Taking Out the Trash
Inventory first.
The Dark-affinity status window came with an inventory, so that side of things was no real inconvenience. The Holy-affinity window was another matter entirely. Without an inventory, it was unbearably cumbersome. Jin-soo searched for an Inventory skill book, and the price drew a quiet click of the tongue. Expensive, as expected.
Still the cheapest of the lot. What settled it was the gap between the minimum bid and the buyout: a mere ten thousand points. A buyout had to cost more than the opening bid no matter what, so the seller had clearly jammed the two as close together as the system would allow.
I'll buy it. Points could always be earned again, and the going rate sat around ten million anyway. He might pick up an Inventory skill book later, hunting or clearing a dungeon, but he could just as easily sell one at the auction house and break even. It was rare enough, of course, that there was no telling when another would appear.
Jin-soo purchased the skill book. Next.
From there he bought skill books and items in earnest, and nearly forty million points vanished in a blink, leaving him with a little over one million. Everything urgent is covered, at least. Anything cheap or needed at once, he bought outright; for the rest, he entered the auctions at reasonable prices. About ten million points were tied up in bids, refundable if he failed to win once an auction closed. Come back as items, not as points.
With that thought, he learned the skill books he had just bought and stowed the items in his inventory. It would be nice if the Dark and Holy inventories were shared. Not being able to share them was a minor annoyance, but there was nothing to be done about it. Even so, splitting the items caused no real trouble. Warrior gear in the Dark inventory, mage gear in the Holy one, and that was that.
My points took a serious hit. The wages of a thoroughly satisfying shopping spree. I can always earn more. A million points was more than enough to live on along Floor 50 anyway, and he had already listed the elixirs he had gathered as lots at the auction house. Minimum bids at market rate. They should sell easily enough. The buyouts he had set a little high.
The regrettable part was the cap on how many items a seller could list. Right now I can only put up ten. Raising that limit meant selling in volume, or selling at a high price. It would have been nice if purchases and the prices paid counted toward it too. Increasing his listing slots was possible through sales alone. Well, it'll go up eventually.
The elixirs he had listed were few, but expensive. Keep selling, and his auction slots would multiply quickly enough. I've already bought most of what I actually need. For the time being, all that remained was to sell elixirs and stack points.
Jin-soo took a quick shower and changed back into the worn-out clothes he had been wearing. He had bought a decent set of metal armor, but there was no need to walk out in it. Metal armor is a nuisance in everyday life. When a fight started, he could pull it from his inventory and auto-equip it. That was enough.
He fastened only the Blood-Sucking Sword at his waist and stepped out of his room. Food first.
He had not gone hungry on the way to Floor 50, but he could not remember a proper meal either. Below this floor, food was not something you enjoyed. It was a survival tool you ate because you had to.
His footsteps carried him down to the restaurant-tavern on the first floor, and the moment he arrived, every player seated at the tables turned to look at him.
"Came down after a good long sleep, did he?"
"Probably."
"Well, there's plenty down here worth staring at. He probably lost track of time."
They murmured among themselves, watching him the way one might watch an amusing new toy.
Some things never change. A newbie fresh to Floor 50 was always the center of attention, and it was not simply because people were bored or curious.
"Oppa, you look like you're all by yourself, without any companions. Would you like to join our party? We were just looking to fill out our ranks."
A girl with a sweet, dog-like face had come up to ask. At the same time, a faint fondness toward her stirred in his chest.
She used a skill.
She looked no older than a high schooler, her face nothing but gentle, but she was still a complete stranger. Faint or not, there was no reason he should feel any fondness for her at all. If it weren't me, that would have hit pretty hard.
His blessings had granted him defense against physical skills and magic. They had not granted resistance to mental skills—curses, hallucinations, confusion, charm. But my Mental Power stat is on the high side. Jin-soo's current Mental Power was a staggering 922. A mental skill at the level of a Floor 50 player could be crushed outright by a stat like that.
And Jin-soo was a veteran among veterans. Stats aside, his will and his mental fortitude were simply of a different order. He had broken even the Blood-Sucking Sword's mental domination through pure willpower. A crude mental skill like this had no chance of taking him.
So she's planning to work me over. A newbie who knew little about Floor 50 was nothing but easy prey for players who already had the information. Item extortion, point theft, meat shields, pack mules—there were more than enough ways to squeeze a newbie's assets and labor dry. The easiest method of all, of course, was simply killing them.
PK someone, and you take every point the dead player was carrying. And that was not the end of it. Monsters dropped items only now and then. A player, on death, dropped a class-change tome or a skill book without fail.
I must look like an easy mark. If companion players had climbed with him, things might have been a little different. Numbers were strength in any situation. But Jin-soo was alone. They figure I lucked my way up to Floor 50 on the backs of my companions' sacrifices. Floor 49's clear mission rode heavily on luck.
No real need to refuse. He had to leave the city and head for the hunting grounds to find the hidden dungeon anyway. He could treat this as a bit of volunteer work along the way. Trash has to be taken out regularly, if you want the place to stay clean.
Not every player preyed on newbies fresh to Floor 50. Some offered help out of pure goodwill, asking nothing in return. But if the trash that feeds on newbies keeps thriving, others might get tempted to follow. Trash had to be cleaned up the moment it showed its face.
"Are you sure that's really all right?"
At his acceptance, the puppy-faced girl broke into a bright smile.
"Of course, Oppa. We were looking for a new party member ourselves."
She beamed, pleased at the thought of another successful catch.
I wonder how many points he's carrying.
She was turning over the cleanest way to wring every last drop from his items, his points, and his labor when footsteps sounded overhead. A group of players came down from the upper floor.
"You trying to gobble up another newbie?"
The one who spoke stood at the head of the group: a sharp-featured, cat-faced woman who looked to be in her early twenties.
"Why are you picking a fight with me again, Unni? Give the bullshit a rest, will you?"
The gentle face twisted, and the words came out in a snarl.
"You're older than I am, and you call me Unni? How many newbies have vanished after going out with your party? Of course I should be worried."
As she spoke, the two women glared at each other.
"Hey, you. If you want to live a long life, you'd better stay out of that party."
With that, the cat-faced woman left the inn with her companions.
"You don't need to pay any mind to what that unni said. She doesn't get along with our party, so she's always going around badmouthing us. You have no idea how hard that makes it to find members."
The puppy-faced girl had her gentle smile back on as she spoke to Jin-soo. At the same time, he felt his fondness for her climb.
"There are always people who envy others."
At his answer, her face lit up. I thought that bitch Hee-soo was going to ruin this. Looks like the skill took just fine. He seemed even dumber and weaker than she had expected. Even a newbie ought to have a few tens of thousands of points. And the sword at his waist looked, at a glance, like a fairly high-level item. A lucky one? Or it might have belonged to companions who had died on Floor 49. Not that it matters.
What mattered was that this one looked like a serious jackpot. Setting everything else aside, the sword at his waist alone was worth a fortune. A few hundred thousand points, at minimum. If it sold high at the auction house, she might even clear over a million.
"Then shall we eat first? My treat, Oppa!"
She lightly caught his arm, her manner warm and familiar.
"Then I'll gladly accept."
"Come this way. I'll introduce you to your new companions."
Jin-soo followed her to another table.
"Welcome. You've been through a lot, haven't you?"
"You can put your mind at ease now."
Her companions greeted him with kind smiles. The talk over the meal was warm to the point of being cloying.
These aren't amateurs. The smiles and the smooth talk were kind enough to win over a genuine newbie fresh to Floor 50 completely. And they all look kind to begin with. Including the puppy-faced girl, every one of them had a face that seemed nothing but good-natured and gentle. Their ages, in particular, skewed young.
You can't trust appearances in the Tower. Players dragged in from other dimensions did not age. Ten years here or twenty—it doesn't matter. A youthful face was no guarantee of a youthful age. If what that woman said earlier is true, her real age is early to mid-twenties at the youngest.
Jin-soo played along with the conversation just enough.
"The Floor 49 mission was hard to clear, wasn't it?"
"We lost companions there too."
"How was it for you, Mr. Jin-soo?"
They matched his words, subtly fishing for information.
"I got lucky. I barely made it out alone."
"What skills have you learned? Your level too, if you don't mind. It would help us settle on a party position."
Jin-soo offered up exactly what they wanted, playing the easy mark to perfection.
"Well, we've finished eating. Shall we head out?"
It was Kim Ji-seon, the puppy-faced girl, who said it, and the others were quick to agree.
"Yeah. We ought to get a feel for how we fight together."
"You have to hunt diligently, day after day, if you want to eat and live."
The party of eight rose and gathered their weapons. Jin-soo stood with them as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
"Let's go, then."
The eight of them left the city with Jin-soo at their center.
"Floor 50 is mostly orcs. But don't let your guard down just because they look like the ones from the lower floors. They're much stronger."
"Right. I almost died at first because I got careless."
Even after they had left the city, they kept kindly feeding him information about Floor 50.
When are they going to show their true colors? Their acting was quite good. Even so, he did not believe for a moment that they were a party of genuinely kind players. He was certain they were vicious PK players. If their intentions were truly good, they wouldn't have dragged me straight to the hunting grounds—and not right after fishing his information out through conversation. They were sloppy about where they looked, too.
They thought they were being careful, stealing glances at the Blood-Sucking Sword whenever they believed he was not watching. To Jin-soo's eyes, the greed filling those glances was all too plain. The moment they show their true colors, I'll clean them up. There was always that one chance in ten thousand, so he had no intention of striking first.
He had just settled that thought when a pack of orcs appeared.
"How about we get a feel for our teamwork?"
The vanguard at the front said it and gave Jin-soo's back a light pat.
"Sure."
Jin-soo stepped forward readily, and the other vanguards matched his pace as they advanced.
"Hah!"
He deliberately fought the orcs with his back turned to the other vanguards, and he did not forget to put on a show of clumsy hands. Steel rang.
"Urgh!"
Slow speed, awkward movements—he mimicked a greenhorn getting by on nothing but the Blood-Sucking Sword. They made their move at once. A spear hissed through the air, and one of the vanguards thrust not at an orc, but at Jin-soo's flank.
Jin-soo caught the oncoming spearhead in his left hand and snapped it clean off, then hurled the broken blade at the man's throat. It sank in with a wet thunk.
"Guhk!"
The vanguard's breath cut off in an instant. He dropped.
"W-what?"
"Chang-su!"
The sudden death of their companion froze them all. Jin-soo calmly went on taking out the trash. The Blood-Sucking Sword flashed, and another party member's head went flying, sheared clean off. A gleaming longsword, pulled from his inventory, was already in his left hand, and metal armor clad his body. He drove the blade home.
"Guhk!"
"You crazy bastard!"
"Kill him!"
Far too late, they understood—and swung their weapons at Jin-soo.