Yujun Lets Out a Groan...
Yujun straightened his back with a groan.
"Ugh. I'm beat."
"You look perfectly fine to me."
"I'm pretending to be fine."
"......"
Master or not, Paranet did not believe a word of it. The man needed to say something that actually made sense.
Paranet knew better. He was the one who had gone on harvesting flowers in the Golden Flower Garden without a single pause, and he knew his master could fight a blood-soaked battle for three days straight and never tire. Paranet was undead, and even he would be the first to drop out of a contest of stamina. That said everything.
"By the way, the guards are swarming in."
"Figures. I killed them without being seen, but there were hundreds of them."
"Should we start pulling back?"
"Retreat? Why would we?"
"Then we're fighting the kingdom guards?"
"We're fighting Coordination."
"Oh. Don't tell me they've already come."
"Yeah. At that speed, they'll be here in about ten minutes."
"Doesn't that mean they're still a long way off?"
"It does. Does the distance matter? They're coming soon either way."
"True. So we just prepare to fight?"
"Yeah. I'm counting on you to shine this time."
"I-I might struggle if it's just me..."
"Who said you're fighting alone?"
"Right? What a relief."
"Scared of Coordination, are you?"
"Please. If they're exactly as we saw them before, I could finish every last one of them inside a minute."
"If they're exactly the same..."
"They've surely grown stronger. Even so, they couldn't have kept pace with you, or with me, could they?"
"If that were all they'd managed, the Demon God Worshippers wouldn't have been pinning their hopes on them."
While cutting down no small number of Demon God Worshippers in the Koruna Kingdom, he had come across a few who clearly expected great things of Coordination. He had wrung nothing substantial out of them, but from the scraps he managed to squeeze free, he had gotten the sense that Coordination might be stronger than he had assumed. A proper edge of tension only helped in a fight, so he had no complaint.
Just then Tapagol jerked his head up.
"Master! Hundreds of Demon God Worshippers are massing and coming this way!"
"What level?"
"Comparable to the Demon God Worshippers you just killed."
"So... they mean to use them as meat shields?"
So far, not a single Demon God Worshipper in the Koruna Kingdom had survived one of his blows.
No point standing around. They're coming to me anyway.
Yujun moved to a stretch of open ground. The Koruna Kingdom was packed so tightly that the gaps between buildings were cramped, but not every part of it was like that. Here and there, old buildings had been torn down and left the space wide. He had passed several such lots on the way, and he headed for the one he judged the broadest.
"Hiss... even this isn't all that wide."
"Because of your magic, isn't it?"
Sharp-eyed Paranet asked.
"Yeah. And I'd rather not drag in players who have nothing to do with this, if I can help it."
"As expected of Master. Justice itself."
"Not quite."
He simply didn't want to hand anyone an excuse to nitpick him later over people who had never been part of it.
Yujun prepared his magic. Calling it preparation was generous. All he had to do was decide which spell to use. The moment he fixed his will on it, the magic would manifest.
What should I use?
Ever since Ancient Magic had evolved into New-Generation Magic, every cast sent a thrill through him. He knew how to use countless spells, yet he had only tried a handful of them. Testing the power of a new spell could only be a pleasure. And New-Generation Magic had never once disappointed him.
The wind's blowing especially hard... maybe that one.
A tremendous quantity of mana gathered around Yujun. More precisely, the mana that had flowed out of him drew back together into a single mass. He held the spell uncast and waited for the ones about to arrive.
Coordination got there ahead of the hundreds of Demon God Worshippers. A breathless standoff held for about ten seconds. Among them, Yujun picked out familiar faces.
The three who ran last time are still here, same as ever.
What stunned him was how incomparably stronger they had become. He had not even properly clashed with them yet, and he could feel it plainly.
"Been a while. Feels a bit like déjà vu, though."
Yujun waved as if he were glad to see them.
Ban Soyeon's face twisted. Choe Gangmin and Song Taeyeong had died by his hand. Watching him smile so hatefully, she could not keep the rage from boiling up.
Deias and Geron studied Yujun closely.
"So that is Shin Yujun."
"He looks scrawny in the flesh."
"Humans are all like that."
In truth, Yujun was quite solidly built for a human. So many races simply dwarfed humankind that Geron spoke that way regardless.
"Players don't settle fights with their builds."
Ban Soyeon's tone had an edge. Whatever else they were, every member of Coordination was Korean. She could not help finding Deias and Geron distasteful for looking down on the human race itself.
"I'll go kill him and come back."
"I told you, you can't do it alone."
Ban Soyeon tried to check Deias's stubbornness, but he turned a fierce glare on her.
"Human. You are not my superior. I told you not to give me orders."
"...Ha."
It would have been better if those two had never come. Their joining had raised Coordination's strength considerably, but being picked off one by one made that meaningless. On top of that, their opponent already had two summons out, and Shin Yujun's summons were nothing like the frail things other players kept. Coordination had investigated his summon Paranet down to the last detail and already knew every ability the creature used. The problem was that Deias and Geron did not. Even when she tried to tell them, they would not so much as pretend to listen. Being ignored would have been a mercy. The moment she tried to pass on information, they cut her off. Nothing she did was any use.
Let him smash his face in, then. It works out anyway. We needed to see exactly where Shin Yujun's strength sits.
Ban Soyeon settled on not stopping Deias. He would not have listened even if she had.
The tall elf known as the Knight of Flash vanished. In the next instant Deias was right in front of Yujun, and he did not even show the motion of a swing. Something flashed and flew straight at him. Yujun did not draw his sword either. He had already raised a barrier — not a shield, but that barrier of the cult's.
There we go.
Sure enough, Deias seemed to know how to dispel it. The moment Yujun saw him shift into a thrust, he generated several shields at once.
Crack, crack — crunch! The barrier shattered, and Deias's sword came screaming in over the wreckage. A thunderous boom followed. The shields did not break. Deias's attack fell short of their defense. He had not destroyed even a single shield, but he did not panic. He lifted his sword, and pure-white energy began to gather at the tip. In a short span, a mass of it had formed, large as a good-sized stable.
Whoa...
Yujun was impressed. The power was one thing, but it looked magnificent too. The stance, as if he were unleashing a finishing move, joined with that radiant mass of light until the whole thing seemed like a scene from a film or a comic. Of course, he did not feel his life was in any danger from it.
He cast the spell he had been holding on Deias. He had meant it for a crowd, but the situation had not allowed that. A low whoosh rose, and a small vortex spun into being before him. Mana flooded into the whirl.
Wind Bomb
Explosion sealed within the wind
It was a spell that packed an explosion into the wind. It looked simple, and it held a power far beyond that simplicity. Its advantage, past the raw force, was that no one but the caster could pin down its range. It literally raised wind, or loaded an explosion into wind that was already blowing, and amplified the result. A player might know which way the wind blew, but none could predict or grasp the size of that wind. Deias was no exception.
BOOOOM—!
A tremendous explosion swallowed the area. Deias, standing right in front of it, was caught in the Wind Bomb, and his body, hammered by blast after blast, shattered to pieces.
As expected. Killing one of these is far more profitable than slaughtering hundreds or thousands of small fry.
He had known it, and it still felt hollow. He had killed hundreds of Demon God Worshippers just to draw Coordination out, and not a single level had gone up. The experience had barely accumulated at all. A high-level player like Deias was on an entirely different plane — less in skill than in the experience he was worth.
Most players could not level this way. The usual method was to form a party and hunt monsters of a lower level. That bought safety, but growth crawled. Unless you possessed something truly overwhelming, going after higher-level monsters was absurd, and doing it alone was even more so.
The rich grow richer, and the poor grow poorer.
Just as those who already held wealth could seize still more of it, the stronger you were relative to your level, the faster you could grow. It was obvious. The bigger a snowball gets as you roll it, the more snow sticks to it. If you could bring down a monster you had no business killing — through an item, a skill, a trait, whatever it took — nothing was better. That was why players went half-mad hunting for good equipment, desperate to get even a little ahead of everyone else. A single option could completely change the shape of a fight, so the weight an item carried was enormous.
When Deias died, Geron's face, which had been watching at ease, went rigid. The members of Coordination reacted little differently. None of them had thought Deias could handle him alone, but they had not expected him to vanish without a trace in a single blow. He died so naturally it was as if he had been lured in on purpose, just so the barrier could be broken.
And then the hundreds of believers — the reinforcements — arrived. Kamaltan, the branch head leading them, approached Ban Soyeon.
"How did it go?"
"How do you think? Deias charged in like an idiot and died."
"...Watch your tongue, human."
"That line. Could you say the same thing to Branch Head Ji Gyutae?"
"......"
"We don't have time to get in sync right now, so I'll let it go. But no one is to face Shin Yujun alone. You aren't unaware of that, are you, Kamaltan?"
Within the cult, Coordination's standing was awkward. They were clearly believers far beneath a branch head, yet in raw combat each of them surpassed most branch heads. That was thanks to the grace and the flesh augmentation they had recently received, but the present reality did not change.
"Fine. Don't face him alone. Then what? What are we supposed to do?"
"I don't know. Now we look for a weakness."
Said that way, the situation looked hopeless, but Ban Soyeon's expression was not particularly dark. Deias had been crushed without a fight, yet the members of Coordination were, at their core, brimming with confidence to the very top. And most important of all, they had come prepared with a hidden card to answer that overwhelming magic.