SSR Weapon (2)
“Hm.”
A silvery liquid trickled steadily from Maxien's hand, the falling drops scattering and vanishing into the void one by one.
She wiped a droplet of silver-tinged blood from her lips.
“High-purity ether? No. It feels… a little different.”
A faint flicker of interest crossed her face.
She had been clearing out the monsters beyond the barrier and returning to the defensive planet when she picked up an Astral-or-higher signal nearby and made straight for its source. By the time she arrived, a four-meter-tall humanoid with red hair was standing exposed in open space.
“A new type of numbering entity?”
It was a monster behaving derangedly, as if it actually wanted to hold a conversation.
If the trickier variants among the mass-produced common monsters were called "named types," then a "numbering entity" was best understood as their higher evolved form.
High-tier monsters possessing independence and uniqueness all their own.
They ranged from man-sized miniatures to behemoths the size of entire planets, which made them impossible to gauge at a glance.
It was disturbingly human-like, that one.
Numbering entities came in every shape imaginable, so an identical copy of a human appearance would hardly have surprised her. It even seemed to radiate that peculiar, eerie pulse unique to monsters.
Though the red-haired creature from earlier had been subtly different. Calling it a numbering entity felt somehow inadequate.
Hm. If it had survived long enough, could it have earned a four-digit designation?
When it came to running away, the thing had been a natural.
I'd have liked to see it again….
At some point, the silver blood around her had scattered like a vast river, rippling and swaying through the void.
As if the blood had been drained whole from the body of some colossal creature.
She summoned the cleanup crew aboard the ship and ordered them to collect the silver liquid.
“Graaagh!”
Th-this madwoman!
Criella trembled with terror.
“A-another moment, and I…!”
Goosebumps crawled over him. She was truly, horribly insane.
When she had flung her blade at him without warning, her eyes had brimmed with a virulent madness. Layered atop that inexplicable madness was a glinting, glossy curiosity — the look of someone regarding an inanimate object.
Like a child toying with an insect, perhaps?
The moment Criella had first met her gaze, a deep revulsion had welled up inside him.
How dare a creature like this presume—!
But that indignation lasted only a breath.
A sharp flash of light pierced through him. He had been about to roar that such a crude attack was useless when—
“Gyaaaaagh!!”
A torrent of silver blood poured from his skewered abdomen.
The instant the flash touched him, he knew something had gone terribly wrong. Within moments he understood: this was no ordinary strike, but a slash capable of wounding divinity itself.
Criella frantically drew upon his divine power. Silvery flames coiled around his body.
And yet.
Shrrk— shrrk-shrk— shrrk—
He could not bring himself to believe the sight of his own flesh being carved away so mercilessly. At last, swallowing the cost to his divine power, he began to grow in size.
The slashed, cloven flesh regenerated in an instant, and his entire body swelled without end. The divine power once confined within his small frame erupted outward,blanketing the surroundings in a dreadful, crushing pressure.
The colossal Criella, wreathed in silvery flame, looked for all the world like a god incarnate.
Power boiled and overflowed from every inch of him — enough that a mere mortal would crumble to dust from meeting his gaze alone.
Ah… ah….
This feeling. This is it.
The sensation of riding above a world, clutching the fates of lesser creatures in his palm. It felt as though a power that could split heaven and earth and bring ruin to creation itself was bursting forth from within his body.
He had no idea why that woman had left the surface to drift in the void — but so what?
Why would a god ever need to concern himself with the affairs of vermin?
His colossal hand swept through space at his command. There was no possible way for her to dodge.
[Hm?]
Had he seen something wrong? The corner of the woman's mouth had seemed to curve in a delicate little smile between his fingers….
[GYAAAAAGH!!]
An impossibly horrific scream rang out from the giant body. Twelve flashes of light tore through him, mercilessly cleaving — as if to split his very head in two.
In that instant, he reached his verdict.
This… is not an opponent I can fight!
The moment he realized this was no time to stand on pride, he abandoned his giant body outright and split off his soul alone, slipping it free.
Had the starlight-haired woman not handled him like a lab experiment, carefully moderating the force of her strikes, even that escape would not have been so easy.
“Oh? Running away?”
He could not understand a single word of her language, but he gritted his teeth inwardly, forced to relinquish most of the divinity anchored in his flesh.
He tore open a rift in the dimensional seams and hurled himself inside.
Shrrk—
[Kgh! You venomous witch!]
Even in the instant his soul slipped free, the woman's strike grazed past him, leaving a grievous wound behind.
The Chaos lot? No — the Three Thousand, perhaps?
No matter how he turned it over, the situation was utterly dire.
His thoughts churned into a tangled mess.
But what did any of that matter now?
He had lost the greater part of his power and was doomed to drift through some unknown dimension!
Ah….
He remembered how his fellow gods used to look at him and berate him: Your impatience will one day bring great calamity upon you.
What was done was done. What good would regret do now?
I'll seize some suitable dimension, recover my strength, and then…!
At that moment, the plane of a certain dimension caught his eye.
It hung slightly wounded and loosened — loose enough that even with the meager power he had left, he might just manage to force his way through.
Just as Criella scraped together the last of his strength and barely pried open a crack in the plane's boundary—
A crimson sword-light was already streaking toward him.
[GRYAAAAAAGH!!!]
Namgung Jin had spent the better part of a shijin — nearly two hours — crying out and searching for someone he couldn't tell was a man of olden times or a man already dead, before finally realizing the whole thing had been an illusion.
There had been no hidden master lurking in seclusion. No passing hero of the orthodox sects had come to his aid. Not even heaven and earth's spirits had lent him their strength.
No one had helped him at all….
It… it was really just this dagger?
The dagger from the Administrator's special shop. Outwardly unusual, certainly, but still — by every measure, a mere dagger.
His hands trembled faintly. He had already finished his simple experiments.
When he swept the blade lightly, it sheared through everything in its wake — terrain, stone, all of it, without discrimination — and when he thrust the dagger outward, a hole punched clean through the center of a boulder some ten jang away, over thirty feet distant.
Wh-what in the world?
"…."
Stupefied, Namgung Jin stared down at the dagger. This time he channeled his internal energy to sharpen his sight and hearing, and swung again.
Sshhhreaaak—
A crisp, clean cutting sound like the very air being sliced apart rang in his ears.
And yet even with his inner sight heightened, he could see nothing properly.
Is… is this even possible?
Sword qi? Sword force? Is this what supreme mastery of the blade looks like?
And this absurd cutting power — what on earth was it?
Then it dawned on him, and he immediately connected to the Interdimensional Integrated Community's Premium Shop.
Sure enough, black shadows clustered at a careful distance around her, murmuring amongst themselves.
Before he knew it, he had called out to her.
“M-m-my lady! Might I ask how one is meant to use this dagger you granted me?”
Fortunately, she seemed to have heard him. In the middle of running others' gacha pulls, she turned her head, smiled at him, and gave a light wave of her hand.
Then golden letters floated up before his eyes.
A highly flexible weapon infused with a trace of Eternium. It automatically extends and retracts by analyzing the wielder's motions, and is composed of a dual-blade system: a core edge generating matter-disintegration waves, and a monomolecular edge engineered for maximum cutting power. Even its durability is exceptional — in folk circles it is hailed as the great divine blade, Swor—
Some kind of description seemed to be written there, but none of it properly sank in. Was it because he hadn't slept properly these past few days?
Then he realized that simply lingering in this place was deducting Karma Points from him, and hurriedly cut the connection.
Only then did his remaining balance catch his eye.
Wha—?!
Was it payment for carving down those villainous Demon Cult masters? Karma Points had piled up.
[Remaining Points: 116,520P]
He was certain he had spent every last point down to zero….
The days he had survived on nothing but bread and water to conserve his points flashed through his mind.
True, he'd done it to stretch out his survival in hiding as long as possible — but he had also drooled shamelessly over other users' boast posts on the community boards. Even so, even if he hadn't been scrimping, a mere ten thousand points couldn't have bought him anything substantial. It took ten thousand points just to climb to VIP Rank 1.
And yet now….
P-points… can be farmed?!
An unavoidable formula was assembling itself in his mind.
One Demon Cult master equals…?
His eyes fell on yet another group of Demon Cult warriors advancing from far away.
They were beginning to look like walking numbers.