I Am Phantom
It was fair to assume his transformation and skills had dropped because his energy was spent.
He, too, had reached his limit.
"Nngh!"
Vitality surged through Master's body. Power boiled inside him, threatening to overflow. He needed somewhere to unleash it.
Master swelled into giant form and poured every scrap of strength he had into casting Domain Destruction straight into the man's face.
KUUUUUUUNG—!
A scale beyond anything that had come before. It felt as if the entire world were being torn apart and crushed. This was the greatest technique Master could use—his hidden trump card. He was certain of one thing: no one who took this head-on would walk away alive.
Crack!
Crrrrack!
The fissure that began at the tip of his fist spread in an instant and swallowed the whole sky. The world itself looked like a shattered pane of glass.
But the true terror of this Destruction technique was not the sheer scale of the devastation.
"…Oh-ho."
The Paladin let out a quiet murmur of admiration—at the intensity you could feel without even being hit, at the raw destructive force.
The fractured shards, the blackened zones of annihilation, began drawing together into a single point. Black lines tangled and writhed over one another, trembling as if about to burst. Concentrate that many fragments in one place, and their destructive power multiplies. Escape was impossible.
Has he given up on running?
Master sneered under his breath. Had the man lost the will to fight after seeing destruction on this scale? Master would have done the same. If a giant suddenly appeared and set out to break the world, anyone would freeze in panic. The man had raised his sword on reflex, but someone who had already hit his limit even in a transformed state could never withstand this.
Be crushed to death.
Great Domain Destruction.
Master swung his fist once more at the place where the destroyed fissures had gathered.
KWAAAAAANG—!
He struck empty air as if slamming a wall, and the gathered lines of fracture poured toward the man. Thousands upon tens of thousands of black lines swept the ground without discrimination.
Bang! Bang! KWAAAANG!
Everything they touched was scoured away. The force was enough to evaporate everything within a radius of hundreds of meters. The earth was gouged out; the domain itself was deleted. A human being would not even leave a corpse.
No matter how strong "he" was as a powerhouse out of the Death God Religion, he was still only human. No—even if he were a god, he would not endure this.
"I am Master! The one who stands at the peak above every last one of you!"
Black dust billowed in every direction. From the heart of it, Master roared. How dare the Empire—how dare the Death God Religion—inflict that humiliation on him. It was time to pay it back.
"I'll start with you and wipe the rest of them out. No one reigns above m—"
"I'm not dead yet."
The voice slammed into Master's eardrums.
His face twisted. Someone had taken a direct hit from the Great Domain Destruction—the technique he was certain could kill even a god—and lived? On top of that, his own stats had spiked and the destructive power had climbed even higher. There was no way a human being could still be standing after that.
…Insane.
Master was stunned. It should have been impossible. And yet it was real. A human who had taken that attack head-on and refused to die.
No. He hadn't taken it.
As the black dust cleared, the man's figure emerged. In front of his sword, the black lines were knotted and compressed into a tangled mass, trapped as if inside a rounded membrane, unable to break free. He had sealed the Great Domain Destruction itself.
In that state, the man spoke.
"Master. I've always wondered something. How do people who never even joined the Great Expedition get to call themselves 'heroes' and swagger around?"
"…What?"
What was this bastard talking about all of a sudden? The Great Expedition? Heroes? Wasn't this man supposed to be from the Empire's Death God Religion? Neither the Death God Religion nor the Empire had taken part in the Great Expedition at all. Those were words that should never have come out of anyone from that side.
And he wasn't finished.
"Someone stole my achievements, paraded them around as their own, and twisted every story out of shape. I've always wanted to know who set that board."
Stole achievements? Set the board? What was he talking about?
Great Expedition. Heroes. Achievements. Distortion…
Ah.
For an instant, Master felt as if the world had stopped. There were only a handful of people alive who could speak like that—and almost no one who could speak about the Great Expedition with any real authority. Because everyone who hadn't run had died. And everyone who had run had turned their backs in fear at the very entrance. So the only person who could say with confidence that "the story of the Great Expedition was distorted" was—
No. That's impossible.
Master shook his head. Right. It couldn't be. Come to think of it, other Players had more or less guessed as much. There were Players who knew Master had never joined the Great Expedition. But that was knowledge only a Player could have.
…He was a Player!
A fine tremor ran through Master's body. At the very core of the Death God Religion—an organization that loathed Players and meant to exterminate them—there was a Player. Ha! And he had looked down on Master the whole time, pretending not to be one? The man was genuinely hilarious.
The man went on.
"But looking at you now, you don't have the capacity for it. You're not the kind of man who could set a board that precise. So who was it?"
"You… A 'Sinner,' and you've been spouting nonsense this whole time?"
"You're the owner of the Other-dimensional Community. Doesn't that make you the Sinner?"
"…!"
The Other-dimensional Community. The moment he mentioned it, he might as well have declared himself a Player out loud. If the Death God Religion learned that, the man's death was already decided.
Shraaaash!
In that instant, a barrier of raw lightning crashed down over him.
"Snap out of it! He's buying time!"
Ah.
The Paladin's voice yanked Master back to himself. All of them were overloaded on the twelve-stack buff of Heaven-Destroying Thunder. Drag this out, and they would take permanent stat loss—and their bodies would crumble to dust. The man clearly knew that and was stalling on purpose.
"Hammer of Heavenly Destruction!"
KWAAAAAANG!
The giant-form Paladin's hammer came down on the man's head. But neither the lightning barrier nor the Hammer of Heavenly Destruction—
"…"
—managed to touch him. Both hung frozen in midair.
"What… is that?"
The Insect Mage's face tightened. He had read every technique so far, but this swordsmanship alone refused to yield any analysis. It wasn't deflection. It wasn't evasion. The attacks were simply bound in place—as if time itself had stopped inside that space.
Swordsmanship that manipulates time in a fixed area… Is that even possible?
And if it was—
The Insect Mage's eyes flew wide; his brow knotted hard.
"Ah—! Get clear!!"
The frozen time began to run in reverse.
ZZZEOOONG!
KWAAAAAANG—!
The fractured lines, the lightning barrier, the Hammer of Heavenly Destruction—all of them hurtled back the way they had come, faster than they had arrived.
"Ghk—!"
"Gaaargh!"
"Hup—!"
The moment the returned force touched their casters, it detonated and hurled them away. A perfect reflection. They had been hit with their own power, returned intact. There was no blocking it.
He bounced my attack back?
Slammed into the ground, his giant form already undone, Master could not make himself believe what had just happened. Great Domain Destruction—an attack unleashed in the form of a legendary giant—had not merely been blocked. It had been sent back. And the reinforced return blow had scrambled his senses completely.
There can't be a Player who can do this…
Master knew virtually every Player of any consequence. Apart from Gracia, there was no Player who could beat him. The recluses? True, there were strong ones who had abandoned Hall of Fame rewards and gone into hiding—plenty of the powerhouses Master had never fully mapped were recluses. But even then, how strong could a recluse really be? And to bounce his attack while every one of his own stats was spiking?
Nothing short of a four-star.
Even being generous, it would take four stars—Level 14. Level 14 was the kind of number only Pangenia's monstrous freaks ever reached. No Player had it. And if one did—
A bug user.
…A bug user, plain and simple. Someone exploiting bugs at will and making a mockery of everyone. But there were too many pieces that refused to sit right if he left it at "bug user."
In that case—
"You… are you an Operator?"
Master lifted his head and looked at the man standing over him.
Operator. Rumors about them had circulated once—that somewhere out there existed the Operator who had built the game called Pangenia. Of course, Pangenia was a real continent, a real place held up by the two Goddesses. This world was no fake. But "the game Pangenia" was different. How would goddesses build a game on Earth? It made more sense that there was an Operator who had designed the whole structure—someone who had bound the game and Pangenia together. One person, or several. And there had been people who claimed they had actually seen an Operator.
A being who reads the entire board.
That was what an Operator was. Someone draped in items that had never appeared even once through the mid-game—things like the Soul of the Hydragon—and countless other pieces that should not have existed. Someone who walked the entire continent without restriction, who had even been sighted in the Abyss. Feats that were impossible unless you saw through the whole board. Naturally, Players had whispered that such a person had to be an Operator.
No matter how I look at it, this one has to be an Operator.
Master was certain. An Operator could talk about the Great Expedition like that. An Operator could show power this overwhelming. And the gear this man was wearing—especially that sword. The ice-white blade of pure frost was, without question, a Unique-grade weapon the world had never seen. On top of that, the Rift Tower itself had branded him a bug user. Look at the way he climbed floors at will. No ordinary Player could do that.
"If you're an Operator… why are you climbing the Rift Tower?"
If an Operator had intervened, the Tower's appearance itself should have been an event—the same way the Abyss Labyrinth had been. But if it was a planned event, why had the Tower branded him a bug user? Why was the Tower trying to eliminate an Operator?
"I'm an Operator, am I?"
The man gave a short, dry laugh. Because the guess was right—or because it was laughable?
Then he bent forward, lowered his head, and looked Master in the eyes.
And he said:
Randolph was Phantom.
…What?
For a moment Master doubted his own ears. He had been so sure the man was an Operator.
Phantom?
…Phantom. In all of Pangenia, only one person was ever called that. The one who had raised more characters than anyone alive, who had casually completed mythic achievements everyone else had sworn were impossible. There were even widespread rumors that Wilhelm the Knight King—the man who had launched the Great Expedition—had been one of Phantom's characters. But Phantom never revealed his identity. He associated with no one. No one even knew exactly how many characters he had raised.
And yet—
"Th-that's a lie…"
Goosebumps rose along his skin. Inwardly, though, he still refused it. He had no choice. If the man in front of him was Phantom, that ultimately meant he was Randolph—the Player who had renamed himself after the Wilhelm character died. But even if this man were Phantom, was it possible, in so short a time, to crush the four people Master had been certain were the strongest like this? He might be sweeping first place in the Hall of Fame while pushing the main quest, but this was strength that had crossed a line. Even granting a hundred steps, a thousand steps—even granting everything—this was power that clearly surpassed three stars.