wall of flame.
There was nothing to be done about it, no matter how heavily a survivor had reinforced their mental stat.
The human mind wasn't so simple that boosting a stat made trauma disappear.
The only answer was to raise that stat a little higher and resist the fear just a little better.
"If she stays like this, we can't exactly bring her along, can we?"
"Probably not. She doesn't seem to be having full-blown episodes, so let's keep an eye on her for now."
"Right."
"And if it doesn't work out, she's got her kids, doesn't she? Hand her off."
"The kids aren't the problem. We'd be losing a fighting asset, and that's what stings. If I'd known it'd come to this, I wouldn't have brought her out at all."
"Her body does seem to be getting better, though."
"You got any spare coins?"
"A few, yeah."
"Then you two are a team—talk it over between yourselves. This part's not something the rest of us can help with."
"You're telling me to put them into the mental stat?"
"You know my Hidden already—setting things on fire. Compared to that lunatic Number Four it's nothing, but it's still a weapon worth using."
"I'll tell her to reinforce her mental stat once she's back with us."
Veteran survivors always carried spare coins.
Burn every coin you had on enhancements, and you'd be helpless the moment an emergency hit.
Most kept five to ten in reserve.
Won-goo, carrying spare coins numbering nearly a hundred, went beyond unusual into outright bizarre.
"That's the way. You've got a Hidden too, Yeongyeong. That punk Pacific's got one as well."
"Everyone's got one."
"The first fight matters most. You land a proper hit right out of the gate, and you can handle things on your terms. Otherwise the whole affair turns real dirty, real fast. You get me?"
"Got it. I'll tell her to spend her coins when she comes around."
Ganjeol Point was a major power, which meant they needed to pull in every last fighter they could. Yeongyeong had only just recovered, but there'd been hope she'd be combat-ready by the time things collided with Ganjeol Point.
As things stood now, that hope would have to be shelved.
Which meant their fighting strength shrank yet again.
For a side already outnumbered, it was nothing but irritating news. Hence the immediate countermeasure: coin enhancement.
"By the way, can we go into the Shelter now?"
"How would we get into the Shelter? We've got to hit the Coin Exchange first. Pacific!"
"Yo."
"You got any sedatives among your stuff?"
"No sedatives. Got Sweets, though."
"Hand some over. Low addictiveness, right?"
"You think there's such a thing as non-addictive Sweets?"
"I'm saying as long as it won't drive her out of her mind, it's fine."
"It's not that bad."
"Give it here. She's suffering."
* * *
Montage's crew swept the apartment's interior with excruciating thoroughness.
Won-goo's people were no slouches at a search themselves, but Montage's side made them look careless.
It could hardly be otherwise, given that Montage's Gift was tracing traces.
"Let's just pick our spot and settle in. There aren't any monsters left—what's all this searching for? Everyone needs rest."
"What kind of talk is that? A place like this gets a minimum of twelve hours of searching. That's the rule."
"Boss, you sure you haven't got some kind of obsessive complex?"
"Oh-h. Cracking jokes at your boss now. Look at you, livening the mood up."
Montage flashed his teeth in a crooked grin.
"I'm asking in earnest, not joking. We find a decent spot and sleep—that's it, so why go this far? Everybody's worn out."
"You remember the time things went to hell because we didn't search properly? Want me to tell you the whole story, proper?"
"Ah... you've actually got a record? Then I concede."
"It was a doozy, let me tell you. So here's what happened—"
"Spare me. If it's that important, save it for drinks after the job's done."
"It's a damn entertaining and important story, I'm telling you."
Just then Joce, who'd gone upstairs to search the upper floors, came hurrying over at a fast clip.
"Boss. Reckon you oughta come take a look at somethin'."
"What is it?"
"There's somethin' up there."
"A portal? Or a dungeon entrance?"
"Don't reckon it's either. Looks more like... traces of people."
"That's possible."
Boss Gong chimed in.
"There could be?"
"Sure. This whole area was gang territory, so a hidden room or two wouldn't be strange at all."
"Not strange, you say?"
"Not strange at all. The punk who used this place was a real sneaky piece of work."
As he said it, Won-goo pictured Respect's smug, weaselly face.
The thought flickered through his mind that this hidden space might well have been Respect's handiwork.
But he couldn't be certain.
Apartment or not, this was still part of the Field.
It was nothing like a Tower or a dungeon.
There was no telling what event might erupt here, or when.
The Taildogs were proof enough of that, weren't they?
In a laughably short span of time, they'd turned this whole place into Taildog territory.
By the same logic, a portal springing up in the middle of the apartment would hardly be strange either.
Everyone moved toward the spot Joce had described.