A Flash of Enlightenment
The skeleton known as the cheapskate—Clang! As I watched the light of madness and excitement fade from the fallen orc’s eyes, my consciousness slowly returned to its proper place. It felt like surfacing from an abyss so deep that you couldn’t see even an inch ahead of you. Huff… Huff… Th-this… So this is actually possible…
With a dagger. In a single strike. I had split a mid-grade orc warrior cleanly in two. Not by leaping from the sky with high-speed flight, but with pure strength alone. The cross-section of the orc that had fallen with its body split left and right was so perfectly smooth that I wondered if I had truly done it myself.
Squelch.Hmm?! The slippery sensation of byproducts on my leg drew my gaze downward, but my head soon turned forward again.
Sixty… maybe over seventy.
The countless orcs that had surrounded me in a circle all lay on the ground, tongues hanging out, their lives extinguished. I couldn’t have done all of this… Damn it, there’s a gap in my memory…
Screams and the clash of weapons echoed from every direction. Fierce battles where lives hung in the balance still raged nearby. Yet I could only stare blankly at the severed cross-section of the orc where blood had just begun to spurt.
A tremor ran through me as if a motor had been attached to my bones. Goosebumps erupted from the crown of my head to the tips of my toes. The scene itself wasn’t clearly pictured in my mind, but the hand gripping the sword remembered what it had done. It conveyed those cool, razor-sharp sensations, and only then did the reality of it begin to sink in.
It was merely a speck of the realm I had longed for so desperately, yet even that was enough to make me want to shout with joy. The shudder that felt like it would last forever burrowed into my marrow, and at last it brought up a message I hadn’t seen in a very long time.
The level of Trait Penetration has increased!
The level of Trait Penetration has increased!
Penetration Lv.5 — Your swings now gain 5%(+2%) penetration.
Whoa… Penetration at level five… It was surprising that the trait had jumped two levels at once, but I still had questions. How had a dagger with a blade shorter than twenty centimeters managed to bisect that hulking orc? Was this the power of the Penetration trait? Or was there something more to it than simply ignoring defense?
Shrrk.Hmm? When I glanced at the dagger, whatever had lingered at the tip of the blade was rapidly vanishing. I tried to summon that energy again, but the unidentified power refused to reappear.
…… I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t move. All I wanted was to hold on to the sensation that had just brushed past me, even if only a little longer. I think I understand a bit now… For the moment, that was enough. It was a shame, but I had to be satisfied. I had heard that some hunters missed an epiphany when it came and regretted it for the rest of their lives. I used to wonder how anyone could be so dramatic, but if I had let this feeling slip away, I would have spent the rest of my days pounding the ground in remorse.
The world quickly snapped back to normal speed. The white space vanished as if it had never existed, leaving only the metallic stench of orc blood, hunters staggering as they still tried to collect loot, and flocks of nameless birds descending to feast on the corpses.
— ······!
When I swept my gaze around, I thought I heard someone calling me. That’s right. I was standing in the middle of a battlefield, and my next course of action was obvious. It was not yet time to stop.
Eliminate 10,000 enemies using dagger-type weapons while in stealth.
📍 Progress: 379 / 10,000
When did it rise this much? Only about a hundred and fifty enemies remained within range, and they were clustered more than a hundred meters away from me. I wanted to sink into that sensation once more. Just as I prepared to fly toward them—
“Ilwol! Over here, over here!”
A short distance away, Yeonhee and the rest of the party were staring straight at me. Of course I had noticed them. But I had wanted to pretend I hadn’t and rush back into battle. Their expressions, however, told me that would be a bad idea.
…… The atmosphere was subtly different from usual. I couldn’t tell exactly why. “It’s fine. We’ve almost finished cleaning up our side,” Yeonhee said, waving me over as if to reassure me. What did she mean, fine? There were still plenty of enemies left.
“The summons acted as a wall… The others probably didn’t see anything. Even if you fought while hidden, they wouldn’t have realized it was you.”
What didn’t they see…? I tilted my head for a moment before the meaning finally clicked. Ah, my fighting style. Right… I had killed quite a few in that short time using only a sword. A hazy memory surfaced. I had repeatedly turned stealth on and off to confuse the enemy. That was quite different from the mage concept I had openly displayed. Of course, to some it might have looked like crude swordsmanship and cheap tricks, but still. It must have been threatening enough to warrant hiding the scene with summons. Yeonhee’s quick thinking had clearly been a stroke of genius.
I got too absorbed…
While I stood there still half-dazed, Arin—whose rabbit ears were standing much stiffer than usual—cleared her throat and spoke.
“Ahem. You did pretty well. But Ilwol, your downward slash from the upper stance is strangely clean… It’s peculiar. Using such large motions in a dungeon is rare… Still! You have a long way to go! Cutting cleanly must not devolve into simply hacking with brute force. Understand?”
“Clack… Clack clack.”
“And what was that in the middle? A swordsman using a body charge! Using the spikes on your body is fine, but… Anyway, a swordsman shouldn’t do that, right…? I-I don’t know!!”
Arin shook her head vigorously, as if she truly had no idea. Wasn’t killing the enemy all that mattered, no matter the method? Perhaps it was the stubborn pride unique to swordsmen that demanded they subdue opponents with the blade alone.
“Ehem…” Her face looked exactly like a master scolding a disciple to stop showing off and train harder. She was surprisingly good at imitating our teacher. The rabbit beastkin walked over, lightly punching my shoulder with a smile. Even on the battlefield she was adorable. I wanted to touch those ears just once. They would probably tremble like crazy.
My mind still felt like it was floating fifty centimeters in the air, but I didn’t miss Yeonhee’s quiet murmur.
“Ilwol…”
“Clack?”
“You can’t go too far ahead by yourself…”
“???”
“You have to leave me enough room to follow…”
…… Only after hearing Yeonhee’s slightly subdued voice did I understand the strange tension I had felt from the party. They had witnessed the moment I approached enlightenment, and the emotions they felt then must have been as mixed as their joy. Even I could tell it had been no ordinary instant. They must have realized it wasn’t the kind of everyday insight that comes from simple exploration. If I had been human, I would have reacted according to their personalities, but since I occupied the ambiguous position of a monster that looked human, they probably didn’t know how to congratulate me.
The silver lining was that everyone, including Yeonhee, was overflowing with talent. They must believe they could catch up somehow. When I reflected on my previous life, I hadn’t been able to do the same. Deep down, in a place even I couldn’t recognize, I had hidden envy and jealousy, sometimes comforting myself with the thought that other possibilities like heightened senses existed. The only comfort was that, as time passed, I had tried to overcome that ugly side of myself.
The efforts I made back then weren’t in vain.
While I quietly savored that peculiar sense of accomplishment, a tremendous explosion erupted where the orcs were gathered, presenting us with our next choice.
“The other side is still in full swing. Should we go help?”
“Let’s recover our mana slowly and then move. We have Ilwol’s buff now, so we should be able to run in a little while.”
“Huff… We’re going again? I’m getting a bit tired.”
With a flick of my wrist, I tossed each of them a brown bottle filled with Irmana’s lake water. I had prepared them in advance that morning.
“Huh? What does giving us this right now mean? Are you telling us to drink it and charge straight into battle? Are you even acting like a supervisor who makes us do all the work now…!”
“Clack clack clack!”
“Hehe… Ilwol says stop complaining.”
“Hah… How dare you speak that way to your master!”
Arin, who had put on a deliberately stern expression, downed the water in one gulp and produced an empty bottle. The others followed suit.
“Kyah! This tastes better than most drinks! Give me more!”
“More!”
“Clack clack!”
“No, just one more bottle! It keeps coming out of that kettle anyway, doesn’t it?”
I nodded.
“Ugh, exactly!”
No. You can’t keep relying on this. Real growth comes when you fight as if you have no items. I shook my head firmly and simply pointed toward the last remaining group of orc stragglers.
“Tsk… Ilwol. You cheapskate. Miser. Scrooge.”
“That’s why your head went bald!”
Wh-what! I used to have such luxurious hair! Calling a skeleton bald…!
“Ah… That was a bit too harsh…”
“Then please accept it for him, Yeonhee. I feel like we should each carry at least three bottles to be comfortable—”
“Ah… N-not me…”
Yeonhee was being held by both Joo-ah and Arin as she slowly walked forward. Joo-ah must have learned from Helen that Yeonhee was weak to this kind of sly teasing and had begun using it.
“I-I’ll talk, so…! Let me go. We have to fight…”
“Hehehe— You promise?”
“Thank you! Shall we run now?”
These cheeky little… Using Yeonhee as a hostage. If she asked, I wouldn’t be able to refuse. We headed toward the objective at a leisurely pace.
Because of ‘Clacky’ and ‘Jeombaki,’ a large number of monsters had swarmed our area, but since Arin and I had performed far beyond expectations, we had already reached the finishing stage. The summons had diligently collected the loot, and Ham Eun-yeong’s singing voice, riding on the shoulder of Lizard No. 4, even roused the hunters who had been sitting down nearby.
Hundreds of orc corpses lined the gentle slopes of the small hill. Those had been gathered by the summons as well. Wow… How many bombs is that? It wasn’t normal to drool at the sight of monster corpses, but to my eyes they looked like lifelines that would protect both Yeonhee and me.
We stored every corpse in the inventory and sped up, arriving at the highest point of the ridge where well over a hundred orcs had taken up a defensive position. The highest point referred to the starting area that contained a crumbling, half-destroyed old fortress. It had originally stood over ten meters tall, but the broken walls now looked less than seven.
As I scanned the situation, my eyes caught one particular orc standing atop a pile of fallen stones, fighting the hunters. That bastard. It’s him. He was the one who had thrown an axe while I was momentarily distracted. An orc warrior whose strength lay somewhere between mid-grade and high-grade. It was only natural that the strongest one would survive until the end.
— Prrrk… Huff… Huff… Seeing him drool blood-mixed saliva, it was clear he was heavily exhausted as well. The moment we joined the fight, the tide turned sharply, and he surely knew it.