Thwuck!
Thwuck!
Yujun's sword pierced the Snowfield Yeti King's eye.
Judged by volume alone, the wound should have amounted to nothing more than a needle sliding in — but Yujun's blade did not carry ordinary attack power. Its offensive figures were so overwhelming that to call them mighty would have fallen short.
"Graaaaaah!"
For the first time, the Snowfield Yeti King screamed in pain. The roar was so tremendous that Yujun's ears gave out entirely, a shrill ring screaming through his skull.
Chaos. As expected.
By rights, the gulf in caliber should have made it impossible to inflict any damage at all. Yet Chaos, a force without precedent, drew the sword's attack power out in full. No — it amplified it.
The Snowfield Yeti King twisted, flailing its fists through empty air in an attempt to hit him. A blind swing was never going to catch Yujun. Expression unhurried, he slipped every blow, then drove his sword into the Yeti King's right eye as well.
In a span no longer than an instant, the Snowfield Yeti King lost both eyes. Even that tremendous regenerative power could do nothing against an attack carrying Chaos.
And this is with Chaos at a mere 130... If that number climbs any higher, this is going to get ridiculous.
The effect as it stood was already more than satisfying, and the fact that there was still room to grow pleased him.
Unable to see what lay ahead, the Snowfield Yeti King was no longer much of a threat. Then it made one last desperate gambit. Its mouth yawned wide, and from that enormous maw erupted a torrent of pure-white freezing energy — an ability akin to Ice Breath.
Set beside the breath of a dragon, of course, it was a somewhat inferior mass of energy. That did not mean the force was slight enough to ignore outright.
By some luck, the freezing energy launched straight toward where Yujun stood. He cast Flash and reappeared at the Snowfield Yeti King's back. The back of its head lay wide open.
He did not hesitate. He swung the sword steeped in Chaos.
Swish! Swish!
In the blink of an eye, Yujun struck dozens of times. This time the Snowfield Yeti King did not scream. It had simply failed to withstand his overwhelming attack power, and died.
"Oh, nice. Waiting was getting dull."
Had the waves stopped at the third, he would have been left staring into space for a good forty minutes.
Ascend to the Summit of the Snow Mountain
Climb to the summit of the snow mountain somewhere in the snowfield.
"So I just have to climb it?"
Going by the description alone, it was far too easy. He had Fly, after all. Even without that, he could simply use Paranet's Space Movement.
He already knew where the snow mountain stood. A blizzard veiled it, yet far in the distance he could still make out, faintly, the shape of a peak rising high.
"Paranet."
"Yes!"
"We're going there."
"Understood!"
Perhaps it was the sight of Tapagol being so thoroughly wrecked a moment before. Paranet seemed wound tight, his spirit drawn up sharp.
Manuela and Yujun set their hands on Paranet's shoulders, and the magic of Space Movement activated at once.
"How much do I get if I catch him?"
"Three hundred million points."
At the client's answer, No-Pay Casual Gamer's brow furrowed.
"That's all?"
"Cut off the bastard's ears and bring them to me, and I'll pay you three times that."
"Nothing difficult about it. Fine. I accept."
"You have my thanks."
Over the past two years, No-Pay Casual Gamer had become a famous figure among players. His inhumanly handsome face and massive frame played their part, but the greatest reason was simply that he was strong. Since resurrecting by means of an automatic revival scroll, he had never once been defeated.
A great many players had come to him with commissions to hunt other players, and No-Pay Casual Gamer accepted only the jobs that suited him — and succeeded at every one. He hunted only players of a wicked nature. Those who committed atrocities, or who did harm to the Continent. It was not that he held some creed. Hunting that sort was simply less of a burden on his conscience.
That was how a new epithet had attached itself to him: Executor of Justice. Every time he heard it from another player, goosebumps rose over his whole body. No matter how openly he showed his distaste, he never went about announcing his name, and so the title hardened into Executor of Justice — or simply the Executor. By now he had resigned himself.
This target is completely insane.
Miura Genshin. His peculiarity was hunting — human or other race alike — and cutting off their ears to collect them. The ears he had already gathered numbered in the thousands, they said. And he chose only the highest-tier players to kill, so Genshin's infamy had climbed without any sense of where the sky ended.
He was a player swollen with pride, going so far as to call himself a sword god, a samurai, and he actually possessed the skill to match. Plenty of bounty hunters had set out to catch him, only to be found later as corpses. Genshin was a headache, and one for which there was no ready remedy. Which was precisely why the turn had come around to No-Pay Casual Gamer.
They say he's in a dungeon nearby. I can finish this quickly and rest.
For two years he had wandered without a single proper day of rest. He had no desire to waste time on a commission that would drag on for days.
No-Pay Casual Gamer made for the dungeon Miura Genshin was said to be clearing. The client sent him Genshin's location by message in real time. Surprisingly, no small number of people knew where Miura Genshin was. Part of it was that the man made no effort to hide, and part of it was how much hatred he had earned. Even so, no one stalked him — because doing so carried that much danger. Already, countless players had gone out to hunt him and paid in blood. Top-tier players were not stupid enough to repeat the same folly over and over.
Twenty minutes or so after he entered the dungeon, No-Pay Casual Gamer found him: Miura Genshin, beaming as he cut the ear from a giant monster.
"......You've got a disgusting hobby."
"Hah? Who the hell are you."
He did not answer. Sword in hand, he charged.
Miura Genshin wiped the smile clean off his face and gripped his sword hard.
Clang!
"What kind of strength is this...!"
Before No-Pay Casual Gamer's monstrous power, Genshin was driven back without a hope of holding his ground. His back drew steadily closer to the dungeon wall.
Clang! Crash!
Cornered, Miura Genshin's face tightened with urgency. Realizing he could not go on like this, he opened his mouth.
"W-wait! I've got something to say!"
"Something to say? If it's a request to have your ears cut off, I'll gladly oblige."
"Not that... You wouldn't have known, but this is a hidden dungeon. I've got information only I know."
"So this was a hidden dungeon."
"Y-yeah."
"Scheme all you like. It won't help. I've killed your kind until I'm sick of it."
A face utterly unmoved. From beginning to end, No-Pay Casual Gamer's expression never changed once. At that nerveless attitude, Miura Genshin swallowed hard.
"......Just hear me out. I know a way to another world — no, more precisely, to another server. It's tied to this dungeon. But neither you nor any player on the Continent could ever figure that method out. It requires a specific item."
"Server? What's that?"
"Put simply, there's another continent exactly like this one. Only there are no humans there, and the NPCs... no, that's not right. Only the other races exist."
"A continent the same as this one, and only other races live on it? Humans were never summoned?"
"Yeah. At least, not to that continent."
"A hard story to believe."
No-Pay Casual Gamer peered closely into Miura Genshin's pupils. He had no art for reading minds, but he could gauge, to some degree, whether the other party meant what he said. It was thanks to the various traits he possessed.
"I-it's the truth. Why would I bother lying here, of all places, huh?"
"You've got reasons to spare. A man who wants to live will say anything."
Then Miura Genshin vanished.
Without the slightest warning.
No-Pay Casual Gamer's eyes went wide.
A skill of a higher order than Blink?
There had been no tell, so it was not spatial magic.
He went through the wall.
He brought magic to bear, smashed the wall in a single blow, and stepped through. Beyond it lay some space whose interior could not be seen. Miura Genshin, standing before that space, startled and tore the parchment in his hands — a decision made in an instant. His body began, slowly, to disappear.
No-Pay Casual Gamer opened his inventory, drew out the Absolute Sealing Orb, and hurled it. The orb shot forth at the speed of light and struck Miura Genshin true.
An instant later, Miura Genshin's body vanished completely.
"Almost let him slip."
For a man who had never once failed a commission, it was a moment that chilled him to the marrow. He was moving to retrieve the Absolute Sealing Orb when his expression went rigid.
The Absolute Sealing Orb was gone.
Look where he might — not the orb, not so much as a trace of it.
What is going on.
He knew the Absolute Sealing Orb well enough; he had used it from time to time. It was not an item that vanished after a few uses.
The orb should still be sitting right there.
It had never once happened before, which only made it more bewildering.
What's the reason?
He turned it over, and the conclusion arrived on its own. Miura Genshin had warped away to wherever he had meant to go, and at the same time he had been sealed inside the Absolute Sealing Orb. Which meant he had warped while trapped within the sealing orb. It fell short of certainty, but on the circumstances alone the odds were very high.
"Did I let him get away."
No-Pay Casual Gamer murmured it under his breath. It was the first commission he had ever failed, and he did not feel the least bit of regret.
Looking up from the foot of the snow mountain, even with his neck craned stiff, the summit was nowhere to be seen. The slope was brutally steep, and the height staggering.
To achieve the second prerequisite task, you must climb in person.
If magic or any movement-related skill is used, the prerequisite will be judged a failure.
"......That's what it says, Yujun."
Manuela said it with a face that already looked worn out.
"So no tricks."
Fair enough. Any mage capable of reaching a place like this would be able to cast Fly without fail, and that would make the second prerequisite far too easy. The system seemed to have tuned the balance, at least to some degree. Balanced, perhaps — though it still struck him as laying it on rather thick.
"We're really going on foot?"
"You can't even call this walking. It's closer to scaling a cliff."
The incline was so severe that keeping one's body up on two feet was a struggle in itself. Manuela's face crumpled, on the verge of tears.
"Why are you crying?"
"I'm not crying! I just... I'm no good at anything physical..."
"Figured as much."
Manuela was short. As a player her stats were high enough to place her among the superhuman, but what stood before them was a snow mountain lashed by a blizzard. She was nowhere near able to scramble up a slick cliff without hesitation.
Yujun, by contrast, was confident he could climb the snow mountain with nothing but his own body. He would not even need mana. His Strength, Stamina, and Agility had all long since broken past 10,000 under his equipment bonuses — nearly ten times Manuela's stats, even with every piece of her gear equipped.
Even so, I can't abandon Manuela and go up alone.
It was not as if there were no way at all. There was exactly one: a method to reach the summit quickly, without magic or skills, and without expending much strength.