Week 5 Mentoring, PvP (6)
I was sprinting flat out.
- Shrrrrk!
Shadow blades raked past a hair's breadth behind me, clawing wildly at my wake. I held my top speed a moment longer, then suddenly wrenched into a hard ninety-degree turn.
Surging up out of a shadow, Dang Gyu-young swept her dagger in a clean arc — and when she missed my ankle by a whisker, she clicked her tongue.
"Tch."
She seeped back into the darkness, and the blades came flying like rain. This time, two shadow butterflies flitted into the path ahead of me.
I instantly funneled strength into my legs and hammered the ground.
- BOOM!
Only after squeezing myself free between the exploding butterflies did I find… another five or six swooping in.
- BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM!
Rocking my body in what must have been a comical stagger, I ran a zigzag and wedged through the gaps between the blasts.
That last one got a little close.
With her bracelet off, Dang Gyu-young was on a completely different plane from the days of peeling stickers off me.
Just take [Shadow Butterfly Flight], one of her signature skills: where she used to manage barely three butterflies at a time, she was now churning them out without limit.
Skills that had once been throttled by her mana cap were being fired off at will.
The prime example was the way she hid in shadow and popped up wherever she pleased — a B-rank skill called [Shadow Leap].
It was a cousin of [Spatial Leap], the movement technique of choice among mages, but its mana cost was so brutal that with her Core at C-rank she wouldn't even have dared attempt it.
Given her caliber, that Core had probably hit A-rank by now.
So how was I dodging the full offensive of this reborn Dang Gyu-young?
For starters, in raw speed at least, the gap between us wasn't large.
For another, raising a thousand S-rank heroes had honed my own control to its absolute peak.
And last of all, I knew every one of Dang Gyu-young's skills inside and out.
I had raised Shadow Weavers before, after all.
It was a fairly rare class — I'd only ever trained two — but I had taken them all the way to S-rank.
- Shrrk-shrrk-shrrk!
Building on that control and experience, I slipped past the blades yet again with dazzling footwork.
But how long was I supposed to keep dodging my heart out like this?
Perhaps a similar question had occurred to her, because as she kept flinging shadow daggers, Dang Gyu-young asked,
"You are actually learning the trait, right?"
"Yes. Just keep doing exactly this."
Even with no visible numbers, I had the peculiar certainty of a grizzled veteran.
The certainty that I was steadily closing in on my goal.
Before the method itself, though—
Like any game worth its salt, Dragon Slayer Academy kept a number of hidden values.
One of them was stacks.
Every consecutive success at a given action banked one stack apiece. Land ten attacks in a row, for instance, and you held ten hit stacks.
What I was banking right now, naturally, was evasion stacks.
Much like hit stacks, each attack dodged was worth one evasion stack.
And the bare minimum prerequisite for learning [Distortion] was sustaining 1,000 or more evasion stacks. Only past that point did every dodge come with a chance of acquiring the trait.
Though at exactly 1,000 stacks, that chance was so absurdly low it might as well have been zero.
So how did you raise it?
By stacking more, obviously.
The more stacks piled up, the higher the probability kept climbing. Dodging again and again and again, knocking endlessly on probability's door — that was the whole process of acquiring [Distortion].
And how did you rack up those stacks even faster?
You evaded attacks from an opponent of a higher tier than yourself — one with higher-ranked skills, equipment, and so on. The bigger the rank gap, the more a single dodge could yield: three stacks, even four.
Early investment matters.
That was why banking them now, at the front end of first year, beat banking them later by miles — and also why most rankers had given up on it even after learning the conditions.
With my skills currently averaging between D and C rank, an opponent around B-rank let me pull three or more stacks at a time.
But suppose my own grade climbed from here?
To earn the same stacks, I'd have to dodge against A-rank enemies.
And once I hit A or S, I'd be chaining dodges against opponents near my own level — for a grand total of one stack apiece.
Worse, allow a single clean hit out of carelessness and the whole count reset from zero. By the time you were B-rank yourself, [Distortion] was effectively out of reach — something you'd have to abandon outright.
Since the week-two PvP, I had not allowed one single clean hit.
I'd also played long, earnest games of tag with opponents who outranked me on paper: Mok Jonghwa's golem, the Feathered Serpent High Priest, the Black Snake.
Which was, in part, exactly why I'd volunteered to draw boss aggro in those two dungeons.
What's the count now — four thousand, give or take?
I'd dragged the near-zero probability up to something worth a modest wager, then let the mentoring event bonus inflate it once more.
And if that's still not enough, I just stack more.
Not with a B-rank sparring partner — prime stack material — standing right in front of me.
In the end, it was purely a matter of time.
Sooner rather than later: this week at best, this mentoring period at worst.
- BOOM!
I dodged another exploding butterfly and cut a new angle — straight to where Dang Gyu-young lay in wait, having read my trajectory.
She slid in close and jabbed her dagger at me in quick succession.
A stab with every word.
"Why. Won't. This. Land?"
When she stayed glued to my heels and flicked her hand, the shadow blades and butterflies all came charging at me at once.
There was nowhere left to dodge — not ahead, not behind, not to either side.
Which left—
Up.
I dipped my knees just slightly, then sprang with explosive force, rocketing into the air.
- Fwoosh!
Frankly, it was a poor choice.
In an aerial exchange, butterflies free to roam the open sky held all the advantage — and as it was, the shadow blades and butterflies were already streaking up after me.
But my play lay elsewhere.
- BOOM!
I fired the [Wind Force] I'd been holding ready straight at myself and shoved hard.
My body shot off like a cannonball and touched down feather-light a good distance away.
"……"
Watching the whole display, Dang Gyu-young made no move to attack; she simply stood there a moment, looking utterly done.
"Keep it coming, senior."
"……I'm done. I need a break."
And she flopped down right where she stood.
She looked more spent than I did — and all I'd done was run the entire time.
Well, she had essentially been dumping every skill she had into empty air; no wonder the fatigue was crushing.
The mental toll of not landing a single hit surely had its share in it, too.
Dang Gyu-young patted the ground beside her.
"Come sit here."
"Yes, ma'am."
She snorted a laugh as I trudged over and flopped down just like her.
"You're actually pretty good at this dodging thing, huh? By the end I was going completely serious — how did I not land even one?"
With the bracelet off, she must have assumed that no first-year, however they flailed about, could touch her; at the start she had handled me with a light touch.
But when I kept slipping away by a whisker each time, stubbornness seemed to take hold. She grew steadily more serious, until at the end she was genuinely wringing out every means she had to put a clean hit on me.
"Skill I built graduating more than two hundred times."
"Committed to the bit, huh. Gonna keep running with it?"
"For the time being."
From the look of her, Dang Gyu-young was dead certain I was hiding something real behind the 'two hundred graduations' fib.
Proving anything would be a chore; letting her believe it was easier, so that's what I did.
At least for the time being.
"You know, the more I think about this, the more it feels like I'm getting the short end of the stick."
"How so? All of this is part of the mentoring."
"Covering for you wasn't in the package. Can I record the replays and post all of this?"
An impish smile curled at the corner of her mouth.
I'd hoped to muddle past it, but no dice, as expected.
[Distortion] had been an exceedingly rare trait even within Dragon Slayer Academy; in this in-game world, next to no one would know it existed.
Dang Gyu-young ran the Thief Club and doubled as an information broker of sorts, and even she had never so much as heard of it.
So there was nothing to gain from word getting out — neither the fact that I was in the middle of mastering Distortion, nor the fact that, in the process, I was dodging every last attack from a third-year of roughly B-rank caliber.
She clearly wanted something in exchange for not reporting to the academy, so I had no choice but to ask back.
"What is it you want, then?"
"Let me think… nothing right now, actually?"
Smiling her sweetest, Dang Gyu-young held out her little finger.
"In exchange, I'm banking one wish ticket. Come on, pinky."
But I didn't rush to hook fingers.
An unsecured loan is the scarier kind, after all.
I could smell something dark and shadowy brewing underneath.
"Suspicious. You're not planning to make me do something weird later, are you? Like joining your club."
"I will not! And since when is joining a club weird?"
"Still, I'm not thrilled about it. Let's just call this close-combat practice, same as with the others."
More stacks were always welcome, sure — but at this point I could ease off, dodge at a comfortable clip, and simply grind out the probability game.
Meaning even if Dang Gyu-young held her true strength back, I wouldn't much mind.
The moment I moved to duck out of the whole arrangement, she coaxed me, gentle as could be.
"Aw, come on, why fold so easily? Learn all the good stuff, then put it toward that, you know, world-peace thing you've got going."
"On reflection, I can contribute to world peace at a leisurely pace."
"Ugh, fine. Then hear me out when the time comes, and if you really hate it, say no. Deal?"
"Deal."
Only then did I hook her pinky.
With a safety catch in place, it should be fine.
Dang Gyu-young beamed, satisfied — but to my eye, the smile looked shadier than any sly grin a black-hearted schemer ever wore.
Why did she want a wish ticket banked so badly?
Something she intends to make me do later, no doubt.
Around the same time.
In yet another Circular Colosseum.
As always, Seo Ye-in gazed across at the far side with a blank face, her eyes half-lidded with drowsiness.
There, at the end of her gaze, stood a woman immaculately dressed in a business suit.
Anyone seeing this woman for the first time would think of one word before all others: competence.
It wasn't merely the picture-perfect silhouette of a career woman, either — she gave the impression she would execute flawlessly whatever else you put in her hands.
She looked, in short, like competence itself rolled into a single human form.
The suited woman's eyes settled on Seo Ye-in.
Seo Ye-in met that gaze with her same unhurried indifference.
The two stood facing each other in silence for a long while — until at last the woman in the suit spoke.
"Young Miss, I have arrived."
And she bowed her head with the deepest respect.
Her name was Ahn Jungmi.
Team Leader of Strategy Team 2 in the Hyeseong Group's Future Strategy Office —
and one of the 'butlers' who had served Seo Ye-in's family since long ago.
[84] The Support Ate it All