The End of Greed
What do we do?
There's been more than enough time for him to resummon. If he's still just standing there, he doesn't want an all-out fight either.
Bring the guild members in and we could probably pin him down. Then he'd summon too.
We'd lose more than we'd gain.
The guild masters edged backward, one cautious step at a time.
They had sided with Robert, Guild Master of the Phoenix Guild, because they thought they could take a huge profit with hardly any risk. The moment it became clear this was not low risk and high return, but high risk and high return, they had no choice but to change their minds.
Not everyone felt the same.
Someone slid in behind Jin-soo, body swallowed by a stealth skill.
Arrogant, for a mere summoner.
The way he had dropped Robert in a single blow left no doubt he was hiding a trump card.
An item with the power to kill in one strike, most likely.
Get careless, and he might end up like Robert.
But I am not Robert. I don't get careless.
Okamoto, Guild Master of the Minamoto Guild, was the finest assassin on Tower Floor 150. Not a single soul on the floor had ever escaped the blow he struck from stealth.
Blame your own arrogance for not summoning anything. I'll take your limbs, drag you off alive, and work you like a slave.
First he meant to cut away the right arm holding that sword—the one that looked like a high-level item—so the man couldn't pull any tricks.
Okamoto's dagger flashed toward Jin-soo's shoulder.
Steel bit.
"Huh?"
The word burst from Okamoto thick with disbelief. The arm that should have severed Jin-soo's right arm was tumbling through empty air, dagger and all.
How in the world—?
Before the shock could settle, Jin-soo was already swinging again, and the blade filled Okamoto's eyes.
Steel bit a second time. Now it was Okamoto's left arm that spun away.
This is a dream.
To Okamoto, Jin-soo's sword path sat so far above his own that he could not even read it. The speed of the swings outstripped his own as well, and he fought with a dagger as his main weapon.
How can a summoner, of all people—?
He had lived it, and still he could not believe it.
This can't be happening. There is no way I fall to some summoner who hasn't even called a single summon.
Okamoto denied reality. Denial did nothing for the agony burning through both shoulders, flesh that felt as if it were on fire.
"Aaaagh!"
A raw scream tore out of him.
Robert, and now Okamoto too.
We don't stand a chance.
At the sight of Robert with one arm gone and Okamoto with both, the guild masters lost the will to fight and quietly drew back. Robert and Okamoto, already badly wounded, had lost their reason.
"You cowardly bastards!"
"Kill him! I said kill him!"
The guild masters ignored them. Others could not look away.
The members of the Phoenix Guild and the Minamoto Guild.
"Guild Master!"
"He attacked the Guild Master!"
"Kill him!"
"Waaaaah!"
The elites of Phoenix and Minamoto charged Jin-soo.
What a nuisance.
A curse or an offensive spell would have been enough. He saw no reason to lay every card he held on the table.
Jin-soo summoned two Bone Dragons.
"Graaaaah!"
"Krrrrrng!"
"We were going to hunt these things anyway!"
"Go!"
The Phoenix and Minamoto guild members showed no fear at the sight of the two Bone Dragons. Jin-soo had not summoned them as a threat.
Manifested mana gathered at the two maws and condensed.
The condensed mana detonated. A pitch-black beam and a pure-white beam lanced from the Bone Dragons' mouths and swept through the players of the Phoenix Guild and the Minamoto Guild.
With a thunderous blast, the guild members charging in a straight line vanished as if they had evaporated.
A dead silence claimed the ground.
The Phoenix and Minamoto members lucky enough to have stood outside the breath went white. Some dropped where they stood. Others could only hiccup, shaking.
Insane.
One breath, and he wiped out the elites of Phoenix and Minamoto.
How is a summon that strong?
Those are Bone Dragons?
If the summons are like that, how strong is a real Bone Dragon?
If a real one had been standing here, every last one of us would be dead.
We took an Out-of-Spec Monster far too lightly.
The guild masters reeled at the power of the Bone Dragons' breath.
Good thing I didn't side with Robert and Okamoto.
If we hadn't pulled back and fought alongside Phoenix and Minamoto, we'd be in the same state.
The thought alone is sickening.
Those who had first agreed with Robert and Okamoto, only to sense the tide turning and withdraw, felt a deep relief.
Jin-soo himself was more than a little surprised by the breath's power.
I didn't think a mana-condensed breath would hit this hard. The mana cost was steep, but this is beyond what I expected.
For this breath he had poured out more than ninety percent of the mana the Bone Dragons held. He had expected the force to rise when he dumped, in a single burst, an output normally split across three uses.
The result was destructive enough to blow past that expectation with room to spare.
The trade-off is the strain on the Bone Dragons themselves.
He could feel their mana circuits groaning under the cost of spending so much at once. Had they been players rather than summons that felt no pain, the overload and the mana exhaustion would have been enough to knock them unconscious.
The overloaded circuits might even have been ruined completely.
That penalty, however, applied only to the living.
The Bone Dragons were Army Summons. So long as the soul and spirit they were built from were not destroyed outright, any damage they took could be restored with time and mana.
"And where do you think you're rushing off to?"
Jin-soo asked it of Robert and Okamoto as they tried to heave themselves up and run.
"Hieek!"
"Urgh...!"
Terror shook them. This was nothing like the moment they had looked at Jin-soo as easy prey and made their outrageous demands with confident eyes.
Now those eyes held nothing but fear and despair.
A monster. That thing is a monster we should never have touched. Why did I ever—
I shouldn't have let Robert sweep me along. Greed blinded me.
They regretted it, far too late. And their ruin had always been coming.
In Jin-soo's memory, the names Robert and Okamoto did not exist. That meant that before the regression, they had died before ever meeting him, or had fallen so low they were not worth remembering.
The Tower was never so forgiving a place that those drunk on their own strength, soaked in overconfidence and arrogance, could keep climbing forever.
"You two are coming with me."
At his words, Robert and Okamoto shook their heads in desperate refusal and shot pleading looks at the guild members who had survived.
Those survivors did not move to help. They did not even look sorry for them.
What they sent back was resentment and hate.
Why provoke a monster like that?
If he'd left it alone, none of us would have been hurt.
The Guild Master's arrogance cost us brothers.
Damn him. If he wanted to die, he should have died alone.
From the surviving members of Phoenix and Minamoto, it was only natural. Their Guild Masters' bad judgment and pride had brought them to the edge of annihilation.
Jin-soo clubbed Robert and Okamoto across the back of the head and knocked them out.
"Hey. You."
Then he called over the guild masters who had sided with them.
"Are you speaking to us?"
"Yeah. You."
"What is it? Do you have business with us?"
"I got to thinking. You chased my summons while they ran without fighting back, and you kept hitting them. That really doesn't sit right with me."
"Th-that was..."
The guild masters had plenty they wanted to say. The Tower, though, was a world of the strong devouring the weak, through and through.
They had watched Robert, Okamoto, and the elites of Phoenix and Minamoto get swept away in an instant. Faced with a predator, they could only tremble like prey. Not one of them managed a protest.
"Seems to me I ought to collect a reasonable amount of points as compensation."
Their faces twisted.
Damn it. I never thought it would come to this.
If we refuse, he'll kill us too, won't he?
Fighting back won't mean a thing.
For now, we bow.
After a brief hesitation, the guild masters tucked their tails in unison.
"You are entirely right."
"Please forgive the discourtesy we committed."
"We're sorry. Truly sorry."
Jin-soo took a suitable sum in damages from them.
Vicious bastard.
He cleaned out our pockets.
He even took the guild operating funds.
Suitable, of course, only from Jin-soo's point of view.
From theirs, it was a fortune large enough to make them weep blood.
"You lot can just go."
He waved off the guild masters who had not sided with Robert and Okamoto—the ones watching him carefully, wondering whether they were expected to pay as well.
This is unfair.
He only shook us down.
Why isn't he taking anything from them?
They attacked the Bone Dragons too.
Naturally, the eyes of the guild masters who had been fleeced turned insolent.
"What? Got a complaint?"
Jin-soo asked it while stroking the lowered head of a Bone Dragon.
"N-no. Not at all."
"We have no complaints whatsoever."
"Then we'll be on our way."
Startled, the guild masters who had paid in points under the name of damages fled at once. They had bought forgiveness with that money. They had no desire to irritate Jin-soo and lose their lives over nothing.
"All right. Shall we get going too?"
Jin-soo seized Robert and Okamoto by the collars, one in each hand, and left.
"Why did you bring us here!"
"Just kill me! I'd rather die than ever bow to the likes of you!"
Dragged in and bound tight, Robert and Okamoto glared at Jin-soo, eyes full of venom.
"Let's see how long you can keep talking like that."
Jin-soo left them to the Shadow Summons and walked away.
Flesh burst. Bone cracked and crumbled. The sounds did not stop.
"Just kill us already! Kill us!"
"Why are you doing this to me!"
Poison still in them, they fought back all the harder. The Shadow Summons were never going to answer.
"Aaaagh!"
"Kurgh!"
Under the endless beating, Robert's and Okamoto's breathing grew thin. A Player might possess superhuman strength and a stubborn grip on life, but he was still a human being of blood and flesh.
Take damage past the limit, and death was the only outcome.
To think I'd die this pointlessly.
I never should have made that choice.
They regretted their decisions, too late to undo what had already been done. Terror of death came over them, and with it a thin relief that the violence might finally end.
Then a wash of bright light swept over them, and the fierce pain throughout their bodies vanished at speed.
"Huh?"
"A heal?"
Robert and Okamoto looked at each other. A moment ago the flame of life in both of them had been on the verge of going out. In an instant, the situation reversed.
They were not fully healed.
There was still hardly a place on either body that did not hurt.
The severed arms, the bones and muscle that had not knit properly—the electric agony running through them was pain beyond imagining. Separate from that, the shower of healing steadied the breaths that had been rattling in their throats, and the dying flame of life roared back up.
And in the same moment, the sounds of bursting flesh and breaking bone rang out all over again.