The Worth of a Weak Class
Even a weak spell like that was more than enough for Tae-hyun to make good use of.
It wasn’t because blacksmiths were strong characters that Kim Tae-hyun had gone around carving up rankers as a blacksmith in Fantasy Online 1.
It was because he had tried absolutely everything a blacksmith could do.
“Hm? What’re you watching? Fantasy Online 1 videos?”
“Yes. It’s different from Fantasy Online 2, but a lot of the rankers from back then came over to 2 too, right?”
“That’s true. Did you see the one where Lee Se-yeon fights a hundred people by herself?”
“Yeah. She was seriously incredible.”
The very essence of a Necromancer!
She opened by cursing the dangerous enemies first—the enemy mages, the priests, the ones who had to be dealt with immediately.
At the same time, she raised corpses to bind up the warriors’ feet and somehow kill one or two people.
And in a battle, one or two people were always going to die.
The instant they did, she revived the corpses.
A Necromancer on Lee Se-yeon’s level could summon powerful Death Knights right away.
To stop a Necromancer who kept restoring mana with all kinds of items and potions while raising corpses nonstop, you had to hit the Necromancer first.
Their side knew that too, so they launched a strike team to target Lee Se-yeon directly.
A special-ops squad made up of thief-type classes.
But Lee Se-yeon had already read it.
She triggered a magic trap on the spot and blew the thieves to pieces.
“Right? She’s not Rank 1 for nothing. Other than that, if you keep watching the other rankers, each of them has at least one famous highlight. You should check them out.”
“Even the thief ranker Do Dong-su’s videos...?”
“Do Dong-su? He’s the thief who got wrecked by Kim Tae-hyun. Instead of wasting time on that guy, go watch Kim Tae-hyun’s videos.”
A cold, merciless evaluation.
Choi Myung-sung said it without even one second of hesitation.
For a ranker on Do Dong-su’s level to get treated like that...
Yoon Ju-hwan suddenly felt a little sorry for him.
“Kim Tae-hyun’s videos were the first ones I watched.”
“Really? So? Wasn’t he insane? Amazing, right? Right?”
Questions fired out in less than a second.
“...”
Yoon Ju-hwan stared at Choi Myung-sung like he couldn’t believe this.
No, seriously—can someone working here be this openly fangirly about him?
But Choi Myung-sung was his boss.
Yoon Ju-hwan swallowed the words he really wanted to say and answered instead.
“Yeah. He really was amazing. His control was obviously incredible, and...”
When people talked about Tae-hyun in Fantasy Online 1, the first thing that always came up was his control.
He read the opponent’s movements, dodged the moment they attacked, countered the instant they used a skill...
To anyone fighting him, it was demonic control.
In fact, a few of the rankers who had fought Tae-hyun had even given interviews afterward.
They were rankers who appeared on broadcasts often, too.
“He seriously didn’t even seem human. It was like he was on drugs or something. You know—like stimulants? Focus enhancers? I’m pretty confident in my own control, but... damn. The second I tried to do anything, he’d already read it.”
“Cut! Cut! Come on, you can’t swear on air!”
“His control was obviously incredible, and?”
“Uh... his ability to read the battlefield was incredible too?”
Tae-hyun challenging people to one-on-ones was what made him famous, but the people who really knew had known even before that.
Especially players who enjoyed PK.
While other blacksmiths got support from giant guilds, Tae-hyun, who wandered alone, had to gather materials and items by himself.
Obviously, there was a limit to how much grinding alone could accomplish.
So then what?
He just killed other players and took what he needed from them.
But in Fantasy Online, attacking first carried penalties.
Tae-hyun had changed the way he looked at it.
‘The guys who run around PKing are already red anyway, so if I hit them first, there’s no penalty, right?’
And on top of that, PK penalties made them drop a lot more items.
So Tae-hyun started hunting down players notorious for PK.
Before he was fully prepared and started fighting rankers one-on-one, Tae-hyun had been someone who fought one against many.
Naturally, he had everything needed to fight groups by himself.
The eye to read the situation, the judgment to pull back when it was time to retreat, the absolute calm not to waver, the persistence to never give up until the very end...
“Is that all?”
“There’s more?”
“Tsk, tsk. This is why newbies...”
When Choi Myung-sung clicked his tongue and waved a hand, Yoon Ju-hwan bristled internally.
Right now, Choi Myung-sung’s attitude was exactly like...
I knew he was a Kim Tae-hyun fanboy, but this is too much!
It was like when some indie band that used to be obscure blew up after getting on TV, and one of the old fans started going, “Ah, these new fans don’t know anything~”
“When people watch Kim Tae-hyun, they all focus on the flashy surface stuff, but there’s something even more impressive.”
“What’s that?”
“Strategy.”
“Oh. You mean setting the stage?”
PK players didn’t travel alone.
And Tae-hyun had never just charged them head-on.
He’d sic monsters on them, sow discord among them, dig traps—whatever it took to split them up, create openings, and throw them into confusion.
Even now, some of those fights ranked among the all-time best clips.
“No. Setting the stage is impressive too, but... what I mean is the character itself.”
“The character?”
“He’s really good at planning out how to build a character to make it strong. When you look at the rankers in Fantasy Online 1, they all had strong classes, you know? Everyone except Kim Tae-hyun had top-tier classes.”
“That’s true.”
“If Kim Tae-hyun had just charged in with a plain blacksmith, no matter how good his control was, he would’ve lost. What made him special was that he did everything there was to do as a blacksmith. You know bombs in Fantasy Online 1, right?”
“Yeah. They were a blacksmith’s bread and butter.”
Bomb-type items blacksmiths could craft.
The damage wasn’t all that high, but they came with a stun effect.
If they hit, the target was paralyzed.
Almost every blacksmith combo had one of those bombs in it.
Bomb into hammer. Bomb into stun, then Nail Barrage. Stuff like that.
“By the end of Fantasy Online 1, everybody used bombs, but originally nobody did, right?”
“Huh? Really?”
“Their damage was laughably tiny. And on top of that, you had to invest in Mechanical Engineering and make them through a complicated process, so nobody bothered. Since all they really had was a stun effect, everyone just ignored them. But the one who dug into that was Kim Tae-hyun.”
Tae-hyun had to do everything a blacksmith could do.
That was the fate of a weak class.
Strong classes could get by using skills half-heartedly. Weak classes had to use their skills like their life depended on it just to keep up.
So he looked into everything he could possibly use.
That was how he discovered bomb-type items.
The damage was low, but they had a stun effect.
Tae-hyun took note of that.
He used bomb-type items to stack every debuff he could on his opponents, then forced them into ugly brawls no matter what.
And bombs weren’t the only trend Tae-hyun started.
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Tae-hyun had shown every single thing a combat blacksmith could do.
“Not just anyone can come up with strategies like that. You need a brain for it. Innate sense, too. And players like that always create buzz. Players who just follow the road other people paved can be rankers and still create nothing. But Kim Tae-hyun is different.”
“Ah. Right.”
Yoon Ju-hwan half-tuned him out.
He had now thoroughly understood that Kim Tae-hyun was amazing.
And he had also learned that when Choi Myung-sung started talking about Kim Tae-hyun, it was best to listen with only half an ear.
“Pelmas. What kind of people are in the group you put together?”
“Pardon?”
“I said, what kind of people? Warriors? Knights? Merchants? Thieves? Archers? Mages?”
“Mm... for starters, there’s a former Royal Guard knight.”
“...!”
A Royal Guard knight.
That was a position you could only reach after classing into a knight-type profession and piling up all sorts of achievements.
Not just any knight, but one who worked around the king and the royal family.
Of course that meant plenty of subordinates to command, along with connections to the king and nobility—a position everyone wanted.
Naturally, the NPC in that role wouldn’t be ordinary either.
Suddenly, Tae-hyun felt hope rising.
Pelmas was such a hopeless wreck that Tae-hyun had already given up expecting anything, but what if the others weren’t?
What if some of them were actually exceptional...?
“Really? What’s his name? Wait—and what kingdom’s Royal Guard? Atali Kingdom?”
“His name is Nekdon. But he isn’t one now.”
“What?”
“Nekdon retired.”
“Lead with that, damn it!”
Tae-hyun grabbed Pelmas by the collar.
He flared up, but when he thought about it, maybe it wasn’t something worth getting that mad over.
Even if the guy had retired, his stats should still be there, right?
“Wait. Even if he retired, his skills should still be intact, right?”
“His skills? Nekdon’s old, and it’s been quite a while since he trained, so not really...?”
“No, what kind of former Royal Guard knight is that lax and that bad at taking care of himself?”
“Well... Nekdon got caught gambling and was thrown out...?”
Pelmas said it while carefully watching Tae-hyun’s expression.
That was when Tae-hyun finally got the picture.
Ah. I don’t know who the rest are, but none of them are going to be normal, are they?
People wandering around in search of the god of luck and gambling were never going to be normal.
A gathering of total disasters.
Should I run?
For a moment, Tae-hyun felt an instinctive urge to forget the class quest and just bolt.
“Tae-hyun, sir. Even so, Nekdon does have ability.”
“Didn’t you just say he’s old and hasn’t trained in ages?”
“Even so, he has a foundation, doesn’t he?”
Pelmas seemed to have noticed what Tae-hyun was thinking and quickly started trying to soothe him.
“And Nekdon isn’t the only one in our group.”
“Right... right. Of course not. Who else is there? A criminal wanted by the kingdom?”
At this point, that honestly wouldn’t have surprised him.
“How did you know?”
“What the hell?”
The curse burst out of him on reflex.
Tae-hyun had officially failed to control his temper.
“I-it’s fine now. It’s all in the past. His identity’s been completely laundered, and he changed his face too, so nobody would know.”
“...”
The thief Ed-an.
Back in the day, he’d stolen a royal treasure and earned the king’s wrath—a fairly famous thief in his own right.
He’d eventually been captured, but he managed to escape by cutting off both his own arms.
After that, he changed his face, his identity, everything, to avoid being tracked down.
“And now he gambles too?”
“What exactly can an armless thief do?”
“Where the hell did you even find people like this?”
Now Tae-hyun was getting genuinely curious.
It seemed like it’d be hard to gather this kind of crowd even on purpose.
“Haha. We tended to gather people who were all a bit desperate... People like us, if not us, would’ve just believed in some other god, wouldn’t they?”
It was rare enough to find eccentrics who believed in a god with no temple and no priests.
Tae-hyun let out a hollow laugh in disbelief.
“Yeah. Good for you. You really did collect one of every type... Ah. Don’t you have a mage?”
“No mage.”
“...”
“But we do have something like a mage.”
“A mage is a mage, so what the hell is ‘something like a mage’?”
“A copyist who used to work under a mage at the Magic Tower.”
“How is that ‘something like a mage’? If someone cleans the royal palace, does that make them ‘something like a king’? Huh?”
A copyist meant exactly that—a person who copied things out.
Someone who wrote and organized whatever a mage told them to.
That was, obviously, very far from actually being a mage.
“Well... you know a mage’s grimoires.”
“Yeah. Skillbooks.”
Books that granted skills.
Each class had its own name for them, but books made by mages were called grimoires.
“He copied all of those down.”
“...!”
Tae-hyun turned his head at the unexpected answer.
“He copied down all the grimoires?”
“If his own words are to be believed, he copied every kind of book there was, so wouldn’t that make him better than most mages?”
The description something like a mage was, if anything, too modest.
Tae-hyun grew curious.
Would grimoires copied by a guy like that instead of an actual mage still work?
“Fine. I’ll know once I go and check. Please, for the love of god, let at least one of them be useful.”
“Haha. Tae-hyun, sir. We may look like this, but we are absolutely not incompetent people—”
“Why don’t you just shut up and go to sleep?”
“Yes, Tae-hyun, sir.”