Thirteen Hidden Traits

Thirteen Hidden Traits!

"You useless slave bastards! Can't you walk any faster?"

Crack!

A sharp, stinging pain jolted me awake. My body, still unable to find its balance, tumbled across the ground, and only after my head slammed into the sand did I finally realize something was terribly wrong.

What the hell is going on?

I had blacked out while watching the game's intro. Now, coming to, this was the situation I found myself in. It was deeply disorienting — yet my mind was spinning with a surprising cold clarity.

This isn't my body.

Thick hands. Corded, bulging muscle that would make a personal trainer weep with envy. Not my body. And yet every sensation felt as vivid as if it were.

My wrists were bound tight, and from the way I was being hauled along, one conclusion was inescapable: I was a captive being dragged somewhere.

I lifted my head. Hundreds of men, just like me, were strung together in a single line and being marched forward. Putting together the man who had just whipped me and the scene around us, the answer clicked into place.

War slaves.

Defeated soldiers. They had lost a war and been taken as slaves. But what stunned me even more was the colossal beast lumbering at the head of the column.

A Hydragon!

That monster — nine hydra heads fused to a dragon's lower body — looked unnervingly familiar. I was certain I had never seen it in the flesh, yet I recognized it the instant my eyes landed on it.

Hydragon. The first true hardship every player in the game inevitably faced. A mass of polygons made real, standing right in front of me. I had raised nearly a thousand characters and killed just as many of these things, so of course it felt familiar — but being able to identify a game monster at a single glance still wasn't normal.

I have to get up.

There was no time for awe. Stay down any longer and I was dead. The moment I pushed myself to my feet, the whip came flying again. Fierce pain made every hair on my body stand on end, but I forced the groan back down my throat.

"Fall one more time and I'll throw you to the Hydragon as feed."

…So it really was a Hydragon. Everything was certain now.

This is Pangenia. Did I get pulled into the game?

It made no sense. Confusion would have been the natural response — yet somehow I was calm. I had already assessed the situation and adapted in a matter of moments.

Every sense, starting with touch, is indistinguishable from reality. …In that case.

It was a game, and it wasn't. It was utterly real — and I remembered rolling the dice at the very end.

All Random. I had randomized everything, hadn't I? If the result of that roll was the body I now inhabited, there was something I absolutely had to check.

"Status window."

That was the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠moment. With a soft rustle, a rolled parchment unfurled before my eyes.

Holy shit.

I barely managed to swallow the curse that tried to burst out the second I saw it. A status window had actually appeared — but what it showed made no sense whatsoever.

First, the stats. Base stats were normally set somewhere between 1 and 10 depending on your talents. These had blown past that ceiling to 12 — and every single one of them was starting at a uniform 12. In five years of playing Pangenia, I had never once seen a golden start like this.

And that wasn't all.

How many talents are even listed here?

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

The parchment scrolled on without end. Over two hundred talents had been stamped onto the sheet — and on top of that, more than ten Hidden Traits had activated.

A single Hidden Trait was enough to make someone a peerless powerhouse capable of uprooting mountains and shaking the world. I had exactly thirteen of them.

Thirteen Hidden Traits.

Even the named NPCs who had consumed stars and achieved Transcendence, even the apex monsters of the Abyss's deepest lore, didn't carry thirteen Hidden Traits. Five was already an extraordinary haul.

Unprecedented. And one of them leapt out at me in particular.

Iron-Blooded Lord's Heart!

A linked trait — and a Hidden Trait — that only appeared once every physical talent had been fully unlocked. Roughly speaking, it kept you from tiring easily, stopped you from being startled by most things, and let you process situations at high speed. It also raised the hidden values of "Stamina" and "Honor" that never showed on the stats screen, granted higher-quality quests, and conferred the "Lord's Qualification."

And I had thirteen of these things.

I burned every Hidden Trait into my memory and moved on to the rest.

Pangenia Collapse. A boundary with reality? I have no idea what any of that means.

I couldn't make sense of it. What I did know for certain was that events far beyond any normal frame of understanding were happening to me.

But I couldn't sit around lost in thought forever.

"Hey."

I spoke to the man walking ahead of me. The man missing the middle and index fingers of his right hand turned his head toward me with a lifeless look.

"What?"

"Where are we?"

"······? It's the Calzman Desert."

I ignored the look that said I'd heatstroked myself into losing my mind and pressed on.

"The Calzman Desert? Don't tell me we're headed for Faisalmer."

The Calzman Desert, in the southeastern reaches of the continent, was an infamous stretch of land dominated by three tribes. All three made their living off slave-hunting and waged war as casually as breathing — complete lunatics. And Faisalmer was the middle market where the slaves they captured were sold.

"That's right. So give up any hope of walking out of there alive."

So that was why the light had gone out of every slave's eyes. No one taken into Faisalmer ever came back out.

The one starting point you should never, ever choose. Get dropped in the Calzman Desert and you're better off deleting the character and starting over.

The desert had always been notorious. I had tried starting here once out of pure curiosity — and quit. After that, I never once selected the Calzman Desert as a starting location again.

Damn it.

Randomizing even the starting point had been my own mistake. Who else was there to blame?

I unpacked the last of my questions.

"Did the Calzman tribes always deal in slaves in numbers like this?"

Even the biggest slave merchants usually handled a few dozen at most. This column looked like it easily exceeded three hundred.

The man frowned.

"How the hell would I know?"

"Why are we being taken, then?"

"Why we're being dragged off? Hell if I know — stragglers from the expedition, maybe?"

"Expedition? What expedition?"

"Haa… The Demon Realm Expedition, built around the 8 Heroes. We lost, and you and I both got caught running. Did you cook your brain in the heat or what?"

The 8 Heroes? The Demon Realm Expedition?

Ah!

…That was my story. Or more precisely, the story of the character I had been playing right before I created this one.

I had gathered eight Unique-grade items from my eight strongest characters and assembled an expedition. Then I had ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠spectacularly tanked the whole thing. We made it into the Demon Realm and got as far as the Demon God's Temple — but we never managed to open the final door, and it was game over. Apparently that whole mess had become known as the 8 Heroes and the Expedition.

"Fuck. If it hadn't been for the infighting, the expedition would've succeeded······!"

Infighting? What infighting?

I was about to ask when the ground shook.

At the same time—

A quest appeared before my eyes. Survive ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠— in this situation? What made my blood run even colder was the failure penalty. Did "real body" actually mean my actual body?

The intro flashed through my mind — the image of Pangenia and Earth colliding.

Rumble! Rumble!

But there was no time to dwell on it. A massive form was approaching from the distance, accompanied by a savage roar.

"Three Hydragons!"

"Form ranks! Prepare for an ambush!"

The slave merchants — seasoned soldiers in their own right — drew weapons from their coats and held their breath. The enemies who had come charging in with no fewer than three Hydragons began slaughtering those merchants without a word of negotiation.

"The Snake Princess! It's the Snake Princess!"

"Snake Princess! Have you forgotten the non-aggression pact?!"

"Aaaagh!"

Screams tore through the air. Treaties and rules meant nothing — they were fighting a pure slaughter. No: a one-sided massacre.

If I just sit here, I die!

Instinct was screaming at me. They showed no hesitation about killing slaves either. Sweeping this entire place clean seemed to be the goal.

I pulled a keyring from the coat of the dead slave merchant lying right in front of me — the same one who had whipped me. The moment the manacles came off, I snatched up a scimitar and braced for the assault.

"M-me too!"

"Free me too!"

The former expedition soldiers spotted the keyring and started shouting. They were, in name at least, soldiers who had marched on the Demon Realm. I might have hoped they would stand and fight beside me — but every last one of them was broken in some way, crippled in body or mind.

Proof enough: every soldier's level sat between 1 and 2. Physical loss and mental damage had triggered level-downs. Even so, the levels were absurdly low. An expedition force weaker than a militia?

Thud!

"M-me first!"

"Ow! Get out of the way!"

I tossed them the keyring and a brawl broke out over it. They could sort it out themselves. I didn't have the luxury of unlocking them one by one.

Meanwhile, the slaughter continued. A scene of utter chaos. If hell existed, it would look something like this.

I have to survive.