Week 8 Mentoring, Conquest Battle (3)
The only movement-type skill I currently possessed was Thief's Step.
Copied from Dang Gyu-young, it sat at B-rank, and with the bonus from the Cloud Walker sneakers Seo Ye-in had given me, it stood at B+.
That said, Thief's Step was never purely a movement skill. Its performance was spread across raising travel speed, smoothing out my motions, and muffling any sound or presence while I moved. If sixty of its points went to speed, the remaining forty or so covered everything else—which meant, judged on speed alone, it wasn't all that fast.
Adding Overheat to the mix would change the story entirely, but with the replay running, I couldn't afford to show Inferno Fist. Thief's Step alone would have to carry me through.
That was why Jo Byeok had managed to catch up to me despite my B+ rank—and the ogre before me was much the same. In raw speed alone, it was slightly faster than I was.
So how do you dodge the attacks of an opponent faster than you without getting hit?
'You read them, that's all.'
Their gaze, their stance, the shifts of muscle and joint—synthesize every scrap of it and deduce where, and how, they meant to strike. And the ogre's attacks were refreshingly honest; it moved exactly the way you'd predict. If it looked like it was going to smash left, it really would smash left.
'Like right now.'
— WHAM!
I shifted a single step sideways, and the club came crashing down square on the spot I'd occupied a heartbeat before. The ogre strode in and swung its free hand, but I burrowed in deeper instead, slipping into its blind spot. When its arms couldn't reach, it tried to bulldoze in body-first; I stepped out on Thief's Step and slipped clear.
"GUOOOOH!"
The beast let out an irritated bellow. It had been swiping at nothing but air this whole time—no wonder it was annoyed.
I could have kept running solo until the crystal finished charging, but...
"Mister, it would really help if you gave me a hand here."
This was, after all, a two-person dungeon; some cover from my partner would spare me a great deal of grief.
But Gwak Ji-cheol was busy dispatching the goblins swarming him.
"Hellooo, Mister."
"Urgh..."
Gwak Ji-cheol chained his spells together in a frantic rhythm, and goblins dropped one after another, each felled by a single dirt bullet. With no attention to spare for my plight, I needled him without mercy.
"You said you'd cover me. When exactly did you plan to start? Should I step outside and handle it myself?"
"Just... give me a moment."
"Are we even a pair? Ahh~ doing this all alone is so har~d~ my legs are going all numb~ at this rate I'm gonna get caught~"
"Damn it... fine, I get it!"
Whether the nagging had done its job or not, Gwak Ji-cheol's chanting sped up.
— KU-THOOM!
Before long he'd raised two thick earthen walls on either side of himself, and the pair surged forward like bulldozers, shoving goblins out of the way in droves. Urgent fire doused, Gwak Ji-cheol moved straight on to supporting me.
— Rat-tat-tat-tat—
Dirt bullets rattled off in quick succession and hammered into the ogre, but the thing didn't so much as react, as if they were no more than tickles. Perhaps stung by that, Gwak Ji-cheol packed the dirt into one enormous cannonball and hurled it.
— BOOM!
"Guoooh?"
The ogre scrubbed at the back of its skull where the cannonball had landed, glanced back over its shoulder once, and turned its attention right back to our game of tag. Dodging a sweeping club, I called out.
"Offensive magic won't cut it. Try something else."
The thing was tough from head to toe—run-of-the-mill attacks simply couldn't hurt it. It would have been a coin toss even if Song Cheon-hye or Hong Yeon-hwa unloaded everything they had, and Gwak Ji-cheol's offense was weaker still. Hardly surprising.
He seemed to have arrived at the same conclusion himself, and asked as he finished off the goblins,
"Then what should I do?"
"Control magic."
"Control... understood."
Gwak Ji-cheol cast his spell, and earthen walls sprouted up one after another around the ogre.
"Guooooh..."
The beast surveyed its surroundings, radiating pure annoyance. One wide sweep of its club and the walls collapsed in a heap. Gwak Ji-cheol clicked his tongue under his breath.
"Tch."
"Again—next one."
"On it."
He chanted once more, and the ground beneath the ogre's footing sank deep. This time it worked decently well; the beast lost its balance and staggered.
"Guooh..."
Things were finally becoming survivable.
Sure enough, when it came to harassment, the nastier the play, the higher it scored.
Gwak Ji-cheol threw himself fully into the underhanded work. Raising walls, digging pits, sending mounds of earth crawling up the ogre's legs and hardening there. Each time, the beast heaved its legs about violently to shake them off, but Gwak Ji-cheol seemed convinced he'd struck gold, and kept targeting nothing but those legs with dogged persistence.
With the ogre's movements reined in like this, running circles around it—a thing I'd been good at to begin with—became easier still. And then, at last—
— FLASH!
My crystal flooded edge to edge with red light. The very next moment, the pillar of light binding me to the Sanctuary snapped off, and a new pillar shot out to link with Gwak Ji-cheol instead. And the crystal he carried began to fill with blue.
"Guoooh?"
The ogre's head whipped around instantly. Its gaze slid along the direction the pillar of light pointed, and at the end of that line it found Gwak Ji-cheol.
"Guoooooh..."
Then, hostility locked onto him, it came thundering forward in earth-shaking strides. As for me—the one it had been desperately trying to catch mere seconds ago—it seemed I'd already been forgotten completely.
The roles had flipped. Now Gwak Ji-cheol charged the crystal, and I ran the harassment.
Chasing at the ogre's heels, I thrust Root forward.
Twister
Wind Force
— Whoosh—
Whirlwinds converged and clamped down on one of its legs, and its whole frame lurched hard. Even so, the charge toward Gwak Ji-cheol did not stop. Perhaps cowed by that momentum, Gwak Ji-cheol's expression turned urgent.
"Oh no."
'And now comes the part where he actually has to dodge...'
All the harassing side could really do, in the end, was pry gaps open in the ogre and buy time. Dodging and staying alive was entirely the crystal-bearer's own job.
I shoved the ogre back with Wind Force once more, but it swung its club without a care.
— KU-BOOM!
"Ugh."
Gwak Ji-cheol twisted aside by a hair. But the assault was only beginning. As a thick forearm came whistling in after the club, he threw his whole body down and rolled across the ground.
— POP!
Compressed air detonated against the ogre's face. The beast scrubbed at it, as if the whole thing were a passing nuisance.
"Damn it...!"
Gwak Ji-cheol scrambled backward and thrust his staff out before him. Green light spilled from the emerald—
— KU-KU-KU-BOOM!
—and layer upon layer of earthen walls rose up between him and the ogre.
Watching it unfold, I couldn't help but sigh.
"Aigoo."
What a terrible move to play. And a misjudgment led straight to a fatal result. Before Gwak Ji-cheol could chain a wall-reinforcement spell—
"GUOOOOH!"
—the ogre plowed in with its entire body. The stacked walls collapsed in a single breath, leaving Gwak Ji-cheol fully exposed before the beast. A palm the size of a cauldron lid swung down—
— WHAM!
"Gwahk!"
Gwak Ji-cheol rocketed away, slammed into a wall, bounced off it, tumbled head over heels, and ended up sprawled spread-eagle on the floor. Hard on his heels, a club the size of a grown man split the wind as it came down.
— CRUNCH!
"Oof."
My brow creased before I knew it. That one had to hurt.
By the time the ogre lifted its club for a second blow, Gwak Ji-cheol had already vanished from the spot. The ground-level dungeon's safety protocol had kicked in and ejected him outside. The next instant, everything washed gray and froze in place, and Dang Gyu-young appeared, releasing her stealth. She looked down at the Gwak-Ji-cheol-shaped crater stamped into the floor and shook her head slowly.
"Haah... this one really does have such a long way to go."
First attempt or not, he hadn't lasted even a handful of moves against the ogre. And I was supposed to forge that level of skill into something that could hold out through a full crystal charge?
'His skill aside, the matchup really didn't do him any favors.'
Where Ilgong had attacked over the walls, adapting his own take on the Cross-Mountain Bull Strike, the ogre's style was to smash straight through them, head-on. And even with [Enfeeblement] knocking its rank down a full step, the thing remained stupidly strong. Which meant that with Gwak Ji-cheol's current defenses, blocking was impossible—he would have to find another means entirely. And once he found it, he'd need extra time on top of that to adapt.
In every sense, a long road of suffering lay clearly ahead of him.
'Of course, that's his problem, not mine.'
Whether Gwak Ji-cheol suffered or not, my goal was unchanged. Clearing the sub-quest ahead of schedule—full speed ahead, exactly as planned.
"Senior."
"Hm?"
"I'm planning to bank my score right away this week."
"Already? It's only day one."
"Didn't see any reason to drag it out."
"Well, in your case I don't mind, but..."
Dang Gyu-young tended to make exceptions for me and me alone—because she'd pieced together a fair share of my true abilities. Mine had long since outgrown the level mentoring was meant for; left to my own devices, I'd sprout up just fine regardless. I had, after all, just kept my HP pinned at a full 100% against the ogre while charging the crystal to completion on the very first attempt. Proof enough.
"But if you bank yours and bail, what happens to Gwak Ji-cheol? Won't he be left floating all on his own?"
As the mentor, Dang Gyu-young couldn't exactly let her group members drift apart. If they were paired up for a week, they ought to act like a pair, like it or not.
I answered breezily.
"I'll just bank the score first. After that, I'll keep matching his pace as usual."
Ordinarily, once the practical evaluation was over there'd be no reason left to keep training—but my case was the exception. My banking a score was, from start to finish, nothing more than a means of completing a sub-quest. Afterward I'd be rank-grinding through the mentoring event anyway, so regardless of points, I planned to keep humoring Gwak Ji-cheol's practice runs.
Dang Gyu-young mulled it over briefly, then nodded—apparently satisfied that anyone who'd explained this much could be trusted with it.
"Fine, then. But who are you pairing with? The handsome one? The pretty one with the gray hair?"
"The gray-haired one."
The handsome one, Go Hyeon-woo, had a group of his own, so he was naturally out. The gray-haired beauty, Seo Ye-in, took her mentoring one-on-one from Ahn Jungmi—which left her without any fixed partner. From where she stood, taking the two-person practical meant queuing for a random match anyway, so there would be no problem at all with me stepping into that slot.
And so I fired off a message to Seo Ye-in.