Recycled Trash and the Unfinished Floor
You finished off Linzea Guild's next ace without even breaking a sweat. Impressive as always, Master.
Bisque's crushed expression flashed through Ryu Hwi's mind. Watching anyone connected to Linzea crumble to pieces was, frankly, delicious.
"Judging by how she looked, even the Phantasma fighting on the front lines have no idea Linzea's been deliberately stalling their progress."
If the guild's next ace had been kept completely in the dark, the rest of the gamers surely weren't any better informed. Which meant the trolling was almost certainly the work of the upper brass running the guild — Gabriel Darius included.
"Time to get moving."
His detour to scout the unfinished zone had already cost him far too much time. Before long, he arrived at the Burning Gem Region.
A colossal gem hung suspended in midair. Around it drifted crystalline shards large enough to serve as stepping stones, orbiting the great jewel like fragments caught in its gravity.
The structure was obvious enough: leap from platform to platform until you reached the gem's summit. Ryu Hwi immediately launched himself onto the first shard. No matter how far he climbed, the crystals never fell — they simply floated where they were, steady as bedrock. Satisfied that they were surprisingly stable, he kicked his speed into high gear.
Hopping up the smaller platforms one after another, he emerged onto a vast stage made entirely of crystal. A space prepared for battle.
"So there were people who got here first."
He swept his gaze across the crystalline arena. Scattered everywhere were the scars of past fights. No monsters had appeared at all until now, but from this point on, they clearly would.
It appears the monsters have not yet respawned.
"Then I've got the ones who came before me to thank for an easy road."
On a related note, I must say I'm surprised. Knowing our villainous Master, I expected you to exploit 'Bisque' somehow.
"If I had time to waste on that, I'd spend it smashing the 50th floor first."
It was the first time since arriving on the 50th floor that he came face to face with a monster. The moment Ryu Hwi got a good look at the thing, he scrunched up his face like he'd bitten into something sour.
"Isn't that the Bloody Scorpion from some other dungeon's boss room? A palette swap, again?"
Just like the Minotaur, it was a monster painfully familiar to the eye.
According to the data, this creature also appears once more as a boss on the 41st floor of the Tower of the Demon God.
"Ah, right — the Chaos Scorpion. So this thing is a rerun of a rerun. Fantastic."
Any other gamer would have tensed up at the appearance of a 'boss.' And with good reason — it meant that boss-tier monsters roamed the 50th floor as common mobs. But Ryu Hwi was different. He was frowning, yes, but only out of irritation at the recycled design. There wasn't a shred of tension in him.
It seems the structure requires you to hunt the monsters before you may proceed onward.
"Fine. My own fault for expecting anything from this game."
Methodically, he hunted down every scorpion on the field. The massive pincers, the venomous stinger, even the flames spewing from its entire body — none of it touched him. Creatures that took a full party hours of coordinated effort to bring down staggered and wobbled from every single one of his strikes.
In the old days he would have aimed for the gaps in its shell, exploiting each weak point one by one. Now, with Sword Gang, there was no need for such delicacy.
"Finisher."
He jammed Peacebreaker into the scorpion's gaping mouth and pulled the trigger. The tremendous energy erupting from the muzzle blew the creature apart from the inside out.
Screeee—
The scorpion twitched for a moment, then burst into flame and dissolved. Confirmed dead, Ryu Hwi pressed forward without a pause. At this level, monsters simply could no longer be his match.
"How much farther up is it?"
Based on my analysis of the map-building MOD, my projection is that reaching the topmost layer will take at least two to three days. Naturally, fighting through the monsters along the way will make it longer.
"Damn it."
Which meant he'd be grinding out these 'rerun monsters' nonstop for days. Muttering complaints, Ryu Hwi climbed onward. Nothing slowed his steps.
The monsters were all palette-swapped bosses, so putting them down took a bit of time each, but not one of them could actually stand in his way. When he ran into a Minotaur-type partway up, he sighed, thoroughly sick of it.
"You again?"
The 50th floor was crawling with recycled monsters, but the Minotaur lingered in his memory with unreasonable stubbornness. He slipped into the creature's openings and settled it in seconds. The moment he confirmed the Minotaur had fallen and was about to exhale in relief—
Master, I am detecting the presence of gamers.
"Oh, come on."
Monsters weren't the only thing he had to worry about.
"Ryu7017!! That's the one with the bounty!"
"Get him!"
He'd crossed paths with plenty of gamers on the way up. Some came at him for the bounty; others simply got swept up in the mob mentality. The hostility was thick, but he hadn't bothered dealing with them one by one — a waste of time.
"Take down that guy and the next-ace spot is mine!"
"We grab Ryu7017 before they do!"
Ryu Hwi had been about to ignore them and dash into the next zone when his feet stopped.
"Are you people Linzea?"
What followed was a chorus of gamer screams. He paid everyone else little mind, but when it came to Linzea's gamers, he crushed them with his full strength — as if to say, you'll regret being a Linzea member who made an enemy of me.
"These people are exhausting. I was already annoyed out of my mind."
I confess I have no idea how this game labyrinth has survived without collapsing until now.
"Tell me about it."
On top of everything else, an endless parade of unfinished zones and bugs kept grinding his patience down to dust. Getting this far had taken him five days. YggON had projected two to three to reach the summit; it was already costing more than double that.
An invisible 'path' floating in empty space was the baseline bug. Some areas were unmistakably marked as roads yet were completely hollow. There were forced-teleport bugs that dumped you into utterly unrelated locations, visual-corruption bugs that warped the scenery just from approaching, bugs that numbed your senses, and instant-death trap bugs.
The Burning Gem Region alone was drowning in lethal defects.
"Come to think of it, the hidden realm on the 1st floor went undiscovered because of bugs too, didn't it? Did the Phantasma crowd really never notice anything was off while conquering this garbage tower?"
Humans are creatures of adaptation. They simply grew accustomed to the bugs and stopped noticing them. At this point, such defects are no longer even perceived as problems.
Not that reporting a bug ever mattered. If anyone had found and reported one, the Linzea higher-ups would have given it a token patch to keep their sabotage of the conquest pace going. With that cycle repeating over and over, the gamers had grown numb, brushing bugs aside as nothing worth mentioning.
Ryu Hwi took his frustrations out on Linzea's gamers.
"Damn it, if it's come to this…"
Several Linzea gamers drew out strange daggers. One look told Ryu Hwi exactly what they were.
"Why are Linzea people using GA-ES bugs?"
Without a shred of hesitation, the Linzea gamers drove the daggers into their own hearts. At that borderline-insane display, Ryu Hwi's expression twisted for an instant. The forms of the stabbers began warping into grotesque shapes — some sprouting wings, some erupting in horns across their bodies, others sheathed head to toe in lizard-like scales.
The memory of the Cheophyeoldan incident rose unbidden, and he couldn't hide his disgust. He had no idea what their relationship with GA-ES was. Most likely they'd reached for a 'bug' as their own way of squirming out of this situation — quite possibly without ever realizing they were poking the lion's mane in doing so.
"Intuition Lv.2 can't fully detect GA-ES bugs, sure. But don't go thinking that using them means you can win."
He trampled the bug-users so thoroughly they would have begged for death instead. Pinned in place and skewered through with spears, they were left impaled into the ground like shish kebabs. The spears themselves got corroded by the bugs into grotesque shapes, but so what — he had weapons to spare.
"Answer honestly and I'll end you painless, right now. What's your connection to GA-ES?"
Humans are weak to pain. Proving the point, they spilled everything in a rush, begging him to just kill them already.
"A black market, huh?"
So 'bugs' were spreading through the underground of World of Phantasm, and supposedly a great many Linzea gamers were using them too.
"Th-that's enough now, right?! I told you everything I know! So hurry up and k-kill me! Uuurgh…!"
The Linzea gamer screamed for death, desperate to escape the pain. But Ryu Hwi's business wasn't finished yet.
"One more thing, last question."
"Just…!! You demon bastard, does tormenting people get you off?!"
"Tormenting people? Boring. Tormenting Linzea, though — that's fun. Do you know Asea of GA-ES? Answer that one and I'll make it quick."
"I know her! I know her, okay?! She's the one who sold us the bugs in person! Happy?! Now kill me! Kill me already, I'm begging you!"
Ryu Hwi granted the Linzea gamer the death he so desperately wanted. Freed from agony at last, the man smiled brightly at the moment it came. Smiling while dying — the man must have been out of his mind. Then again, he really had been liberated from pain, so fair enough.
"That was real fun— no wait. What a nuisance."
He didn't know what GA-ES and Asea were plotting. But whatever it was, smashing it to pieces would settle the matter.
"Just you wait. Asea — and GA-ES."
"So the 50th floor really was unfinished."
Ryu Hwi wasn't the only one to grasp its state. The GA-ES guild had instantly sized up the situation on the 50th floor as well.
"Gabriel's thrown his big gambit. One wrong step and he could be the one destroyed — a bold move."
The master of GA-ES was certain: Gabriel was the prime mover behind this whole affair.
"So he means to drag Latia down with this opportunity?"
"You mean the people who've spent their whole lives licking Latia's toes?"
Asea's revulsion was naked on her face.
"That man is a snake. Once he marks his prey, he never, ever lets it go."
The GA-ES master knew exactly what kind of man Gabriel was — and what he was moving toward.
"In the end, what we want overlaps, so cooperation is possible… but letting everything unfold exactly as he intends would be no fun at all."
"What will you do?"
At Asea's question, the master of GA-ES smiled wickedly.
"We smash the unfinished thing to complete rubble. And then…"
The Tower of Light reflected in those jade eyes.
"GA-ES opens a new era."