Total Chaos
Meanwhile, Tae-hyun watched the commotion he’d stirred up with deep satisfaction.
A complete disaster zone!
The uproar Tae-hyun had started swelled in an instant, turning into a gale that tore straight through the crowd.
You successfully slip into stealth while pushing through a large crowd.
Stealth has increased.
His Beginner Stealth skill was already level 9 now. One more level, and he’d gain Intermediate Stealth.
Thanks to Divine Foresight and his Luck, he could pull off things that should normally have been impossible at his skill level.
As a result, his skill growth speed was several times faster than normal.
Tae-hyun successfully sprinkled poison into the Restaurant Guild’s cauldrons.
Once he’d succeeded in putting the poison in, everything after that was easy.
As the other cooks started stirring panic into the air, the players began to grow uneasy.
“There’s really poison in here?”
“Hey. You’ve got cooking skills, right? Check it.”
“There is poison! These crazy bastards! They really did poison it!”
Once not just the cooks but other players started shouting too, it instantly became accepted as fact that poison had been added.
“These sons of…”
“Come to think of it, hasn’t the Restaurant Guild been pulling shady crap for a while now? These guys are complete trash! Bet they got paid off by somebody to do this!”
Tae-hyun casually blended into the crowd of players and shouted at the top of his lungs.
The players, oblivious, flew into a fury and started yelling.
“Dirty bastards!”
“Restaurant Guild, you wanna die?!”
“Grab them! Don’t let them run!”
“What the hell happened?! You said there was no way we’d get caught!”
“W-we shouldn’t have been…”
Restaurant Guild Master Chao snapped at his guild member Wutan.
Wutan was fairly well known within the Restaurant Guild.
A poison-cooking specialist.
While other chefs chased better flavors and more moving dishes, learning new skills and raising their levels, Wutan had focused on learning how to make stronger poison and more insidious poison.
Chao had found Wutan’s abilities extremely useful.
It wasn’t as if cooks existed only to cook, after all.
The moment people were most off guard was when they were eating.
And in this plan, Wutan had proven his value perfectly.
While countless players enthusiastically ate the food, not one of them had noticed anything.
All thanks to Wutan’s poison-cooking skills.
He even had skills that prevented the eater from noticing, so even the other cooks hadn’t caught on.
And then suddenly, a disturbance broke out.
“How the hell did they notice?”
Grinding his teeth, Chao walked up to the cauldron and checked the dish himself.
Wutan had definitely rigged it so no one would notice under normal circumstances…
“?!?!”
Chao’s eyes widened.
What the hell is this?
“Did you put this poison in?”
“I didn’t!”
“Then why is there this crude-ass poison in here? What idiot put this in? Anybody and their dog could spot this!”
Of course, no one stepped forward.
Because Tae-hyun had put it in!
Chao spat and cursed viciously.
There was nothing to be done.
He had no idea what had happened, but at this point there was no cleaning it up.
“We didn’t poison it!”
“Then who put this poison in there?! Don’t give me that bullshit!”
“You got paid off, didn’t you? You took money, didn’t you?”
Around the cauldrons, Restaurant Guild members were being threatened by angry players.
How do they know? Is there a traitor in the guild?
It never even crossed Chao’s mind that some lunatic had secretly slipped poison into their cauldrons to cause this uproar.
To him, the far more plausible explanation was that one of his own guild members had betrayed them.
“No choice. Pack it up and run!”
“Yes!”
They’d already spread as much food around as they’d promised the guilds.
If they stayed any longer, the enraged players might attack them.
And of all places, Abalab City was somewhere the Governor didn’t care if adventurers PKed each other.
“Detox food for sale! I’m only charging cost!”
“Really? At cost?”
One player looked at Tae-hyun with obvious suspicion.
But Tae-hyun’s acting wasn’t something you could see through with just a look.
He slammed his hand down on the table where the dishes were laid out and said,
“I really am charging cost! Just look at what those Restaurant Guild bastards did. As a fellow cook, I’m ashamed…! I’ve got pretty decent antidote-related production skills. Come on, eat up! Detox food!”
Tae-hyun radiated the solemn sense of responsibility of a man who had sincerely chosen the cook class.
Even the suspicious player replied in an apologetic voice.
“Sorry. I shouldn’t have doubted you. Those Restaurant Guild cooks pulled something so messed up…”
“It’s fine. I understand. They’re the scum here!”
As people came flooding over, Tae-hyun quickly sold his food.
Then, in the middle of it, a whisper came in.
It was a whisper from Cain.
Looking up, Tae-hyun spotted someone standing behind the line of people in absurdly conspicuous armor.
Cain.
Cain blurted it out, stung to the core.
No matter what, he’d rolled around under Tae-hyun for this long, and now Tae-hyun was being stingy over a single antidote.
“……!”
Cain was horrified.
No way…
This fucking lunatic!
Cooking has increased.
You successfully poisoned 6 people. Poison Crafting has increased.
You successfully poisoned 13 additional people. Poison Crafting has increased.
Infamy has risen.
There was no way Tae-hyun, busy as he was, was running a charity service for other people.
He had a reason for doing this.
This is the perfect situation to level up my cooking skills—especially poison skills.
The Restaurant Guild had already taken the blame for the incident, so even if Tae-hyun poisoned a few more people here, there was no way it would come back to bite him later.
Even if those who ate the food later realized they’d been poisoned, they’d blame the Restaurant Guild.
Cain’s jaw dropped so far it looked ready to fall off.
I swear, in all my life, I have never seen a bastard like this…
“Try this and see if you get a detoxified message.”
“Nothing.”
“Then maybe not that one. Try this.”
“……It says I took frost damage.”
“Guess that wasn’t it either. Then try this one.”
“You bastard, you’re doing this on purpose, aren’t you?”
“What? Is that really something you should be saying to me when I’m working this hard for your sake?”
As Tae-hyun lowered his voice, Cain immediately shrank back with a squeak.
“N-no… it’s just… you keep getting it wrong…”
“You think the Restaurant Guild’s cooks are just random nobodies? They’re high-level players. It’s hard to detox poison like this in one shot, so shut up and stay still.”
“……”
Cain quietly shriveled up.
Meanwhile, Tae-hyun meticulously kept going until he’d wrung every last drop of skill experience out of the situation.
“Good. We’re done. Let’s go in!”
“Waaaaaah!”
“It’s Lee Da-bi!”
Hearing the roar of the crowd, Tae-hyun tilted his head.
“A famous player? Like a ranker?”
“No… Lee Da-bi is…”
“……?”
“She is pretty famous. She’s the Guild Master of Power Warrior.”
“?!”
Once he listened properly, Tae-hyun realized the cheers weren’t exactly positive.
“Power Warrior, go die!”
“Lee Da-bi, go die!”
“Stop putting up ads everywhere! It’s driving me nuts!”
But Lee Da-bi waved anyway, completely unfazed.
Looking at her, Tae-hyun came to a realization.
This woman’s skin was every bit as thick as his own.
“Everyone! Thank you! Please all join Power Warrior!”
“Jesus, no one’s joining!”
“Do you have to advertise your guild this dirty?!”
“If you join right now, you’ll get a finely crafted longsword and gold—”
“Shut up already!”
Cheers and boos poured out at the same time.
Because this player named Lee Da-bi had advertised absolutely everywhere, there were a lot of people booing her.
But surprisingly, there were also people enthusiastically joining in.
Not Power Warrior guild members, either.
Just people who’d heard the ads so often they’d become addicted to them.
“The strongest guild! Join now and get a free longsword!”
“Join! Join twice!”
What made it even funnier was that these people weren’t guild members at all.
As if enjoying the reaction, Lee Da-bi waved and walked into the arena.
Silence hung over the arena grounds.
Twenty people? More than I expected.
The players entering through the doors at each entrance checked each other out.
A giant pillar stood at the center of the circular arena, with rocks scattered throughout.
Quickly reading terrain like this was one of the conditions for winning in PK.
“Then… adventurers! Let the fight begin!”
The trumpet blared, but nobody moved first.
Everyone was feeling each other out.
Who should they attack first?
In an arena like this, once you got singled out, you were done—beaten down until the end.
Cain swallowed hard.
Right now, the person at the biggest disadvantage was him.
His appearance stood out too much.
His armor practically screamed, I’m high level!
“Everyone. Let’s attack that guy.”
“……!”
Sure enough, someone pointed at Cain.
A player who looked like a hunter jabbed a finger his way and said,
“He looks like a high-level player at a glance. We need to take him out now. If we leave him for later, he’ll tear through the place by himself.”
“That actually makes sense. Look at his gear. He looks ridiculously strong.”
This bastard…!
Cain’s body tensed with nerves.
This was bad.
Did he need to brace himself to fight while surrounded?
There were so many players in the arena that the preliminaries had been split again and again into separate groups.
And to save Cain for a decisive moment, Tae-hyun hadn’t bothered entering the same arena bracket as him.
Which meant there was no one here to help him.
Think. Think! What do I do?
If this had been the old Cain, he’d have given up and charged in first.
If he was going to lose anyway, he’d take a few bastards down with him.
But Cain wasn’t the same as before.
He’d learned a lot from following Tae-hyun around.
What would Tae-hyun have done here?
Cain let go of his sword hilt and looked at the others.
“This gear just looks like this on the outside. I didn’t have any other decent equipment, so I had no choice.”
“What kind of bullshit is that…”
“And me, a high-level player? Has anyone here ever seen a player like me before? Have you ever seen anybody walking around in gear like this?”
There was no way anyone had ever seen armor like the bizarre thing Cain was wearing.
“Stop lying just because you don’t want to get attacked! Everyone! He’s making that up to save his own skin!”
“That’s funny.”
Cain shrugged like he didn’t care.
He acted calm, but just making excuses in a moment like this was the worst move possible.
He had to attack.
“The second the match started, those two immediately started ganging up on me, right? Doesn’t that seem suspicious? You two are friends, aren’t you?”
“?!”
“Now that I look at it, it’s obvious. You were gonna gang up on people one by one like this, then pop out at the end and win as a duo.”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“I saw you two talking before we entered the arena. You looked real close. Figures you were on the same team!”
Cain was making it all up on the fly.
When you lie, the key is to just keep pushing. Don’t stop, don’t hesitate. What if you get caught? Deal with that when it happens.
It was like Tae-hyun’s voice was whispering in his ear.
“Th-this…!”
“No choice! Attack!”
“?!”
Were they actually a team?!
As the pair drew their weapons and rushed him, Cain couldn’t help but be startled.