Dungeon Raid (2)
Lee Suyeon, homeroom teacher of Class 1-5, gnawed on a Monami pen as she scribbled in her faculty notebook.
BOOM!
A mana bullet from a sniper in the rear line detonated the skull of a demonic wyvern from Combat Simulation Stage 8. The wyvern thrashed once in midair, its nerves still firing, then crashed to the ground and dissolved into light.
A solid combination. A nature-type ability user holding tank without any fuss, support holding the mid-line, and overwhelming damage pouring in from the rear. A stable party that actually lived up to the textbook ideal.
Lee Suyeon doodled in her notebook for a few more minutes, then left the ninth dungeon-raid team's training hall with a muttered "Good work."
"Hmm..."
She flipped the notebook open and skimmed the strengths and weaknesses she'd logged for every team so far. One blank slot jumped out at her immediately.
Only one team left. The one with that monster of a kid.
She walked over and stopped in front of their door.
"Hoo."
Lee Suyeon promised herself she would not be shocked by whatever bizarre stunt Jeong Jojun usually pulled, then yanked the door open.
The instant she stepped inside, that resolution evaporated. The Monami pen froze between her teeth, and her pupils blew wide.
What the fuck is that?
She stared, eyes bulging, at a scene that took a sledgehammer to everything she thought she knew.
Combat Simulation — Stage 13: Giant Ghoul.
A massive demon whose rotting flesh hung off its frame in dripping slabs. Plenty of people would look at that decaying meat and assume it would be easy to cut through. They would be dead wrong. True to its nature as a demon, the Giant Ghoul's rotting flesh was saturated with the unique miasma of the undead — the equivalent, for an ability user, of wrapping every inch of their body in aura. An extremely nasty opponent.
The raw power of that enormous frame, plus the demonic energy coating every last inch of it. This was a demon first-years shouldn't even dream of facing. And yet...
"Grk...! Grrrk...!"
The Giant Ghoul whipped its rotting flesh as it swung its right arm. Despite its massive bulk, the arm came down with terrifying speed toward a boy swinging a sword below.
The boy drew a breath.
"Hup!"
In a single instant, silver flashes stitched themselves across the air. The scattered light chewed relentlessly at the Giant Ghoul's elbow joint, and the arm slammed into the dirt instead of the boy it had been aiming for.
He didn't waste the opening. He surged forward, silver light erupting from him once more. A smile hung on his lips — but his eyes were still, utterly calm.
He was like a wolf. A savage wolf with silver fur streaming behind it as it tore into its prey.
SHRAAAK—!
The boy's slashes shredded the Giant Ghoul's belly, and chunks of flesh rained down. An invisible force seized the torn hide and ripped the wound even wider, and blue mana-charged bullets poured into the opening.
This was the moment Lee Suyeon's understanding of formation crumbled.
The conventional wisdom — front line holds, mid and rear support and deal damage — did not exist in this team. The front line deflected and dumped damage, and the mid-line poured damage into the exact same spot. The boy was the spearhead. The girls behind him were the shaft that drove that force home.
And the girl in the rear...
"Hweeehng~."
She was so overwhelmed by the insane battle unfolding in front of her that she was slapping buffs onto her teammates in a daze.
"Grk...! Grrrk...!"
With its belly torn open and its guts now spilling out, the Giant Ghoul made one last desperate lunge, tipping its massive body forward. That bloated bulk listed and came crashing down on the boy still swinging his sword.
It's over.
Lee Suyeon reached her conclusion internally. Choosing a mutual kill as a last resort was foolish, even for a demon. This was a boy pouring out sword strikes so fast you couldn't even see his shoulders, let alone his hands. Speed like that would let him dodge without breaking a sweat.
But contrary to Lee Suyeon's expectations, the boy didn't dodge the falling Giant Ghoul. He simply tightened his grip on his sword.
"Hey...! Hey!"
Sensing something wrong, Lee Suyeon was about to activate her ability when space rippled around the boy's body. Everything nearby was sucked toward him. In Lee Suyeon's field of vision, only the boy gripping his sword remained. Jeong Jojun, existing alone.
Slip.
Jeong Jojun vanished, and only the faint rustle of a breeze brushed past Lee Suyeon's ear.
"Oh, fuck..."
Lee Suyeon muttered a curse, stunned. The boy reappeared behind the Giant Ghoul. And the Giant Ghoul was still falling forward — except its body had been split in two.
"What a shame..."
Jeong Jojun muttered, and the Giant Ghoul dissolved into light and vanished.
What's a shame, you crazy bastard.
Jeong Jojun, master of the Swordsman class — a profession that didn't even exist in this world, one she'd never even heard of. That muttered remark, as if he were thinking of someone, sent a chill down Lee Suyeon's spine.
"What even..."
Seeing Violet staring at Jeong Jojun from the mid-line with a look of utter exhaustion, Lee Suyeon felt a sudden kinship.
"What even was thaaat~?"
Maya, still dazed in the rear and slapping buffs everywhere, was just extra.
"Kyaah! Jojun!"
The only girl in the room who looked completely unfazed, Alice, bounced over and threw herself into Jeong Jojun's arms. She nuzzled her cheek against his arm, purring. Jeong Jojun gazed at her adoringly and brushed his hair back.
That little...
The sight made Lee Suyeon's blood boil. What kind of shameless display was this on sacred school grounds. It was absolutely not because she was over thirty and hadn't even dated, let alone gotten married. This was a teacher's duty. She needed to give them a proper scolding...
"Oh, Teacher. You're here?"
With impeccable timing, Jeong Jojun looked at Lee Suyeon and flashed a bright smile. Lee Suyeon swallowed the words that had climbed all the way to her throat.
"Yeah. You little punk."
Then it occurred to her that she hadn't written a single thing in the faculty notebook she was holding. Not that she needed to. This team had already blown past every standard she could think of.
"Hey, Jin."
Kim Subin, the face of the Giwon Guild, dusted off his hands and spoke up. Kim Jin, the face of the Tamrang Guild standing beside him, tilted his head to show he was listening, and Kim Subin dragged over the demon he'd just caught by the scruff of its neck.
"You remember what I told you before? About the inter-class tournament."
Thud.
Kim Subin tossed the demon he'd dragged from the water onto the ground.
"The thing you couldn't read with psychometry?"
"Yeah, that."
Kim Subin rolled the demon around with his foot, examining it. It had a human shape covered in scales — a nauseating sight. Tough enough that it still wasn't dead, the demon's gill-slits on its cheeks fluttered as it flopped around like a fish.
"Ugly as hell. Yongyong, eat up."
Something the size of a puppy, wreathed in vivid blue flames, popped into existence near Kim Subin's feet. Covered in fluffy fur with a tiny horn in the middle of its head, the creature panted happily, then crunched down on the fish-man's skull.
Crunch. Crunch.
Like a puppy licking and gnawing bones, it lapped up the fish-man's fluids and tore out its throat, thoroughly enjoying its meal.
"Is that actually true?"
"I'm telling you it is."
Kim Subin protested in an aggrieved tone at Kim Jin's skeptical question.
"Look, no matter how many times I say it, nobody believes me. What stake would I have in covering that up?! Huh?! I mean, seriously..."
Kim Subin scratched his head vigorously, grumbling.
The inter-class tournament at the Great Demon Subjugation Academy a few months ago. Something inexplicable had happened that day. Every single person in Building A of the academy had collapsed — an incident of massive scale. To investigate, Kim Subin, whose ability was spiritual power, had used psychometry to read the memories...
But from a certain point onward, every memory he'd read had been erased.
Kim Subin had been shocked and told the people around him that the memories were gone, but at first they'd just accused him of joking around. Only after he'd stubbornly convinced them did they believe him, and the incident was ultimately pinned on some unknown ability user capable of knocking out a huge number of people without being detected by a spiritualist's psychometry.
"That thing that happened last time... it might not have been an ability user after all."
Kim Jin raised an eyebrow, and Kim Subin kicked the headless fish-man.
"This thing. I tried reading its memories too. Same deal. The memories don't even exist. They just... don't read at all."
"That so."
Kim Jin answered quietly.
"Something... something's happening."
"Yeah, this really doesn't look good."
Kim Subin lifted his head and took in the scene before him. A massive well, and hundreds of fish-man corpses scattered around it. Something was definitely going on.
"Hey, Angel."
"Yes, Player!"
I looked at Angel, who was nibbling on a macaron so huge it barely fit in her tiny hands, chewing like a squirrel, and reviewed the proposal she'd just made.
"So... you want me to crank up the difficulty of the dungeon I'm heading into this time? To suck up some Causality?"
"Nom nom nom. Yes! That's right."
Angel, amber eyes sparkling as she demolished the macaron. What the hell was this little shit thinking? I thought I'd misheard, but she was serious?
"Hey! You little shit! How could you do this to me?!"
This was betrayal. Where had the Angel who'd been so devoted to me gone? Was this some greedy management-team devil standing here instead?
I snatched the macaron she'd been eating and tossed it into my own mouth.
"Ahh! Player!"
Tears welled up over those amber eyes. Must've been that good. For a second, her cute face almost made me spit out the still-unchewed macaron out of pity — but I mercilessly crunched it up and swallowed.
"Eeeh..."
Angel looked up at me, sniffling.
"Hey! Don't look at me like that! What am I supposed to do when you make that face?! You're telling me to raise the Causality so some freak monster can pop out again, huh?"
"Ah..."
Angel's face went blank, like she'd just realized something.
"Oh, right. I didn't tell you about this."
She sniffled, muttered "my macaron..." and continued.
"We don't extract Causality from the Player's world anymore. All the Causality and everything else we get here gets concentrated on you, so if you raise the difficulty, you can think of all the rewards we'd normally receive as flowing back to you from now on."
"What?"
"It came from the very top... I don't know the details either, but you know that incident from before... the ones we compared to a virus."
I nodded. The fish-men. Cheonghwa's blackening. All of that had been because of the virus.
"That's probably why our side is giving you full support. The management team frothed at the mouth and threw a fit, though."
"Why are you only telling me something this important now?"
I smoothly pulled a hidden macaron from my pocket and placed it in Angel's hands.
"Waaah~!"
Her eyes sparkled, and that happy smile curved them into crescents again.
"I'm sorry! I should've told you last time we talked..."
Watching Angel smack her own head and frantically tear open the macaron wrapper, I sighed. Well, she's cute, so I'll let it slide. She's been taking such good care of me this whole time. She's allowed one mistake.
"So, Player, are you going to raise the dungeon difficulty?"
"Yeah, let's raise it."
On top of the original rewards, I'd get the ones from upstairs too. No reason not to. My skills were improving by the day, and after weeks of training, my dungeon-raid teammates and I were clicking perfectly. At this level, I could slice up whatever boss popped out without breaking a sweat.
"Yes, then you'll need to be a bit careful today. Like the Arachne's Labyrinth, the boss might appear in a modified form."
"Got it."
I picked up the sword lying in the wardrobe and strapped it to my waist. Today was dungeon raid day. The morning the fourth scenario began.