Shin Byung-cheol's Greatest Crisis
Training Center. A private training room.
Seo Ye-in leveled her magic gun at the advancing iron dummies, the muzzle spewing blue fire in rapid bursts.
Tududududu!
The magic bullets slammed into the dummies and burst apart on impact — yet not a single scratch appeared on their bodies, the intensity having been set punishingly high. Feeling no shock either, it seemed, the dummies simply marched on through the barrage, closed in on Seo Ye-in, and swung their massive arms.
Of course, Seo Ye-in was hardly the type to get caught by such clumsy attacks. She threaded through the gaps in their offense, firing all the while.
Tududududu!
Watching her, I thought, the direction is set, at least.
The match against the assassin duo had given me a fresh look at Seo Ye-in's strengths and weaknesses. Her attack power was strong enough to fell any first-year in the grade — but it amounted to nothing if she never landed a hit. Even Jang Mu-geuk hadn't taken a single clean shot; a few light grazes were the most she'd managed. Which meant her utility was still lacking.
That weakness could be patched with secondary weapons, accessories bearing bonus effects, or new skills and traits.
Still, no need to rush.
Utility skills on the level of Bullet Time or Ghost Without Shadow weren't the sort of thing you stumbled across every day, and her secondary weapons were already in production on the Hyeseong Group's end — about two weeks, they'd said.
So for the time being, the direction would be, deepen what she has rather than broaden it.
Focus on ranking up the skills she already owned. Most of what Seo Ye-in had learned was likewise plateaued at C-rank, and only steady training from here on would carry them to B, one by one.
And so I added a few more traits to the iron dummies — durability reinforcement, knockback resistance, and the like. Fighting them over and over would let her hone a whole spread of skills and traits in equal measure.
Tududududu!
Full of drive today, aren't we. Seo Ye-in kept moving without a break. Normally her sloth battery would have run dry long before this and she'd have keeled over, but today she was lasting a good while. Pitting her against promising-tier opponents really did pay off — Jang Mu-geuk, too, had looked like his competitive pride had been well and truly stoked by the end.
Next chance I got, I'd have her face Cha Hyun-ju as well.
Meanwhile, I sank into thoughts of my own. The plan had slipped a little off track.
▷ Stamps: 9 / 10
The original plan had been to complete the Stamp Coupon while burning through the Random Rank-Ups. But then, against all odds, [Sovereign] had climbed to B-rank.
Not that I minded a variable like that — quite the opposite, really. It wasn't as though Random Rank-Ups were hard to come by again.
Maybe I should go pester the butler. I still hadn't been in touch with Ahn Jungmi. If I told her Seo Ye-in had learned Ghost Without Shadow thanks to me, she would surely pay generously — and wouldn't she cheerfully toss a Random Rank-Up on top of that?
Of course, the "generous payment" was a separate matter entirely.
Should I ask for more poison herbs, or... The deliberation carried on a while longer.
The next day. Raid Tactics class.
Seo Cheong-yong, as ever, carried the lesson along with his usual good-natured smile. The good news was that the class had reached its final stretch; the bad news was that he chose that final stretch to assign homework.
"—Now then, let's each pick an F-rank boss raid dungeon and take some time to analyze it."
"..."
"I hear Ms. Jo Oksoon gave you a similar assignment — do them at the same time and you'll finish twice as fast, right?"
True to his word, Madam Jo Oksoon had assigned a "boss monster survey and analysis" in Monster Ecology class not long ago. And now a boss raid dungeon survey was being stacked on top of it. Coincidence?
The quick-witted ones seemed to have guessed the topic of the next Raid Tactics lesson, their eyes gleaming. Seo Cheong-yong's smile looked unusually meaningful.
"That's all for today, everyone. Enjoy your lunch!"
The moment Seo Cheong-yong stepped out of the classroom, the students rose in a rush to follow. But then Song Cheon-hye and Han So-mi looked around the room and spoke.
"Return to your seats."
"Belongings inspection starts right now!"
"...!"
The classroom din, just on the verge of turning rowdy, shrank to a low murmur. Students hurriedly checked the doorway and the windows — and sure enough, a translucent membrane hung draped across them. A large-scale barrier spell deployed by the academy. Proof that the belongings inspection — the Ban Wave — had been triggered.
Early, isn't it.
The second Ban Wave usually hit around the time finals drew near, since that was when the most students tried to claw their grades upward by any crooked means available. But with roughly a month left until finals, this was decidedly early.
Which is exactly what makes it work. Belongings inspections were meant to come unannounced — if you knew the timing, you'd only be careful when it counted.
Meanwhile, a frantic whisper drifted over from the diagonal seat.
"Hey, hey, hey! Help! Help!"
"Help with what?"
"Got anything? Anything I can hide?"
Back at the first Ban Wave of the semester, I'd stashed a whole pile of high-grade banned items in the Life Cube for him. He seemed to be hoping for the same favor this time, but all I could do was shake my head.
"Don't have any. You know that."
The Life Cube had long since been converted into Beomi's private villa. And even if I'd had something on hand, it would've been hard to use this time — the Disciplinary Committee was watching us with hawk eyes from close by. Song Cheon-hye in particular seemed to have flagged the two of us as persons of interest, her gaze locked on us without letup.
"Really nothing? Really?"
"Give it up. Criminals shall accept their punishment obediently."
Just as Shin Byung-cheol opened his mouth to say more—
Bzzt—!
A membrane of magnetic field materialized at one end of the classroom. It swept rapidly toward the far wall, flushing out every banned item in its path, and warning-lamp red lights flickered to life all across the room — for some, inside their uniform pockets; for others, within their desk drawers. And on a few students' foreheads, a red letter I seared itself like a brand, marking banned items stashed in their inventories.
Shin Byung-cheol, as it happened, fell into both categories. His forehead in particular blazed incomparably brighter than anyone else's, and Han So-mi stared at him with wide, fascinated eyes.
"Whoa, his is totally red!"
"Be serious."
Song Cheon-hye tossed out the light rebuke and approached Shin Byung-cheol. Then she gave her order.
"Take them out. Every single one — all of them."
"..."
The I brand on the forehead lingered for as long as even one banned item remained in one's inventory. Shin Byung-cheol, therefore, had no choices left, and Song Cheon-hye swept every item he produced into her own inventory.
By the time the brand on his forehead had faded somewhat, Shin Byung-cheol ventured a careful question.
"Th-that, Teacher Song? How about we call it a day for today?"
"I said take them all out."
Pzzt,
At Song Cheon-hye's fingertips, a hummingbird woven from pure current flickered into being and vanished. The message was clear: resist, and he'd get a taste of Hummingbird before she confiscated everything anyway. In the end, Shin Byung-cheol was shaken down to his last pocket.
He really hauled in a lot. The man's banned items just kept coming, endless as the tide — enough to make the onlookers gape. Considering that most of it was Thieves Club assets, this raid was shaping up to be a costly one. And where Dang Gyu-young's wrath would point afterward was easy to guess.
Perhaps sensing as much, Shin Byung-cheol pleaded with a pitiful face.
"Aigooo, if you take all of this~ what am I supposed to live on~ just a little bit, maybe~"
"Sit down."
Naturally, it didn't land. Song Cheon-hye cut him off, stern and unyielding, then made a full circuit of the classroom with Han So-mi, confiscating the remaining students' banned items and scanning their student IDs. During the first Ban Wave there had been resisters, but now, having all felt the gulf in strength between themselves and the Disciplinary Committee, everyone cooperated meekly.
When the sweep was finished, Song Cheon-hye spoke.
"Penalty points and disciplinary measures will be added according to severity. Details will be sent to you via message."
"All done! Let's go get lunch~"
And with Han So-mi waving both hands, the two of them left the classroom. Loaded down with high-risk items as they were, they presumably wanted to reach the Disciplinary Committee room as quickly as possible.
Murmur, murmur...
The students cautiously began to speak up one by one, and in no time the noise swelled back to full volume. Most of them had never carried banned items in the first place, and even those who'd been caught just shrugged it off — bad luck, end of story. Shin Byung-cheol, however, was another story entirely, and he sat rooted in place, his soul all but departed from his body.
He stayed dazed like that for a good long while before coming back to himself somewhat and clawing wildly at his own head.
"Unbelievable. All of it, gone? I am so, so screwed."
"That's what you get for hauling it all around at once."
"Big Sis Dang's gonna rip every last hair out. Am I going bald over this?"
"Wear a wig."
Not like you need hair to run a tea house, after all.
While answering with perfect indifference, I turned the situation over in my mind. With all the banned items it had seized in this Ban Wave, the Disciplinary Committee would need to gather and manage them until they were handed over to the academy. But anything done by human hands has its loopholes, large or small — and it is the nature of thieves to worm their way into exactly those loopholes.
Simply put: they're going to hit the Temporary Confiscation Storage again this time.
The odds of a storage-infiltration event were very high. Which meant the first thing I needed to do was— borrow the cube.
The Life Cube's hidden effect: place banned items inside, and they slipped clean past the Ban Wave and any similar detection magic. So it was worth securing the Nature Club's blessing and renting it out for a few days.
With that settled, I left the classroom and made for the class next door. The Ban Wave had been enforced across the entire year, so the neighboring classroom was in a similar state of disarray.
Amid it all, Park Nari was faithfully serving as the mini tiger Beomi's punching bag — involuntarily, of course.
"B-Beomi. S-stop hitting. Stop, please."
"Myaa."
Beomi kept firing off soft, padded punches. Whether something else had soured her mood, or she simply felt like hitting something, there was no telling. But she soon caught the presence of a newcomer, turned her head this way, and found me.
"Meow."
"Hi, Beomi."
Beomi hopped down from a desk and started toward me, then faltered, keeping a careful distance. Apparently she remembered being shoved around by Wind Force and chilled to the bone by Chillwind in the Glacier Zone PvP. But as I stood perfectly still, her wariness gradually melted away, and she closed the rest of the distance to rub her forehead against my knee.
"Meow."
"I brought snacks."
As it happened, one of the specialties of the Gathering of Evildoers made for a fine cat treat: dried fish. Broken into little pieces and offered up, it vanished down her throat without complaint.
And in that state, I raised the matter at hand.
"There's something I'd like to ask you."
"Meow."
Beomi answered while crunching through the dried fish. Translated, it probably amounted to, go on then, let's hear it.
So I said it.
"Could I borrow the cube?"
"...?"
The dried fish dropped from Beomi's mouth. The way she stared up at me, utterly grave, seemed to say it all:
— What did you just say?