That? That's Easy, Of Course (?)
“Nope. I'm done hunting wraiths.”
Wraiths were the easiest prey around, but after a thousand of them, even I had grown bored. Which meant there was only one thing to do: set my sights on bigger game.
“Dokkaebi?”
A dokkaebi, in a fantasy game? Orcs and elves I could understand, but dokkaebi felt far too Eastern for the setting. It wasn't exactly an Eastern-fantasy game, after all.
The moment my question left my mouth, the chat window—already scrolling fast—erupted.
“.......”
Some viewers were practically bursting to explain, while others only ever talked about themselves. I filtered out the ones crossing the line and simply took in the advice worth hearing.
Dokkaebi, huh. A creature I'd never once laid eyes on.
Strangely enough, my competitive spirit began to stir.
“Let's go, then.”
Alas, poor child. Off so soon, are you?
Beware the ground where Unreung crawls.
Look upon the path you'd take—look once more, and yet again.
Be careful. And be careful still.
For should you let your guard slip even a little…
the dokkaebi fire that swallowed the clouds will swallow you whole.
Following my viewers' guidance, I arrived at the place where the dokkaebi fires burned.
The region known as the Fire Sea of Unreung.
The moment my foot came down on that ground, it sank with a soft squelch—and something seething beneath the surface came into view. Something pulsing with a bluish heat.
“?”
I shook off a force that seemed bent on dragging me down and leapt high into the air, landing a step ahead. Before the cloud-like smoke could coil around my body, I sprang forward again.
I stole a glance at the chat as I weaved through the clouds clawing at me. Perhaps annoyed, the smoke itself surged up and tried to bind my ankles.
I swung my spear and cut it down.
“You just jump, though?”
No they're not. Clouds can be cut just fine.
After all, I'd watched the sky itself get carved open during the brief clash between the angels and the demons. There was no way that claim would hold.
Hm. Looking at it again, I really was among the weak here. Simply surviving among those insane monsters had been an act of courage in its own right.
“Looks like we're almost there.”
After running for a good while, the clouds finally stopped grabbing at my feet. Far in the distance, past the ring of encircling earth that was Unreung, a blue sea of fire spread out before me.
A great blaze built from countless tiny blue flames. Looking closer, I could make out small, flickering wisps here and there—and off in the far, far distance, fires of middling size as well.
“...First things first.”
Let's see what she can do.
Gripping my green spear, I lunged at the nearest dokkaebi fire. The moment it noticed me, it shifted from blue to red. Bouncing toward me like a slime, it swelled its body the way a lion swallows its prey whole.
Fwoooosh!
Flame met spear. The fire lost its cohesion under the spear's charge and scattered—only to merge with the flames around it, birthing something even larger.
A flicker of doubt crossed my mind, but I kept carving through the dokkaebi fires all the same. And still they only grew bigger.
The dokkaebi fire was, in many ways, like a slime. The differences were that it was a gas rather than a semi-solid or liquid—and that it steadily absorbed its surviving kin to grow.
By the time I'd cleared about half of the flames, the dokkaebi fire had swelled to three times the size of the ones I'd first faced.
One message in the chat caught my eye.
“......”
Tap.
I twisted the green spear once.
Three dokkaebi fires came crawling toward me. Each was three times larger than before—and their raw power had grown more than fivefold.
But what of it?
'That's not how you wield a spear, little saint. To think you regard the blood of the angels as nothing more than a means of physical reinforcement.'
Watch closely. The angels are a race known as the people of the spear. One thrust not enough? Then all that remains is to drive an even fiercer one home.
'Useless memory.'
I swept the wistful recollection—the one that gnawed at Lily—clean away.
The twisted spear shot toward the dokkaebi fire like a bolt loosed from a bowstring. No—it didn't fly, not exactly. The spear remained in Lily's hand, and the Sylphid's Ring on her finger poured its strength into the shaft all the same. But it whirled so fast that it might as well have taken flight, and it bored straight through the dokkaebi fire.
Fwooooom! The dokkaebi fire, swollen to triple its size, dissipated in an instant—and the flames around it, unable to withstand the shockwave of that force, lost their shapes as well.
In that moment, the dokkaebi fire stopped absorbing.
The chat froze right along with it.
“...Holy hell. What was that?”
“Uh… wasn't that Spear Tornado?”
“...The one only third-tier spearmasters can use?”
Behind the fire sea of Unreung lurked figures clad in black, hoods drawn low, lying in wait for Lily's belongings and her gold. The ones called Bandits swallowed hard at the technique Lily had just displayed.
In villages and neutral zones, harming other players was off-limits—but in hunting grounds like these, or on the roads beyond a village's protection, PK was fair game at any time.
Not that killing players through PK made someone a murderer or a bad person, per se. PK was, at heart, a game mechanic—one the developers actively encouraged.
But such acts never came without penalties. Commit PK, and the Plunderer title was slapped onto you first of all, earning you the hostility of villages and NPCs alike. Push your PKing too far, and a bounty would be placed on your head, sending bounty hunters hounding your trail. Some guilds made a habit of executing any Plunderer on sight, no questions asked.
“Still worth it, though…”
Despite all those drawbacks, the wealth to be gained through PK was great enough that Deoen overflowed with bandits of every stripe.
The leader of the three-man crew known as HandItOver scratched his head.
“We were only after the Sylphid's Ring, and now… no chance in hell. We get close and we're dead on the spot.”
“Body Enhancement must be really good, huh. Hah, maybe I should reroll too.”
“Quit talking crap. Do you know how much we've sunk into what we've already got?”
“Ahh, I'm kidding, I'm kidding.”
The long-haired bandit giggled behind her hand, fixing Lily with a stare through her Primal Eye.
She was genuinely beautiful.
Beautiful to the point of madness.
How fun must life be, walking around with a face like that? True, the woman herself wore a fabricated avatar—but the Lily before her was so breathtaking that such calculations never even came to mind.
The woman toyed with a keen dagger.
“Let's just kill her once. Her face annoys me.”
“Huh? She's nothing but pretty, though.”
“Yeah. Jack's got a point. Anyway, I don't see us taking that thing down head-on. Let's pull out. Getting our faces on her stream for nothing would be a problem.”
As the leader and his man rose from their spot with a lazy aww, fine, the woman leveled her dagger toward Lily.
“Mister. Listen up. That girl is raking in broadcast money right now, you know.”
The dagger flicked, and Lily's face flashed across its polished surface. A blade forged not from ordinary iron, but from some specialized material.
The leader nodded slowly.
“Plus she took gold coins off a woman named Yena. No way she's still sitting on all that without cashing it out.”
“Exactly.”
“That's right, boss lady.”
“So! Even skimming just ten percent of that money is fifty coins! That's over seven hundred bucks!”
Seven hundred dollars from a single plunder. What a lucrative line of work.
And beyond that—slim odds, admittedly—there was the Sylphid's Ring to consider, an item whose price was whatever a buyer would pay.
'Well, selling it would be the tricky part… but I can always funnel it through the black market.'
The woman flashed a bright smile.
The leader and his man shook their heads—weary in the way of people long accustomed to her. The woman was unstable at times, but her skill was beyond question. That was precisely why, despite countless raids, she had never once become anyone's target.
“Look, we all know you're good. But how are you gonna catch her? If you can't put her down in one hit, a kill order drops on all of us, and this whole lifestyle is finished.”
“That? Easy.”
The dagger wavered in her grip.
Razor-sharp—yet at the same time, reflecting what lay far, far away.
“This is more than enough.”