War
"Who the hell dares!"
Lucas, guild master of the Chavel Guild, issued the summons with fury stamped across his face. Leaving only the bare minimum to hold the guild hall, he called in every last member.
Two hundred and fifty players gathered.
"I was in the middle of a hunt."
"I was eating."
"They dragged me out of bed."
"Don't even start. They yanked me out of the shower."
Hauled in without warning, the Chavel players grumbled, faces sour with complaint.
"This isn't a war, is it?"
"What are you scared of? I'm excited, honestly."
"Fair point. If a war breaks out, we can finally take a proper cut."
Once the full force had assembled, Guild Master Lucas stepped to the front.
Lucas took the lead, and two hundred and fifty players followed at his back.
I don't know who they are. I will not let them live.
Rage had climbed to the crown of his head. An entire party had been wiped out, and as if that were not enough, the thirty-man team he had sent to investigate was dead as well. This was no different from an open challenge to the Chavel Guild.
They aren't easy marks. If anything, he judged them likely to be a party of considerable skill. Lucas was impatient and violent by nature, but he was no fool, and he understood the weight of information better than anyone.
Not a party from one of the great guilds.
Guilds of any real size marked out territories and moved inside them. Barring something unusual, they had no reason to collide in the hunting grounds at all.
Knowing those bastards, if the other side had belonged to a great guild, they never would have touched them in the first place.
The first to die had been classic thugs—fierce toward the weak, craven toward the strong.
Odds are the enemy numbers fewer than ten. They wouldn't be famous powerhouses everyone already knew by name, either.
Allen's party? Or Yamamoto's?
Lucas pared the list of suspects down one by one.
Doesn't matter who.
So long as they operated around this city, there was a hard ceiling on their strength. However skilled they might be, no one could overcome a head count of two hundred and fifty.
They'll be sitting on a decent pile of points, too.
They had dropped forty players. They had to be holding points well into the hundreds of millions.
And if some of ours die in the fight, that pile only gets bigger.
On the surface, Lucas played the loyal guild master who cherished his people. His true heart was nothing of the kind.
To him, the members of the Chavel Guild were nothing more than prey he meant to devour when the time came.
Crush them with numbers, drain their stamina and mana, then finish it myself. Do that, and he could easily reclaim every point and item the guild had accumulated.
I was planning to stir up a conflict and harvest points before long anyway.
They had started the fight for him. From where Lucas stood, there was nothing to dislike. Even so, he had no intention of letting his guard down, and no intention of dying a fool's death to his own pride. That was why he put on a show of towering rage and scraped together every remaining member—to build a situation in which he could not lose, even if the enemy had been hiding strength beyond all common sense.
Two hundred and fifty players of the Chavel Guild marched in high spirits toward the source of the distress signal. Once they arrived, the real hunt would begin.
Then a rain of arrows hissed down from the trees.
Shafts punched home.
"Ghk!"
"Kh—!"
The arrows picked out only the healers and mages—those in robes, staves in hand.
"Ambush!"
"Hold the line! Protect the healers and mages!"
Tanks raised their shields, and the healers and mages cast defensive skills to save their own lives.
"Die! Flame Storm!"
"Loose!"
Attack skills and arrows screamed up into the canopy. Assassins rushed in as well, swiftly ringing the trees.
Fire roared. Then, from the exact opposite direction, a crimson blaze erupted skyward with a thunderous blast.
"Aaaagh!"
"Save me!"
"Hot! It's too hot!"
"There's a mage on the other side!"
"Aagh! My head!"
"I can't see! I can't see anything!"
"My body's rotting!"
"Curse skills and decay skills! They've got a dark-attribute healer too!"
Two ambushes, and the column dissolved into chaos in an instant.
A mistake.
Lucas's face twisted savagely.
A full two hundred and fifty players, gathered in one place. He had expected a fight while they ran a fleeing enemy down—not to be struck first. Moving bunched together as a single mass had only made the damage worse.
Up in that tree.
Lucas drew his broadsword and strode forward.
He had meant to spend his subordinates first and only then step in. This flow was dangerous.
The blade sheared clean through the tree where the mage stood. As the trunk came crashing down, he launched himself after it, meaning to snuff out the mage and the healer in a single stroke.
"Huh?"
There was no one on the fallen tree.
What is this?
A magical attack came screaming in from behind a boulder.
Not this time.
He hurled himself forward and swung. The boulder split apart like styrofoam.
Empty again?
No one stood behind the rock.
A teleport skill? Or stealth?
Lucas's thoughts snarled.
Flame roared and detonated. All the while, the Chavel members were being hammered one-sidedly by magical attacks, curses, and decay.
I'll kill them.
His eyes flashed as he sprinted toward the direction the spell had come from. This time he did not attack rashly. He honed his senses to a razor edge and focused on the flow of mana.
A shadow?
Within the shadows cast by the dense trees, he felt mana moving.
He swung without hesitation. A great shield burst from the dark and caught the blow with a ringing clang.
"Got you, you bastard!"
Lucas's eyes blazed. Blue aura streamed from his sword in branching trails, and when he detonated it, the shadow scattered in a burst of light. From within spilled an armored knight with a shield, a warrior gripping a greatsword, and a robed mage and healer.
These aren't players.
He had assumed the enemy was a player who had learned stealth-type skills. They weren't human.
Summons.
Lucas grasped the situation in an instant.
"Kill them!"
Now that their position was exposed, there was nothing to fear. He chained attack skills into a ferocious assault, blast after blast, and the other guild members poured in behind him.
"Don't give them an opening! They can hide in the shadows! I'll hold the tank and the warrior—go for the healer and the mage first! And find the summoner nearby!"
Lucas raised his voice and roared.
"You rat bastard!"
"I'll kill you!"
The Chavel members moved briskly at his command.
Then arrows rained down on them, punching through the ranks.
"Ghk!"
"Aagh!"
That was not the end. Another shaft sank home.
"Kugh—!"
"An assassin!"
A shadow assassin went aggressively after the healers and mages. The Chavel members did not simply take it.
"Get the archer and the assassin!"
"Light Orb!"
"Eyes That Light the Dark!"
"Binding Shackles!"
The guild launched a full counterattack. Blasts and impacts tore through the trees amid screams, and voices snapped across the melee.
"Aaaagh!"
"Over here!"
"They're gone?"
"Hit the shadows wherever you feel mana!"
"Find the summoner!"
The shadow summons and the players of the Chavel Guild tore into each other in a savage close fight.
Their level is high across the board.
Watching the battle from a distance, Jin-soo coolly assessed the Chavel Guild's strength.
Good enough to move on to the next city.
And yet they lingered in the Starting City, little more than a beginner town. The reason had to be so they could hunt other players.
Plenty of real combat experience, too.
They had noticed the Shadow Summons hiding in the dark almost at once. The moment they identified what they were, they moved to find the summoner.
Their response is remarkably sharp.
Tanks took the shadow archers' and shadow mages' attacks on their own bodies to shield the healers and mages. The healers and mages supported with everything they had. The other damage dealers poured on the assault from the best positions each of them could claim.
There are a lot of them, though.
He had ambushed them, then cut a fair number more in the exchanges that followed. Even so, close to two hundred Chavel members remained. The bigger problem was that the deaths were steadily slowing—the tanks' defense, and healers aggressively weaving recovery and protection skills.
Skilled, and numerous on top of it. This won't be easy.
Hoping the summons alone could finish it had been asking too much.
"I need to join them. You stay here."
Jin-soo said it to Shin Sua.
"Okay."
Shin Sua nodded, her expression bright.
"You stay here too. Or should I unsummon you?"
He turned to Leo.
"Nyaaaang!"
Leo pulsed back a fierce refusal.
"If you come with me, you could die."
The weakness of a living summon was simple. Die while summoned, and you died for real. Unlike an inanimate summon—which, even if forcibly dismissed, could be called again after the cooldown so long as the materials held—this was a different matter entirely.
"Kyak-kyak-kyak!"
At the mention of death, Leo gaped his mouth wide and burst into mocking laughter.
Is this thing afraid of nothing?
Part of him wanted to drag the cat along and let him learn, properly, what a brush with death felt like. He couldn't actually do that.
"Eat this and watch quietly."
Jin-soo pulled a heap of meat from his inventory.
"Mrow! Chomp! Chomp! Chomp!"
Leo pulsed his agreement, then immediately launched into a full-blown feast.
"I'll be back."
With that, Jin-soo was gone in a flash.
Sniff. Sniff. Sniff.
Lost in his frantic eating, Leo tilted his head. The smell of fresh blood was jabbing at his nose from close by.
"Nyang?"
He turned, and saw red blood dripping from Shin Sua's tightly clenched fist. She had squeezed so hard her nails had punched through the skin.
"Nyaoong?"
Leo stared at her as if she'd lost her mind, then went right back to the meat.
I'm still just dead weight.
She had sent Jin-soo off with a bright smile, but inside she was raw. She had believed that as she grew, she was becoming useful to him in her own way. Yet in the fight just now—and even now—she was nothing but baggage he had to protect.
Just wait. Next time I won't be stuck watching from this far away.
It would not end at merely casting blessings and protection on Jin-soo and the summons before a battle. She would take part in the fight, and she would help.
"Flame Storm. Flame Barrier. Flame Burst."
Fire roared and detonated. Jin-soo drove a magical assault into the backs of the Chavel members who were hammering the shadow knight and the shadow warrior.
"Aaaagh!"
"There's another enemy!"
"A mage! Over there!"
The guild members caught by his spells came howling toward him.
A sharp click—and Jin-soo had already swapped his gear through the inventory. Gripping the Blood-Sucking Sword and a gleaming longsword, he charged.
Both blades flashed, and the heads of the Chavel members lunging at him came free. The blood they spilled, the Blood-Sucking Sword gulped down with greedy hunger.
"Careful! He's no ordinary fighter!"
"Block him!"
The mana-charged Blood-Sucking Sword crashed against a tank's shield and stopped dead.
"Kill him!"
Players closed in from every side, weapons leveled.
Jin-soo drove a kick into the shield, snapped his body back, and brought the sword around. The players who had charged to kill him lost their lives instead.
No need to bother fighting the tanks.
He slipped past them and went for the damage dealers and the healers.
"Taunt!"
The tank players cast Taunt at him. A player caught by the skill briefly lost their reason and attacked the caster.
As if that would catch me.
With a Mental stat like his, how could Taunt possibly land? Jin-soo wove past the tanks and cut the dealers and healers down in rapid succession.