Week 9 Midterm (5)
Seeing the weapon in Cha Hyun-ju's hands, I threw out a question.
"Weren't you running a dagger-rogue concept? What happened to the daggers—why the bow?"
Cha Hyun-ju had wielded paired daggers in public practical evaluations to hide her true abilities, switching over to her main weapon, the bow, only once her replays were set to private. And yet here she was at the midterm, bow in hand.
Cha Hyun-ju answered through gritted teeth.
"I threw them away. Because of you."
"Because of me?"
"That's right!"
A quiet swell of pride stirred in me. Left to her own devices, she'd have wasted ages grinding away at daggers—apparently I'd spared her all that. So Wind Force did bring about positive change once in a while.
"Good call. Bows suit you better than daggers, Cha Hyun-ju."
"Zip it."
She kept up her low growling, but I stayed perfectly composed and kept the questions coming.
"So how'd you find us out here?"
"You think I'd tell you that?"
"Looks like you've got some kind of detector. Am I close?"
"……."
Her reaction said I'd hit the mark. Truthfully, I'd already been running on a guess that amounted to certainty. Even for a rising prospect with a long-range class's wide field of vision, spotting us from that distance and giving chase would have been a tall order—which put the weight squarely on the item theory. And sure enough, the survival items supplied in the boxes included a whole family of "detectors."
"I'd like that detector for myself. You came here wanting something too, didn't you?"
"The crystal."
"Figured as much. Then let's keep this simple. Winner takes—"
"—everything."
Cha Hyun-ju nocked an arrow with lightning speed and leveled it at me. In that instant, a thin blue line seemed to streak for the bridge of her nose—and she loosed an arrow straight into the incoming Magic Bullet.
- Zing—!
Arrow shards and Magic Bullet fragments scattered through the air. Reflexes worthy of a rising prospect, all right.
Cha Hyun-ju jerked her chin toward the direction the shot had come from and spat out a word.
"Get him."
At her command, the boy paired with her moved to comply—right up until I stepped into his path.
"Not gonna happen."
"……."
"Nothing wrong with trading names before we start, is there?"
"Kang Hee-chan."
"Kim Ho."
Kang Hee-chan was the archetypal warrior class, longsword in hand—offense and defense nicely balanced, his skill sitting somewhere around the 600-point tier by my estimate. Deciding I wasn't worth another word beyond introductions, he swung straight for me. I slipped aside lightly, already angling for a counterattack, when—
- Thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip!
Cha Hyun-ju opened up with a wild barrage of arrows. Seven of every ten to pin me down, three to keep Seo Ye-in in check—solid harassment for disrupting the sniping. And it wasn't just volume; something unusual was mixed in among the incoming shafts.
Those ones will blow.
I'd clocked the explosive arrows, so where I might ordinarily have drifted aside with a lazy dodge, I put real distance into it.
- Pop-pop-BOOM!
"Tsk."
Her ploy having failed, Cha Hyun-ju clicked her tongue once—then let fly with even greater ferocity.
- Thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip!
With Cha Hyun-ju's covering fire at his back, Kang Hee-chan drove me hard with one continuous attack after another. Judging by how well they meshed, the two of them must have been paired a few times before. Between dodging arrows and dodging longswords, I had my hands full. Then a shot streaked in, aimed dead at the bridge of Kang Hee-chan's nose—
- Zing—!
—and Cha Hyun-ju batted the Magic Bullet out of the air with perfect precision.
A genuine murmur of admiration rose from my heart.
"Your skill really is inversely proportional to your personality."
"I told you to shut your mouth!"
- Thwip-thwip-thwip!
A downpour of arrows, sword strikes without pause. I wove this way and that through them, steadily giving ground.
- Zing—!
And Cha Hyun-ju chopped the third shot out of the sky mid-flight. Reflexes were part of it, sure, but the real cause was simpler: the sum of the skills and traits Cha Hyun-ju had stockpiled simply outweighed Seo Ye-in's. Right now, only two things were lending her sniping a hand—[Magic Bullet] and [Ejection].
What's your move now?
By this point, Seo Ye-in had surely grasped that ghillie-suit sniping wasn't landing. What judgment she made next was worth watching—so I would stall just a little longer.
- CLANG! CLANG!
I deflected Kang Hee-chan's slashing chain with Root and swatted the rest away with a summoned dark cloud, zigzagging my steps all the while to slip Cha Hyun-ju's arrows. His face twisted into a scowl.
"Starting to see why Hyun-ju can't stand you."
"Frustrating when nothing connects, isn't it?"
"Honestly, it's tru—!"
- WHOOSH!
I evaded the longsword sweeping in on a diagonal and fell back a good distance, flicking a glance to the side as I went.
"You kids have no room in your lives for leisure. Look around you. There's a squirrel to watch up in that tree, a lake sitting right beside us. How pretty is that?"
"What kind of bullshit is that."
All that diligent retreating, fleeing, and retreating yet again had carried us a fair distance from where the fight began—and just as I'd advertised, a great lake beside us was catching the reflection of the setting sun. But was there truly any need to bring up the lake, of all things, in the middle of a battle?
That, too, was by design. To scatter Cha Hyun-ju and Kang Hee-chan's attention, even for the space of a breath—
- Rat-tat-tat-tat!
—and let Seo Ye-in pour through the gap.
Shedding her optical camouflage ghillie suit, Seo Ye-in emerged and emptied her assault rifle on full auto. The Magic Bullets came raining down without warning, and Cha Hyun-ju scrambled into evasive footwork—but the range at which Seo Ye-in had revealed herself was far too close. Two or three of the shots she couldn't dodge hammered into her body.
"Kgh."
She'd never imagined the snipe-and-hide Seo Ye-in would close in this near, and the shock showed. Even so, she recovered her equilibrium in moments and began answering fire with fire.
- Thwip-thwip-thwip!
A long-range bombardment duel. This time the baptism of arrows fell on Seo Ye-in. With the distance between them fairly short, Cha Hyun-ju hadn't been able to evade every Magic Bullet—so, by the same logic, Seo Ye-in was bound to eat the arrows she couldn't dodge.
Contrary to that expectation, Seo Ye-in advanced on Featherwalk. Her eyes flashed for an instant, and then she threaded her body through the slimmest of gaps in the arrow barrage, raised her assault rifle again, and fired on full auto.
- Rat-tat-tat-tat!
Truly outstanding.
A one-sided exchange of blows powered by Bullet Time. Cha Hyun-ju took Magic Bullets across her entire body.
"……!"
And in the breath where the covering fire lapsed, I kicked off the ground and tore free of Kang Hee-chan. He lunged to pursue at once, but the distance refused to close.
- Vwooooo—
A whirlwind had lashed his body in place. In the next heartbeat, wind gathered around him, compressed—and detonated.
- BAM!
"Ughk."
Kang Hee-chan wobbled in place and dropped to one knee. A few heaving breaths later, he raised his head—and there was Seo Ye-in, leveling her muzzle at him with a perfectly blank face.
- Rat-tat-tat-tat!
Kang Hee-chan was judged incapable of combat and ejected, leaving only his subspace backpack lying forlorn where he'd stood. His items were probably all in there. Seo Ye-in and I turned our eyes to the last one standing.
- Ssssss,
That many Magic Bullets to the body, and Cha Hyun-ju still had her wits about her. She glared at me, teeth grinding hard enough to crack. You had to give her tenacity its due.
I dug through Kang Hee-chan's subspace bag and fished out the detector.
"We won, so we'll be taking this. Thanks kindly."
"You son of a bitch. Don't even think about stretching out and resting easy for the rest of this midterm. Wherever you are, whenever it is—"
- BAM!
The compressed air burst, and Cha Hyun-ju went flying off in a beautiful parabola. Her landing zone: the dead center of the lake beside us.
- SPLASH—!
Water leapt high into the air. A moment later, a thoroughly drenched clump of waterweed bobbed to the surface, sharp eyes glaring at us through the tangle.
And there it is—a genuine vengeful water spirit, no acting required.
Seo Ye-in stared at the sight, unmoving, and then—
- Rat-tat-tat-tat!
—opened up on Cha Hyun-ju with the assault rifle.
"Hey, hey—why are you shooting her?"
"She said bad words."
"…Hm. Bad words are not okay, that's true. Go on, a little longer."
- Rat-tat-tat-tat!
Ducking and weaving through the deluge of Magic Bullets, Cha Hyun-ju swam for the far shore. There she turned her back to us and glared once more—but the instant Seo Ye-in raised her muzzle, she bolted in a hurry.
We saw no reason to give chase. Kang Hee-chan was locked out for six hours, and we'd stripped them of every survival item they had. Cha Hyun-ju would have to meet the night exactly as she was—cold, hungry, drowsy hours ahead.
Suffer a little, why don't you.
The Crystal Detector was an item that scanned for nearby crystals once every 12 hours. On top of that, a fully charged crystal glittered with a special marker—likely the very reason Cha Hyun-ju had come hunting us with her eyes on fire.
Only two Calorie Bars this time as well, but with everything we'd eaten from the other supply boxes stacked on top, it came to just enough to fill the stomach.
"Still, living off Calorie Bars for three whole days feels a little sad. Let's cook something proper tomorrow. Grilled fish, maybe."
"Okay."
Seo Ye-in nodded.
We would have set off at once to charge Red Crystal No. 2, except—
"What's your battery percentage right now?"
"Fourteen…."
That pitched battle just now had drained the tree-sloth battery to the dregs. The trip to the Sanctuary might pose no problem, but she stood a good chance of running flat on the way back.
"Let's call it a day, then."
"Mm…."
And so we went looking for somewhere to rest. Near the lake rose a rocky hill of no great height. Climb halfway up and study the gaps between the jutting boulders, and you would find a crevice just wide enough for a person to slip inside—one that opened into a cave of surprisingly cozy proportions. A cave practically announcing itself as a rest stop. Shelters like it were scattered all across the island. This, too, was part of the midterm's design: comb the dungeon's smallest details carefully, and they paid dividends in crystals and survival alike.
Dinner was wild tree fruit and Calorie Bars. A bite here, a bite there, and the light faded until darkness pressed in on every side. Inside the cave we spread out two sleeping bags; outside, we rigged alarm traps—without them, one of us would have been standing the night watch. As for light, the charged Red Crystal stood in. If it had been yellow it might have passed for a mood lamp, but in red, the ambience ran closer to a butcher's shop.
Well. It is what it is.
"Good night."
"Mm…."
Leaving Seo Ye-in's reply trailing behind me, I closed my eyes inside my sleeping bag.
"……."
Inside her sleeping bag, Seo Ye-in lay with her eyes half open, staring at the ceiling of the cave. Sleep came pressing down on her in waves, and still she couldn't slip under. The main reason: the tiger plushie that shared her bed every single night was missing. Its absence made the empty space beside her loom all the larger.
"……."
Tossing and turning, she turned her head and studied Kim Ho's face. He had already sunk deep into sleep. Somewhere in the middle of gazing at him, Seo Ye-in suddenly recalled something from earlier that day.
"Hop aboard, my lady. We shall descend at a leisurely pace."
"You're the tree sloth, Sloth Kim Ho. Get down. Hurry."
She had ridden down from the great old tree on Kim Ho's back, and for some reason she had stayed clinging on a little longer even after they touched the ground—the comfort had been that hard to leave.
"……?"
She cocked her head for a moment, and then, seized by some thought or other, dragged her sleeping bag across the cave floor to Kim Ho's side. Ever so carefully, she leaned her head against his sleeping bag.
"……!"
Seo Ye-in's eyes widened a fraction. A single word had flashed through her mind: comfy!
She pulled her sleeping bag flush against Kim Ho's, settled her head against it, closed her eyes—and sleep came pouring in at once….
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[182] The Support Eats It All