The Mad Blacksmith Enters the Arena
Fantasy Online Arena.
It was a place built for PVP—player versus player combat.
The place where, whenever players got fed up while gaming, they’d shout, “Oh, you think you’re so good at fighting? Then get your ass into the arena!”
But never before had this many people gathered there.
“Is it starting?”
“Who do you think’s gonna win?”
“No clue. Still, doesn’t Lee Se-yeon have this? I mean, come on. It’s already ridiculous that a blacksmith and a necromancer made it this far in a fight. If Lee Se-yeon loses, that’s seriously humiliating.”
There was a reason so many people had come.
The players fighting in the arena were just that extraordinary.
One of them was Lee Se-yeon.
As the head of the Necromancer guild, she was the powerhouse who had kept her guild in first place for over a year and a half.
And that wasn’t all.
It wasn’t just her skill as a guild leader—her individual combat power was exceptional too.
She was also the ranker holding the number one spot in solo rankings.
Necromancers were known for excelling in large-scale hunts but being weak in one-on-one combat, yet Lee Se-yeon had overcome that weakness and defeated countless rankers in PVP.
On top of that, she was stunningly beautiful, so of course she was popular.
“Noona! I love you!”
“Unni! Please look over here!”
In fact, one-third of the people gathered here were her fans.
But Lee Se-yeon paid them no mind and stared straight ahead.
Her opponent was walking out.
“It’s Kim Tae-hyun!”
“Kim Tae-hyun! I’m counting on you! I bet on you! If you lose, I’m screwed!”
He looked like a completely ordinary man, but his popularity was no less impressive.
Kim Tae-hyun.
His class was blacksmith.
Of course, if he were just an ordinary blacksmith, he never would’ve become this famous.
In Fantasy Online, blacksmiths could make good gear and earn money, but they were clearly limited as a non-combat class.
It was the sort of class you either raised as an alt or picked if you weren’t interested in serious raids and combat.
But Kim Tae-hyun had shattered that perception.
“You want to go one-on-one with me? Are you insane?”
“Why? Scared?”
“No, I’m just wondering where this lunatic crawled out from...”
The man laughed as if the whole thing were absurd.
And reasonably so. His class was rogue.
Not just any rogue, either, but one specialized specifically for one-on-one combat.
And it wasn’t like he was some low-level nobody.
He was a player who consistently hovered around the top twenty in Fantasy Online.
And a blacksmith was challenging him to a duel?
“If you’re scared, I guess there’s nothing I can do.”
“Wait!”
The blacksmith’s angle was obvious.
If he refused because it was too ridiculous, the guy would run around saying, He was too scared of me to fight.
“Fine. Kim Tae-hyun, right? Get up here. I don’t usually indulge this kind of nonsense, so you should be grateful.”
“I’m really, really grateful.”
At the time Kim Tae-hyun said that with a grin, the rogue didn’t understand what he meant.
Start!
The rogue’s stealth was blocked when the blacksmith threw out a disposable item—ash.
The rogue’s figure appeared in midair.
The rogue, who had casually gone invisible and tried to stab him from behind, was startled.
No, it’s still fine. I’ll go with Ambush!
Ambush—the opener to every combo the rogue possessed.
The moment he attacked from behind, it would trigger a critical hit and inflict a status ailment. It was the rogue’s secret art.
Even if the blacksmith had noticed him, there was no way a blacksmith could keep up with a rogue’s speed.
“Y-you crazy bastard!”
And the rogue shouted in horror.
Not in the same sense as before.
This time, he meant it literally.
Because the one afflicted with a status condition wasn’t Kim Tae-hyun.
It was him.
“You put a trap on your own back?!”
No wonder his cloak had looked a little bulky.
The blacksmith had installed a paralysis trap on his own back.
The rogue, not realizing it, had landed his flashy backstab right into it.
Wham!
A massive hammer smashed into the rogue’s face.
Rogues were never a class meant to tank hits.
They were supposed to dodge, evade, and stylishly toy with their opponents.
His health vanished in an instant—down by half.
Paralyzed and unable to move, the rogue was genuinely stunned.
He’s a blacksmith?!
That attack power was ridiculous. It hit like a warrior’s.
“I don’t really have attack skills, so this is the best I can do. Cut me some slack.”
“You son of a—!”
The moment the paralysis wore off, the rogue used Backstep and leaped backward.
Sure, half his health was gone, but he was still fine.
The opponent was a blacksmith.
He was a rogue.
If he kept his head on straight, he could finish this without taking another hit.
Trap Installation
Trap Installation
Trap Installation
“???”
But instead of rushing in, the blacksmith began tossing traps onto the ground.
Since he wasn’t even bothering to camouflage them, the rogue could see them plainly.
There was no point in setting them like that.
“What are you doing?”
“Ah. Making sure you can’t dodge.”
Then Kim Tae-hyun raised his hammer and brought it down on the traps.
KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA-BOOM!
They were explosive traps.
And no matter how non-combat-oriented blacksmiths were, their defense was still better than a rogue’s.
“I... I lost...?”
The spectators’ eyes went wide at the unexpected result.
But that was only the beginning.
His next opponent was a holy knight.
Holy knights.
A class with such tenacious vitality and defense that other classes called them cockroaches.
The sort of enemy against whom trickery like what he’d used on the rogue wouldn’t work.
And the holy knight he’d chosen wasn’t some average one, either.
He was a ranker in the top ten.
But Kim Tae-hyun won again.
“H-he won again!”
From helmet to boots—even down to the underwear he wore beneath his armor—everything had been optimized.
It was equipment built specifically to counter a holy knight.
Of course, if that alone had been enough to beat holy knights, they never would’ve been so hated in the first place.
What impressed people was Kim Tae-hyun’s control.
Against the rogue, the agility gap had simply been too wide to avoid getting pressured, but against a holy knight with similar agility, that control truly shone.
Strike, dodge, come back in, strike again.
The holy knight, with no decent wide-area skills, was driven to tears.
His vitality was so high that he kept recovering every time he got hit, but being pounded like this over and over was mentally exhausting.
Only after more than three hours of being reduced to something close to a punching bag did he finally surrender.
Even then, he still had more than half his HP left.
“I surrender!”
And Kim Tae-hyun didn’t stop there.
He kept challenging top-ranked players to PVP, and every time, he won.
Class differences seemed not to matter to him in the slightest.
One day, after a match ended, someone asked him: