Guerrilla
"Guhk!"
"Aaaagh!"
Arrows came screaming out of nowhere and buried themselves in the Players with tracking skills—the ones combing the very front for any trace of their quarry. Vital points punched clean through, the trackers were dead before they even understood they had been hit.
Thmp. Thmp. Thmp-thmp.
The arrows were not aimed at the trackers alone.
Thunk!
"Gack!"
"Aagh!"
They concentrated on the archers with bows in their hands.
"Block them!"
Zhou Tianguo snapped the order at his tanks and broke into a full sprint toward the direction the arrows were coming from.
"Guild Master!"
The fastest of the melee damage dealers tore after him.
I'll kill them. Zhou Tianguo ground his molars until they ached. The enemy numbered a mere two. Seven, at the absolute outside. He had been certain they would run. It had never once occurred to him that they would strike first.
He had prepared anyway, just in case. If they ambushed, he had assumed they would go for the healers or the mages—in a fight against monsters or Players alike, those were the ones who decided everything—so he had split his preparations down the middle. And yet the enemy had gone after the Players who knew tracking skills, and the archers.
I will not let them escape. He would catch them, tear them to pieces, and kill them.
But when Zhou Tianguo and the melee dealers arrived, nothing waited for them but empty brush.
"Spread out and find them! Now!"
Even if they had bolted the instant the arrows stopped, they could not have gotten far. He gave the order and was just about to move when—
Shaaaa—
"Urgh!"
A clammy, sinister curse washed over Zhou Tianguo and the melee dealers alike.
"M-my head!"
"I can't see!"
"Hah—hah! My heart—!"
Caught in the curse, the dealers groaned in agony.
How is this possible?
Zhou Tianguo reeled. What they had run down was an archer. A dark-attribute healer might, of course, be mixed into that party—but a curse was not all-powerful.
A curse skill's range shouldn't be anywhere near this long.
He looked until his eyes stung, and still there was no sign of the dark-attribute healer who had cast it. It was not merely that he could not see them. He could not feel so much as a thread of mana.
And then—
BOOOOM!
A tremendous blast, and brilliant fire bloomed in the rear, where the tanks, healers, and mages were gathered.
"You bastards!"
Zhou Tianguo's face twisted into something murderous. Tanks, healers, mages—every one of them was slow.
"We hit the mages first!"
At his shout the scattered melee dealers drew back together and charged toward the source of the magical assault. They needed the healers anyway, if only to have the curses clinging to their bodies dispelled.
Shwip-shwip-shwip!
Thmp-thmp-thmp!
In that same instant, arrows rained into the backs of the charging dealers.
"Guaaargh!"
"Krk—!"
Twelve melee dealers, vision and movement both bound by the curse, died in a breath.
"Uwaaaaa!"
Reason burned clean away. Zhou Tianguo sprinted with everything he had toward where the arrows had come from, and once again no one was there.
Shaaaa—
All that welcomed him was curse after curse, of every kind.
BOOOM!
And still, where the tanks, healers, and mages stood, explosions kept detonating one after another.
"Grr—!"
In the end he abandoned the hunt for the archer. He had no choice but to make for the place the magic had come from.
But—
"Damn it!"
Nothing remained where the attack spells had flown from, either.
Zhou Tianguo erupted, a roar packed full of rage. It changed nothing. He had already lost the enemy, and the damage was catastrophic.
Better than I expected.
Jin-soo's face lit up.
As his blessing grew, the levels of his existing main skills had risen to 522, and Shadow Summon was among them, of course. The Shadow Assassin was a summon shaped by Jin-soo's stats and blessing, but level still mattered. The higher it climbed, the more completely the summon could receive those stats and that blessing.
And it isn't only my stats and blessing that get passed on.
Every class skill the Shadow Summons possessed was locked at 522 as well. The passives unique to them—the power to hide inside shadow, and the power to move through it—had grown along with the rest.
Hiding in shadow and traveling through it is the same as before. What had strengthened was the concealment that erased every trace of mana.
And that isn't the end of it.
A Shadow Summon had originally been able to hide or move only its own body through shadow. Not anymore.
Now it can hide or carry one more person along with it.
That was a breakthrough. It secured Jin-soo's own movement and safety, and it let him look after Shin Sua's as well. Even so, carelessness was out of the question. However much the concealment of hiding in shadow had been reinforced—
I can't swear it'll fool someone with a high-level tracking skill, or a Player whose mana sense is exceptional.
That was why he had made the holders of tracking skills the target of the first ambush. Jin-soo and the Shadow Archer had sniped them with arrows and erased every last one.
Points really are the best.
With points to spare, he had been able to turn a heap of archer skills into synthesized skills through Skill Synthesis, and high-level archer-exclusive items had been just as easy to buy.
Locking levels through the blessing really is a cheat. A complete cheat.
Before the Regression and after it, Jin-soo had lived a life about as far from archery as a man could get. The moment he acquired archer-exclusive skills and brought them to level 522, everything changed. The skill modifier drove his accuracy up to the point of never missing, and the destructive power rose with it—enough that a single arrow could snuff the life out of a boss monster.
There's a reason they say level is a tyrant.
Even so, set beside an archer of the same level and the same skills, Jin-soo's actual ability fell well short. He could not read the wind, and predictive shots—reading where an enemy would move and loosing the arrow ahead of them—sent his accuracy off a cliff.
A target that stands still, I never miss. A target that moves is another matter entirely.
For the moment, though, this was enough. He had learned the archer skills only a few days ago.
Reaching this in so little time is a cheat all by itself.
He had no intention of staying satisfied with archery at its present standard.
When I have the room for it, I'll learn this properly.
He had a fine teacher in the Shadow Archer. Improving would not be difficult.
Even then, I'll never stand level with the ones who were truly born for it.
With the blessing's help, though, he could at least come close. Archer, assassin, mage, healer, tank—set his main class, warrior, aside, and every one of them left him with the same nagging sense that he was awkwardly reaching for second place.
That can't be right.
Jin-soo forced the feeling aside. He had lived his entire life as second. This time, he was going to be first. No matter what.
Curse Trap is pretty useful, too.
Trap was one of the archer-exclusive skills he had picked up recently. An archer hit hard at range and poorly up close, and Trap was the skill meant to make up for that.
Ordinarily the limit is a small snare that catches an enemy by the ankle for a moment.
Skill Synthesis had come through once again.
Attribute Skill Trap.
An archer did not simply loose ordinary arrows. Flame arrows, ice arrows, explosive arrows—special shafts, each steeped in its own property. Attribute Skill Trap was a synthesized skill that could seal the attribute of an archer's skill inside a trap.
A pure archer would only have been able to load the attributes that go on special arrows.
Jin-soo was not carrying pure archer skills alone. He had the skills of a healer, a tank, an assassin, and a mage as well.
Turning warrior, assassin, and mage skills into traps failed.
Whether the attack power packed into those skills was simply too great for Attribute Skill Trap to hold, or whether some other unknowable reason was at work, he could not say. Either way, the attempt had failed miserably. Fortunately, making a healer's curse into a trap had succeeded.
That one was a real jackpot.
Curse Trap, able to turn a curse into a snare, would be a considerable asset in a guerrilla fight like this one.
Not that it can hold a curse in full.
Some loss of potency, when a curse was made into a trap, had been unavoidable.
Raise the level, and I can probably overcome that.
He might even be able to load a mage skill of tremendous force, or an assassin skill with the power of a one-strike kill.
Only if I can raise the level of the synthesized skill, of course.
At present, no method existed at all for raising a synthesized skill's level.
It'll come later. It has to.
Jin-soo trusted the blessing. Steadying himself, he prepared for the next fight.
"Grinding you alive and drinking you down wouldn't cool me off, you goddamned bastards!"
Zhou Tianguo roared it at the top of his lungs, and most of the guild roared with his rage. Not all of them.
We ought to just pull out.
As time passed, the fever broke in a few of them, and their heads slowly began to work again. Even so, they could not force so much as the first syllable of retreat past their lips.
There's no way through this.
After the first ambush, the elites of the Yellow Dragon Guild had prepared for everything. They were hit anyway, again and again at steady intervals, and every raid cost them dearly. The elite roster, once over a hundred strong, had been cut down to forty-nine. They had not fought a single proper battle, and already their numbers were less than half.
We might be wiped out entirely.
Those still alive were, of course, more skilled than the dead. The problem was that the enemy refused a head-on fight and waged a meticulous guerrilla campaign instead. They never so much as glimpsed their foe. They were simply beaten, one-sidedly, and defeat was as good as sealed.
The archers—the only ones who could fight at range—are already gone.
More than half the mages had survived, and most of the healers were unhurt. That was all. They had no way to track the enemy, and no way to defend from a distance.
The mages won't be enough.
An archer's range ran far beyond the reach of a mage's attack skills, and once the enemy had sprayed their magic they vanished as if they had evaporated. Striking back meant nothing. Every clash, their own side was pummeled without ever catching the enemy's shadow, and as that repeated, the enemy stayed whole while their casualties snowballed.
If we at least couldn't track them, it might be different.
The Players with tracking skills had been annihilated in the first raid. Even so, the Yellow Dragon elites could follow the enemy with ease, because the enemy kept leaving traces out in the open—thick aftershocks of mana, footprints, left there blatantly.
It's an obvious trap.
Those traces were nothing but bait, meant to draw them somewhere they could be attacked without effort. The trouble was that Guild Master Zhou Tianguo, and most of the guild with him, were whipped into a frenzy like wild boars that had taken a bullet.
I have to say it.
Until a little while ago he, too, had been too worked up to see the trap for what it was. Not anymore. Even if it brought Guild Master Zhou Tianguo's wrath down on his head, pulling out now was the only way to live.
"Guild Mas—"
Pyeeeng!
Thwack!
Before the words were even finished, a single arrow streaked in and claimed a comrade's life.