The Unstable Wildcard
"Sounds good. Let's go!" Tae-hyun had no reason to refuse. Honestly, the three of them were in no position to join any other party anyway! Two of them were currently afflicted with the plague curse, and Tae-hyun, by the looks of it, was likely to hit the level limit.
It's been so long since I joined a random party that I completely forgot about level limits. Normally, playing Pan-On involved forming impromptu parties to clear dungeons. Any regular player would have experienced level limits as a matter of course. But Tae-hyun was far from a regular player! He had only ever cleared massive, blockbuster quests, so he had never had a reason to join a party like this.
As they walked, Lee Da-bi leaned in and whispered in Tae-hyun's ear. "You aren't hit by the level limit, are you?"
"...!"
Lee Da-bi's intuition was on a completely different level compared to Cain's!
"Su-hyeok! Over here!"
Jeong Su-hyeok's friends called out to him warmly. Su-hyeok hesitated at their friendly demeanor. He was no longer the naive, pushover Jeong Su-hyeok of the past. Hanging around Tae-hyun had sharpened his wits dramatically!
"You guys... want something from me, don't you?"
"...!"
"How did you know?"
"...I'm leaving."
"No, wait!"
"Just sit down! Sit!"
Choi Jin-hyuk patted the chair next to him, urging him to sit. Su-hyeok sat down, casting a wary glance at his friends.
The era of the arena is coming! We're going to pass the qualifiers for the upcoming Arena Pro League and make a name for ourselves! Those were the ambitious words his friends had spouted. Since then, they hadn't really been in touch. Su-hyeok had been too busy clearing his own quests to pay much attention to them either.
Some weird guy flew all the way to the Uruk Region... Just clearing the daily quests in the Uruk Region was hard enough, but then a whole flock of bizarre cult NPCs had suddenly flown in out of nowhere. For Su-hyeok, it had been a total bolt from the blue! He had only just managed to send them away and return.
"Su-hyeok, we need your help."
"What kind of help?"
"The Prika Continent Arena! Join us!"
Indeed. The reason Choi Jin-hyuk had sought him out was none other than the arena.
"???"
Su-hyeok tilted his head. "Don't you guys already have a five-man team?"
"Well, about that..." Jin-hyuk began, counting on his fingers. "One of our guys caught the plague curse..."
"..."
An entirely unexpected reason! Su-hyeok had already seen the quest window for the plague curse. Since they were in the Uruk Region, it wasn't that dangerous for them, but it was causing absolute chaos back in the Erangs Kingdom.
"Can't you just play with him once the curse is lifted?"
"Who knows when that'll be?"
"I heard Tae-hyun-sunbae went to solve it."
"What? Really?"
Jin-hyuk's ears perked up. Stories about Tae-hyun were always fascinating to hear! It was always mind-blowing that such a famous player was so close to them.
"Even so, we can't just wait around until it's solved. Besides, the guy who got cursed died a few times and took a massive death penalty. He dropped out of the team to try and recover his lost stats. I don't think he'll be able to run the arena with us."
Jin-hyuk's five-man arena team was in much worse shape than expected. They were down a player entirely.
"Su-hyeok, please join our team!"
"Yeah! You're the perfect fit!"
"No... that's a bit..."
Su-hyeok hesitated. His friends seemed to have incredibly high expectations of his skills, but that wasn't actually the case. Of course, objectively speaking, Su-hyeok's skills were excellent. The explosive levels he had gained while traveling with Tae-hyun, the potential of his class, and his own sheer persistence. A player who could raise their magic skills to the Advanced tier just by practicing alone in the Magic Tower training grounds was extremely rare. Tae-hyun hadn't kept him around for nothing!
The problem... lay in Su-hyeok's skill—the passive that applied a random effect to every spell he cast, a skill that truly defied imagination. When he was wandering around alone, he could somehow manage the fallout, but if it went wrong in a 5v5 arena match, it would be impossible to salvage. What if he accidentally team-killed them? Just thinking about it was horrifying.
"...So that's why it's going to be tough," Su-hyeok explained in detail, hoping they would understand. Surely, after hearing all this, they would get it! But his friends had the exact opposite reaction.
"That's it!"
"That's exactly what we want!"
"...???"
Su-hyeok's face went completely blank. "What?"
"We want exactly that! As expected of Su-hyeok! Hanging out with Kim Tae-hyun-sunbae wasn't just for show!"
"I told you. With Su-hyeok's skills, it'll definitely work."
"No... guys?" Su-hyeok tried to interject in his fluster, but his friends were already chatting excitedly among themselves.
"You did understand what I said, right?"
"Yeah. Every time you cast magic, a random effect triggers."
"How on earth is that a good thing?!" Su-hyeok finally burst out, unable to hold back. No matter how he looked at it, that skill was a massive detriment in the arena!
Slap.
Choi Jin-hyuk placed a hand on Su-hyeok's shoulder and spoke in a dead-serious voice. "Su-hyeok."
"...?"
"We're in a position where we desperately need even something like that."
"..."
It was true. It was a horribly luck-dependent skill, a double-edged sword that could go either way if it triggered poorly... but precisely because of that, Jin-hyuk's team needed it all the more. Objectively speaking, Jin-hyuk's team was severely lacking in skill!
"We tried running other arenas, and we even went to check out the one in Prika, right? Our skills... are way worse than we thought..."
When they lost in other arenas, they could make excuses like, Damn it, we lost because of level differences! Dirty pay-to-win levels! or Damn it, we lost because of gear differences! Dirty pay-to-win gear! But the Prika Continent Arena was a place where such excuses were completely blocked! Having suffered defeat after defeat there, Jin-hyuk's team had no choice but to admit it. They were simply outclassed!
"If we want to pass the qualifiers and make it to the main tournament, there's only one way! Sheer luck!"
"Exactly! There's literally no other way!"
Levels and equipment were normalized, but classes and skills remained intact. With their average skill level falling short, Jin-hyuk's team had to bet everything on classes and skills.
"Su-hyeok! Let's go with luck!"
"That's all we have left now!"
Dumbfounded, Su-hyeok asked, "Didn't you say last time that you were risking your life on the arena?"
"This is risking it!"
"It sounds less like playing in the arena and more like flipping a coin..."
Su-hyeok's words hit right where it hurt! But Jin-hyuk and his friends didn't back down. They clung to him relentlessly! Seeing his friends literally grabbing his legs and sobbing, Su-hyeok's heart finally softened.
"Fine, fine. I just need to head to the Prika Continent and join you guys, right?"
"Su-hyeok!"
"Thank you!"
"No, seriously, don't get your hopes up too high. You have no idea how often this skill backfires."
"It's fine! It's fine!"
Jin-hyuk and his friends completely ignored Su-hyeok's warnings, already celebrating. They felt as if they had just recruited an army of a million strong!
"Do you think we could get Kim Tae-hyun-sunbae on our team?"
"Why don't you ask him yourself? I heard the broadcasting station invited him as a seeded team, but he turned them down. There's absolutely no way."
"Whoa, invited by the broadcasting station?" Jin-hyuk muttered with an envious expression. It was a level of treatment he couldn't even begin to imagine.
"Come to think of it, didn't they say a few foreign teams were coming as invited teams?"
"I heard Lee Se-yeon is coming from the Korean side. Is that true? It's not confirmed yet, right?"
The room instantly grew noisy as everyone started talking at once. Jin-hyuk waved his hands to quiet them down.
"Now is not the time to worry about other people. Since Su-hyeok has joined us, let's prepare with everything we've got! Our goal is to pass the qualifiers!"
"Hell yeah!"
"Connecting you to Gabriel now."
Bae Jang-wook nodded at the staff member's words. If one had to pick the player whose name was being shouted the most in Pan-On right now, it was undoubtedly Gabriel.
These were the grudges of players who had suffered massive losses due to the plague curse! Of course, it wasn't just haters. Players who caused massive, server-wide incidents like this always gathered a fanbase. Just like Tae-hyun had in Pan-On 1.
Despite becoming such a hot topic, Gabriel had vanished like a ghost as soon as the incident exploded. It was to the point where people wondered if he had stopped logging in altogether! Yet, out of nowhere, he had contacted MBS. Bae Jang-wook couldn't help but be bewildered.
I'm pretty sure Gabriel is a foreign player. If he was a foreign player, there were plenty of foreign broadcasting stations he could have gone to. Why on earth had he contacted MBS, a Korean broadcaster?
"Hello. This is Bae Jang-wook. What can I do for you?"
"Tae-hyun-nim??"
"Tae-hyun-nim???"
The staff members in the room all tilted their heads in confusion. What was with this extreme level of respect?
"Are they actually close?"
"Is he really his engineering disciple? For real?"
"No, but even so, does that mean player Kim Tae-hyun was the one who spread this plague bomb? Surely not..."
The staff members chattered, but Bae Jang-wook couldn't bring himself to flatly deny it. The Tae-hyun he knew... He is definitely the kind of person who would detonate something like that! That was an undeniable fact! Of course, Tae-hyun had absolutely nothing to do with this incident, but...
"Yes. This is indeed the broadcasting station that player Kim Tae-hyun has contracted with. But what is your reason for contacting us?"
"Ah..."
Bae Jang-wook was surprised. For a foreign player to even know about that. It was hard for overseas players to be aware of such details. He really was a massive fan of Kim Tae-hyun!
But Kim Tae-hyun probably doesn't care at all, though? In Jang-wook's opinion, Tae-hyun didn't seem like the type to care about viewership ratings. If he did, he wouldn't have played the way he did in the first place! The MBS broadcast was just a bonus for Tae-hyun—a convenient excuse to give his mother while playing the game.
"No, you don't need to worry about it to that extent..."
Jang-wook stopped mid-sentence. What if he had set it off a bit later?
Wait, that would have been an absolute disaster!
It was a relief that the Frika Arena League hadn't officially started yet. If it had exploded after the league was underway, the entire schedule could have been thrown into chaos. A cold sweat ran down Jang-wook's spine.
"I don't think he'd go that far... Wait, more importantly, where did a foreign player like you even learn that proverb?"
Watching Gabriel dig himself deeper and deeper into a pit of self-loathing, Jang-wook grew even more curious. Just what kind of relationship did these two have for Gabriel to act like this? To an outsider, they might as well have been a long-lost parent and child reunited.
Of course, the real answer was 'absolutely nothing.'
Tae-hyun didn't even properly remember who Gabriel was!