The Divine Elixir (3)
Now, in my hands, I held the legendary potion known as the Elixir — the mythical draught said to bring you back to life as long as you splashed it on within thirty seconds of getting your head chopped off.
I was genuinely curious how something like that was even possible, but since I summon an entire machine legion without questioning the mechanics, I decided not to dwell on it.
Either way, the point was that I now had one extra life to spare.
The shop sells it for a whopping 1,000,000 coins, but I could apparently craft one myself for only around 500,000.
Which meant building a dedicated factory felt like overkill, so I decided I'd only mass-produce them someday, when I was truly rolling in spare resources.
"Eheheheheh..."
Rune had given off a distinctly sharp and cold impression when I first met her. But watching her grin down at a dying orc now, that image had been thoroughly shattered.
Kuma, watching from the side, seemed to be in an equally good mood — it was busy blowing steam rings shaped like donuts.
"Ahem."
"Oh... M-Master..."
"You don't have to."
"No, I must. If my senior is doing it, how could a junior not?"
"Fine... Either way, we're heading back to reality soon."
"By 'reality,' you mean...?"
"That's right."
Whoosh.
Apparently the tteokbokki she'd eaten before had suited her taste perfectly, because although her body didn't require food at all, Rune had done nothing but gorge on tteokbokki since then. So I bought her chicken instead — and she proceeded to stuff herself with nothing but chicken all over again.
"The three special forces guys are due to return soon, you see. Two weeks, give or take?"
In just two weeks flat, we'd blasted through stages 31 through 40.
And what I received for it was a Return Stone good for forty days.
It was time to go back to reality and acquire some more standing for myself.
According to Sun Wukong, there wasn't much longer until the second ability of his unique trait finally unlocked.
Right now, to the people I summoned — those in their teens to thirties — I was an incredible existence, but to everyone else, not so much.
Sun Wukong apparently received gratitude from his parent as well, but he said very few people actually treated him like a true god the way he'd described.
The age bracket that worships pro gamers like gods is that same young demographic, so his side was easy. Mine, on the other hand, had precious few who believed in me that fervently.
"So I need faith and worship at a level where people would still support me even if I announced I was doing drugs? What kind of terms are those?"
Then again, I could see why transcendents and gods would need something like that desperately.
But I had no intention of becoming a god anyway.
My motto had always been to just drift along with the flow of things. How on earth did my life turn into this?
While I was lost in musings like that, the two of them — already finished with their return preparations — were standing before me.
"Everyone got their badges on?"
These were the badges Pitasha had crafted this time around.
A hologram, no less, that made the wearer's appearance appear completely different to others.
She'd turned the two of them into massive, towering armored knights.
Part of it was to keep strangers from approaching me too easily — but honestly, the real reason was that Rune's outfit was far too indecent.
According to her, the inside was almost entirely machinery, but the outer appearance was barely mechanical at all — the rest might as well have been bare skin.
As for Rune's "outfit": a strip of metal that amounted to a vest — existing purely to keep her chest from bouncing — and a bottom that was practically nonexistent.
"Master."
"Y-yes?"
"Would you like it if I dressed as indecently as Rune?"
"No! Absolutely not."
"Not even when it's just the two of us?"
"...Shut up! We're returning!"
"Hehe..."
Ever since Rune had shown up, Pitasha had started getting noticeably more aggressive.
The moment I declared our return, light began to bloom from all three of our bodies.
And when I opened my eyes, the sight greeting us this time was absolutely breathtaking.
"Wow... so this is how it turned out?"
"KYAAAAAAAAAAAAK—!"
Clank.
"No! Don't look!"
"Why are you the one—"
The moment we materialized, we found ourselves in an open-air outdoor bathhouse. The problem? It was the women's bath.
Pitasha scooped me up in a panic and started running. She'd even slapped some helmet on me out of who knows where and bolted.
I had no idea how to switch the thing on, so I just sat there in the dark for a while, until Pitasha finally stopped and I wrestled free of the helmet.
KABOOOOM!
"A familiar sound."
When I opened my eyes, we were outside the city limits.
Pitasha summoned a transport unit, loaded me into it, and told Rune to climb on behind.
Rune mounted up with her expression as frosty as ever.
Ah — to everyone else, they looked like giant mechanical knights, but to my eyes it was just Pitasha and Rune.
"Whoa... that thing is freaking huge."
"No way."
"Is that a MECH?"
The middle schoolers passing by dropped the jjolmyeon they were carrying on the spot.
"Aw, shit! That was eight thousand won!"
Leaving the wailing student behind, the rest of them came rushing over and crowded around me.
"It IS a mech! Please, just show us a Raptor once!"
"Can we take pictures?"
"I'm a Heavy Weapons Unit fan! Please!"
They were practically clinging to the transport unit.
Rune's eyebrow twitched, so I told her to rein it in, then summoned exactly what the kids wanted — a Raptor.
I summoned the saddle-equipped model, and as we traveled together with the students, I asked where we were.
Civilians snapped photos of the middle schoolers riding Raptors down the road.
"So. Where is this?"
"Seosan!"
"Seosan? Wow... that's far."
With that, I traded small talk with the middle schoolers.
I messaged Director Lee Jin-seok to say I was back, and since the kids were having such a blast, I just let them enjoy themselves.
KREEE!
One of the kids started poking all over the Raptor, so I had the thing sprint off with him aboard.
"WOOOOOAAAAAH—!"
Naturally, so he wouldn't fall off, a small belt popped out of the Raptor's flank and strapped the student firmly in place.
"Me too! Me next!"
"GO!"
RATATATATATATATA
The students screamed with laughter on the back of the Raptor as it tore along at blistering speed. And watching the ones left behind gaze after them with pure envy, I found myself thinking:
South Korea wasn't such a dreary country after all.
Those kids would soon be old enough to be summoned themselves. The reason they could still enjoy ordinary days like this was almost certainly thanks to the artifacts I'd distributed nationwide.
After taking the Raptor back from the middle schoolers, we rode the transport unit to Daegu.
Of course, before arriving, I summoned Raptors en masse, fanning tens of thousands of combat units out across the entire country as we advanced.
For the record, I was truly close to 100,000 now.
Though technically not quite there yet — before coming back, I'd summoned with my forces packed solid with only top-tier and high-tier units.
The combat units that spread out began hunting down the goblins lurking in hiding, one by one.
KWAAAAAAAANG—!
"Oh! Hyunwoo, that you?"
"Been a while, hyung."
"Yeah. And you've brought some reliable friends with you, huh?"
I'd been about to go deal with some orcs reported nearby when Ju Hwan came striding over, having already finished them off himself.
He'd dropped from the sky in an instant and slammed a bomb straight into an orc's skull — leaving the thing with, quite literally, nothing but an exploding head.
He hadn't been at this level when I last saw him. He'd grown enormously.
"Oh, right — hyung. They say this stuff actually works?"
Swish.
"What's this?"
"Divine elixirs. Three million won each. Up to ten per person actually take effect."
"Take my money right now. Give me your account number."
That was Ju Hwan for you — always hungry to get stronger.
He must have made a killing in the meantime, because he wired over 300 million won on the spot.
Ju Hwan and I were both technically still special forces personnel, for now.
But once the martial law was lifted and we all returned to civilian life, we would become guild leaders.
Ju Hwan's assigned territory wasn't Seoul — it was the upper-left region of the Korean peninsula.
And mine was the lower-right, where Daegu and cities like North Gyeongsang, South Gyeongsang, and Busan sat.
Though my abilities were so overwhelmingly dominant that the entire lower half of the country might as well have been under my jurisdiction.
The lower-left went to Kim Min-gyeol, the weakest of the four of us, with his Super Regeneration.
The upper-right went to Hwang Jinhyeok.
Word was he'd chosen a sponsor recently and grown tremendously powerful. I'd have to meet him at some point.
Gulp.
Gulp.
Ju Hwan downed all ten divine elixirs right there on the spot.
I figured he'd be fine — the man was absurdly strong already.
KUOOOO—
Mana began to materialize around him, rippling like a heat haze.
His orange mana wavered, then sank back into his body, absorbed completely. And the mana he'd swallowed soon began leaking subtly from his eyes as a fierce inner glow.
CRACK.
Cr-crackle...
A miniature explosion blossomed above his palm.
"What... in the world did you make...?"
Ju Hwan.
The first thought that crossed his mind after drinking the elixir:
I'm going to die.
Bottom-tier, low-tier, mid-tier, high-tier, top-tier.
The elixirs were graded across five tiers, and these were supposedly the absolute lowest of the low, so he'd gone ahead and downed all ten at once.
He was strong enough now to sweep away hundreds of orcs single-handedly.
At this level, wasn't he probably stronger than the Sword Masters from novels?
He'd grown so strong that he couldn't even imagine who he'd compare himself against anymore.
Naturally — he'd never fought anyone else, so the possibility that someone out there was stronger than him simply never occurred to him.
But the instant he drank the elixir and felt that sensation — death —
what surged through him wasn't fear. It was euphoria.
He'd begun to feel like he could never grow any stronger, and the waves — ever growing in number, ever thinning in quality — had left him disillusioned.
He'd burned through his entire mana pool just to brawl orcs bare-handed with Pakuto Arts, resorting to sheer madness for the sake of a real fight.
Back when he'd been dragging himself down to earlier wave stages just to feel something, he'd realized the battle-lust that first manifested in the war was never going away — and so he'd finally returned to the modern world.
And now, at last, something had shown him his limit.
The divine elixir — the one the mech Kim Hyunwoo had handed him.
Like drinking cold water on an empty stomach, every mana circuit in his body suddenly came into razor-sharp focus.
And the more he spun his mana along those newly visible channels, the wider the circuits grew — and the more his output amplified in tandem.
"I'm losing my mind here..."
He looked up at Kim Hyunwoo, who was staring at him with a dazed expression, and broke into a wide grin.
He simply couldn't hold it in any longer.
"Once the chaos in South Korea is over... when that day comes... I want to fight you. For real."
With everything he had.