A Deal with Death Lord Garamikan
Twelve Army Summons burst into a charge.
Two of them, black and white, hit the monsters first — one behind an enormous shield, the other swinging a hammer. Shield and hammer flashing, they drove forward like war chariots and mowed the creatures down without slowing. A paired set of black-and-white archers followed, loosing arrows at blistering speed, while the rest of the summons hunted in pairs of their own.
Looks like they still have every skill they learned in life.
Combat technique and experience seemed to have carried over intact. More than that, summons born from the same soul and spirit moved as if they shared a single body, their timing uncannily precise.
They were one being to begin with. Of course they would.
The only disappointment was that, unlike the Shadow Summons, the classes weren't balanced. Aside from one pair of tanks and one pair of archers, the rest were all warriors and assassins.
Mages and healers rarely become guild masters. Nothing to be done — and there's no need to force a balanced roster anyway.
Jin-soo had turned the guild masters into Army Summons for one reason only: they were stronger than the boss monsters he had been using as summons. He wouldn't have a chance to make anything on the level of a Bone Dragon into a summon for some time, but even a monster around the grade of a variant lycanthrope would be enough for him to consider a replacement.
No point distinguishing monsters from players.
From his perspective, he was simply swapping in individuals whose strength in life had been greater, all to reinforce his forces.
The Army Summon skill leveling up is part of it, but they're remarkably strong.
The guild masters who had become his summons were stronger than they had been alive, thanks to an Army Summon skill that had climbed all the way to level 822. Buffs piled on top of that.
Even Army Summons created by the Holy-affinity Sovereign Necromancer take the Dark-affinity Dominator Necromancer's buffs without a hitch.
Corrupted Heart, Fallen Armor, Jet-Black Sacred Flame — the Dark Dominator Necromancer's buffs settled onto Army Summons made through the Holy Sovereign Necromancer without the slightest trouble.
Then this ought to work too.
Jin-soo switched his status window, then cast the Holy Sovereign Necromancer's buff skills on the summons: Immortal Heart, Sacred Armor, and Radiant Sacred Flame.
It works.
The Holy Sovereign Necromancer's buffs and the Dark Dominator Necromancer's buffs took hold at the same time.
Duration is the problem.
A buff skill at level 822 lasted more than eighty minutes.
Status Window Switch has twenty-two stacks.
Managed properly, overlapping the buff skills of both classes was entirely possible.
Excellent.
All of it was thanks to Skill Sharing.
The summons stay even when I switch status windows. The advantage is enormous.
Holy window or Dark, the summons persisted without any hindrance at all, and the upside was staggering.
Once I have some room to spare, Leo and Kkami won't get forcibly unsummoned either.
That, of course, was still a long way off.
For now, even if Skill Sharing grows, I'll have to pour the gains into combat skills.
Jin-soo kept hunting, running trial after trial while he put the Army Summons through their paces.
The leveling speed is absurd.
With the Bone Dragon, the Shadow Summons, and the Dragon Tooth Soldiers spread out and hunting on their own, the efficiency itself was in a different league.
I might reach Floor 101 sooner than I thought.
Floor 100 was a space of staggering breadth, and Jin-soo had expected that gathering every title and clearing the hidden dungeons would cost him no small amount of time. With the Bone Dragon joining them, though, and the Dragon Tooth Soldiers forged from twenty-one of its teeth, that pace looked ready to collapse.
Challenging the Bone Dragon raid really was the right call.
The growth of his blessings through feats and titles, and the immense spoils, were welcome enough — but turning the Bone Dragon into a summon was the greatest prize of all.
Its combat power is outstanding, but the real change is mobility on another plane entirely.
No matter how high one's stats, running on two feet could never compare to flight. The Bone Dragon's arrival cut the time spent shifting between hunting grounds down to a fraction.
Best keep moving.
The instant Jin-soo committed to a forced march—
What?
Shin Sua, who had been casting blessing and protection skills with everything she had, felt a chill she could not name, and her whole body shuddered.
Jin-soo moved from city to city, hunting by day and sorting items by night. In the course of that routine, his points crossed sixty billion.
I could buy items above level 1,500.
At most, one or two of them.
It would feel good for now, but in the long run it's waste.
More decisively, his forces were already a perfect case of over-spec. Unless he was hunting an Out-of-Spec Monster like the Bone Dragon, gear below level 1,500 and gear above it amounted to the same thing. A knife meant for chickens and a knife meant for cattle could both make short work of an earthworm.
No need to change my weapons. The armor's the same.
Baekcheonsingeom went without saying, and the Blood-Sucking Sword kept climbing in level, its performance rising with it.
Before the regression, the Blood Demon used the Blood-Sucking Sword right up until he died.
So long as its level could be raised, there was no problem with its performance.
The Blood-Sucking Sword's drawbacks mean nothing to me.
As a growth weapon, the Blood-Sucking Sword had to drink an enormous quantity of blood to level up. The higher that level climbed, the less use it had for the blood of low- and mid-grade monsters; it demanded vast amounts from high-grade monsters such as dragonkin and giants, or from players themselves. Jin-soo, however, had no need to feed it blood at all. He only had to fix its level with a blessing, and that was the end of it.
The residual will lingering in the Blood-Sucking Sword had stayed quiet as well, perhaps because he had firmly suppressed its energy when he first obtained it.
For armor, the Black Dragon's Cursed Armor Set is more than enough.
And while the class he knew best — and the one in which he was strongest — was the warrior who fought with two swords, the skills of his other classes were formidable in their own right. Only his proficiency lagged.
I'll just raise each class's main gear to a reasonable grade.
Shields, staves, bows, daggers, leather armor, robes — upgrade the items, and there was an immediate way to spike his combat power.
I haven't used a shield at all, but if I want to maximize a tank's core skills, it's essential.
He would need two staves and two robes, one set for a mage and one for a healer. Going finer still, it would be better to have pieces that played to the traits of both Holy- and Dark-affinity classes.
I'll need daggers too.
Baekcheonsingeom and the Blood-Sucking Sword were exceptional enough to cover for him, but proper assassin skills still required a dagger. Leather armor was the same story: the options for an archer and an assassin were entirely different.
At this rate, I might actually run short on points.
Sixty billion points had seemed like more than he could spend at his current level, but the moment he set out to replace every primary item with something past level 1,000, a strange magic took hold and the sum began to look desperately small.
Still, I should just do it.
If it had to be done, sooner was better.
Just then, a knock sounded at his door.
What?
This was a city he was visiting for the first time today. There shouldn't have been anyone coming to find him.
The hinges creaked. Jin-soo opened the door, and a familiar face framed in fluffy fur appeared — a wandering merchant.
"Lucy."
"Haha, it's been a while. Might I step inside for a moment?"
Lucy asked, tail swaying as she looked at him.
I thought she might show up. Of course she did.
However she kept digging up his information and pinning down his location, it was genuinely uncanny.
She really might have a special skill for detecting items steeped in karma.
Once or twice could be coincidence. Keep repeating it, and it became inevitability.
A mark walked in on her own. No reason to turn her away.
Another wandering merchant he might have refused. Lucy was more than welcome.
"Come in."
Jin-soo threw the door wide, and Lucy smiled as she stepped into the lodging.
"Oh? Lucy!"
Shin Sua lit up at the sight of her, rushed over, and pulled her straight into a hug.
"I'm so glad to see you, Lucy! You're still adorable!"
She said it while fiddling with Lucy's fluffy tail.
"Ha, haha... I'm glad to see you too, Miss Sua."
Lucy let out a laugh like someone halfway to enlightenment and returned the embrace in an awkward tone.
She does not look glad at all.
Ears and tail drooping, she clearly hated what Shin Sua was doing. Her face, though, was working very hard not to show it.
"Nyaang!"
"Kkaak!"
Leo and Kkami took an interest in Lucy. Leo bustled about, sniffing at her scent, while Kkami jabbed at her body with its beak, testing her reaction.
"What adorable little things. Hahaha!"
Lucy forced a smile and stroked Leo and Kkami as if she found them charming.
She looks extremely uncomfortable, and thoroughly displeased. Grinding her teeth and enduring it. Is it because the True Dragon's Corrupted Dragon Heart is what she's after?
The other byproducts were worth a fortune as well. But the pinnacle among them could only be the True Dragon's Corrupted Dragon Heart. Corrupted or not, wasn't a dragon heart still the most precious thing a true dragon could yield?
"So what brings you here?"
Jin-soo smiled as he asked Lucy her purpose.
"You already know. Why ask? It's the Bone Dragon's byproducts."
Lucy wrinkled her nose and stated her business without preamble.
"A commission?"
"Yes. If it weren't a commission, how would a penniless wandering merchant like me dare try to buy a Bone Dragon's byproducts?"
She delivered the self-deprecation with perfect calm.
What's this? A play for sympathy, so she can appeal to my feelings and hammer the price down?
Jin-soo regarded her with suspicious eyes.
"The points I received as a commission fee come to ninety billion. Of that, the price of the True Dragon's Corrupted Dragon Heart is sixty billion."
At Lucy's words, puzzlement crossed Jin-soo's face.
"Did you eat something strange?"
He wasn't startled because she had named an absurd figure. He was startled because she had named the exact market price with a reasonable premium attached.
"My client is someone called Garamikan. A person who stands at the very summit of the Tower..."
Listening, Jin-soo's expression hardened.
"You mean Garamikan of the Aurs Dimension — the one they call the Death Lord?"
Lucy flinched, startled.
"How do you know him, Mr. Jin-soo?"
She stared at him, eyes full of disbelief. She simply could not accept it. Information on the Tower's highest players, the Death Lord Garamikan among them, was clutched tight by a handful of NPCs. That was why Lucy, nothing more than a novice wandering merchant, had learned who the Death Lord Garamikan even was for the first time only when she accepted this commission.
I only learned about him recently, by luck. How on earth does he know?
For a player on Floor 100 to mention information he could never possess even if the sky split open — Lucy had no choice but to be horrified.
"That isn't what matters. You're saying the Death Lord Garamikan commissioned you to buy the Bone Dragon's byproducts."
The Death Lord Garamikan was a resident of the Aurs Dimension. Players from Earth simply called them demons. Blue-tinged skin, a horn on the forehead, a grotesque appearance — to Earth-born eyes, they looked exactly like the demons out of fantasy novels and comics.
It's only a temporary name, the way the Tower's natives get called NPCs.
It wasn't appearance alone that earned them the name. Demons had overwhelming affinity with Dark-class jobs, and most of them were short on patience, like people with no control over their tempers, and extremely aggressive by nature.
And from birth they're on a completely different level from Earth-born people, who start with nothing.
Even before awakening, demons possessed bodies, innate authority, and mana incomparably stronger than anything from Earth. Their numbers were few, but each one was a tremendous powerhouse.
And then those things awakened as players.
Unlike Earth-born players, who began at level 1, demons started at no less than level 1,000 the moment they awakened. The formidable bodies and mana they already possessed converted into high stats, and their innate authority became high-level skills.
Well. They start on different floors of the Tower, so we can at least contend with them.
Other-dimensional beings, unlike Earth humans who were dragged in with no abilities and had to climb patiently from the first floor, were granted levels, stats, and skills matching their original capabilities, and began their ascent from the hundredth floor and above rather than the first. One could call it unfair that the starting lines themselves were different...
Without a system like that, if everyone started from the same line, people from Earth would be hard-pressed to survive.
Giving Earth-born players time to adapt to the Tower and a chance to grow strong, then setting a stage where they could compete with the born powerhouses of other dimensions — that arrangement deserved praise.
Not that it changes the fact we were dragged here by force.
Before his regression, Jin-soo had been someone who, despite the enormous penalty of being born on Earth, suppressed the powerhouses of other dimensions and reigned as one of the strongest. Among the players judged the strongest of all, he had stood second.
Even so, he did not know why the Tower forcibly brought intelligent beings from other dimensions and awakened them as players.
I still don't know what the Tower wants.
It wasn't that it wished for players to die. It created a harsh environment, yes, but it granted power to match — as if it were waiting for someone capable of conquering it.
This time, I'll find out.
He had failed before the regression. He would not fail this time. No matter what it took, he would conquer the Tower, uncover its secrets, and return to Earth.