Basilisk
Slash. Slice. A splintering crunch, and the wet sound of something chewed apart. The desert monsters that charged Jin-soo died in the space of a breath. Those that came running over the sand fell without ever piercing the summons' barrier, and the ones that had buried themselves in the dunes to close the distance died the same way, unable to break the Sand Worms' guard.
With two Sand Worms added, there is nothing left for me to do.
Not long ago, quite a few had still been slipping through the sand to bare their fangs at him. Now the Sand Worms were dealing with every last one, and not a single monster managed to reach Jin-soo.
Thanks to the Sand Worms, the speed of the hunt has improved beyond comparison.
It seemed he could finally make a proper circuit of the place. The desert monsters slammed into the wall of summons and were ground apart in a one-sided slaughter, unable to break through.
Is this stretch finished?
When the flow of experience thinned to a trickle, Jin-soo shifted to another stretch of desert and repeated the same pattern. A full day passed that way.
This is a problem.
Jin-soo frowned. His level was rising well enough, and his achievements climbed without issue. The Sand Worms, however, refused to show themselves at all.
Surely the mission zone does not hold only a single Sand Worm.
He wanted to believe otherwise. The more he turned it over, though, the more he suspected it might be true. Before his regression, Jin-soo had hunted Sand Worms himself. Most Players, however, chose to avoid them rather than fight.
There were guilds, I had heard, that simply cast Sanctuary and waited the mission out.
A survival mission had no monster one was required to kill in order to clear it. If the healers took turns casting Sanctuary and the party simply endured, the mission could be cleared by waiting alone.
Once one reaches the upper floors of the Tower, time-attack survival missions cease to appear at all, so the method loses its meaning.
On the middle and lower floors, however, it was a perfectly serviceable way to clear a time-attack survival mission with ease.
The drawback is that one does not grow. Then again, people do not usually endure blindly from start to finish.
With multiple healers who had learned Sanctuary, a party fought when the fight was manageable, and when something beyond them appeared — a Sand Worm, for instance — they cast Sanctuary and weathered it. That was all it took. Used that way, the method could strike a reasonable balance between growth and safety. The catch was that Sanctuary had to be triggered again and again, which meant a party absolutely had to keep a large number of healers on hand.
The problem is how few healers there are.
Healer advancement tomes dropped in far smaller numbers than those of other classes. In raw combat power, a healer was bound to be the weak one, and without the help of companions, leveling itself was impossible. Worse, both Players and any monster with a measure of intelligence marked healers as the first to be killed the moment battle was joined. Party members did everything they could to protect them, but that protection could never be perfect.
And should the party itself collapse, leaving everyone to survive alone, a healer is as good as dead.
When it came to a moment in which saving one's own life was work enough, most people — unless their sense of duty ran unusually deep, or the bond between them did — abandoned the physically weaker healers and mages and left them behind. A healer's chance of survival dropped sharply as a result.
When the numbers are few, the price rises. That is only natural.
And yet a healer was indispensable to the hunting of monsters. A mage, put bluntly, was only an inconvenience to lack. The hunt grew less efficient, and that was the whole of it. Without a healer, hunting itself was impossible.
The reason was simple.
This world is not a game. It is reality.
The Tower was a world like a game, possessed of a special power called the System. A Player could level up and come to possess a body beyond human limits, and could learn skills that conjured masses of fire and ice. There was no save-and-load function, however, and no coming back to life in a village after death.
Die, and that is the end.
Even a mortal wound could be healed completely, so long as the wounded lived and, with the help of companions, climbed to the next floor of the Tower. Death, though, was final. Without a healer, it was a world in which a small wound could fester and kill. Without Sanctuary, one could neither sleep easy beyond a city's walls nor make use of the auction house. A healer was, by necessity, essential to the hunt.
On a time-attack survival mission like Tower Floor 199 in particular, the number of healers a party held was tied directly to whether that party lived.
Which is why, on Tower Floor 199, most of those who broke through did so as guilds, bringing large numbers of healers with them.
And so there had been no great crisis. There were even those who cleared the Tower Floor 199 survival mission without ever so much as laying eyes on a Sand Worm.
Is a single Sand Worm truly all there is?
Thinking it through, he realized he had never once met a Player who claimed to have encountered more than one Sand Worm during the Tower Floor 199 survival mission.
This is a problem.
If he could have his way, he would fill all seven remaining Army Summons slots — every one of them, setting aside the Bone Dragon, the Demilich, and the Orc Shaman — with Sand Worms.
And I have filled only a single slot, and already it is over.
The disappointment sat heavy in him. He did not give up. He resolved to move even more diligently, determined to fill at least one more of the six slots still open with a Sand Worm.
I will search the entire desert.
Who could say? If he threw himself into the hunt, another Sand Worm might yet appear.
Time passed in a blur. Six days had gone by since the Tower Floor 199 survival mission began.
Only a day remains.
There had been no further gains. Jin-soo had hunted without rest, driven by the intent to wipe out every monster in the mission zone, and all he had to show for it was a mountain of ordinary desert monsters. The Sand Worm he had hoped for never appeared again after the single one he killed on the first day.
So there really is only one. Then again, even a single Sand Worm is normally more than difficult enough to kill.
He could accept it, to a point. The regret was not so easily set aside.
Then I should at least finish cleanly.
He had failed in his goal of hunting more Sand Worms and increasing his Army Summons. The other goal — slaughtering every monster in the Tower Floor 199 survival zone — still had a fair chance of being realized. Over the past six days, Jin-soo had confirmed the far edge of the desert that made up Tower Floor 199, and after that he had launched a full-scale extermination.
A mission zone is not some endless expanse without limit.
Once he had confirmed where the desert ended, he divided the ground into sectors and hunted according to plan. The result was a clean sweep of monsters across more than ninety percent of the desert spread over Tower Floor 199.
Half a day ought to finish it.
Monsters did not respawn on Tower Floor 199. Kill those that already existed, and it would be over.
I should earn at least one achievement.
He suspected a notice might come through — something along the lines of First to Hunt Every Monster in the Tower Floor 199 Mission Zone.
Clear this quickly, and rest.
He needed at least a little time to recover before ascending to the Tower's 200th Floor. As he had been doing all along, Jin-soo used the magic attack skill Water Barrier to douse his summons in water. Leo and the Orc Shaman unleashed wide-area taunt roars as well, dragging the monsters' aggro onto themselves.
A sharp rush of wind — and the desert monsters hidden in the sand converged as swiftly as iron filings drawn to a magnet.
"Krrrrk!"
"Kyaaaak!"
Every variety of desert monster charged in, and every one of them fell to the summons.
Nothing out of the ordinary.
For Jin-soo, who had still been hoping one more Sand Worm might show itself, it was a disappointment. As time passed, the number of desert monsters steadily dwindled, until at last the experience stopped coming in altogether.
So it is not coming after all.
In the moment that disappointment settled deep, the sand shuddered, rough and violent.
A Sand Worm?
Jin-soo's expression brightened.
Yes. There is no way a desert this vast holds only one.
Then a system message rose before his eyes.
The Lord of the Desert, Basilisk?
Jin-soo's face lit up. A Basilisk was a monster of a caliber that could not even be compared to a Sand Worm.
This is not a monster that should appear on a low floor like 199.
It seemed to have manifested because he had satisfied some special condition.
It appeared because I was the first to hunt every monster in the Tower Floor 199 survival zone.
Judging by the words about waking from sleep for the first time, that seemed to be correct.
A windfall. And what a windfall.
Not even in his dreams had Jin-soo imagined a Basilisk appearing in the middle of the Tower Floor 199 survival mission.
Sand burst upward in a violent spray. A draconic monster of massive bulk tore free of the desert and revealed itself — the Basilisk. It was smaller than a Bone Dragon, and yet immense all the same, large enough to reach a third of that colossal size.
"Grrrrr!"
The Basilisk growled low and gathered its mana.
In that instant, Jin-soo launched himself. The summons charged the Basilisk in the same breath, and from the Baekcheonsingeom and the Blood-Sucking Sword in his hands, a pure-white aura and a blood-red aura blazed up like flame.
He drove both blades toward the Basilisk's nape. The moment the Baekcheonsingeom and the Blood-Sucking Sword punched into the back of its neck, the Basilisk blasted petrifying breath at the summons.
Those that failed to dodge turned to lumps of stone in a flash, then were forcibly unsummoned where they stood.
The wound is shallow.
His own attack, by contrast, had failed to take the Basilisk's life.
Its durability stat is absurdly high.
Even so, it was not Bone Dragon-class. Jin-soo swung his swords in rapid succession, going for the eyes. The Basilisk hurried to shut its lids, but it did little good.
"Kyaaaak!"
Both eyes a bloody ruin, the Basilisk let out an enraged roar and shook its head from side to side, spewing petrifying gas from its mouth and nostrils. The gas was weaker than the petrifying breath, but it spread across a far wider area, and where it touched the surface of Jin-soo's armor, the metal hardened rapidly into stone.
A troublesome one.
He had barely begun to frown when a voice cut through.
"Purification!"
Shin Sua's Purification swept in, and the armor that had turned to stone returned to its original form.
"Purification! Purification! Purification!"
From atop the Bone Dragon's head, Shin Sua poured Purification out without restraint. At the same time, the summons that had not been unsummoned — those whose bodies had only partially petrified, their mobility dulled — regained their original forms.
"Grrrrng!"
"Kyaoooo!"
Then two Bone Dragons sank their teeth into the Basilisk's head and torso.
"Kyaaaang!"
The Basilisk thrashed, trying to bury itself in the sand.
In that instant, two Sand Worms erupted from beneath the dunes and tore into its soft underbelly with saw-like teeth.
"Kyaaaaak!"
The Basilisk rampaged even more violently, belching petrifying gas.
How is this hide so tough?
Jin-soo was frankly incredulous. Even under sword strikes packed with aura, and the biting attacks of the Bone Dragons and Sand Worms, the Basilisk held. Its hide was torn, blood streaming from the opened wounds, and still it moved with violent force — biting the Bone Dragons, raking the Sand Worms with its claws, and pouring out petrifying gas.
At this level, it would be fair to call it an Out-of-Spec Monster.
If it was troublesome enough that even Jin-soo felt the difficulty, then for any other Player it was no different from a monster made to kill.