Maybe Touch of Healing Will Fix It...
Maybe Touch of Healing will fix this?
No. Touch of Healing itself was already sealed. Solving the problem with an ability didn't even make sense.
Which leaves items.
The surest fix, as always, was sitting in his inventory—and under the present circumstances, it was also his only lifeline.
It isn't a curse or a disease, so an elixir would be pointless.
A truly suffocating bind. Lately the Demon God Worshippers seemed to be warping him all over the place. Were they trying to treat him to the joys of an amusement park?
Yujun shook his head at the useless thought.
This is no time for stray ideas. Think. What do I do?
Bleak was the right word for it. Both of the weapons he had been counting on had vanished at a stroke.
Wait. Not everything's gone, is it?
He still had his inventory. Looking at the notice that his skills and traits had been sealed, Yujun found his answer.
A scroll.
◈ Option: Removes all buffs and debuffs.
The Buff Removal Scroll was a consumable that did exactly what its option said, and under ordinary circumstances he almost never had cause to use it. Stranded in a predicament this peculiar, though, it felt impossibly important.
He poured mana into the scroll at once and tore it.
A soft flare of light bloomed, and a gentle warmth wrapped around him.
All buff and debuff effects have been removed!
Even Goddess's Grace, the buff Manuela had cast on him, vanished with the rest—but the debuffs already clinging to him had been far too lethal to leave the scroll unused.
Power restored, Yujun raised a shield first, to make sure he was safe.
Clang! Clang!
Imperial knights' spears hammered down on it, and of course the shield didn't take so much as a scratch. The enormous barrier that had sprung up out of nowhere threw not only the imperial soldiers into confusion, but the people who looked like Yujun's allies as well.
"We had a mage?"
"We have mages. We always have mages. We just don't have a strong one."
"Then what's that man?"
"No idea. Never seen his face."
"Reinforcements, maybe?"
"We had reinforcements?"
That was when Yujun conjured dozens of Hellfires in the empty air.
Whoosh!
Hot, massive fireballs lit the surroundings and stitched themselves across the sky. He could have made more, but he saw no need. He already had a fair sense of how powerful Hellfire became when it was cast through New-Generation Magic.
He sent them a short distance from where he stood—straight into the imperial ranks. More precisely, they traced a steep arc and flew.
The dozens of Hellfires that had seized every eye slammed into the shield over the imperial camp.
BOOOOM!
The roar had barely spread before the shield shattered. The imperial army flinched and tried to scatter, but by the time they saw the barrier break, it was already too late.
Boom! Boom!
Enormous fireballs melted soldiers and hammered the ground. Only a handful who had fallen back the instant they sensed Hellfire's abnormal force escaped the aftermath, and they were, quite literally, a minority. Most of the imperial army dissolved before the magic even touched them.
His level didn't rise. His experience didn't increase either. The thought occurred to him that this place might be a virtual space.
They vanish the moment they become corpses...
Intuition settled in. It was the same feeling he'd had in the intermediate tutorial, inside that virtual battlefield of the past. Extremely similar.
This isn't an advanced tutorial ground or something... is it?
He would have liked that to be the case, but honestly the guess was absurd.
Still, it's definitely a virtual space.
Yujun let out a heavy sigh.
The cult had apparently believed they could catch him by sealing his abilities and shaving down his stats. In truth, if he hadn't possessed a Buff Removal Scroll that could only be bought with real money, he would have been helpless.
From their side, this has to be infuriating.
Everything they had prepared to kill him had failed. A clean failure they might have swallowed. What they had instead was Yujun slipping the crisis on a hidden trump he hadn't even meant to keep in reserve, and it would have been strange if their irritation weren't climbing.
Of course, the trap wasn't entirely spent.
I have to get out of here...
He knew instinctively where the exit was. The very rear of the imperial army.
Which means cutting through them.
Straight through the middle was the shortest path, and obviously more dangerous than going the long way around. Yujun, however, had power that made fretting over that largely unnecessary.
He sprinted through the gap Hellfire had blown open. Allies who read the charge as a signal roared and surged after him.
What are they doing?
Like that, they were no better than a suicide squad.
Yujun scratched his head.
I could just leave them...
Somehow he felt too sorry to do it. He slowed and prepared a new spell—first a few dozen Chain Lightnings, simple enough, and then Incinerate.
Incinerate was a name he had given the spell himself. It produced a fireball of extreme heat, and what set it apart from Hellfire was how well it combined with magic of other attributes. The synergy was considerable. He had never actually used it, but if the theory held, the result would be formidable.
Incinerate loaded into each of the dozens of linked Chain Lightnings.
Whoosh! Crackle! Zap!
A vast amount of mana was spent, but his reserves refilled almost at once. The fusion succeeded. Every time a spark jumped, fireballs scattered in every direction, and that alone produced meaningful casualties—and this was only the two spells joined, not yet detonated.
Yujun set off the Incinerate riding the Chain Lightning.
KRA-KOOM! BOOM!
A roar like thousands of lightning strikes in succession went on for a while. The imperial army, its numbers sharply thinned, was driven back without resistance and kept retreating.
That ought to be enough.
He hadn't dropped the magic on ordinary soldiers. These were elite players gathered in one place. Satisfied, Yujun picked up speed and left the battlefield.
"Where do you think you're going!"
Someone cut across his path. He had been moving at a speed that might as well have been light, and the interception was astonishingly precise—there was no way around it.
Yujun raised his sword, took one step back, and studied the man.
Human. Astonishingly, human. But certainly not Korean. He was tall, with deep-set eyes and a sharp bridge of the nose, a face that was perfectly Western.
Another human, the same as me... so this isn't a virtual space after all?
His thoughts tangled.
"Who are you?"
"That's what I want to ask. You... what in the world are you?"
"You're the one who stepped in front of me."
"Why... why is it I can't kill you..."
The mysterious player ground the words out through clenched teeth, as if they burned. Yujun frowned. Spouting nonsense like this, the man looked like something was wrong with his head.
"No matter how many times I rewind it, I can't so much as wound you, let alone kill you. What did you do to me?"
"What are you even saying?"
A lunatic?
He didn't have time to humor a player spraying nonsense out of nowhere. The man hadn't actually attacked, and Yujun was about to walk right past him.
"I've told you several times already. My name is Dustin."
If he had attacked, Yujun would at least have dodged and hit back. Instead the man suddenly introduced himself, and Yujun stopped dead, dumbfounded.
"What are you on about now? Been day-drinking? I've never seen you before."
Dustin smiled bitterly.
"This is my last chance. I don't want to fight you anymore, but this world is forcing me."
Yujun listened in silence, then spoke.
"This isn't the first time you've seen me? You've actually met me?"
His memory wasn't bad enough to forget a player he had seen once. If anything, his mind had grown sharp enough that forgetting would have been the strange part.
"Yes."
"That's odd..."
What he could be sure of was that Dustin's face was new to him. Still, it didn't seem like an act, so he decided to ask what he was curious about first.
"You said the world is forcing you. What does that mean?"
"Do you know of the Demon God Worshippers?"
"I do. How could I not?"
"Good. Less to explain, then. They locked me in here."
"When?"
"I don't know how much time has passed. I do remember that I was trapped here in my fourth year."
"Fourth year?"
That would mean barely a year had gone by. But there was something he couldn't overlook. The man was not Korean. A typical Westerner, and his looks leaned European.
People who had been in Korea were the ones summoned as players, so it wasn't as if the Tower of Infinity currently held no one but Koreans. Even so, Yujun didn't believe this man had been summoned alongside them.
"What country are you from?"
"Poland."
"Poland?"
Not a country he didn't know. He had only glimpsed it in passing while browsing the internet, but now that he was a player it came back at once. A nation of about thirty-seven million, not so different in population from Korea, as he recalled. Which raised another question.
"Were only Polish people summoned to the Tower of Infinity? Or did they lump the northern European countries together?"
"Poland. Even if they weren't citizens, anyone residing in Poland was subject to summoning."
Yujun nodded. The same as Korea.
"You're Korean?"
"Oh. How'd you know?"
He had assumed Westerners mixed up Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese, so it was surprising the man got it immediately.
"Ah, that's not the important part. Why did the Demon God Worshippers kidnap you? There has to be a reason."
"Simple. Because of the ability I have."
"Which is?"
"...At this point, I suppose there's nothing I can't say. My ability is Save and Load."
"Wait. You don't mean save, like in a game?"
"I do. You're Korean, so you've played console games—single-player games, yes?"
"Yeah. I know what those are. But... I didn't know that could manifest as an ability. If it can, that means you can control time. Right?"
"More or less. It's an ability with many restrictions, though. There's a limit on how many times it can be used."
"That's insane."
Which meant Dustin had already lost to him several times.
"Didn't you say someone was forcing you? You're not even attacking me, and you look fine."
"Hardly. Right now I'm barely holding on with everything I have. Which is why I have a request."
Yujun knew very well what kind of request enemies in this situation made.
"You want me to kill you?"
"I have no choice but to stop you anyway. You killing me is only natural. What I want is for you to kill the one who made me like this."
"Me? Why would I bother? No."
Yujun shook his head, thoroughly uninterested.
"Y-you... ngh. I'll give you this."
Having briefly slipped the world's compulsion, Dustin pulled an item from his inventory and threw it. Yujun caught it, checked the information, and answered with a bright smile.
"And who, exactly, would you like me to kill?"