A New Patron (2)
"Doesn't the watered-down version humans can actually use count as something less?"
"Then I hardly need to obtain your authority, do I?"
"Refused anyway. This power is enough for now. And I'll only keep growing from here."
After my answer, no more messages came from Sun Wukong.
But I could tell.
He wasn't offended. If anything, the emotion bleeding through was pure amusement.
So what do I do now?
For starters, I'd run the stage on repeat and get a few rounds in against these orcs.
Screeee!
"What a hilarious little creature. Just who is this fellow, that a mortal could receive a god's power in full?"
The idea that the power granted to humans was some diluted knockoff?
What nonsense.
A patron may pour down authority in its entirety, but how much of it a mortal can actually absorb depends entirely on that human's capacity. No matter how lofty the divine power they receive, there is always a limit—and yet this boy had digested nearly all of it and made it his own.
"Tempting, though..."
The Great Sage, Heaven's Equal—Sun Wukong.
Once the troublemaker of Huaguoshan, who became its chieftain.
And afterward, the one who picked a fight with the Buddha himself and survived.
"To think he'd dismiss my authority outright. Khekhek... that's funny in its own right. But oh ho, he landed a real blow on Omnissiah, didn't he? Kik kik..."
Screeee!
"Oh dear, oh dear! Who taught you to throw a spear like that! Tsk...! Sign with me, boy, and you'll gain spearwork that rivals the gods themselves!"
A patron contracts with a mortal and shares power with them.
And in return, the patron sustains its existence through the rewards that contractor earns.
"...Someone of my standing, of course, doesn't need to bother. But the others? They have to make themselves known. Otherwise there'd be no point in transcending by writing one's way into myth, now would there? Heh heh."
The way for one who has crossed beyond the mortal realm to enter the divine realm and live on eternally without losing their existence is simple enough: they need only be known by the beings of the mortal world.
I, who stood against gods in the body of a mere monkey, am worshipped by monkeys to this very day.
That is why I lose no power even without contracting with some creature like this one.
Even the humans have come to know me and worship me besides.
But the others must broadcast their existence and sustain or strengthen themselves through the rewards their contractors earn.
If they hate that arrangement, then they'd better wag their tails beside some greater god, living off the scraps that deity deigns to hand down.
"Have those creatures no pride at all? How does one who once commanded an entire era come to live so pitifully? But more to the point—how do I snare this one?"
At present, this boy was putting on the most overwhelmingly dominant performance of anyone on the planet called Earth.
One glance was enough to see he was being worshipped as a hero in his own homeland—so contracting with him would mean, incredibly, the support of an entire nation.
Population mattered, of course, but the honor of being the patron of a nation's pillar—and the karmic weight that came with it—was nothing short of a delicacy for a transcendent being like myself.
"Spearwork, is it... Then perhaps something at this level will do? If even this he can't master... then the contract is on hold. You brat."
[Sun Wukong has sent you a gift. Accept it?]
"...This isn't the contract, right?"
[Sun Wukong scoffs at you.]
"I accept."
Fwoooosh—
Light flared up and then seeped into my body. I walked over to the crystal orb, laid a hand on it, and checked my status window.
Traits: Throwing+1, Overdrive+4, Command, Flame Resistance, Stability Enhancement, Strength Enhancement, Stamina Enhancement, Heaven-Rending Peak-Shattering Spear
Origin: The fighting style of the era when Sun Wukong claimed the Ruyi Jingu Bang from the Dragon King's palace in the early Journey to the West and turned the Celestial Realm upside down. Composed of five forms in total.
Form 1 — Heaven-Sundering Strike
Form 2 — ???
Form 3 — ???
Form 4 — ???
Form 5 — ???
A single blow brought down from above. Anyone struck finds the shockwave rippling into the ground beneath them—where it erupts.
"Oh... it's staff arts, isn't it? Pretending not to watch while sneaking peeks this whole time, you sneaky old monkey..."
"UWOOOOOOOOO!"
The orc—one strike from death after the beating my spear had given it—lunged at me the instant my attention wavered. Its massive hand came rushing in, the shattered remains of its club abandoned behind it.
Swish—
I had already poured countless hours into dodging and blocking these creatures' fists. Defense was mastered. Now it was time to learn offense.
And right at that perfect moment, Sun Wukong had handed me an excellent trait.
"Heaven-Rending Peak-Shattering Spear, Form 1—Heaven-Sundering Strike."
Suuwoong—
KWAAAAAAAAAANG!
"Grraaagh..."
I swung the spear straight into the creature's skull, and its head simply detonated on impact.
"...Honestly, this calls for a staff, not a spear. Could it be this is exactly what Sun Wukong intended? Well, it IS the staff art that turned the Celestial Realm on its head, after all."
First I set the stage to run on auto-battle once more, then drifted back to the crystal orb to browse for the best possible staff. It didn't take long to find one.
Contains 0.1% of the power of the genuine Ruyi Jingu Bang.
"You're kidding... a measly 0.1% of its power, and it costs 100,000 coins?"
Still, it wasn't something beyond my reach in my current situation.
Getting there just meant saving up a lot more coins first.
"Onward and upward, then. Might as well push for stage 28. Let's wrap up 27 fast!"
PEWPEWPEWPEWPEW!
Orc skulls burst apart in an instant. When stage 28 began, three second-rank orcs emerged this time. Stage 29 gave me ten first-rankers and three second-rankers.
"The final stage 30 wave. Come on in."
After having my harvester units cart off the orc corpses littering the area, I opened the gate right away.
And what stepped out was a third-rank orc.
This one bore a new emblem: a boar tattoo.
That made tiger, wolf, sheep, and now boar—four orc varieties accounted for.
Unlike the hammers and clubs the others had carried, this one was holding a sword.
"Kurata! Huyabaha! Ritaguya!"
"UH! UH! UH! UH!"
The fifteen first-rankers and five second-rankers trailing behind it roared in response, like soldiers answering their warlord's cry. The third-rank orc flashed a proud, toothy grin at its horde—then extended its sword.
Flick.
"Yarutanya!"
"UWOOOOOOOOO!"
The orcs broke into a charge in an instant. A good hundred of them, at a rough guess, came thundering forward.
And at the head of the pack ran the third-ranker, green energy wrapping around its sword and then its entire body as it closed the distance.
<...Tsk.>
A heavy weapons unit—a tank-type bristling with two enormous shields and two free arms—planted itself in the orc's path. It drove both shields into the ground, then used its remaining two arms to seize and lock its spear in place.
"Uraya!"
KWAAAAAAAAAAAANG!
The moment the orc collided with it, the steel shield tore away like paper.
We couldn't yet forge armor from the exotic SF-grade materials—coins were too tight for that. Instead, we'd pushed our engineering to the limit to make these shields as brutally tough as possible. And this third-rank orc had simply shredded one.
The other orcs, watching, seemed to drink in its confidence; they grabbed the necks of the raptors lunging at them and carved straight through.
"...Fire!"
RATATATATATATATA!
Hundreds of rounds per second tore across the field. The ordinary orcs were wiped out completely, and only a handful of the first-rankers survived.
"Insane. So this is third rank? Then what in the world is a seventh-ranker—the supposed apex of orcs...?"
Bullets slammed into the third-rank orc's body—but steam hissed from the wounds, and they began regenerating in seconds. Then the rounds lodged in the freshly healed flesh simply dropped out and clattered to the ground.
"Fire! Wipe out everything except the third-ranker!"
RATATATATATA!
Flames geysered from the muzzles, and every orc around the creature was annihilated. Blood-red tears began streaming from the third-rank orc's eyes.
"Oh, give me a break. Psycho bastard. More heavy weapons units, front and center!"
Maybe those beasts had their tragic backstories. Didn't matter. This wasn't some shonen manga universe.
This was a dark fantasy where thousands—tens of thousands—died every single day.
"Fire."
RATATATATATATATA!
This time it wasn't snipers—it was the heavy weapons units themselves. Two of them, each mounting a full four miniguns, charged straight in and riddled the creature into a sieve.
"Repeating: eliminate everything the moment it exits the gate. Heavy weapons units handle the third-rankers."
<Tsk. Tsk.>
I turned my eyes from the gate as it began opening again and looked toward Pitasha. She was still reinforcing the fortress, though the work was nearly finished—soon she'd move on to repairing the outer walls.
"When are you planning to install the cannons?"
"Ah... right now I can only set up conventional cannon emplacement, so I'm planning to build proper laser turrets later instead! I should be able to have them done around wave 100!"
"Hmm. Isn't that a bit far off?"
"At our current pace, that's only about two months away!"
She had a point.
Reaching wave 30 had taken roughly three weeks.
Meanwhile, most of the participants—fewer than twenty of them currently still fighting at stage 20—were dying without ever coming close to clearing the stage 10 wave.
First things first—I need to raise South Korea's overall level.
I was mulling that over while running stage 30 on repeat when new information appeared on the Korean server.
"...Solid thinking, honestly."
The way to get magic stones on Earth was for a Returnee to die, and then wipe out the goblins that survived that stage and got summoned here afterward.
But as the death toll kept dropping, that supply would dry up before long.
Soon enough, the original poster's reply appeared.
"...A Raid?"