The Test
"Huh?"
"Whoa!"
Nine players of the Minamoto Guild collapsed in a froth of spit under Leo's cat punches, and Jin-soo and Shin Sua could only stare, half their wits gone.
"What just happened?"
"Don't ask me. I have no idea."
Leo's movement a moment ago had been absurdly fast.
I thought players might give him some trouble.
He had never dreamed they would drop this easily. How much monstrous force could those tiny forepaws possibly hold, to produce a result like this?
This is an opportunity.
Ordinary monsters lacked the intelligence to hold a conversation with a player, so there had been no way to ask what had happened to their skills and stats after Leo got to them. Players were different.
I can check how far their skill levels and stats have fallen.
Better to interrogate them than to kill them outright.
Smack!
Jin-soo peeled back an unconscious player's eyelid and slapped him hard across the face.
"Aaaagh!"
The player jolted awake with a wretched scream.
"Hiiik!"
Then he saw Jin-soo and Leo in front of him and nearly fainted all over again.
"Open your status window. Let me see it."
At Jin-soo's words, the player's eyes shook wildly. Showing one's status window to another person was something that simply did not happen.
"If you'd rather not, you can just die."
"No, sir! I'll show it!"
One indifferent sentence was enough. The player made his status information public.
His level's the same.
His class level was unchanged as well. The number of skills he still possessed, though, was far too small.
And every skill he has left is over level 200.
Not a single skill at level 200 or below remained.
His stats are abnormal too.
The man looked like an assassin, yet his stamina, durability, magic power, and mental power were all zero.
Strength and agility are normal, at least.
What those two had in common was that both sat above 200.
Did Leo devour every skill at level 200 or under, and every stat at 200 or under?
He was looking straight at the result, and he still could hardly believe it.
Even if Jin-soo himself had advanced to Dark Predator, Skill Predation and Stat Predation would have needed to be at least level 200 to unleash power on this scale. And that was only the minimum.
Once he factored in the speed at which Leo had stripped skills and stats from monsters and players alike, it would not have been unbelievable if Skill Predation and Stat Predation had already passed level 400.
Did he hit skill level 400 the instant he absorbed the Dark Predator class book?
If that were the case, then why had he failed to devour skills and stats in the 300 to 400 range?
No matter how I turn it over, it doesn't make sense.
If he could have, he would have asked Leo his skill level outright.
Might as well actually ask. You never know.
It was absurd, and still a small part of him wondered.
"Leo, can you show me your status window?"
So he asked.
"Nyaaang?"
Leo tilted his head, wearing an expression of pure incomprehension.
"Then at least tell me your skill levels."
Jin-soo tried again.
"Nyah?"
Leo did not seem to understand a word of it.
"Jin-soo, what are you even asking Leo? No matter how smart he is, there's no way he'd follow something like that."
At Shin Sua's words, Jin-soo shook his head.
"Yeah. I only asked on the off chance. Ah, forget it. I don't get it either."
A hollow laugh escaped him.
Finish the interrogation first.
He woke the rest of the unconscious Minamoto players and pried the information out of them. They had exactly one thing in common. Every skill and stat at level 200 or below had vanished without a trace.
So what do I do with this.
Inside the Minamoto Guild, there were still people who knew about him and Shin Sua.
Cleaner to wipe the slate.
Jin-soo looked at Sasaki, the man in charge of the Minamoto Guild in the Starting City, and cast False Mask.
False Mask
Assuming the face and form of Sasaki, chief of the Minamoto Guild.
Ssshhk.
In an instant, Jin-soo's face became Sasaki's. Not only his face.
Creak. Creak.
Bone and muscle twisted, and his build shifted until it was close to Sasaki's as well.
The level's gone up this much, and the body still isn't a perfect match.
Had Sasaki been built like him, the imitation would have been flawless. But the man was a good six inches shorter, thin and slight, and there was a limit to how completely Jin-soo could become him.
Still, the higher the rank, the better.
He was the man in charge of the Minamoto Guild in the Starting City. No one was going to get in his way.
The rest I can cover well enough by wearing the same items.
The transformation was finished.
"Hiiik!"
"What is that?"
The Minamoto players who saw it recoiled in horror.
"Aaaaagh!"
Sasaki, faced with a perfect copy of his own face, screamed. Skills that altered one's appearance were not unheard of. Stealing another person's face this completely, though — he had never seen that.
In truth, it owed a great deal to False Mask having reached level 922.
Without the Blessing, even Jin-soo could never have raised a non-combat skill so high.
"I'll say this nicely, once. Everything in your inventories. Take it out."
He addressed the nine Minamoto players.
"N-no!"
"If you strip our items, you're just going to kill us!"
Of course they refused, and violently.
"Yeah? Then have it your way."
Jin-soo drew an assassin's dagger from his inventory. Before the regression, he had seen this often enough. An enemy brought completely under his heel was given exactly two choices.
Die cleanly, without pain. Or die writhing in it.
At first, every one of them chose the latter, sworn never to hand their items to a mortal enemy. Given time, most changed their minds.
A few held out to the very end, of course.
And there's nothing I can do about those.
The dagger in his right hand began to dance.
"Aaaaagh!"
Screams rose through the forest, raw and hopeless, as if hell itself had opened under the trees.
Seventeen people who know about me. That's all.
Fewer than he had expected.
Well. Dirty work run through an unofficial subordinate guild isn't the sort of thing you advertise.
That would explain it.
Ordinary guild members who weren't officers didn't even know the unofficial guild existed. And not every officer knew either.
Names and descriptions are all I've got.
Still, cleaning them up didn't look like much of a problem.
Jin-soo walked straight into the Minamoto guild house in the Starting City as if he belonged there.
"You've arrived, sir!"
The guild members bowed at the waist and shouted it in unison.
What is this, a crime syndicate?
Every guild had its own air. Some felt like companies, some like families, and some — the Minamoto Guild among them — like gangsters. Yakuza.
He didn't care for the atmosphere, but from where he stood, it made the work easier.
He passed a guild member the note ordering those seventeen to the office. Then he walked in without a word.
Should be fine.
Sasaki had written the note himself.
False Mask is good for everything except the voice. And the language.
He could wear the face. The voice was another matter. And Jin-soo did not speak Japanese.
Items first.
He opened the safe in Sasaki's office.
He's been stocking it nicely.
Jin-soo cleaned the safe out down to the last useful thing.
Creeeak.
"You called for us, sir!"
"Why the summons again? Did something go wrong?"
A few minutes after he finished pocketing the items, seventeen players filed into the office.
Not a shred of caution.
He was wearing Sasaki's face, and this was the Minamoto guild house. Of course they weren't wary.
He crooked a finger. Twice.
The seventeen gathered at the gesture.
"If you've got something to say, just say it. Why drag us in here?"
"There must be a reason, don't you think?"
Puzzled as they were, they still closed in around him.
"Out with it. Did the job go sideways?"
"Do we have to step in ourselves?"
The questions were still leaving their mouths when it happened.
Whish!
Baekcheonsingeom and the Blood-Sucking Sword tore free of his inventory and flashed like lightning.
Slash!
"Guh—!"
Seven died before they could even react. The other twelve registered the attack and flung themselves clear.
Shhk!
Too late.
Six more were dead in the next instant.
"Has this bastard lost his mind?!"
"What the hell do you think you're doing?!"
"Sasaki's gone insane!"
The four who remained ripped their weapons free and shouted.
Jin-soo launched himself forward. The smaller frame made his movement a little awkward, but not enough to matter.
KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA!
Baekcheonsingeom and the Blood-Sucking Sword roared to life, one wreathed in pure-white aura, the other in blood-red.
"You think we'll go down that easy?!"
"I'll make you regret starting this!"
The four came at him, weapons swinging, killing intent thick in the air. The survivors were genuinely skilled. A step below Sasaki, perhaps, but not by any wide margin.
The one who looked like a tank threw a heavy shield across Jin-soo's path and cast a guardian skill.
Shhk!
Against Baekcheonsingeom's Skill Nullification, a guardian skill meant very little.
"Ota died in one blow?"
"That isn't Sasaki! His main skills and his weapons are different!"
Three of them realized the truth. They realized it far too late.
Grasp of Black Darkness. Shackles of Binding. Crown of Thorns. Physical Weakening. Twisted Footsteps.
Grasp of Black Darkness
Shackles of Binding
Crown of Thorns
Physical Weakening
Twisted Footsteps
Jin-soo cast the curses and a magical attack skill in the same breath.
Fwoosh!
BOOM!
Magic hurled into bodies already slowed by curse was lethal. The assassin, thin on defense, lost his life.
Two targets left.
"Eeek! Hey! Is nobody out there?!"
"Just run! If we can get out of the office—!"
The will to fight gone, the last two bolted for the door.
The moment they turned their backs, the weapons in Jin-soo's hands became a bow.
Sh-sh-sh-shuk!
Thud-thud-thud-thud!
The arrows he loosed punched into both of them.
"Gaaahk!"
"Krgh—!"
Thump.
Turned to porcupines in a heartbeat, the two folded and hit the floor.
Clean enough.
Outside, it was quiet. He had set a noise-blocking item in the office and triggered it before any of this began.
Time to go.
His business in the Minamoto guild house was finished. Jin-soo stepped out of the office as if nothing at all had happened and walked out of the guild house.
With the cleanup done, Jin-soo returned to ordinary days. Not long after, his Blessing grew.
What did it give me?
The fixed level of a constitution such as Holy Physique or Dark Physique might have risen, but what he wanted most was a new Blessing skill.
Huh?
Unfortunately, no new Blessing skill appeared.
A rise in the fixed level of a Blessing-exclusive skill.
The Blessing-exclusive skill that had sat at level 122 rose to a fixed level of 222, and its number of uses climbed to 122 as well.
A little disappointing. Still good, though.
Jin-soo brought the Blessing-exclusive skill to level 222.
A hundred levels. The performance has to be better. So what changed in Skill Sharing?
He expected the number of skills he could share to increase. The guess landed dead center. What had been only two shareable skills on each side had become twenty-two.
Jackpot.
Twenty-two on the holy side, twenty-two on the dark side. Forty-four in all.
Even subtracting the four he had already used, he could still share forty skills.
Huh?
He had been ready to cheer when he checked the option newly added to Skill Sharing at level 222 — and for a moment, he had nothing to say.
└─ You may designate the target of Skill Sharing. ★
What does that mean? Don't tell me I can share skills with other players.
That reading looked entirely too likely.
And in that instant, Leo surfaced in his mind.
If I can share skills with a summon, too...
Then the class skills of the Dark Predator book Leo had swallowed — Skill Predation and Stat Predation — might yet end up in his own hands.