Misunderstanding
Steel hissed. Bone split.
Every time Jin-soo swung, the Sasaki pursuit squad died where they stood, ankles locked by curse skills, helpless to do anything but fall.
That thing is a monster. A monster we could never defeat.
Watching his comrades die, Ogawa went rigid with terror.
"Guhk!"
"Aaaagh!"
In a breath, the rest of them were gone. The blade was already turning toward Ogawa.
"Eek! I surrender! I'll do whatever you tell me. Please, just spare my life!"
Thud.
He threw himself flat in a full prostration, driving his forehead into dirt still wet with his comrades' blood.
"Hm."
Jin-soo, a stroke away from taking the man's head, stopped the sword.
Kill them all, and the next pursuit squad becomes nothing but a nuisance.
For the sake of understanding the situation, leaving one of them alive seemed acceptable.
"Does the Minamoto Guild have anyone else with a tracking skill on your level?"
"N-no, sir. There isn't."
"No? Well, that would be the normal state of things. Which means if I kill you here, the pursuit ends."
The color drained from Ogawa's face.
"Spare me, and I will make certain no pursuit squad ever comes after you!"
"Hmm…"
The sword, already lifting, paused.
"Explain. Carefully."
"Yes, sir! The Minamoto Guild believes Sasaki is the one behind all of this. Sasaki…"
He spilled the rest in a frantic rush. Stripped to its core, the plan was simple: he would report that the Sasaki subjugation force had been bewitched by a demonic sword, gone mad, and perished together with Sasaki himself.
"You're writing a novel. You honestly think a story that full of holes will hold?"
"It will! It absolutely will! Please trust me! I am twenty-second in the executive rankings! I have the Guild Master's absolute confidence, and my connections are vast and solid!"
"Plenty of weak points in it. I'll assume those are yours to handle."
"Thank you! Thank you!"
"And how, exactly, am I supposed to trust you?"
Put plainly, once Ogawa made it back in one piece, nothing stopped him from discarding every promise he had made.
"There is a contract that stakes one's stats!"
He drew a sheet from his inventory. Jin-soo knew the thing at a glance.
A Mana Contract.
He had used one himself when he bound Shin Sua.
"What this item does is—"
"I know what it is. Spare me the explanation."
"Ah. Of course."
"Give it here."
"Yes, here."
Ogawa held the contract out, and Jin-soo filled in the terms.
"Sign."
Ogawa took the page back. One look at what had been written there, and his face set like stone.
This is a slave contract in all but name.
And not a sloppy one. Ambiguous clauses, room for misunderstanding, any twist of the wording a man might use to slip the leash—all of it had been cut away. A perfect slave contract.
"What, you don't like it? Say so. Now."
Ogawa shook his head hard enough to blur and signed before the silence could stretch.
Light burst from the page. The contract dissolved into a brilliant flare and sank into both of their bodies.
"Go."
Jin-soo flicked a hand in dismissal.
"Yes, sir! At once!"
Permission had barely left Jin-soo's mouth before Ogawa spun and ran at a dead sprint.
"Do you think he can actually pull it off?"
Shin Sua watched the fleeing back, doubt plain in her eyes.
"I don't know."
If he failed, the Minamoto Guild's own people would kill him.
And then they will form another pursuit squad.
Should that new squad manage to find Jin-soo, the misfortune would belong to the Minamoto Guild. Letting Ogawa walk away had been a consideration, of a sort.
If they chose to kick that consideration aside of their own will—not once, but twice—and kept making a nuisance of themselves, then whatever followed would be no one's fault but their own. They would have nothing to say in their defense.
Jin-soo and Shin Sua threw themselves into the hunt, clearing hidden dungeons and ordinary ones with equal fervor. Even so, the levels and achievements he wrung from the hunting contributed far less to the growth of his Blessing than the effort he spent.
The reason was his summons, who hunted more diligently than he did—without pause, through all twenty-four hours of the day.
The more of them I have, the easier this becomes. And the better.
Levels climbing, achievements stacking, points and items accumulating even while he ate and slept. He could not have been more at ease.
That is no excuse to grow idle.
Dust gathered into a mountain. A smaller share of the contribution was no reason to hunt at half speed, and hidden dungeons, in any case, were something he had to find with his own eyes.
Today, as on every other day, he went out with Shin Sua.
He had not the faintest idea what storm the summons he had turned loose were raising across Tower Floor 150.
In the conference room of the Phoenix Guild on Tower Floor 150, every executive had been called in. Word had arrived of something wrong near the Starting City.
"A Bone Dragon showed up near the Starting City?"
"Yes. That's the report."
"They didn't just see wrong? Why would a Bone Dragon come out here?"
"Exactly. Probably mistook a wyvern for one."
"It's certain. They swear they saw it. There's evidence."
"Evidence?"
"Yes. They sent a video recorder."
"Play it."
"Yes."
The device whirred to life, and far off in the recorded sky something with a dragon's shape strode the open air.
"Huh? It's real."
"That's a Bone Dragon! It is! It really was one!"
"The color's off, though. Why's it white?"
"Bones are white! That's why!"
"Ah. Right."
The footage had been taken from a considerable distance, but the resolution was more than enough to settle whether a Bone Dragon was there at all.
"We move. Now."
"Right. We take it before anybody else gets there first."
"Think it through. That's a Bone Dragon. If it's truly an Out-of-Spec Monster, one mistake and we're the ones who get hunted."
"You stay careful, coward. Our party's going after the Bone Dragon."
"What? Who do you think you're talking to!"
"Enough!"
At a word from Robert, Guild Master of the Phoenix Guild, the shouting executives shut their mouths as one.
"Call in every top-tier party. That thing is ours. No exceptions."
"Waaaaah!"
The cheer had barely broken before the executive who had urged caution spoke again, displeasure tight on his face.
"This is too hasty. I believe we need a more thorough investigation."
"Then you're out. The ones who agree are more than enough to take it."
"But—!"
"If you sit there dithering and someone else kills it first, can you take the blame?"
That question stole the rest of his argument. Robert was not even forcing anyone. He had gone so far as to say that anyone who disliked the idea need not join the Bone Dragon raid at all, which left no principle left to stand on.
"Right. If you can't take responsibility, keep your mouth shut."
"Cowards can sit it out. What's the problem?"
And the room itself had already decided. The executives were overwhelmingly in favor of the raid.
"We leave the moment the top-tier parties are assembled. Move. Quickly."
"Yes, sir!"
The Phoenix Guild scraped its elites together in a rush and set out for the Starting City.
It was not the only guild to do so.
The Daehan Guild, the Yellow Dragon Guild, the American Alliance, the Ollih Guild, the Alsani Guild, the Minamoto Guild, the Kujo Guild—guild after guild. Nearly every major power on Tower Floor 150, the moment word of the Bone Dragon spread, formed an elite force and marched on the Starting City.
Jin-soo kept to an ordinary circuit, lodging to hunting ground and back again.
Sharing skills that carry an affinity restriction on acquisition yields the greatest effect.
He was spending his uses of Skill Sharing without waste.
Every class had its core skills. Those divided cleanly in two: non-attribute skills that both the holy and dark affinities could learn, and skills restricted to holy alone, or to dark alone.
Until now I considered it no great problem. Status Window Switch was sufficient.
Skill Sharing solved the matter more cleanly still. The greatest convenience was the vanishing of the boundary between the holy status window and the dark.
The inventory alone makes the case.
Switching from the holy window to the dark, or back the other way, the true obstacle had always been items.
Equipped gear was unaffected. Anything left in the inventory could not be used.
Both windows carried a spread of classes.
The use count and cooldown of Status Window Switch were not the difficulty. The Blessing-exclusive skill had risen in level, its stacks surging from twenty-two to one hundred twenty-two and its cooldown falling from two hours to one.
Skills were no difficulty either. Holy or dark, only the type and the inclination changed. The quality did not decline.
Items were another matter.
Wear warrior equipment under the holy window, switch to the dark, and reaching for another class's gear required whatever he had staged in the holy inventory. The reverse was identical.
It was not a problem that would bite immediately.
Monsters on the level of Tower Floor 150 were weak enough that he had no need to hunt by switching windows at all. Even if he did switch, they were weak enough to fall without class-specific equipment worn for the sake of combat power.
Inconvenient remains inconvenient.
The Cursed Skeleton Knight's Staff was the same. Stored in the inventory, it could maintain the Skeleton Knights' summoning. Change the status window, however, and the inventory went inactive—and the knights were dragged back by force, unsummoned.
To keep them summoned without interruption, every switch meant pulling the staff from the inventory and placing it back in.
The work did not devour much time. It was, quietly, a bother all the same. And in the Tower, where no one could say what would erupt, or where, or when, preparation had to be complete at every moment.
When I had only two shares apiece, there was no margin to spend one on the inventory.
That was no longer true.
He spent one of the holy window's sharing uses on the inventory itself and made it a shared skill. After that he stored every class's core equipment, along with the items he reached for often, in the holy inventory. Gear and combat no longer cared which window was open.
The dark window's inventory he reserved for goods not yet sold and for things he rarely touched, and so kept the two in balance.
Shifting items between inventories meant a status-window switch every time. That, too, was labor.
Skill Sharing cleared the problem away.
Sharing the summon-contract skill mattered just as much.
Leo and Kkami were bound to that skill. Their summons could be maintained only while the dark window remained active.
Switch the dark window over to holy?
They unsummon themselves.
Make the contract skill a shared skill, and that difficulty vanished with the rest.
I regretted being unable to use Kkami's scouting, or Leo's wide-area taunt roar, from the holy window.
Then Leo's combat ability had been added on top, and the regret had only deepened. Skill Sharing settled that as well.
To think summoning would become my main strength.
Fresh from regression, newly arrived on Floor 1, he could not have imagined it.
Work hard.
Even now the summons hunted without rest, all of it in service of his growth.
Hm?
A report struck his mind: they were being chased by humans bearing weapons. Such things happened now and then. Shake the pursuers off, and there was nothing to it.
The trouble was that the reports did not arrive in scattered bursts and then fall silent. They kept coming, without pause, from many places at once.
The Bone Dragon of Army Summons, the Dragon Tooth Soldiers, and the undead summons besides—all of them sending the same report?
This was not a matter he could set lightly aside.