One Against a Thousand
Peace Breaker blazed with light.
An energy round wreathed in the power of a falling star screamed across the sky, hurtling straight toward Gabriel Darius — or more precisely, toward the giant eagle he clung to.
“……?!”
By the time he noticed, it was already too late.
The bombardment from Peace Breaker punched clean through the eagle.
The beast's shriek echoed in every direction.
“A ultra-long-range snipe!”
Gabriel's eyes went wide.
“Impossible… he can even do this.”
He burned the image into his memory: Ryu Hwi, all that distance away, leveling the massive gunblade at him.
“I've been hit.”
The sight of Gabriel's eagle plummeting from the sky was visible even from far away.
The gamers gathered at the scene held their breath. It was a sneak attack, yes — but he had intercepted Gabriel Darius himself. And from this distance, no less!
Ryu Hwi slung Peace Breaker over his shoulder and swept his gaze across the crowd.
Several gamers flinched the instant their eyes met his.
“You wanted a demonstration of my skills, didn't you?”
Faced with more than a thousand gamers, Ryu Hwi showed not the slightest trace of intimidation. If anything, the situation was inverted — the other gamers were the ones cowed by the man who had just shot Gabriel's mount out of the sky.
“You don't get to judge me. I judge you.”
One against a thousand.
By any common-sense measure, there was no way Ryu Hwi could win. And yet the scene of him sniping Gabriel out of the air moments ago, that inexplicable confidence that refused to shrink even before an army of gamers — it had frozen the Linzea players in their tracks.
It was just one man. However strong he was, surely they could overwhelm him with sheer numbers…
But even thinking it, none of them dared move.
“If nobody's going to move, shall I go first?”
Ryu Hwi aimed Peace Breaker at the gamers and pulled the trigger without a moment's hesitation.
The star-forged round it spat out crashed directly into their ranks.
Ruthless bombardment. The gamers threw up shields and deployed defensive skills alike, but Peace Breaker's rounds punched through every one of them.
A few pulls of the trigger, and more than ten gamers were game over.
“You bastard!”
They couldn't just sit there and take it. Only then did the enraged gamers surge toward him.
Ryu Hwi kept pulling the trigger. Each shot was a killing blow, and with superb penetration on top of it, each round skewered a gamer only to deal damage to the players standing behind them.
Eighteenth round.
Peace Breaker's energy gauge hit zero.
Ryu Hwi stopped firing and wrapped both hands around the weapon's grips.
“He's out of ammo!”
“Now! Kill him!”
The gamers unleashed their skills in a single, unified assault. A thousand players attacking at once — a spectacle you'd rarely witness even in a large-scale raid. It was, truly, magnificent.
Ryu Hwi watched it all unfold with perfect calm… and smirked.
“Fighting all of you right now would be pretty stupid of me, though, wouldn't it?”
He laughed in the Linzea gamers' faces.
“Take care, then.”
In an instant — before the wave of attacks could reach him — Ryu Hwi vanished.
He'd slipped out of the spot, whether by logout or by some other means entirely.
The moment the gamers realized it, their fury boiled over.
“You son of a—! That rat bastard!”
“You've got to be kidding me! Coward!”
The Linzea gamers hurled curses into the air.
“Did he escape with a return stone?”
“A return stone takes at least ten seconds to activate! What return stone?!”
“He logged out, obviously. Damn him… if he logs back in, he'll be right here, so keep a tight watch!”
“That freak uses all kinds of weird skills. It might not have been a logout.”
“Then what do you want me to do? Dammit!”
The Linzea gamers ground their teeth — some of them so worked up they started snapping at each other.
Over a thousand gamers belonging to Linzea Guild had assembled, including Gabriel Darius himself, back in action after a long absence. And the only result was the humiliation of being beaten, one-sidedly, by a single man.
It was the moment the fearsome reputation of Linzea, the guild that had ruled World of Phantasm, came crashing down.
SR — Teleport Lv1
Instantly teleports the user to a memorized location or the most recently visited point.
When used indoors or inside a dungeon, returns the user to the entrance.
Stored Charges: 5/5
Cooldown: 1 hour
Ryu Hwi had used Teleport to slip away with ease.
World of Phantasm did have an escape item known as a return stone, but its activation delay was painfully long. He'd had other ways out of that spot even without Teleport — he simply chose to use it on purpose.
Because when Teleport activated, the effect looked uncannily like a logout.
“Rinzea has now tasted a proper humiliation. I've uploaded it to Yggtube in the meantime.”
Unknown's Deep Sea Escape 7 — 1 vs 1000! And the Ending?!
This would set every nerve in Linzea on edge. Even Gabriel Darius had tasted disgrace, after all.
“Flipping the table on a situation where they're absolutely certain of their superiority — that's the fun part.”
“Won't dungeon access become even harder for you going forward?”
“It's fine. They can't possibly station dozens of guards at every single dungeon.”
Even if enemies sealed a dungeon entrance, he would smash through by force, clear the dungeon, and return via Teleport. For the time being, that was his policy: punch through the interference and keep clearing dungeons.
“The enemy aren't fools, you know. They'll devise countermeasures. Dungeons aside, simply strolling around this game labyrinth may become difficult. Their surveillance will be laid over every inch of it.”
“Well, I expected at least that much.”
Ryu Hwi covered his mouth with one hand. Even as he spoke with apparent composure, at this very moment his mind was churning through possibilities — how to move next.
How could he make his enemies suffer? How could he strike most effectively? How could he crush them most thoroughly?
No need to rush. Step by step, blow them apart for certain.
Ryu Hwi set off — toward his next objective.
Dungeon: Underground Labyrinth of the Blue Meadow — CLEARED
Dungeon: Temple Beyond the Rainbow — CLEARED
Dungeon: Lake Beneath the Rain — CLEARED
Dungeon: Meadow of Morning Mist — CLEARED
── CLEARED. CLEARED. CLEARED…
“He got away again!”
“Why can't you stop him? Dammit!”
“At this rate, Linzea Guild is a running joke!”
Slipping freely past Linzea gamers and bounty hunters alike, Ryu Hwi cleared dungeon after dungeon.
Anyone keeping an eye on World of Phantasm's information feeds watched the dungeon rankings churn at an absurd pace.
1st Place — Ryu Hwi (──)
The fastest anyone had ever earned the Phantasma qualification was two years. At his current pace, Ryu Hwi would hold that qualification in his hands in a single month.
Countless eyes were tracking Ryu Hwi's every move.
And the man himself, at this very moment…
“Nothing like a bit of liveliness.”
…was strolling leisurely through town.
A village not far from the tower at the center of the world. Before challenging the dungeons nearby, he was taking a rest — and doing a little preparation while he was at it.
Ryu Hwi recalled the conversation he'd shared with Wolya and 5555.
“Saint Yggdrasil Hospital? Why there, of all places?”
“Gabriel left behind a strange remark. Think you could dig something up for me?”
“Gabriel… don't tell me… All right. I'll start looking right away. But it'll take quite a while.”
“That's fine.”
“Got it. Oh — and if you happen to have time, there's a place I'd like you to visit. If you go to that town, you'll see something interesting.”
For reasons of her own, 5555 had recommended he pay this town a visit.
“Something interesting?”
“How should I put it… the result of all the atrocities gamers have committed so far, maybe?”
Being so close to the Tower meant the town crawled with gamers gunning for Ryu Hwi — but he paid them no mind whatsoever.
After all, not a single soul currently recognized him as Ryu Hwi.
Forges the target's perception rather than altering the physical body.
“As I noted before, the mod's fidelity is impressive. Rather than changing your body itself, it rewrites how others perceive you.”
At present, Ryu Hwi was using the mod to alter his appearance. His hair was dyed a burning red, his eyes recolored a vivid blue. Garish tattoos wound across his body here and there, and even his face had been reshaped into something thuggish and wild.
“Even so, isn't this rather conspicuous? You look every inch a street thug. Could it be a secret longing of yours to appear this way…?”
“What kind of longing would that be?”
This look of his was simply the result of picking, more or less at random, the option he judged to be the one he would be least likely to choose.
Nobody would ever imagine that Ryu Hwi — a man with a thousand hunters on his trail — would disguise himself in something so flamboyant. And indeed, the gamers around him stole glances at his appearance without ever once suspecting he was the wanted man 'Ryu Hwi'.
Especially not while he was peacefully enjoying a shopping trip.
“Pick one already, will you?”
The old shopkeeper's attitude was curt. He was no gamer, but a resident living his life inside this game labyrinth — and his view of gamers was anything but warm.
“Business been treating you well lately?”
Ignoring the man's brusqueness entirely, Ryu Hwi struck up conversation.
“Thanks to the likes of you, that is.”
The shopkeeper replied just as curtly.
“Where are you from, old timer? World of Phantasm?”
“Pong World.”
“Ah — my apologies, how careless of me…”
Pong World.
An experimental game labyrinth that Latia Soft had built in Yggdrasil's earliest days. In other words, anyone from Pong World had existed since the very dawn of the Yggdrasil era. This reaction, then, was only to be expected.
The living beings who made their homes inside game labyrinths. Certain gamers had taken to calling them by the derogatory name 'NPCs'. Dismissing them as mere game data had driven a deep rift between the labyrinth residents and the gamer class.
And a resident of Pong World had watched that entire history unfold firsthand.
“How do you find life in World of Phantasm?”
“I don't know what business that question is of yours. Just hurry up and pick some—”
“Ah, this one, and that one, and that one over there, and this — oh, this too, please.”
All his equipment was prepared through Random Boxes anyway, so labyrinth currency was useless to him. Ryu Hwi spent the fortune he'd accumulated without the slightest hesitation.
“……”
The shopkeeper went speechless as Ryu Hwi swept up everything on display like a whirlwind.
“So — how is life here, actually?”
“You're a guest with nerve thicker than a castle wall, I'll give you that.”
The shopkeeper let out a long sigh.
“How's life here, you ask? Murkier than a stagnant pond. Nothing flows through it, so it can do nothing but rot. Not that a gamer such as yourself would understand.”
Almost nothing had ever been properly made known about the residents living within Yggdrasil — even after so much time had passed since the world tree had taken root. It had taken people a long, long while to realize that these were not beings one could dismiss as 'NPCs'.
“Then, for example… if World of Phantasm suddenly collapsed, what would happen to the residents?”
“Game labyrinths closing down is hardly news anymore. Frankly, I'd be glad if the whole thing fell apart.”
Normally, a man would rage if the ground beneath his life crumbled away. But the game labyrinth residents showed no concern at all for the collapse of the world they lived in — if anything, they seemed to welcome it.
“You can pry if you like, guest, but I'm no member of the 'Bloodspy Corps'. Squeezing me won't get you a single scrap of information.”
“The Bloodspy Corps?”
The term was unfamiliar.
“Isn't that what you're after? Information on the Bloodspy Corps?”
“What is this Bloodspy Corps, exactly?”
“That would be—”
Just then, the surroundings suddenly erupted into commotion.
Wondering what was happening, Ryu Hwi scanned the area. People were streaming toward the plaza. More precisely — only the game labyrinth's residents were heading there, while the gamers responded with weary irritation.
“How much longer must we bow our heads to gamers?!”