Demon
"Heh heh heh. You're finished now!"
Han Man-ok shouted it with absolute confidence written across his face. Inside, he was anything but at ease.
This was never something I meant to use here.
The Demon Summoning Bracelet he had just triggered was a reward for clearing a hidden dungeon. Even a player who was no summoner could call a demon simply by wearing it, and the strength of whatever answered was decided by the quantity and quality of the souls offered up as sacrifice.
It had been Han Man-ok's hidden card. Until this moment he had done nothing but feed it offerings. Not once had he activated it.
To think I'd burn one of only two charges on the Tower's 200th Floor.
The bracelet was a consumable, good for two uses and no more. He had never intended to spend it on this floor at all.
All I wanted was a war with Changseong Gate, so I could secure more sacrifices.
The Blood White Sword Demon had ruined everything.
And I never imagined he would be that strong.
The original plan had been simple enough: lure the Blood White Sword Demon in alongside Sahyeol Gate's elites and erase him. The plan had come apart. The man was too strong. Far from dying, he had wiped out every peak master of Sahyeol Gate.
A monster.
If the Blood White Sword Demon had been exhausted, or torn open by grievous wounds, Han Man-ok would have finished him with his own hands and offered the soul as sacrifice. But the man had killed thirteen peak masters and still stood untouched. His armor was a little scuffed. That was all. His mana flowed smoothly, and his stamina did not look much diminished. Fight him like this and Han Man-ok would lose, without question — and the only price of defeat was death.
So he had been forced to play the card he had hoarded and hoarded again. No item, however precious, could outweigh his own life. It was the obvious choice.
Still, if I can salvage those two swords and that armor, it won't be such a losing trade.
The items and points of the dead peak masters would be his as well.
The Demon Summoning Bracelet still has one charge left.
He would have to offer souls again, but that was only a matter of gathering them slowly, the way he had this time.
A shame I can't use that bastard's soul as the offering.
The Blood White Sword Demon's soul would be devoured by the demon he had summoned.
With a blast like an artillery shell detonating, the demon lunged at Jin-soo. Jin-soo twisted a fraction aside and swung Baekcheonsingeom and the Blood-Sucking Sword, both wrapped in sword aura.
Clang!
The demon's spear, wreathed in seething blood-red energy, turned the blow aside with contemptuous ease. Then sword and spear crashed together in a furious exchange, and shockwaves of mana and shards of sword aura burst outward in every direction.
He's far beyond anything on the 200th Floor.
The demon was strong. Power, speed, spearmanship, a monstrous well of mana — and on top of that he fought with a tail and wings, organs no human possessed, moving in ways that defied sense. He lashed with the tail, wrenched his center of gravity into impossible angles, and used his wings to change direction even while hanging in the air. It was a style that would have rattled a player rich in battle experience. Jin-soo was unhurried.
He had hunted more bipedal monsters with wings and tails than he could count. Other players might have struggled. To Jin-soo, a demon was no difficult opponent at all.
"KWAAAAAAK!"
Without warning the demon's jaws gaped and vomited a torrent of crimson flame. Jin-soo twisted aside as if he had expected it and slipped clear with ease.
Not quite an Out-of-Spec Monster.
The demon before him was certainly far stronger than the players of the 200th Floor. He had the raw power to sweep away three or four of the floor's great guilds by himself. But coldly speaking, that was his limit. He did not possess the transcendent might that soared past a floor's ceiling — the kind of strength that, without Jin-soo himself as the variable, could never have been hunted at all, in things like the White Drake or the Bone Dragon.
Could I make this one an Army Summon too?
Since his regression he had turned undead monsters into Army Summons, but a demon was a first. There was no way to know.
I'll just have to see for myself.
The sword aura gathered along Baekcheonsingeom and the Blood-Sucking Sword shrank at a rapid clip. Its power, far from falling, climbed. He was compressing the aura to raise its destructive force.
The demon's spear was driven back. The demon did not flinch.
"For a human, your skill is no ordinary thing. But a human still cannot defeat me."
The blood-red haze coiled around the spear grew thicker, stickier.
"The stronger the human, the sweeter the soul. I will kill you and devour it."
Pouring out an even fiercer presence, the demon charged Jin-soo again. Shockwaves of mana and fragments of sword aura, heavier than before, exploded in every direction, and the two of them moved so fast that players of Starting City's caliber could barely follow them with their eyes.
And yet, in all of Starting City, there was exactly one person with the skill to watch the duel properly. Han Man-ok, Sect Leader of Sahyeol Gate.
He's fighting a demon on even terms. And compressing his sword aura as if it were nothing.
Sect Leader Han Man-ok bit down hard on his lower lip. He had granted that the Blood White Sword Demon was strong — but only at the extreme edge of the supreme peak.
He had been wrong.
The martial might on display now was something no one could even dream of without having reached the Transcendent realm.
He was toying with me.
A master of the Transcendent realm had no need to pick off peak masters first. Even in a straight fight he could have shattered the Sahyeol Eight Trigrams Formation that Han Man-ok — barely across the threshold of the supreme peak — and thirteen peak masters had laid down together. And until the demon appeared, the Blood White Sword Demon had neither compressed his aura nor loosed a single aura ring. He had met Han Man-ok and the peak masters with nothing but raw sword aura.
They had been played with. Thoroughly.
The demon will win. He has to. He will. No — he must.
If the demon lost, Han Man-ok died.
At first he had been certain of a perfect victory. As the fight dragged on, unease bloomed in his chest. His heart hammered. The urge to flee this place boiled up until he could barely stand still inside his own skin. Run now, and he might live even if the demon fell. But if the demon won and his seat was empty, he would get no proper reward. Leave, and the rats would move on the spoils that were his by right.
I can't be satisfied with points alone. There's still plenty of time left on the summon.
The summoned demon would be forcibly returned after six hours.
And while he's here, he lends me his power.
He could not make unreasonable demands, though. The demon only lent his strength for requests he was willing to accept.
Absolute obedience to my commands would be best.
For that he would need a vastly greater offering, and a demon willing to answer such terms.
The last charge — I will never waste it as emptily as this one.
He meant to gather sacrifices to the limit and set a far grander board.
Through Kkami's eyes, Jin-soo watched Han Man-ok.
He's not running.
Jin-soo had thought the man might flee to another city while the demon kept him occupied, or slip into a no-PK zone. Han Man-ok did neither. Instead he held a careful distance and watched the fight.
Saves me the trouble.
A smile touched Jin-soo's lips. Even if the man ran for another city or a no-PK zone, catching him would only take longer. There were ways.
He's strong. I'll give him that.
So the skill conversion could finish cleanly and completely, Jin-soo had deliberately held back the skills of his other classes — curses, magical attacks, and the rest. Even if he had used them, he suspected the fight would only have ended sooner. He still would not have dropped the demon with ease.
Or would I? If I'd brought the summons in as well, maybe it would have been over in a moment.
While he turned the question over, the skill conversion on his Dark-affinity status window came to an end.
Burned through a fair amount of mana and stamina.
He was confident he could fell the demon without switching windows to restore both to full. But the point of this fight had been finishing the skill conversion, not hunting a demon.
Status Window Switch.
Status Window Switch
Dark Affinity → Holy Affinity
Jin-soo replaced the Dark-affinity status window with the Holy-affinity one.
In that instant—
BOOOOM!
"Krgh!"
The demon jerked back in alarm.
"What trick did you just pull, you wretch!"
Panic on his face, the demon glared at Jin-soo as if he meant to kill him where he stood.
"Huh?"
Jin-soo, for his part, tilted his head at the reaction.
Why is he acting like that?
The Holy-affinity status window and the Dark-affinity one held identical stats. There should have been no difference in combat power.
"Ah!"
A memory he had forgotten surfaced.
Right. Now that I think of it, the mana demons use stands in direct opposition to Holy-affinity mana.
Before his regression, Jin-soo had used Dark-affinity mana. He had only ever heard and read about the advantages of Holy-affinity mana. He had never felt them himself.
But why is he this shocked? Even Holy-affinity mana only deals a little extra damage to a demon.
It was true that Holy-affinity mana opposed a demon's. Unless the gap in caliber was extreme, though, the result was only a mildly irritating scrap of additional damage. It could not leap a gulf in level or stats.
If anything, when the demon's caliber was higher, carrying Holy-affinity mana became a serious disadvantage.
Steel rang and aura shattered, and the demon's scream tore out of him.
"Krgh! AAAAAAGH!"
Which was why it should have been impossible — level and stats unchanged, nothing altered but the shift from Dark-affinity mana to Holy — to overwhelm the demon in front of him the way he was doing now.
And yet that's exactly what I'm doing.
Jin-soo reached back through his memories from before the regression. There was only one conclusion.
My caliber is far above that demon's.
The demon possessed power that transcended the 200th Floor. It stood to reason that his caliber would sit well above the players of that floor.
But the same is true of me.
Thinking it through, it made sense that Jin-soo's caliber would outstrip the demon's. On the way to the 200th Floor he had cleared every floor in the shortest time possible. He had killed the Out-of-Spec Monsters of Floor 50, Floor 100, and Floor 150. He had hunted countless monsters and won fight after fight against other players.
And I've piled up an absurd number of achievements and titles.
The easiest way for a player to gauge his own caliber was to look at the achievements he had accumulated.
Eight Impossible Feats, on top of that.
Jin-soo retraced every step of the road he had walked.
Of course the gap is overwhelming.
Judged coldly, with everything he had done, it would have been the greater injustice if there were no gap in caliber at all.
If anything, it would be absurd for my caliber to merely match that demon's. Yes. This is how it was always supposed to be.
By the time Jin-soo had understood the situation and simply accepted it—
The demon raged against the unreasonable fate that had fallen on him. But no matter how fiercely he turned his face from the truth in front of him and denied it, he could not change the cold reality.
