The Pursuit Squad
"Haaahm!"
Jin-soo woke in the afternoon, stretched until his shoulders cracked, and pushed himself up off the bed. He had fallen asleep deep in the night while forging a Skill Synthesis, and only now had he finally managed to rise.
Sua's probably been waiting.
He left his room and knocked on Shin Sua's door.
"It's me."
The door creaked open at once.
"You're up now?"
"Yeah."
"Then let's go eat."
"You still haven't had lunch?"
"Nope. I waited so we could eat together."
"You should've eaten first."
Jin-soo gave a short, crooked smile and went down with Shin Sua to the dining room on the inn's ground floor, where they ate a meal that served as both breakfast and lunch.
"How are you planning to take them?"
Shin Sua asked, her face bright with curiosity.
She knew as well as he did that war with the Yellow Dragon Guild could not be avoided, and that was precisely why she wanted to know. Outnumbered as they were, how did he mean to fight that guild and win?
"First, we break them apart piece by piece."
He intended to eliminate the Yellow Dragon Guild members in this city. The moment trouble broke out, higher-level parties from the cities above would surely be dispatched—and he meant to cut those parties down one after another, gnawing away at the guild's strength.
With a sound-blocking skill wrapped around them, Jin-soo laid the plan out for Shin Sua, step by careful step.
"Think it'll work?"
"We try every method we've got. That's all we can do."
War with the Yellow Dragon Guild was no game. It was a fight to the death, with his life and Shin Sua's both hanging on the outcome. Our greatest strength, and our greatest weakness, is that there are only two of us. That left a single way to attack: guerrilla strikes that wrung every drop of mobility from hit-and-run. The real question is how long we can shake professional pursuers. On that point, he had no choice but to trust the skills he had learned the night before.
"Let's move."
"Okay."
Once the meal was done, Jin-soo and Shin Sua slipped quietly out of the city. Then Jin-soo closed his eyes.
He was reaching for his new summon, Kkami.
While they had been inside the Undead Hidden Dungeon, the cooldown on his summon-contract skill had come back around. He had attempted a contract with a new summon at once, and fortunately it had taken.
The beast newly bound to Jin-soo was a crow with three eyes. Its intelligence sat a notch below Leo's, and aside from the extra eye set in its forehead, it looked no different from an ordinary crow.
Unfortunately, its combat power was also close to zero, just like Leo's.
Still, that doesn't mean it has no strengths.
The Three-Eyed Crow, with all three of its eyes, possessed extraordinary sight. And because it could fly, its mobility was excellent as well.
Made for scouting. That's what it comes down to.
At a glance its shape was hardly different from a common crow, so its camouflage was outstanding too. The price of the summoning, as with Leo, was food and a trickle of mana.
Jin-soo named the Three-Eyed Crow Kkami.
There was no use for Kkami inside the Undead Hidden Dungeon.
It had been nothing but a mouth to feed. Once they left the dungeon, however, that changed.
Does what it's told, at least.
In Jin-soo's mind, the image of Yellow Dragon Guild members out on a hunt took shape. Kkami possessed a skill that let it pass along everything it saw and heard to its summoner.
"Let's go."
"Okay."
Jin-soo and Shin Sua moved carefully toward where Kkami waited, and along the way he received the past movements of the guild members the crow had been watching.
So it really is a PK guild, built out of player-killers.
In the memories Kkami relayed, the Yellow Dragon Guild members were boasting about having killed another player a week ago—and even as they bragged, they were already regretting that such luck might not come their way again.
Trash.
He had held a faint hope that the rank and file might be different. They weren't.
That one lied, too.
The tank they had taken alive had all but leapt out of his skin when asked whether the Yellow Dragon Guild was a PK guild of player-killers, and had sworn up and down that it absolutely was not.
Then I don't need to keep my promise either.
The condition for sparing that tank had been that he tell the truth.
Let's end this.
Jin-soo summoned his Shadow Summons. The Shadow Assassin was missing from the set, but that would be no problem against the ones ahead.
Kill them.
The order and the cast came as one. Together with the Shadow Mage, he unleashed a magic attack.
Crimson flame roared over the Yellow Dragon Guild members as they hunted monsters, and then the fire detonated in a thunderous blast.
"Aaaagh!"
"It's hot!"
The explosion took the archer, the mage, and the healer with it.
"What—an ambush! Call for backup, now!"
The tank shouted as he shattered a rescue stone—and in that same instant the Shadow Knight's shield slammed into his body. The arm holding his own shield bent at a grotesque angle.
"Agh! It hurts! It hurts!"
The Shadow Knight's sword drove into the screaming tank's throat.
A curse from Jin-soo and the Shadow Healer washed over the guild members who remained.
"I—I can't see!"
"M-my feet!"
Blinded and rooted where they stood, they met the Shadow Warrior's greatsword and the Shadow Archer's arrows. The greatsword sheared through their torsos as easily as a farmer cutting rice at harvest, and the archer's shafts, every one finding its mark, punched through the throats of those still breathing.
"They're weak."
Shin Sua muttered it, looking almost deflated. She had steeled herself, summoned her stone golem, and gripped her staff tight—only for the enemy to be wiped out before she could so much as lift a hand.
"Don't let your guard down. And get ready. They'll come swarming in soon."
He could have used the Shadow Archer to drop the tank before the man ever triggered the rescue stone. He had left him alone on purpose, so the stone would go off and draw in the guild members stationed at the Yellow Dragon Guild's branch.
"Got it."
At his word, Shin Sua nodded and concealed herself.
"Who dares lay a hand on our Yellow Dragon Guild!"
"I'll peel the flesh off you piece by piece and kill you slow!"
Before long, the enraged guild members came pouring in. About thirty of them.
That many means nearly all of them have come.
There were roughly fifty Yellow Dragon Guild players in this city. Ten of them had been cut down by Jin-soo while guarding the entrance to the Undead Hidden Dungeon, and a party of ten had just been annihilated.
Which meant these thirty were essentially everyone left at the branch.
Two or three might have stayed behind as a precaution, but that's not worth worrying about.
Jin-soo cast another magic attack alongside the Shadow Mage. Flame surged up once more and burst in a brilliant explosion.
"Aaaagh!"
"Which bastard was that!"
"Kill them!"
He had poured mana in with the intent to wipe them out, yet about half of them survived.
Then the Shadow Archer's arrows came whistling in, and among the survivors the healers, the mages, and the archers lost their lives.
The stone golem, the Shadow Knight, and the Shadow Warrior charged. Jin-soo drew Baekcheonsingeom and the Blood-Sucking Sword and rushed the enemy as well.
"Kill them!"
"Waaaaah!"
The Yellow Dragon Guild members came at Jin-soo with bloodshot eyes. They never reached him. The stone golem's fists, the Shadow Knight's sword and shield, and the Shadow Warrior's greatsword cut them down or smashed them into bloody pulp before they could close the distance. Arrows and attack magic followed in a concentrated barrage, and only a single player broke through that hail to stand before Jin-soo.
"Uh……"
The sole survivor to make it that far looked half out of his mind.
"Grrraaah! Die!"
Terror twisted his face as he swung his sword—but the blade never arrived. The Blood-Sucking Sword in Jin-soo's hand pierced the player's heart.
The thirty Yellow Dragon Guild players who had appeared so full of themselves were wiped out, just like that.
"Kkaak! Kkaak!"
When the fighting was truly over, Kkami settled onto Jin-soo's left shoulder and nuzzled against him, as if demanding praise for a job well done.
"Nyaaang!"
Leo, perched on the right shoulder, growled at Kkami, plainly displeased.
"Don't fight."
Smiling, Jin-soo drew monster meat from his inventory and split it between Kkami and Leo.
"Nom, nom! Munch, munch!"
"Peck, peck, peck—gulp!"
And peace returned.
"Let's go."
"Okay."
Shin Sua nodded at his words, and they left the place behind.
After that, following what the captured tank had told them, Jin-soo made a circuit of the cities the Yellow Dragon Guild kept as its principal strongholds and rapidly cut down the numbers at each branch.
"What sons of bitches dare!"
Zhou Tianguo, Guild Master of the Yellow Dragon Guild, erupted in a roar, killing intent streaming off him in thick ropes. In the space of a single week, more than a hundred of his guild members had lost their lives.
At first he had assumed a raid by some rival guild they were already hostile with, and he had rushed to prepare for war.
It wasn't that.
The enemy that had inflicted such devastating losses on the Yellow Dragon Guild was estimated to be nothing more than a single party of seven or eight.
"What the hell is the pursuit squad doing that they still haven't caught those bastards?"
Zhou Tianguo had not gone himself. He had formed a pursuit squad and sent them out.
"Their pace is simply too fast, and they come and go like ghosts, so the chase has proven quite difficult. Even so, the gap has closed to a single day's distance, so by tomorrow you should receive word that they have been caught."
"Tell them to bring the bastards back breathing. I mean to tear them apart myself."
"Yes, sir. Understood."
Zhou Tianguo believed the matter would be settled the moment the pursuit squad got a hold of their trail. Most of the guild members who had been attacked were clustered among the mid- and lower-level ranks. But that was nothing more than Zhou Tianguo's wish.
"Pursuit squad."
Sharing Kkami's sight, Jin-soo spoke to Shin Sua.
"I-is it a full-scale fight?"
"No. Only about three parties."
"Isn't that too few? Think how many parties we've already wiped out."
"The players we hit were mid- and low-level, so they figured three high-level parties would be enough."
"They're letting their guard down?"
"Yeah."
"Works out for us."
Jin-soo and Shin Sua were moving at full strength, while the enemy, loose and complacent, had assembled a pursuit squad that was clumsy in both skill and size.
"Let's finish them clean."
"Okay."
The war with the Shabel Guild, and the battles against Yellow Dragon Guild members that had followed straight after, had left Shin Sua accustomed to fighting other players.
Jin-soo and Shin Sua left a measured trail, then hid.
A short while later, the Yellow Dragon Guild's pursuit squad showed itself.
"The trail's less than ten minutes old. We've practically got them."
"The Guild Master said we only need to bring them back with a breath left in them, right? I'm cutting their limbs off."
"When I think of the hell we've been through because of these bastards, it sets my teeth on edge. It really does."
The pursuit squad was seething. Jin-soo and Shin Sua had moved at their ease—resting when they pleased, eating, sleeping.
The pursuers, by contrast, had been forced to hunt faint traces with tracking skills, and to close the distance they ate on the move. Rest was a luxury. Even sleep was nothing but the barest catnaps as they dragged the chase onward.
"Once we catch these bastards, the suffering's over."
"Ugh, I just want to sit down and eat a proper meal."
"I want to sink into hot water."
"I want to sleep without standing watch."
Chatting among themselves, the pursuit squad drew near the place where Jin-soo and Shin Sua lay hidden.
Not a shred of tension in them.
They were swollen with the groundless confidence that catching their quarry meant an automatic win.
Jin-soo drew up his mana alongside the Shadow Mage and cast a magic attack. His spell was a mage-exclusive skill, quickened and swollen by the buff of his divine favor, by Shin Sua's blessing, and by the influence of his Dark Physique. It triggered fast, and its power was tremendous.
Flame roared, and the blast thundered down on the off-guard pursuit squad. In the same instant the Shadow Archer's arrows flew.
In that successive storm of ranged attacks, many of the lightly defended mages, archers, and healers died. But unlike the fights until now, a single strike could not massacre half their number.
Even rotten, a thoroughbred's still a thoroughbred, is that it?
Caught flat-footed as they were, the tanks moved to shield the mages and healers the instant they sensed mana. The archers, the assassins, and the melee fighters scattered on their own, each hunting a way to live. So for an ambush that had landed cleanly, the results were nothing special.
They had managed to cut the enemy down by only nine.
"These bastards dare!"
"Kill them! Just kill them!"
"Waaaaaah!"
But that disappointment belonged only to Jin-soo, the one who had sprung the ambush. The prey they had expected to flee the moment they were met had struck first and caught them completely off balance.
As a result, a full third of their number died without ever fighting a proper battle.
From the pursuit squad's side, it was a loss of staggering size—one they had never seen coming.