Week 4 Sweep (2)
After drawing her as an opponent two matches running in the PvP assessments, this time I'd been paired with Hong Yeon-hwa outright. What kind of karma did I have with this girl, that she kept latching onto me?
Not that I minded.
Better her than slogging through the raid with some middling partner. She was rising-star caliber, her combat ability thoroughly proven—which meant I could simply hand off every fighting-related task without a second thought. And there was something oddly familiar about her, too. The Ruby Magic Tower Master had been one of my main picks back in the day, and the more I looked at Hong Yeon-hwa, the more she resembled that woman. Like watching a version of her a few years younger.
If only the expressions matched, they'd be a perfect copy.
The difference lay in the face she made when looking at me. The Tower Master always carried the air of a bomb primed to detonate, as if daring the world to test her volcanic temper—whereas the Hong Yeon-hwa in front of me was cowed and trembling with fear. Not that I was entirely blameless there. I had blown her to pieces three times now, once per encounter—anyone would flinch.
Still, panicking on sight seemed a bit excessive. Surely some colossal misunderstanding had taken root. I could start treating her with world-class sweetness from here on and gently untangle it over time, but—
Why bother?
Did it need untangling? My goal right now was to clear this quest fast and efficiently, and a certain atmosphere of dread would serve that goal far better. So I resolved to act exactly according to the image living in Hong Yeon-hwa's head. If she believed me a tyrant, then a tyrant I would be. When I arranged my features into something properly sinister, her face bleached several shades whiter.
Hong Yeon-hwa wanted to cry. That things had come to this was entirely her own fault.
She had arrived at the Dungeon Hall as on any other day, intending to queue for a match. But just before scanning her student ID, she spotted him—Kim Ho, waiting nearby for his turn. Mercifully, he was facing the other way, back turned. Even so, the mere sight of that back sent a chill streaking down her spine.
A new objective was born. One that outranked any raid score.
Avoid being his partner. At all costs.
Teammates were assigned at random—but if she tapped her ID now and, by some catastrophe, matched with that monster of a man... and then the two of them ended up alone in a sealed space... her breath snagged at the mere thought.
So Hong Yeon-hwa resolved to take her sister Hong Ye-hwa's advice: for today's raid, she would wait a while before signing up. Once Kim Ho entered a dungeon with somebody else, she would find her own teammate then. And so she waited, stealing furtive glances at him, willing a teleport portal to open at his side.
She waited... and waited... and waited some more... She just kept waiting.
The longer it stretched, the more her pride crumpled—and in exact inverse proportion, her self-loathing swelled. I'm supposed to be the next Master of the Ruby Magic Tower. Why am I skulking around like a rat, reading someone else's mood?
She peeked at Kim Ho again. Blank-faced, lost in thought. Not the faintest sign of a match forming.
I can't wait any longer!
Her pride, so long crushed beneath fear, rose in furious revolt. She refused to spend one more minute tiptoeing around! ...Not that this meant she'd suddenly found the nerve to partner with Kim Ho. She merely, quietly, revised the plan: she would slip in first. Then she schemed a step further.
Live mode it is.
He was human too; he would run practice mode at least once. If she skipped practice entirely and dove straight into live, she could sever even the slimmest possibility of being paired with him. Opening on live mode was a touch unnerving, but she'd twist her way through somehow. Marveling at her own genius, Hong Yeon-hwa scanned her student ID—
—and a teleport portal yawned open before her. And before Kim Ho as well.
Her pupils shook without mercy. W-why is this...? No. No way. They'd just happened to open at the same time, right? Her partner was waiting somewhere else entirely, right? While Hong Yeon-hwa labored furiously to deny reality, Kim Ho stepped into the dungeon without a flicker of hesitation. Next was her turn. Her feet would not move. The perfectly ordinary teleport portal looked, to her eyes, like the mouth of a bottomless shaft descending into hell.
After dithering for an age, she finally hauled in a deep breath. Hoo... Right. I have to go in. Standing here would fix nothing. Forcing her leaden feet forward, she walked into the dungeon—clinging, in some corner of her heart, to one gossamer thread of hope: that someone else would be waiting inside.
"......"
Fat chance. Her eyes locked dead onto Kim Ho's, waiting within. Her gaze sank to the floor all on its own. I'm doomed...
Of course the unlikely thing was the thing that happened. Who could have imagined Kim Ho would queue for live mode? Only then did his long wait make sense. The raid had barely begun; the overwhelming majority of students were flooding into practice mode, and those entering live this early could be counted on one hand. No—there were none. Naturally he had kept waiting, with no partner ever appearing. And naturally, she became that partner the instant she matched. She had walked into the tiger's den of her own two feet.
Why did I do that... Regret came flooding in, far too late. She shouldn't have indulged her pride. She shouldn't have gotten clever. She should have just rested today and tried tomorrow... But the water was already spilled, and no amount of regretting would unspill it. Hong Yeon-hwa steeled herself as best she could. Whatever else was true, inside this dungeon she had to give it everything.
The objective of this raid was a sweep. Bring down all 88 monsters and she would take a perfect score at 100% completion. Judging by how the raid instructor had drilled "detail," "thoroughness," and "observation," these monsters were hardly going to come calling on their own. They would be tucked away cunningly in every corner of the dungeon.
So how do we search? She needed to talk it over with her teammate. With Baek Jun-seok, her usual partner, she simply issued one-sided orders—he found thinking to be a chore, and there was no helping those muscle-brained swordsmen. Kim Ho, though, was a caster like herself; he would surely have ideas of his own. Hong Yeon-hwa lifted her gaze from the floor to open that discussion—
—and slammed straight into Kim Ho's frigid stare.
"......"
Her mouth would not open. The words that flowed so freely with Baek Jun-seok only circled inside it. When she went on merely fluttering her lips, Kim Ho bit out a single short phrase.
"Follow me."
"H-huh?"
And off he strolled, entirely on his own. Hong Yeon-hwa trailed after him with no idea what was happening. After advancing at a brisk pace for some time, Kim Ho stopped once more, alone, and fixed his gaze on a thicket at the forest's edge. She stared at the same spot and saw nothing remarkable whatsoever. There's nothing there.
At that moment, Kim Ho flicked a loose pebble with the tip of his foot. It shot away at a horrifying speed and vanished over the brush, and—
"Gwaack!"
—with that single death rattle, the remaining count dropped by one. Hong Yeon-hwa's eyes went perfectly round. ...There was one?
"Kerek!"
Her astonishment lasted only a moment before three goblins burst from the thicket—ambushers, by the look of them, who had revealed themselves in a fury over their kinsman's death. Kim Ho gave the creatures a single once-over, then resumed walking as though they did not exist. Every goblin eye swung to the Hong Yeon-hwa who remained. Blinking, she looked back and forth between the departing Kim Ho and the charging goblins.
"Hey, hold on—"
He was seriously just leaving? The absurdity was so complete she couldn't even work up anger. Her ruby flared a searing red—
-POOF!
—and the three goblins were lumps of charcoal. To be fair, goblins were trash mobs she could clear on her own. Having talked herself into roughly that much acceptance, she turned to look—and Kim Ho was already far ahead. Terrified of losing him, she sprinted flat out. By the time she finally caught up, he was holding a hefty rock he'd picked up from somewhere. He hurled it mercilessly into a nearby thicket, and four more enraged goblins came boiling out. Having survived the routine once already, Hong Yeon-hwa cast without panicking.
-POOF!
When she looked back, Kim Ho had opened up another huge lead in those few seconds. Hong Yeon-hwa finally exploded. Honestly, by her temper's standards, holding out this long was heroic.
Hey!! Walk together!! Are you raiding solo?!
That roar lived strictly inside her skull. What actually crossed her lips was:
"Hey. Together, come on."
With Kim Ho, her volume was, mysteriously, auto-adjusted. Whether he caught that tiny murmur or not, he glanced back over his shoulder—and slowed his stride.
He really did slow down... Hong Yeon-hwa confirmed, once again, that this man was someone you could actually talk to.
In any case, the pattern was sinking into her body. Kim Ho would walk ahead, hurl a stone or stir some formless force to provoke the hiding spots—thickets, treetops, the blind side of boulders—and monsters would burst out in answer. The cleanup was Hong Yeon-hwa's share. Mostly low-grade things like goblins and orcs, so none of it was difficult.
-FWOOOOSH!
"Kerek!"
The monsters did not all react identically, though. Every so often, one would spin on its heel and bolt the instant it was discovered. Under the Sweep rules, those were the true menace—if a creature fled and hid elsewhere, you could find yourself re-treading ground you had already cleared.
"Kerek?"
But not one escape ever succeeded. A blade of wind would come sliding in, and the runners would halt as though they had struck an invisible wall—then be swallowed whole by the flames Hong Yeon-hwa summoned.
-FWOOOOSH!
After enough repetitions, something began to come into focus even for Hong Yeon-hwa, whose eyes at first couldn't sense what was hidden at all. Wherever monsters lay in ambush, a peculiar wrongness hung in the air. The longer she looked, the more loudly that wrongness announced itself. Her powers of observation were sharpening all on their own.
Hong Yeon-hwa tilted her head, watching Kim Ho's back. This is... strange, isn't it? How was this so easy? She was hot-blooded to the bone, a hopeless fit for the patient, meticulous labor of a sweep, and she had braced for a slog when she entered the dungeon. Instead, monsters popped out everywhere Kim Ho went, and all she had to do was trot at his heels and everything got handled. All raid long, he pressed on to the next spot, and the next, without spending even one second on deliberation. He was as practiced as a man who had done this dozens, hundreds of times. But common sense insisted no one had done this hundreds of times—so he either possessed phenomenal eyes or a detection-type skill of equivalent grade. Hong Yeon-hwa quietly updated her mental dossier on Kim Ho: monstrous magic resistance, martial arts honed to the extreme, and now, detection ability of a very high order.
"......"
Midway through that thought, Kim Ho stopped in place yet again. She stopped with him and scanned ahead: a deeply sunken, pit-like hollow lay before them. The terrain of this great forest did rise and fall erratically, but this looked unnatural beyond the norm. Suspicious to any eye. When Kim Ho gave his hand a light swirl—
-CRRUMBLE,
—the soil at one edge of the hollow sloughed away, exposing the mouth of a burrow. Hong Yeon-hwa's eyebrows climbed. He saw that? She had judged it worth climbing down for a closer look, but ferreting it out in a single stroke... Setting her bewilderment aside, she studied the burrow too. It was sized for goblins; a person would have to fold up uncomfortably to squeeze inside. Then Kim Ho spoke.
"Go check it."
"...Me?"
"You don't want to?"
His expression hardened by degrees. Sensing mortal danger on pure instinct, Hong Yeon-hwa answered at speed.
"F-fine, I'll go. I'll go..."
And she crawled into the burrow, grumbling the whole way. In truth, "go check it" had meant "try your fire magic in there," but Hong Yeon-hwa had no way of knowing that. A short while after she disappeared inside—
-BOOM! POOF-POOF!
—several detonations thundered from within, and the monster count dropped by a hefty margin. Then, wreathed in thick smoke, Hong Yeon-hwa crawled back out of the burrow—filthy with dirt from head to toe, her scowl a faithful portrait of her disgust. Why do I have to do this?! But the instant her eyes met Kim Ho's, she performed rapid damage control on her face. ...Come to think of it, I can manage this much. He had made everything easy for her so far, after all. The rationalization completed itself in record time.
"......"
Whether or not Kim Ho knew her inner workings, he moved on to the next spot without a word. Hong Yeon-hwa scurried after him.
The raid that had raged like a storm was nearing its end. The last two wouldn't need to be hunted down at all—they were standing right in front of them.
Trolls. Mid-tier monsters with builds a shade more imposing than a grown man's. High regeneration, plus a respectable magic resistance, made them nasty opponents for a mage. And here stood two of them—worse, even at a glance they looked anything but ordinary, positively reeking of boss monster. One hefted a massive club; the other, a pair of axes.
Hong Yeon-hwa shot Kim Ho a cautious, questioning look: what's the plan? He held her gaze for a few seconds, then answered curtly.
"Fight them."
"...By myself?"
"......"
No answer came. Hong Yeon-hwa sighed inwardly. Right—she was the fool for hoping, even a little. As if that man would ever kindly sync up a combo with her. She took a step forward. Soon the air around her began to simmer with heat, and the trolls wavered behind the rising haze.
I'm more than enough on my own.