Hard Counter
"Pacific. Put the mask on. That bastard's horn is the weak point. Hye-ji."
"Yes, sir."
"Nothing else matters. Aim for the horn and only the horn."
Even as he gave the orders, Won-goo was signaling the crew again. This time it was a hand sign he rarely used — the signal meaning push them without a single pause from here on out.
It was a signal Won-goo hesitated to use because of Lee Hyun-sung. If you told that man not to rest, he would genuinely keep moving without resting even a moment.
"Cheol-su. Tell Dulla to focus on hammering the ice golems."
Dulla, having just recovered from the shock, was picking himself up off the ground.
"And you could stand to lend a hand yourself, old friend."
"That is a point well taken."
With that, Pacific — the Nightmare Dokkaebi Mask now on his face — dove straight into the horde of ice golems. And the Trailer, finally moving in earnest, began grinding them down while Dulla rampaged among them. Through the chaos, Pacific and Won-goo weaved, hunting for openings.
Pacific, of course, was the faster of the two. With the mask and the drugs stacked together, his physical abilities were simply beyond what Won-goo could match. Even Won-goo, a survivor with more than two hundred coin enhancements under his belt, couldn't keep up.
A Gift was the foundation of everything. For a non-enhancement type like Won-goo to outpace an enhancement type like Pacific was simply impossible. On top of that, wearing the mask let Pacific move as if he'd been returned to his prime. Purer than when he'd taken drugs or patches — if anything, his coin enhancements had progressed further than before his curse, so it would be no exaggeration to say the man was practically flying.
He closed the distance to the Arctic Giant in a heartbeat and went straight for its face. The giant opened its massive jaws, trying to chew him out of the air — because once you were airborne, changing direction was next to impossible.
But Pacific reacted as though he had seen it coming. He kicked off the Arctic Giant's open mouth to regain his momentum and dropped back to the ground. Then he hurled the chakrams he'd been carrying — straight at the horn. One flew wide, but the others struck true. Even a grazing pass made the Arctic Giant's face contort in pain.
Thud!
Pacific hit the ground. As if it had been waiting for exactly that, the Arctic Giant raised its foot and slammed it down — and Pacific rolled clear, tumbling across the snow.
"Boss Gong! That horn is hard as hell!"
"You think it wouldn't be? The thing shrugged off a rifle shot."
"So what do I do? Just keep wailing on it?"
"Got a better idea?"
Thud!
The Arctic Giant stomped the ground again, harder this time. Pacific dodged with even more room to spare — and with good reason. He had put zero weight on counterattacking. He knew the thing regenerated, so there was no need to waste attacks anywhere unnecessary. Knowing that, Pacific devoted himself entirely to evasion. The only place any of them needed to land an attack was that horn.
"Boss Gong, the horn really does look like the weak point!"
"Then it is!"
"That bastard defends that horn like his life depends on it."
"Stay mobile and wait for the opening. Hye-ji will give you covering fire."
The Arctic Giant was actively defending the horn against any attack that came near it, while Won-goo and Pacific kept desperately targeting it. At least, that was how the Arctic Giant perceived it — its weakness had been exposed.
Won-goo, however, was drawing a very different conclusion. Even in the middle of this chaos, he was holding onto his cool and analyzing. Never stop thinking, or you die. It was one of the laws he'd re-learned after coming back to this godforsaken world. And thinking it through, he reached the answer again: breaking that exposed horn would not be easy.
Truthfully, the more he considered it, the stranger it looked. The Arctic Giant was the highest-tier monster to appear in the area in recent memory — a creature on a scale that would let you call it the Field's boss mob. A swarm of trash mobs that could pass for a legion, plus three ogres on top. Clearing just that much would pay out party-level rewards to every survivor gathered here — and then there was the rare monster itself, the Arctic Giant. Even a regular giant's corpse sold for a fortune; an Arctic Giant's would go for far more. It was easy to understand once you considered that a goblin and a goblin shaman commanded different prices, and a shaman and a cursed shaman differed even more drastically. The Arctic Giant was a monster that famous. A named monster in its own right.
And yet the Arctic Giant's body was almost insultingly fragile. Fine — it was a summoner and a caster. Even so, its durability was pathetically thin compared to the scale it had displayed. Won-goo didn't miss that point either. Something was wrong. And anyone with sharp eyes couldn't help but notice how unnatural it was.
So he reached a new estimate.
"This bastard dumped ALL his durability into the horn!"
"What?"
Pacific shouted, half in disbelief.
Crack! A rifle shot rang out from far away — and the Arctic Giant swatted the bullet aside with its raised arm.
In that window, Pacific climbed the giant's leg. To the Arctic Giant, that was a major threat. It felt as if the horn could be struck at any second.
"I mean it literally. The thing can regenerate anyway, so it figured the rest of its body didn't need to hold up."
"So it made the horn insanely hard and left everything else?"
"Exactly."
"Then what now? Is there no way to break it?"
"Why wouldn't there be? We just have to make it not hard. You just keep pulling aggro! You don't need to actually hit the horn. Just stay annoying — keep pestering it."
Won-goo, who had already finished closing the distance, was hammering the Arctic Giant again and again with Turnon's Warhammer. And the giant didn't spare a flicker of attention for the blows landing on its own body. In its mind, all it had to do was protect the horn.
At this point, the fight was effectively decided. The only reason Won-goo had hesitated was that he didn't know the true nature of that regeneration — not because he feared it. If it was ordinary self-regeneration, the answer was simple: Turnon's Warhammer. It was the hard counter to enhancement types with recovery-type abilities — every strike shaved the target's stats down by a fixed ratio.
It wasn't a tactic you could use openly, of course. The stronger the opponent, the more strikes it took, and against a skilled enemy the odds of eating a massive counterattack before you landed enough hits grew steeply. But not today. The Arctic Giant had invested everything in the horn. Its primary ability was summoning, its secondary was magic — which meant it had zero preparation for close combat. If it had been allowed to keep summoning, things might have gotten dicey. But Won-goo had needled it with exquisite precision, blocking the extra summons — and then closed to melee range. With every card laid bare, the victory had decisively tipped.
Unaware of any of this, the Arctic Giant had settled on a simple strategy: protect the horn above all else. Which was, in fairness, the correct move — as long as the horn held, the Arctic Giant could not die.
Summoners and mages didn't travel alone. They carried companions to cover them, or failing that, always kept at least one instant-cast spell in reserve. For the Arctic Giant, that was summoning ice golems — an endless stream of them. Summon regenerating golems, field a proper force, and weather the fight. That was the pattern.
But the enemy was terrible for it.
Wham! Wham! Wham!
The opponent the Arctic Giant was watching most closely was none other than the small figure far away — Jeon Hye-ji. The attacks coming from that petite frame were, at this moment, the most dangerous thing on the field. So it gave her the most attention, and after her, the masked man — Pacific. He was too fast to react to, and he kept gunning for the horn. There was one more, the one with the hammer, but the giant judged it wasn't worth worrying about. He wasn't as fast as Pacific, and he wasn't aiming directly for the horn. Swinging a hammer, yes — but not enough to matter.
The critical two were those others. They didn't hit hard enough to shatter the horn in one blow, but they still had to be watched — the Arctic Giant knew that if they kept hammering away, eventually something would give. So it defended actively. It had no room to chant a single spell. One clean hit, and this would be over — that was its calculation. These small fry could be finished with a single landed attack. Deal with the two gnats in front of it first, relocate somewhere it could take cover, and finish the summoning. It had planned it all out — never realizing how wrong that plan was. The hammer-wielder it had dismissed as a decoy was, in truth, the main attack.
So it waited for its moment, snatched up a nearby boulder one-handed, and hurled it at Jeon Hye-ji. The rock tore through the air at terrible speed and came within an instant of swallowing her up — but Mu Beob-sa pulled her into his arms and yanked her out of the spot, and the boulder sailed past harmlessly.
The Arctic Giant's face twisted in fury. The faint smile that had hung at the corner of its mouth was already gone.
Vuuuum!
Pacific leapt airborne, and the giant swung a palm to swat him out of the sky — a gesture almost exactly like a man killing an insect. It wasn't literally the size difference of man versus bug, but if that hand connected squarely, Pacific would be hit as hard as if he were one.
"Boss Gong! How much longer? This thing's speeding up!"
"Almost done!"
Hammer blow after hammer blow, too many to count. In less than five minutes, Won-goo had landed a volume of strikes on par with the fight against Ralph — the direct result of the Arctic Giant ignoring him completely. Judging it had landed enough, Won-goo drew the Meaty Dagger from his belt. Carrying it, he raked the blade straight across the Arctic Giant's Achilles tendon.
The motion was subtly different from his hammer work — the natural, unhurried grace of a man who had held a blade his whole life. The Arctic Giant glanced down at its foot at the cold, sharp sting. Won-goo didn't hesitate; he sprinted for the other leg, slid across the snow like a base runner, and swung.
Shiiing!
A sound so clear and crystalline that the word "pure" seemed made for it. The note the blade sang was different from when Dae-young used it — cleaner, more transparent, more lucid. And the cut it left matched. It had sliced the Arctic Giant's Achilles tendon, and the wound looked like someone had run a blade through a block of tofu. Not the messy hacking of Dae-young — the cut of a true bladesmith.
Granted, Won-goo wasn't a combat specialist. But he was a survivor — a Resistance man who had lived to the very end of the apocalypse. Basic combat training had long since been drilled into him, so handling a blade at this level was no problem at all.
Tsssss!
Blood fountained from the Arctic Giant's severed tendon. Dark crimson blood sprayed upward like an actual fountain — not the throwaway kind people joke about, but a real, pressurized geyser. A strange blood, pouring from that colossal body. Won-goo took the spray full in the face, and drove the knife into the tendon a second time.
"Graaaaagh!"
The Arctic Giant's grotesque scream tore through the air. Clutching its leg, it glared down at Won-goo — and enormous eyes met eyes smeared red with blood. Won-goo's teeth flashed white.
"Finally seeing me now, huh? Let me teach you something. You know those bastards that walk on two legs? You cut here, and they never walk again."
Thud! Thud! Thud! Thud!
Even as he spoke, his other hand kept hammering away. The cold agony from the Meaty Dagger broke through the giant's obsession with its horn — it raised both hands to crush Won-goo where he stood. And Won-goo didn't even try to dodge.
"It's over, you bastard. Your soft spots are all exposed!"
Instead of avoiding the massive descending hand, Won-goo waited for it. Watching from close range, Pacific screamed.
"Boss Gong!"
BOOM!
An impact that shook the whole area. But Won-goo was perfectly fine. And then the Arctic Giant's shrieking scream rang out yet again — as its enormous fingers dropped, severed, into the snow.
"Told you it was over."