Week 4 Conquest Exam (1)

Go Hyeon-woo had his hands full with the report and the extra homework I'd assigned him. His brain was in for a rough weekend.

As for me, I was spending more and more of my time at the Magic Engineering Workshop. What I did there hadn't changed much over the past several days: groundwork in Workshop 4, the occasional disassembly of failed projects the club seniors brought in, and — the moment a spot opened up in Workshop 1 — a quick dash inside to craft items. The only difference this time was that the materials going in were on a whole different level.

On top of those, I threw in every high-grade material the other seniors had handed over as commission rewards, putting all of it to use. And so the days spun past like a hamster wheel...

Weekend morning. Dawn had just broken, and outside the window the sky was slowly brightening. I set down the tools in my hand.

It's done.

A slim, elongated, core-shaped component. I had wrestled with nothing but this thing for days on end, and at last it was finished. The moment I breathed mana into it, a faint updraft rose, and the odds and ends scattered across the workbench floated up into the air. Once they'd lifted a few centimeters, I cut the flow, and they came rustling back down.

"...!"

The seniors, who happened to be taking a short break, saw the sight and their eyes went perfectly round. Perhaps they didn't want to crowd me, because instead of swarming over, only Bong Jaeseok and the female senior I'd met before came close. Both of their faces brimmed with the thirst to understand.

"So that's why you were scraping materials together so desperately... You've gone and made something fascinating again."

"Mind if we take a quick look?"

"Of course, Senior."

At my word, the two seniors leaned in close and turned the component over, examining it this way and that. Admiring exclamations escaped them in turns.

"So that's the structure..."

"I kept wondering why you needed Floating Stone Extract — turns out it has its uses after all..."

"Wow, look at this. Incredible. Just incredible."

The principle behind the component broke down into three broad stages. The Mana Engine supplied the mana; the Weather Chip induced a localized shift in climate across a set range; and the Floating Stone Extract determined what kind of climate it would be.

Bong Jaeseok passed the component back to me and asked, "Judging by the shape, this goes into a weapon, doesn't it? A staff? A scepter?"

"Something like that."

"And the body — got one yet?"

As it stood, the thing was merely a part; only once mounted onto something would it actually serve as an item. I pulled an iron rod a little over a meter long out of my inventory.

"I'm planning to make do with this for now."

It was the free F-rank iron rod the academy provided, lightly reworked. When I slotted the component in, the two merged into one without a hitch.

Levitate Zone. A zone of levitation. A wind spell that raised an updraft and sent everything within its range floating upward. Objects and monsters alike differed in weight and magic resistance, so how far each one lifted off would vary — but anything that floated even a little became that much more susceptible to physical force.

In other words, inside that zone, everything grew more vulnerable to Wind Force.

That said, this Iron Rod of Levitation was only E-rank, and the always-active Levitate Zone was merely F-grade. Its power was slight and its range narrow — about the size of a single small room, if I had to put it in terms.

Well, I had used an iron rod.

Magic engineering items were shaped not only by their components but also, heavily, by the metal that formed the body. It was a stopgap measure, and with an iron rod, E-grade was the ceiling at best. Build a finer body from finer metal, and naturally both rank and performance would climb.

Which raised the question — where did one get that 'finer metal'?

Down, of course.

To the underground floors of the Dungeon Hall. I stowed the iron rod back in my inventory.

Whether he intuited that my time had come, Bong Jaeseok looked at me and said, with a trace of regret, "So you won't be coming around for a while, then."

He was so certain because I had used up every last scrap of the materials I'd stockpiled, timed precisely to the completion of the Iron Rod of Levitation. Had I intended to make anything more, I'd have set a little aside. It was the truth, so I didn't deny it.

"Yes. I owe you a great deal for everything."

The female senior slipped into the conversation.

"If you owe us that much, then join our clu—mmph!"

"Owe us, my foot. If you ever feel like making something again, come by anytime."

Bong Jaeseok had clapped a hand over her mouth mid-sentence. He could see my heart had already moved on, and seemed to have decided it was cooler to simply send me off with good grace. I bowed politely and stepped out of Workshop 1.

"No, why are you just letting him go?"

"Come on, do you really think he'd join? He's not the kind of talent you can tie down in one place."

"You never know until the very end!"

"Just give it up."

A light squabble carried on from the back of the workshop.

I spent the rest of the weekend at the Training Center, honing Wind Force and my Core.

Monday. The student cafeteria was packed from first thing in the morning. Rather than elbow through the crowd for breakfast, Seo Ye-in and I opted to take ours outside — coffee in one hand, a folded waffle in the other. We sat side by side on a bench at the edge of the campus grounds.

Watching the passersby over our waffles, I noticed the proportion of people in plain clothes had jumped sharply. The alumni invited to serve as mentors. Their arrival was a large part of why the cafeteria had started bustling this week. Mentoring would begin in earnest in week five — the second month of the semester — in other words, next week. This week was set aside for them to receive the basic guidelines and the broad strokes of the program from the academy.

Which was why there was something I needed to tell Seo Ye-in.

"Announcement: Kim Ho's Magic Bullet special lecture is temporarily suspended."

"...?"

Seo Ye-in halted mid-bite of her waffle and turned her head toward me. A smudge of cream had found its way onto her cheek somewhere along the way, but absorbed in my words, she didn't seem to have noticed. Her gray eyes held steady on me, silently demanding a reason.

I explained in an even tone. "You'll be picking up the new skill during next week's mentoring anyway, so there's no need to rush right now. This week, it's better to shore up your foundations."

Efficient growth didn't come from blindly multiplying the number of skills you owned; you also needed time to raise the proficiency and rank of the ones you already had. It was a stage everyone had to pass through, and in my view, this week was perfect for it.

I'd been about to just tell her to train well on her own when I remembered that Seo Ye-in worked noticeably better when given a little direction or a concrete goal.

"Let's aim to get both Magic Bullet and Ejection to C-rank. And then we surprise the mentor mister. Like — 'What?! A first-year with this kind of Magic Bullet?'"

Whether the mentor would turn out to be an alumnus or a third-year was anyone's guess, so the word 'mister' was perhaps a stretch — but the point, either way, was to train hard and give the mentor a proper shock.

Seo Ye-in nodded slowly. "...Okay. I'll try."

If I remembered right, Magic Bullet sat at D and Ejection at E, so pushing both to C-rank within a single week was honestly a tall order. Even so, I'd set the bar high on purpose — because only then would she train in earnest. And because a faint hope whispered that, with Seo Ye-in's overwhelming talent, it might just be possible.

"Hey, by the way — you've got cream on your cheek."

"?"

"No, not there. The other side."

"??"

"A little more to the side."

"???"

Conquest class. Instructor Seo Cheong-yong wrote two words on the blackboard.

"Last week's conquest was run around conserving your most precious resource: time."

A time attack. The core had been how little time it took to achieve the objective inside the dungeon.

"Now, let's see some hands. There was actually something unusual around the middle of that swamp. Anyone remember it?"

"...?"

The Class 3 students glanced around at one another, nonplussed. Every single face wore the same unspoken question: There was something like that?

The rules being the rules, everyone had been fixated on blasting through the dungeon as fast as possible — with the Beheader Goblin hot on their heels, kitchen cleaver in hand. In a situation that desperate, who on earth would have the leisure to calmly survey the scenery? These were ordinary students, not grizzled veteran players...

Of course, neither was I the type to shoot my hand up all alone at a moment like this. When a long while passed with no one stepping forward, Seo Cheong-yong smiled faintly and put the answer up on the board: in the middle reaches of the Goblin Swamp, a geometric pattern had been engraved into the base of a tree.

"Hard to spot even when you're looking carefully. In a desperate situation, it's that much easier to miss. Even so, you must always make a habit of catching these seemingly trivial things. Any idea why?"

This time, a girl in the very front row answered. "Because you can only know whether something's really trivial after you've checked."

"Exactly right."

What if that seemingly trivial thing were, in truth, a core element of the dungeon? Say it was the device that armed every trap in the area? A mechanism that summoned additional monsters? An entrance leading to a hidden chamber? There was nothing to gain from strolling past it obliviously.

"So, this week's conquest theme is—"

"—the sweep."

Sweep. How cleanly could you scour the dungeon's interior? If a hundred monsters existed, how many of them could you find and put down? Of course, there was zero chance all hundred would come swarming the moment you set foot inside; they would be lurking in every corner. Only by combing the dungeon from end to end, carefully and thoroughly, could you score high.

Seo Cheong-yong held up one finger. "First important thing. There is no time limit this week. Take it slow, look thoroughly, and anyone can hit the top score! How about that?"

Color bloomed across the students' faces. Ground down by PvP, ground down by the time attack, ground down by the Formidable Foe, ground down by the two-on-two — and now, at last, a conquest that let them catch their breath.

Seo Cheong-yong smiled sweetly and raised a second finger. "Second important thing. The terrain is random. You might draw a jungle, ruins, a cave... Every one of you will take the conquest in a different dungeon."

A student in the front row shot his hand up. "Teacher, then is the terrain different between practice mode and the real thing?"

"Different."

"Then isn't practice mode pointless?"

"Do you truly think it's pointless?"

"...Ah."

The student realized something and lowered his hand. Even entering a different dungeon every time, experience kept accumulating. Observation skills, too, sharpened the more they were trained. And that honed eye would serve in the real run — and further down the line, in every other conquest this semester.

"Don't fixate on points alone. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Run practice mode a number of times and treat it as experience. And those of you planning to cheat — save your points this week."

A few students flinched and avoided Seo Cheong-yong's gaze. With random dungeons, the old trick of copying someone else's replay was useless anyway.

Seo Cheong-yong checked the time and brought the lesson to a close. "Before I send you off — this week, there is homework."

The moment that cursed word passed his lips, the students' faces flooded with betrayal in an instant. To think that even you, of all people, would assign homework...

Seo Cheong-yong chuckled sheepishly, as if to apologize.

"Watch your replays and draw ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠a map of your dungeon. Don't forget to mark the monster positions. Due by next Monday. And that's class! See you next time!"

Today I'd arranged to move separately from Go Hyeon-woo and Seo Ye-in. Teammates would be decided at random regardless, and for those ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠two, racking up experience mattered most — they'd be starting from practice mode. Me, on the other hand? I was a man with experience stacked past overflowing; practice mode would be a waste of time. From the very first step, I was going straight to the real thing.

I made straight for the upper level of the Dungeon Hall, tapped my student ID against the terminal, and while I waited for my teammate to appear, gave myself a moment to think.

It'd be nice to land someone useful...

Pulling up this week's quest:

With me along, no matter who I drew as a partner, 100% completion was a foregone conclusion. Honestly, I could have handled everything from start to finish single-handedly and it wouldn't have mattered a bit. So what, then, did 'someone useful' actually mean here?

Simple: someone carrying a skill worth claiming through Copy.

My work at the Magic Engineering Workshop had been wrapped up for the time being, so the Magic Engineering skill would sit idle for a while. I intended to overwrite that slot with a combat-type skill.

How long did I wait? A teleport portal yawned open nearby. The moment I stepped through, the air turned crisp and clean. The uneven ground underfoot suggested mountainous terrain.

And my partner was...

You again?

Red hair, and a blazing ruby. And the instant she laid eyes on me, every trace of color drained from her face.

It was Hong Yeon-hwa.

Next Chapter — [60] The Support Ate It All