There’s Definitely Something Important Inside
If it was being guarded even more tightly than the prison where they kept the nobles locked up… then there was no need to think too hard about it. Whatever was inside had to be something extraordinary.
And the Authority of Archisus too…
The pirates’ treasure was tempting, sure, but what Kim Tae-hyun needed most right now was the Authority of Archisus.
How was he supposed to raise his character?
He hadn’t joined a guild, and he’d started months later than everyone else. The gap was already there.
And if he wanted to catch up from here, ordinary methods wouldn’t cut it.
Now that he’d advanced into a Legendary class, he needed to find its exclusive skills as fast as possible, level those skills up, and hit skill mastery. At the same time, he had to progress through the Legendary class questline and collect its rewards.
He had to do both at once.
Legendary class. The words made it sound amazing, but the Avatar of Archisus was a lot rougher than he’d expected.
It came with an absurd penalty to leveling. Sure, it was good for stat growth, but even that was random. And compared to other Legendary classes, it didn’t even come with proper combat skills or magic.
Is this really a Legendary class?
Thinking about it just made him feel wronged all over again.
There was nothing more infuriating than having a class called Legendary only for it to be worse than the other Legendary classes.
“Ahem. Shall we go in?”
The pirate gestured politely as he guided the two of them forward.
Tae-hyun and Rufo shrugged and stepped inside.
“Haa…”
The first thing they heard upon entering was a sigh.
Not the sigh of someone genuinely exhausted, but the kind people let out when they were trying to look cool.
“You’ve arrived?”
“…”
Tae-hyun looked at Denelson with a dubious expression.
What’s with this guy trying so hard to pose?
Being handsome was already enough to make him irritating. Adding that dramatic air on top of it just made him even more obnoxious.
Since he was the head of a pirate crew, he was obviously a bastard to begin with, but seeing him act like this only made Tae-hyun want to kill him more.
“I heard about you.”
Denelson stretched. The movement was so elegant it looked more like a model posing than a man loosening up.
Rufo saw it and stiffened, nodding with a tense expression.
“Why do you look so nervous?” Tae-hyun asked.
“Can’t you feel that imposing aura?”
“What? That?”
To Tae-hyun, it looked less like an aura and more like a man getting drunk on himself and acting ridiculous.
Rufo looked at him like he was pathetic.
“You simply haven’t trained enough to recognize it yet, Lord Tae-hyun. Once you reach a higher realm, you’ll understand. Even if he appears full of openings, that in itself is proof of a perfectly completed sta—”
Slip—
Denelson wobbled, then quickly corrected his posture.
Tae-hyun stared at him and asked, “Didn’t you just almost fall over?”
“…”
Denelson straightened himself as if nothing had happened.
Tae-hyun wanted to press him on it, but he held back.
This was still the pirates’ stronghold, after all.
“I’ve heard you work quite well,” Denelson said. “From the blacksmith work to the pirate flags, my men say there’s nothing you can’t do.”
“I did suffer a bit, yes. Still, a promise is a promise, isn’t it?”
Rufo looked at Tae-hyun in utter disbelief, but Tae-hyun didn’t care in the slightest. He’d long since plated his face with a few layers of steel.
Suffered doing what?
The people dragged here had done all the work. Tae-hyun had mostly just watched.
“When you first said it, I wasn’t sure whether to believe you or not… but it seems I was right to trust you. Don’t you think?”
“You won’t regret it.”
“Good. I always thought merchant bastards were all talk and smooth tongues, but you seem to have a surprising sense of responsibility.”
Denelson nodded, looking pleased.
Rufo sighed inwardly. Merchant people might have silver tongues, sure, but compared to Tae-hyun?
Not even close.
“I intended to watch how you worked before deciding, but if you’ve done this much, that should be enough. I’ll permit you to come and go. Continue working here.”
Denelson, captain of the Caterand Pirates, has granted the merchant group passage.
Quest completed. Your reputation within the Caterand Pirates has increased.
Fame has increased by 100.
Infamy has increased by 200.
You may now use contribution points to take items from the Caterand Pirates. If you spend too many contribution points, the pirates may become displeased.
His Fame had gone up, but so had his Infamy.
That was probably because he’d been doing work for pirates.
Well, this much doesn’t matter.
Infamy only became a real problem once it got ridiculously high. At his current level, it wasn’t a big issue.
And besides, his Fame was still higher.
When Infamy far exceeded Fame, all kinds of things started happening. Cities might refuse you entry. A bounty could be placed on your head. People might come hunting for you.
But it wasn’t all bad.
There were advantages to having high Infamy too.
Evil-aligned NPCs liked players with high Infamy, and sometimes those NPCs would even come to you asking to become your subordinate.
Back in Fantasy Online 1, players who went all in on villain builds had deliberately raised their Infamy on purpose.
After all, if you were going to kill every player you saw and steal their gear anyway, it was more profitable to commit fully to that route.
And Tae-hyun had robbed those guys blind wherever he found them.
The reason was simple.
The higher your Infamy, the higher the chance you’d lose items when you died.
And if that stacked with red-name penalties from killing other players?
You were basically a walking item vending machine.
Before Tae-hyun’s flashy one-on-one battles with rankers, there had been a long trail of tearful PK players behind the scenes.
It got so bad that PK players had made their own online community just to deal with it.
A whole villain-player cafe formed for the sole purpose of hunting down Kim Tae-hyun.
Of course, gathering in numbers hadn’t changed anything.
Tae-hyun had just laughed and looted them all the same.
“Thank you for granting us passage, Denelson.”
“I’ll keep watching. You won’t grow lazy just because I praised you, will you?”
“Of course not.”
Tae-hyun moved to leave with Rufo.
The conversation was over, after all.
But Denelson stopped him.
“Wait.”
“...?”
“I heard your cooking’s pretty decent.”
How’d he find that out?
Tae-hyun was slightly surprised.
His cooking skill wasn’t low. Intermediate Cooking wasn’t something just anyone had. And once you added his Luck and the Avatar of Archisus bonus on top of that, the results he could produce were far beyond what most chefs could manage.
“Where did you hear that?”
“One of the merchant employees mentioned it.”
Rufo looked appalled.
Which idiot had let that slip?
It wasn’t some earth-shattering secret that Tae-hyun was good at cooking, but there had been no reason at all to tell Denelson that.
Who was it?
Tae-hyun asked the question himself.
He was curious too. Who had such a loose tongue?
“Who said I was good at cooking?”
“Do you think I bother remembering the faces of every worthless insect? The cooks we brought to the island were all disappointing, so I got a little angry, and someone mentioned it. I don’t quite remember who.”
Only then did the two of them understand what had happened.
Most of the players on the island were working hard.
That didn’t mean all of them were getting good results.
The blacksmiths assigned to weapons had it relatively easy. The truly unlucky ones were the chefs put in charge of Denelson’s meals.
The chefs assigned to the pirates were able to mass-produce food, work with ingredients they normally couldn’t handle, and gain experience that way.
On top of that, the pirates usually said everything tasted great, so completing the work was easy enough.
Denelson, on the other hand, was impossible.
He was pickier than the most insufferable gourmets in the cities.
Crash!
Denelson threw the plate the moment he disliked something. The chefs could only flinch and shut their mouths.
The chef players had pride too.
They were people who’d staked their gaming lives on cooking, in their own way.
So when Denelson acted like that, they became stubborn and tried again out of sheer spite.
Crash!
Another plate shattered. Another chef was thrown out.
A different reaction at last.
The other chefs stared at Denelson in shock.
The chef who’d brought the dish puffed up with pride and casually brushed under his nose.
This is my level.
I’m jealous…
I should’ve made that dish too…
There was no greater thrill for a chef player than satisfying a picky NPC with a single dish.
Crash!
In the end, not a single one of them made it past Denelson.
The merchant employee standing nearby had been chewed out so relentlessly that he blurted out the one thing he remembered—that Tae-hyun had gone out of his way to track down a cook and learn from one.
“I enjoy fine cuisine,” Denelson said. “Simply being delicious isn’t enough. It must have class.”
For a pirate, this bastard is ridiculously picky.
Tae-hyun listened with a flat expression.
To be honest, all this gourmet talk meant nothing to him. He was perfectly happy living off soup at the neighborhood sundae-guk place. Seeing some pirate putting on airs like this was just absurd.
“Can you satisfy my tongue?”
The Exclusive Chef of the Pirate Captain
The captain of the Caterand Pirates, Denelson, is notorious for his exacting tastes and difficult personality.
Creating a dish that satisfies his palate will be anything but easy.
But if you succeed, Denelson is certain to reward you accordingly.
A chance no chef can turn down.
Challenge the impossible.
🎁 Reward: Exclusive Chef of the Pirate Captain, ???, ????, ????
What kind of trash quest is this?
The rewards looked flashy enough. With that many question marks, Denelson was probably planning to give extra rewards personally.
The problem was Exclusive Chef of the Pirate Captain.
The moment he accepted that, he’d be stuck working under Denelson as a cook.
And for Tae-hyun, who was already too busy clearing his Legendary class quest, that would be a straight-up shackle.
No, wait…
Something flashed through Tae-hyun’s mind.
He felt like he could make use of this situation.
Ah. He’s not about to pull some weird stunt again, is he?
Standing beside him, Rufo suddenly felt uneasy.
Tae-hyun had already done the unexpected several times now. If left alone, there was no predicting what he might do.
“You’re going to refuse, right?”
“I’ll do it!”
“?!”
Rufo whipped around in shock and stared at Tae-hyun.
This man was serious?
“No, what in the world are you thinking? Every cook they brought here got thrown out!”
“Cooking isn’t something you do with skill alone.”
“What?”
“A true chef cooks with his heart.”
Denelson let out an impressed sound.
“Magnificent. Your attitude alone is different from those greenhorns outside.”
“Haha. Thank you for the compliment.”
The two chatted amicably, but Rufo wasn’t fooled for a second.
He had a good eye for people.
And in his opinion, Tae-hyun was absolutely not the sort of man who’d think like that.
Cooking with his heart, my ass.
If he said Tae-hyun might stab a customer through the heart with a kitchen knife, that would’ve been more believable. Tae-hyun was nothing like those artisan chefs.
What exactly is he plotting?
“Then may I begin cooking?”
“Fine. There are ingredients inside. Show me what you can do.”
“Thank you.”
Tae-hyun turned with a grin.
To Rufo, that smile looked ominous and nothing else.