Skill Master

I logged into Legacy of Raid and checked the time. It was still eight.

Pink Berry wouldn't be here for a whole hour, so I headed for the training grounds in the village. I wanted a look at the skills I'd picked up with my second class advancement, starting with the easiest to read: the passive.

Simple, and more than a little tempting. A skill that lifted my base attack, with attack speed stacked on top of it — a stat I'd always loved. I was mastering this one. No question.

Next came Chain Slash, which was a bit less friendly. I loosened up in front of a dummy and drew the sword I'd carried out of the Corrupted Adjudicator fight. The instant I thought about using it, light kindled along the blade.

Shhk!

A number floated up over the dummy, nothing like the damage from cutting down goblins at level 1. Chain Slash was a seriously finicky skill, and one of the reasons was the cooldown. Three seconds. The funny part was what happened when it landed: every successful hit raised my attack speed by 3 percent for three seconds.

Which meant—

I put strength into my right hand and lifted the sword. Just as before, a blue glow — the mark of Chain Slash — ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠wrapped the blade. I drove power into the left foot set behind me, kicked off the ground, and shot my right arm forward in a swing.

Shhk!

The sharp sound of the cut rang across the training grounds, but the blue light around my sword didn't fade. Chain Slash. Consecutive attacks, exactly as the name said. One swing wasn't a reason to stop my body. Sword and body moved together, the wrist turning as if it had always known the path, and this time the information didn't come through my eyes. It came through the body — the shift of muscle, the range of motion I could actually bear, the flow of force — and through Legacy of Raid's system laid over all of it.

I swung again, right on the razor edge where the chain wouldn't break.

I went to swing once more, and the blue light died.

"This is hard!"

Attack speed. No matter what game I wandered into, I liked watching it climb, and most of the time it was a good stat — the kind that let you fire a long-cast skill sooner, shaved the startup and the recovery, and made a fight feel clean. In Legacy of Raid it was a little too much to hold.

I knew attack speed was good. Chain Slash was the strange part. This wasn't some PC RPG where a higher number simply made you loose arrows faster. I swung the sword myself. I set the stance myself. Direction, timing, all of it was mine to choose, and in Legacy of Raid attack speed laid a correction over every one of those things. Think about it simply and the startup shrank, the blade came around faster, and the recovery shrank too. It sounded incredible. The problem was that ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠I had to control all of it myself, completely.

Until now I'd thought of a move, carried it into my body, and executed it, and somewhere near the end of an attack I'd start reaching for the next one. The moment I tried to think of that next action, the swing was already finished. In the sliver of time it took to reach for the thought, Chain Slash had already ended.

Sword Mastery had given me 5 percent. Two landed Chain Slashes added 6. Eleven percent in all — except it hadn't arrived as a flat eleven. It was five, then eight after the first hit, then eleven after the next. Every swing, I had to control a body that was getting faster because the attack speed was climbing under me.

"Wow... I knew it'd take physical skill, but I didn't think it would be this hard..."

With every attack the speed rose, and my judgment, my focus, my awareness had to rise with it.

"Nnngh. Feels like I can do it, and also like I absolutely can't..."

The attack-speed buff on Chain Slash could stack ten times. Ten separate times I would have to adapt to a body that kept changing speed.

"This is going to be nothing but practice, practice, and more practice."

That settled it. Ten successful stacks of Chain Slash. I had no idea how anyone else who'd advanced into Sword Master used the skill, but I was going to master this one — not as a system trick. With my body.

"I-I overslept...!"

Lee Hayan jolted upright, staring at her phone through eyes that still hadn't woken.

A full hour past the time they'd agreed on. She'd meant to wash up and fall straight into bed the moment she logged out of Legacy of Raid, but the video of her and Lee Arang raiding the field boss had left her heart hammering, and she couldn't make it stop. When she came back to herself, the edit was finished and the video was already up on her Ryutube. After that, her memory simply cut out.

She woke facedown on the computer desk, checked her phone by instinct, and confirmed that she had, in fact, overslept. The Connector had been charging. She snatched it up, fastened it around her neck, and hit the power button. The world in front of her went pitch-black, and from the cozy little room she'd decorated she launched Legacy of Raid at once.

The backdrop from last night's logout had barely finished appearing before she was looking around. Nowhere — not anywhere — was that small, cute Arang.

Wh-what do I do...! Oh, the friends list!

She opened the menu and dove into the friends window. The list was spotless, with exactly one name left on it, and a green light was burning beside Lee Arang.

Th-thank goodness. She's at the training grounds.

Hayan rushed there to apologize, and then she couldn't get a word out. Arang was standing with the sword from the Corrupted Adjudicator fight held level with her face.

It was a serious expression Hayan had never seen on her, and inside, Hayan screamed.

Sh-she's way too cute...?

From Arang's side of it, that had to be the face of someone concentrating with her whole life. On a build younger than fifteen, with that soft, round little face, even the most serious expression in the world was unbearably cute. Hayan was still squealing over it when the squeal turned into shock.

Arang was cutting the dummy. Blue light clung to the sword, and every swing came faster than the last, until somewhere along the way she was hitting at the speed of a max-level Sword Master.

A level 30 Sword Master.

Hayan knew exactly which skill that was. When she was bored she'd raised other classes for fun, and Sword Master among them — not to the level cap, but to 50. Chain Slash, the most basic skill a Sword Master had. Its damage coefficient sat lower than the other one-handed sword classes, but it was the only attack-speed buff they got. At first it had seemed wonderful. Then the Sword Master players figured out that attack speed was a trap stat, and Chain Slash was demoted to a three-second, 3-percent buff you popped before a long cast. Most of them didn't use it at all.

And now a little girl was taking that skill and carving a dummy to pieces with physical ability that shouldn't have been possible.

The numbers rattled upward one after another. No matter how she looked at it, that was not level 30 DPS. If Arang hit the level cap, put a full set of gear on, and walked into a raid, Hayan couldn't even begin to imagine the damage.

A little time passed. Then Arang suddenly pitched forward as if she were about to collapse, and Hayan sprinted in and caught her.

"Arang! Are you okay?!"

"Huh? Pink Berry, you're here? Is it nine already?"

"It's already ten-thirty..."

"Wait... ten-thirty? If you got here, you should've said something. You made me wait an hour and a half."

"No, I overslept. I only woke up at ten."

"Yeah?"

"Never mind that. Is your head okay?"

"Huh? Why?"

"What do you mean, why?! You just pitched forward! It's not because you played so long yesterday, is it?"

"I'm fine. I'm fine. I just focused a little too long and got dizzy for a second."

"You're really okay? Your body's still so young. Playing for too long isn't good for you..."

"I'm really fine. I'm super healthy! Come on, let's go level!"

"Haaah. All right."

Chain Slash.

About two hours of practice, and I finally had it. I kept the attacks coming while the attack-speed buff held at ten stacks.

Building the first stacks was the hard part. The moment I hit the maximum, the attack speed simply held, so it wasn't difficult anymore. Aside from my brain aching a little on the way there, there was no problem at all.

And the result of training, and training, and training again...

Nothing.

Because when you were actually killing monsters, three Chain Slashes and the mob was already dead...