Bitter Ties (2)
"What in the world just happened?"
Still half out of her senses, having heard nothing that amounted to an explanation, Shin Sua turned to Jin-soo.
"I'll tell you once we've finished these things off."
"You'd better."
Jin-soo drew Baekcheonsingeom and the Blood-Sucking Sword and cut down the monsters already at death's door. Shin Sua summoned her stone golem as well, swinging her staff like a club as she cleared out the rest, and the hunt was over in an instant.
"Nyaaa!"
Leo came strutting over to the two of them, chest puffed so wide he looked thoroughly pleased with himself.
"Good job. You did well."
A job well done was still a job well done.
"Now explain."
"All right."
Jin-soo told her that Leo had devoured the job advancement book.
"One class book did all that? Summons can change class?"
"First I'm hearing of it, too."
Leo's freakishly high skill efficiency was just as much a mystery to Jin-soo himself.
One swipe of a forepaw, and he devours the skills and stats of monsters on Floor 150.
By everything Jin-soo knew, it should have been impossible. Stranger still was that Stat Predation—a class skill that ought to stay locked until job level 100—had been usable from the very start.
Well. Better to look on the bright side.
There was no taking back the fact that Leo had consumed the Dark Predator advancement book. The best he could do was count himself lucky that the cat could wield those class skills at such an absurd level of power.
Regret won't undo what's already done.
Jin-soo and Shin Sua pressed on with the hunt.
If the Blessing grows this time, what will it raise?
Everything the Blessing had gained so far amounted to his stats climbing to level 1,322 and his skill levels to 922.
I'd rather see another Blessing-exclusive skill. Something like Skill Synthesis, or Skill Sharing.
Every Blessing-exclusive skill to date had been a windfall. His status windows and classes had doubled to two. Skill Synthesis let him take skills from other classes, and Skill Sharing let holy-affinity and dark-affinity skills cross between windows.
What I need most is a rise in job level.
With his job level locked at 2, the worst of it was being able to learn only the basic class of each profession.
Patience.
Whatever came of it, he stood only to gain.
Even if I don't get the Blessing-exclusive skill I want, I lose nothing.
The Blessings he already held would simply grow in its place, and that, too, meant a rise in his strength.
The summon contract's cooldown ought to be coming back around soon.
Each time the cooldown reset, Jin-soo had cast the summon contract skill—and failed, again and again.
The first two were fine.
Leo's wide-area taunt roar and Kkami's scouting had done outstanding work in speeding the hunt along.
The two after that were both failures.
Fail again, and it would be three in a row.
It'll work out.
Even a string of failures wouldn't hurt much. The summon contract had only ever been a side benefit, picked up after he changed class to summoner so he could buff his Shadow Summons and Dragon Tooth Soldiers.
And I already have plenty of summons.
Shadow Summons, Dragon Tooth Soldiers, the ant colony, Army Summons, skeleton knights, dullahans, death wizards. For an ordinary summoner, a single failed contract would have been a serious risk, and the moment combat-useless Leo and Kkami appeared, that summoner would have seriously wondered whether to abandon the class altogether.
Jin-soo was the exception. He already commanded a summon army large enough to be called a one-man legion.
He and Shin Sua finished the first day's hunt without pushing themselves and returned to their lodgings—only the two of them, of course. Jin-soo's summons kept hunting around the clock, day and night.
"Giura is dead, and the Ikeda party was wiped out?"
"Yes, sir. They'd been missing for a day, so we sent out a search party. All of them are dead."
At his subordinate's report, Sasaki—the man in charge of the Minamoto Guild in Starting City—frowned.
"Who did it?"
If another major guild was involved, this could spark a guild war.
"They were taken down by a rookie who just reached Floor 150."
Sasaki's frown deepened.
"A rookie? Did they try to shake down a newbie and get it turned back on them?"
"Yes, sir. That's what happened."
"If even Giura is dead, then they know how the Ikeda party ties to our Minamoto Guild. Any rumors?"
"Quiet so far."
"Quiet so far, is it. Hmm..."
Sasaki closed his eyes.
Shaking down rookies was something they did from time to time, and to keep the aftermath clean, the targets were always newcomers with no guild and no one behind them. Once in a very great while, though, the script flipped.
It'll be trouble if they go around shouting about it the way those bastards did.
A few years back, something much like this had happened. The survivors had gone public, claiming the Minamoto Guild was PKing rookies who had no backing, and the uproar had been considerable. The guild master of their unofficial subordinate guild insisted it was the personal misconduct of a few members, and pressed the line that those members had only dragged the Minamoto name into it as a lie to save their own skins. Bribes were scattered, pressure applied, and the matter was somehow laid to rest.
This time the problem is bigger.
Both that unofficial guild master and a Minamoto officer were dead.
They haven't started running their mouths, so they might have a bit more sense than the last ones.
Even so, they were a time bomb. Ikeda, the unofficial subordinate guild master who would have taken the fall, was dead. So was Giura—low-ranking, yes, but still a Minamoto officer. And because a similar incident had already blown up once, the danger was that much greater.
The rookies might keep their mouths shut out of fear of clashing with the Minamoto Guild.
But there's no reason to carry a risk like that if I don't have to.
They didn't have to spread the story in the open. They could just as easily spread it in secret.
I'll handle them the same way I handled those bastards.
The ones who had gone around shouting that the Minamoto Guild ordered the player killings had been erased in the hunting grounds once the fuss died down, without a rat or a bird the wiser.
"Assemble every member of my party."
"You're going yourself? However skilled they are, they're still rookies. Isn't this overkill?"
"The more delicate the matter, the more thoroughly it should be handled."
In truth, two or three senior officers would have settled it easily enough. But the old saying existed for a reason: better safe than sorry.
The Ikeda party were no slouches themselves.
Giura in particular had been a considerable fighter, as befitted a man who had climbed to an officer's seat. If he wanted a clean finish, better to see to it himself.
There was also a tidy bit of side income in it.
The points the Ikeda party has stacked up won't be small.
The same went for Giura. This was a chance to take those points by perfectly legitimate means, and to buy goodwill among the other officers by showing that even the man at the top moved his own body and led from the front.
"You've pinned down his location?"
"Yes, sir. He went out to the western-gate hunting grounds. Ogawa's summon is already on him."
Ogawa was a summoner who commanded venomous insects. His fighting strength was nothing special, but his talent for tailing, espionage, and assassination was exceptional.
"Good. Gather the party at once."
"Yes, sir."
Matters like this were best ended quickly. The moment his party assembled, Sasaki meant to finish the whole affair in a single swift stroke.
Jin-soo and Shin Sua went out to hunt just as they had the day before.
"Nyaaaang!"
The instant Leo's wide-area taunt roar rolled out, monsters came swarming—a drum of heavy feet, growls and shrieks tearing the air. Leo shot ahead exactly as he had yesterday and drove cat punches into the pack.
"Looks like all we have to do today is clean up after him again."
"Seems that way."
All of yesterday, the two of them had done nothing but finish the monsters Leo left at death's door, and today looked no different.
The summons really are doing everything.
Between the summons hunting on their own around the clock and Leo's performance on top of it, Jin-soo's own work had shrunk to almost nothing.
"Kkaak! Kkaak!"
Just then, word came from Kkami of a place where the monsters had gathered thick.
"Kkami's been flying like mad since yesterday."
"He has."
Jin-soo had to agree. Once Leo started showing off, the crow seemed to grow anxious; without even being told, he had been ranging everywhere, feeding Jin-soo monster counts and reports. The hunt moved all the faster for it.
At this rate, the Blessing might grow within a few days.
Jin-soo was savoring the smooth pace of it when a harsh buzz cut through the air. Two winged insects that had been circling on noisy wings thrust their stingers forward and dove for his eyes and Shin Sua's.
The stinger meant for Jin-soo bounced clean off his closed eyelid. His durability was simply too high for an insect's sting to pierce. The one that lunged at Shin Sua failed to break the protective skill wrapped around her and ricocheted away as well. Jin-soo snatched both out of the air and crushed them in his hands.
Whose doing is this?
If only one of them had been struck, he might have written it off as chance. But the insects had come at him and Shin Sua together.
"Thought they'd go down easy."
"Ogawa's summons are always like that."
Japanese voices, and with them ten players settled into place as if to ring the two of them in.
"Minamoto Guild?"
Jin-soo asked it with certainty. He and Shin Sua had only just reached Floor 150—far too little time to have earned anyone's grudge. The only people they had bad blood with were the Minamoto Guild's unofficial subordinate guild, the ones who had ambushed them on the first day. And these people were speaking Japanese.
"You don't need to know that."
One of the ten shot toward Jin-soo like a bullet.
"Just die."
A dagger keen with killing intent flew for the nape of his neck, a sharp strike aimed at the gap between helm and armor. The speed of the approach and the attack alike was tremendous—tremendous, that is, only by the standards of Floor 150.
Baekcheonsingeom flashed free of its sheath and sheared off the right arm swinging the dagger. The Blood-Sucking Sword followed, piercing the man's heart dead center and drinking his blood in greedy gulps.
"Gaaah!"
Run through the heart, the player shriveled into a mummy in an instant, and his life snapped off.
"What?"
"Endo's dead!"
"How did Endo go down that easily?"
Caught in a turn none of them had imagined, the Minamoto players—nine of them now—fell into open panic. Jin-soo was neither surprised nor shaken, and so he moved straight into the counter.
A rush of air—and a ball of black fur slipped easily past him, charging the Minamoto players ahead of his own blade.
Leo?
The one who had overtaken him was Leo.
Those ones are faster and stronger than monsters.
Smarter, too. Just as Jin-soo moved to stop him, Leo's forepaws blurred and struck at lightning speed.
The remaining nine Minamoto Guild players collapsed where they stood, eyes rolled back, foam at their mouths, sprawled across the ground.