Taming the Fox
The festival, sparked by Journey’s event, was in full swing.
Even as everyone else sang and danced with abandon, there were those who couldn’t quite let themselves relax.
“…So what do we do now?”
“I’m asking the same thing. Damn… and here I thought this was finally the run where we’d get the first clear.”
“Hey, let’s not lie to ourselves. We couldn’t even land a single hit. What first clear?”
“Whose side are you on?”
“You little punk, did the gravekeeper put you up to this?”
It was the party led by “PizzaIsStillHawaiian,” along with everyone else who had been racing for the first clear against the raid boss called Gravekeeper.
To them, Gravekeeper was a mountain they had to conquer—an immense, impossible peak.
Honestly, if you were to turn the word absurdity into a character, they thought Gravekeeper would be exactly that.
And yet they hadn’t given up on the strategy, because the higher the mountain, the greater the sense of accomplishment once you finally climbed it.
“A raid’s only fun if it’s hard. If it’s easy, what kind of raid is that?”
Joining hands with your comrades and overcoming a towering mountain.
How romantic was that?
Of course, there was also the matter of prestige, which made the whole thing even more enticing.
In any case, for those reasons, they refused to let go of hope and kept searching for even the smallest opening.
“I think Gravekeeper is hard because it’s a realistic boss. In other words, it doesn’t behave like an MMORPG boss.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Think about it. If this were reality, would a boss really slap a marker over people’s heads saying, ‘I’m hitting this one!’?”
“Uh… no?”
“Exactly. So we need to approach this realistically too. Not with the mindset of ‘I can take damage and keep fighting,’ but ‘I can’t get hit at all.’ Obviously that isn’t easy either, but still.”
Even in Silia Online, as realistic as it was, every boss up to that point had still followed the rules of an MMORPG.
They attacked the player with the highest aggro, executed patterns in a fixed order, or unleashed one pattern chosen at random from a set list.
Of course, responding to those attacks was left to the players, so individual skill still mattered.
But Gravekeeper was different.
It was a being that had cast off the chains of the system that bound all the other bosses.
That was why Gravekeeper was treated as a stain on Demonins, and why players cursed it so freely.
Love it or hate it, if they were going to face something like that, they would have to abandon their conventional sense of logic just as completely.
“Healers, don’t try to force heals. Stay as far back as you can. Tanks and DPS, if your HP starts dropping, go to the healers and get patched up. If things look dangerous, just throw up shields. And if it looks like Gravekeeper’s coming, don’t even glance back—run.”
“Tanks, don’t get scared and keep fighting. Stick to it like your life depends on it. If you try to save your own skin and live alone, it’s over the moment everyone else dies anyway. And if it comes for the healers, get on it immediately.”
“Lastly, DPS—when the tank’s got it pinned down, look for your opening and hit it. Don’t just swing wildly. Coordinate with each other so you take away its room to dodge. And always keep in mind that an attack could come flying at you at any moment.”
At first, it didn’t go well.
Trying to step outside the familiar framework of the system and fight like it was real battle caused problems everywhere.
Waiting for heals, only to die.
Trusting a shield and dying anyway.
Charging after it too hard, losing balance, and dying.
Death, death, death.
Even the progress they had made up to that point regressed because of it.
The crowd on the forums mocked them for it.
But as the saying went, one step back for two steps forward.
“I saw it—your attack pattern…! Rapid-rattle-rattle-rattle! Aaaah, somebody save me!”
Clang!
One of the DPS finally managed to block Gravekeeper’s sword.
Of course, they were immediately cut down by the follow-up slash, but it was still an incredibly encouraging result.
“At last… you’ve become human.”
“That sword-using bottom-feeder who used to die without even dealing damage is finally pulling his weight. I have no more regrets in life…”
Overcome with emotion, the raid leader that night opened a bottle of wine they had been saving for a truly important day.
What occasion could possibly be more important than the day a reckless sword monkey finally became a person?
Once they grew accustomed to attacking and moving their bodies more smoothly, the PizzaIsStillHawaiian party and the other teams sharing information with them were all smiles.
They finally had hope that they could make progress at last.
“I can’t deny it’s a badly designed boss….”
“But it also feels like a boss that suits the freedom of Silia Online better than anything else.”
Before long, they had reached the point of glorifying the very Gravekeeper that had butchered them dozens of times.
That alone showed just how brightly their copium furnaces were blazing.
And the flames shone so fiercely that the people watching from the sidelines started worrying the entire circuit board might burn out.
Then, at that moment, the honorary firefighter Journey appeared.
Swoooosh!
“…”
“…”
Thanks to Journey dumping cold water on them without warning, their tiny, precious copium furnace survived.
“Damn it, what’s the problem? Why don’t we just leave them alone and keep bashing our heads against this thing? So what, are you saying we’re not even going to raid?”
Someone shouted in the suddenly gloomy atmosphere.
Even so, the heaviness hanging over the group showed no sign of lifting.
Gravekeeper had shown just a little bit of humanity.
And when Journey, the one person it could actually talk to, was spared and turned back instead—that was where all the trouble began.
After that, when Journey hurried after it and shared food with it, and when it stood quietly before some nameless person’s grave, the entire community had exploded.
It started with claims that it wasn’t a merciless raid boss but a human-like NPC, and before long there were even people painting those who challenged the Gravekeeper raid as violent troublemakers.
How were they supposed to ignore the scrutiny now?
Even if it had a human side, it was still a raid boss.
Even if they cleared it, it would just resurrect again anyway, so why was everyone making such a huge deal about it?
“When we were the ones getting wrecked, nobody said a damn thing!”
“Are we not even people to them?”
Their grievances bubbled up like a spring, but even the largest spring was just a drop before the vast sea.
And with overseas communities causing a ruckus too, what exactly were they supposed to do?
There were people defending them, sure, but the timing was undeniably awful.
After all, only one party could enter at a time, and now even more people were climbing the mountain just to watch the stream and see Gravekeeper for themselves, which meant their time for attempts kept getting cut short.
In truth, that was a bigger problem than public opinion.
“This might actually be a blessing in disguise.”
The raid leader, who had been watching the situation, finally spoke.
“Honestly, even if we kept hammering away at it the way we were before, the odds of clearing it were microscopic. Hell, ‘microscopic’ is generous—it was basically impossible.”
They had kept telling themselves they could do it in order not to lose their motivation, but there had been no sign of a clear path forward.
When the raid leader brought up the truth everyone had been avoiding, all eyes turned to them.
“We should go with the flow.”
“You mean give up?”
“No. Take a break. A week or so. Gather information, sharpen our control. Maybe look up some sword manuals or even take a few classes at a kendo dojo. If you really can’t be bothered, play a Souls-like game or something.”
“So you’re saying we should improve ourselves.”
“Exactly. If we can discover Gravekeeper’s weakness in the meantime, even better.”
“If that’s the case, then….”
“I feel like a manga protagonist. Isn’t this basically the cliché where you meet a formidable foe, get crushed, then train until you get stronger?”
The sharpness in their eyes, which had bristled at the thought of a surrender announcement, softened once more.
The raid leader, who had broken into a cold sweat a moment earlier, spoke in a deliberately calm tone.
“I’ll tell the other parties too. We can suggest taking a short break.”
“What if they say no?”
“Then let them try clearing it by brute force. If that were possible, we’d have done it already. And the other groups are probably in the same boat as us, so they’re unlikely to refuse.”
Sure enough, not a single top party rejected the proposal.
They, too, had come to feel the limits of their own abilities.
And so, a miraculous grand unification was achieved.
With blood-hot competitive spirit set aside for the moment, a stage of harmony opened before them, and that was the beginning of the peace summit later remembered as the Hawaiian Pizza Summit.
* * *
“Aaagh!”
“Why, why us?!”
A mob of Apostles, their voices overflowing with injustice, went flying through the air while shouting something incoherent.
As if I could understand a single word of it.
I couldn’t exactly throw them toward the cliff, so I lobbed them back in the direction of the mountain path they’d climbed, and they vanished between the trees with pitiful echoes trailing behind them.
“Nice direction. Nice power.”
I saw off the final Apostle as they flew in a clean arc that made me wonder if this might have counted as a hole-in-one if this were golf.
Maybe I had a talent for golf.
Maybe I was one of those tragic geniuses who never even knew they were gifted because they’d never tried it once in their life?
Ah, the tragedy of an education system that drills people until they die without ever knowing their own talent. How heartbreaking.
“Hmm… still, I guess this world is better than that one.”
No, it definitely was better.
Korea had its share of problems, sure, but at least people weren’t spending every day worrying about whether they’d survive.
In this world, it wasn’t even a matter of rote education—half the kids never got any education at all and learned how to hold a dagger before anything else.
Unless, of course, they were the children of the very, very high-and-mighty.
Well, either way, this defense was over.
The crack in my sword had widened even more, so today I’d fought mostly with hand-to-hand techniques instead of blade work, and because I’d been moving my body more, it was surprisingly good for blowing off stress.
I was brushing the dust off my hands when I felt movement below the mountain path.
“Haa… haa… there, there he is…!”
A new wave?
As I prepared for battle, a familiar voice struck my ears.
“Hello!”
“…?”
It was definitely the voice of that woman called Journey, or whatever her name was.
Journey, who had somehow learned to greet people with a fairly natural pronunciation, bent over and gasped for breath as she stood before me.
The whole thing was so casually familiar, like she’d come over to a close friend’s house, that I was momentarily at a loss for words.
…What?