Weapon Master (1)
We topped off our bellies with snacks while making the rounds of the street stalls, and our next destination was the Game Center Seo Ye-in had been looking forward to.
The Game Center, like everywhere else, was packed so tight there was barely room to plant a foot. Even so, we refused to be beaten, wedging and squeezing our way inside and heading for the student-only corner tucked away in the back. The mini-games here cost a fair chunk of points, so the crowd thinned out considerably—but compared to two weeks ago, even this place was far more bustling than usual.
Then Seo Ye-in's footsteps stopped dead, and she stared fixedly at one spot.
"Gunslinger Adventure......"
"It's gone."
The machines had been rearranged, and most of the mini-games had been swapped out for new ones—periodic rotation applied to more than just the prizes, after all. Gunslinger Adventure in particular had been a prime candidate for the chopping block, seeing as we'd walked off with prizes on scores all but tantamount to the house record.
Our resident Positivity Boss, Go Hyeon-woo, moved to console the gradually wilting Seo Ye-in, and I threw in a word of my own.
"Haha, Miss Seo, do not take it to heart. Are there not plenty of other amusements to be had?"
"Other stuff's probably fun once you actually try it."
"Mm......"
"Let's look at the prize list first."
A fresh goal would bring her interest back along with it.
◈ Invisibility Scroll — Accessory
◈ Equipment Enhancement Stone
◈ Rank Up (E)
◈ Fierce-Looking Teddy Bear
◈ .......
The lineup resembled two weeks ago and yet had changed. Back then, Random Rank-Up had been sitting right there for me to snatch up; now it was nowhere to be seen. To be fair, it wasn't a reward that appeared all that often.
Which left the next-best option.
I'll just have to grab the Rank Up.
Air Burst, the one I'd picked up at the graduate flea market just now, was already fairly easy to rank up on its own—but adding a Rank Up scroll to the mix would shave the time cost down even further.
I asked the other two.
"Anything catching your eye?"
"Rank Up."
Go Hyeon-woo was still deliberating, while Seo Ye-in chose the same as me: Rank Up. She seemed to be planning to use it to raise Bullet Time to E—not a bad pick.
So how did one go about getting it, then?
▷ Condition 1: Score 20 kills or 15+ assists in Weapon Master
▷ Condition 2: Fewer than 3 deaths
Go Hyeon-woo, who had been hovering at our elbows, spoke up.
"What manner of game is this Weapon Master?"
"That one."
Of the newly installed machines, a single title claimed half the student corner. A competitive survival free-for-all: Weapon Master. The rules were simple—everyone roamed a set space aimlessly for a set time and fought whenever they crossed paths with an enemy.
You could feed in another token to continue after dying, but tokens naturally cost 300 points apiece, and the [Rank Up] we were after meant calling it quits at three deaths.
"Twenty kills or fifteen assists on two deaths or fewer. Not exactly a walk in the park."
It meant you owed ten kills for every life you lost. The one piece of good news was that this game, too, could be played in pairs. One of us hunted down twenty kills while the other chased fifteen assists, and the numbers lined up perfectly.
"And yours truly is not to join the pair?"
"Afraid not. Teams of two."
"I see. Then I shall enter as a solo. My interest has been thoroughly piqued, you see."
"Which prize are you going for?"
Go Hyeon-woo gave the prize list another once-over before answering.
"Nothing there takes my fancy, so I shall think of this as an experience and simply enjoy myself."
"Works for me."
Just then a match ended, and a whole row of seats opened up. The next wave of players waiting nearby filed in to fill the vacancies, and the three of us claimed three in a row.
Seo Ye-in inserted her token first. A large '?' bloomed on the screen and began flashing rapidly through the silhouettes of one figure after another.
Titles like that one never come without a reason.
The class and weapon of the character you controlled were decided at random—with one lone exception: your own class was carved out entirely. For instance, since Seo Ye-in's class was Gunslinger, ranged characters would never come up for her. In their place she might roll a Paladin, a Mage, a Priest, or any number of others. You had to handle whatever you were dealt with real skill and take the win—hence the name Weapon Master.
Before long the flickering silhouette locked into shape, and Seo Ye-in's character revealed itself. A bald, powerfully built man with swarthy skin, his clothes worn half on and half off, his whole body slathered haphazardly with something red—tattoo or paint, impossible to say. In his grip hung a crude sword; at his waist, a hand axe.
Seo Ye-in had rolled the savage tribal warrior—the Barbarian.
On screen, the Barbarian bellowed at the top of his lungs, as if to announce his presence to the world.
- KROOOAAGH—!
"......!"
Seo Ye-in's gray eyes went bright and sparkly. Apparently she approved. Her interest had come back around—good.
Next, my own character was set. A scrawny, emaciated man with a spine curled like a shrimp's, dressed much like Seo Ye-in's Barbarian, a long pipe of a blowgun clamped between his teeth. He looked remarkably like the Skinny one we'd met at the Feathered Serpent Altar.
A tribal poison-needler.
Take a dart from him and all manner of status effects kicked in—the screen went blurry, left and right reversed, your movement slowed to a crawl. A character built less for taking enemies down than for controlling them. Granted, that came with the condition of actually landing the darts—but then, who was I?
The Mini-Game Demon King himself.
And with that, our roles settled themselves.
"You go for kills, I'll stack assists."
"Mm."
Seo Ye-in nodded.
Go Hyeon-woo's screen, meanwhile, displayed a lovely mage of a woman in elegant, demure robes. When she swept her staff through the air, a snowstorm whirled up around her.
Go Hyeon-woo let out a gasp of admiration.
"Oh, a Mage, I see. I have wondered about it for the longest time—what a fine chance to try it with my own hands."
"Careful. That one's made of paper."
"Haha, I shall mind myself."
Soon every participant's character was locked in, the view whooshed away, and in the next instant Seo Ye-in and I were standing inside a vast ruin. Darkness swallowed every direction, torches burning here and there casting a wan glow over the surroundings. And along the very bottom of the screen, a scoreboard kept count of kills, deaths, and assists.
The countdown began, and the match was underway.
[3]
[2]
[1]
[START!]
"Right, let's move out."
"Moving."
Seo Ye-in, our melee character, took point. She pushed down the broad corridors wherever her feet carried her, hanging a left whenever a fork appeared, then a right, and pressing on again. We were trudging along without any particular destination when a heavy shadow wavered in the torchlight and began drifting closer.
- Clank, clank—
A knight in slab-thick plate armor, with a Priest trailing behind. They were evidently just as unaccustomed to melee classes, because their every movement was spectacularly unnatural.
- KROOAAAR—!
Seo Ye-in's Barbarian let loose a roar and charged. She closed in right on top of the knight... and swung her sword in wide, floppy arcs. Nothing to be done—the controls hadn't settled into her hands yet. The knight was clearly in the same boat, holding his shield out front with a fumbling, half-hearted thrust.
Hm. Painfully awkward.
Barbarian and knight traded blows, both sets of arms creaking like rusty gate hinges. Pilot a class you'd never touched, and this sort of carnage was par for the course.
Right in the middle of that tea-party excuse for a duel—
- Vwiiing—
The knight's body flooded with bright light. The Priest at his back was casting a heal. With one side recovering health unopposed, Seo Ye-in would be the first to drop at this rate.
Not that I intended to just spectate. I had started prepping my darts the moment the fight broke out, and the reload was finished now. I took aim—
- Fwoop!
A dart slid neatly through the gap of the knight's visor. His movements slowed at once, visibly—a slow debuff, by the look of it. When your body goes sluggish in the middle of an exchange, huge openings spill out of you whether you like it or not.
Seo Ye-in hammered the knight's shield with her full strength to break his stance, then brought her sword down again with the same whole-body force.
- CLANG!
Barbarian-grade brute force dented the steel helm clean inward. Even so, she did not stop swinging.
- BAM! BAM! BAM!
"Whoa, that one's running."
The Priest spun on his heel and bolted. But a dart caught him in the nape, Seo Ye-in strode after him in long easy steps, snatched him up by the scruff, and slit his throat where he stood.
"Not bad at all, for a first-timer."
"Me, strong."
"You are. Downright monstrous."
The Barbarian was, in a word, a man's-man class that settled everything with raw physicality alone.
"On we go."
"Mm."
We kept following the ruin's corridors until two more human shadows wavered in the torchlight. What appeared next was a pair of Warriors, dressed in matching leather armor and carrying matching sword-and-shield kits. With classes rolled at random, duplicates like that did happen. The twin Warriors spotted us in turn and came charging at speed.
I loaded a dart and gave Seo Ye-in her order.
"Axe."
"Axe."
Seo Ye-in drew the hand axe from her belt and flung it straight ahead. It whirled end over end through the air and buried itself in Twin Warrior A's shoulder with a thock. It was her first throw, so I'd figured a miss was likelier than not—but apparently, with a Gunslinger for an original class, the woman could throw just about anything.
"Let's clear out the axe guy first."
"Mm."
The Barbarian was striding in to engage both Warriors at once when—
- Fwoop—!
I sent a dart flying. A thin needle sank into Twin Warrior B's throat.
"Ah! What is this thing?!"
A bewildered yell rang out from somewhere—presumably the player piloting Twin B. From the way he flailed about with no compass at all, he'd caught the reversal status effect. An unfamiliar class was disorienting enough without the controls running backwards.
In the meantime, Seo Ye-in bore down on Twin A without mercy. With an axe lodged in his shoulder, his fighting strength had already cratered. A threw his shield up in front of him, and she simply kicked it out of the way, stepped in, and raked her sword across him at a diagonal.
- KRRRCH!
Twin A split neatly in two, and Seo Ye-in wheeled toward B in the same breath. Perhaps the reversal had just expired, because B was steadying his stance and moving to meet her—
- Fwoop!
Only until the next dart found its mark.
"No, seriously, what IS this thing?!"
Another baffled cry rang through the student corner. I checked B's status: his movements had slowed to a caterpillar's crawl. Slow this time, then. And a slowed target was easy prey for the manliest Barbarian of them all—Seo Ye-in.
- KRRRUNCH!
"Strong."
"Strong."
We shared a light high-five. Smack.
[168] The Support Eats It All