Week 6 Mentoring, Raid Conquest (1)
Raid Conquest class.
Teacher Seo Cheong-yong entered the classroom wearing his usual good-natured smile, then drew an armful of papers out of subspace.
"Your homework is all graded. Here you go."
It had been the Week 4 Sweep raid—the rules called for observing even the most trivial corners of the dungeon with care, and hunting down every monster lying in ambush. The assignment had been to rewatch the replay, draw up a map, and mark each ambush point, and now the grading was finished.
The moment Seo Cheong-yong set the stack down on the lectern, the papers took wing as though alive, fluttering off one by one to their rightful owners.
Students checked their scores, compared them with their neighbors, and the murmur in the room began to swell.
"What'd you get, out of a hundred?"
"Ninety-two. You?"
"What? You told me you didn't even do it last time."
"That was a lie, obviously."
And so, naturally enough, the mood carried me into comparing scores with Seo Ye-in and Go Hyeon-woo on either side of me.
Go Hyeon-woo, curious in spite of himself, was the first to crane his neck my way.
"And how did Brother Kim fare?"
Instead of answering, I simply held my map up for him to see—a record of every last detail of the dungeon's interior, flawless beyond a single complaint.
A perfect score, as only natural. A veteran gamer who couldn't manage a little paperwork forfeited the title, after all.
Go Hyeon-woo pored over every corner of the map, exclamations of admiration spilling out of him.
"Just as one would expect of Brother Kim. There is ever so much to learn from you."
"Glad to hear it. So—what did you two get?"
The assignment had been simple in content: trace along with the replay even roughly, and a baseline score was guaranteed. I'd figured everyone would manage fine, but human nature being what it is, I still wanted to see the numbers. At my question, Go Hyeon-woo and Seo Ye-in held out their maps in perfect unison, as if they'd rehearsed it.
Go Hyeon-woo — 86/100
Seo Ye-in — 91/100
One surprise.
Seo Ye-in's score was a notch higher.
And a second surprise.
Her map was, more or less, perfectly respectable.
I'd half expected the warped aesthetic sense that had ravaged her cookie batches to run rampant here too, but the thing had every element a map required. Judging by the crisp right angles scattered across it, she'd likely run a ruler along every line—and really, as long as a reader could tell where the monsters were hiding in ambush, what more could one ask? Seo Cheong-yong apparently felt the same, if the generous score was anything to go by.
Next, I shifted my gaze to Go Hyeon-woo's map...
...The artistic value was arguably higher on this one—it looked like an entire ink-wash painting executed in a single breath of the brush. The problem was that deciphering it took some effort. Less a dungeon map than, well...
'...a battle formation chart?'
A heavily encrypted one, at that. A map whose entire purpose was marking monster ambush points, yet impossible to read—of course Seo Cheong-yong couldn't grade that kindly.
Scores compared, the two of them reacted in their own distinct ways.
"Hoh. Most surprising."
He must have assumed his score would edge out hers at least a little, because Go Hyeon-woo looked genuinely rattled.
Seo Ye-in, meanwhile, quietly raised one hand and flashed him a V sign. Where on earth had she picked that up?
A wry smile settled on Go Hyeon-woo's lips.
"My own defeat, then. But Lady Seo—next time, it will not come so easily."
His handsome face carried it off so well that even third-rate-villain lines sounded perfectly gallant. Seo Ye-in gave a wordless nod, then sagged back into her desk, half slumped, half sprawled.
Clap, clap.
At that moment, Seo Cheong-yong's applause rang through the room. Quiet as it was, it carried a curious weight: the classroom chatter died at once, and every head turned forward.
"You've all checked your results, yes? Generally, keeping a wide field of view is the right call in a dungeon—but poring over the small details like this will serve you well too. We'll circle back to that another time."
Seo Cheong-yong wrote a single word on the blackboard.
"Today's topic is a word everyone has heard at least once: the Guardian. So—what is a Guardian? Anyone care to answer?"
Two students answered simultaneously, with two entirely different replies.
"A mid-boss."
"The final boss."
Then they turned and stared at each other as though the other had said something outlandish, eyes locked in a silent argument of I'm right, you're wrong.
Seo Cheong-yong smiled gently.
"Both of you are correct. Depending on the role it's given, a Guardian may be a mid-boss—or the final boss. Every boss monster has its own temperament, after all. A boss with minions under its command will naturally post a mid-boss-tier Guardian, while one that keeps a dungeon all to itself makes the final boss the Guardian outright. Then tell me—what is a Guardian's role?"
This time the answer was so obvious that the room fell quiet instead. Everyone was too busy suspecting a trap hidden in the question. As glances darted back and forth and no one volunteered, the girl in the very front row finally raised her hand, visibly uncertain.
"To... guard something?"
"Correct. A Guardian's role is, precisely as the word says, to guard something—a mid-dungeon gate, a boss monster, or the dungeon itself. And one thing is certain: to conquer a dungeon, whatever stands guard must be broken through."
"And the more efficiently you break through it," he added with a smile, "the smoother the conquest goes. Right?"
"Now then, this week's raid, so that you may come to understand the Guardian's role all the better—"
"—we will be spending this session standing in the Guardian's shoes."
After all, if you want to learn to attack properly, taking one real beating teaches you more than a dozen repetitions of swinging your own sword. Unpleasant experiences brand themselves into memory all the more vividly. The intent was to have us weather an enemy offensive with our own hands, remember exactly which parts stung, and turn that knowledge around for our own use later.
Seo Cheong-yong flicked his wrist, and a simple sketch bloomed across the blackboard: a ruined temple, a goddess statue standing at its heart, monsters pouring in toward it from all four directions. Under the concentrated assault, cracks spiderwebbed across the statue until it finally collapsed. The board wiped itself clean—and the identical picture reappeared. Monsters swarming the statue once more, but this time a warrior with sword and shield met them, cutting down all who pressed close.
"Keep this statue from being destroyed until time expires. That is the goal of this week's Defense."
The less damage the statue took, the higher the score—and every monster felled in its defense counted toward the total as well.
"And just as in last week's PvP assessment, Arbitrary Rules will be appended this week too. If you skipped mentoring, they stay random. If you attend, your mentor bends them in whatever direction they please."
At those words, most of the mentoring students winced—last week had not been kind to them. Our group alone had been ordered to peel stickers off mages at melee range and put through every hardship imaginable. Who would be delighted to hear that this week promised more of the same?
'Well. One person, actually.'
While everyone else's faces darkened a shade, Go Hyeon-woo alone looked positively eager.
"Now this I look forward to. A new challenge is always a joy."
The blazing incarnation of positivity, the Positive Boss, the man who looks at a glass and sees it half full: Go Hyeon-woo.
Seo Ye-in, meanwhile, was his perfect opposite. Raid, mentoring, arbitrary rules—everything alike seemed to strike her as a nuisance.
'The poor butler has her work cut out for her.'
I sent a silent cheer across the campus to Ahn Jungmi, wherever she was. Stay strong, Butler.
After class, we set off for the Dungeon Hall, the appointed meeting place for mentoring.
Somewhere in the middle of that aimless walk, a familiar figure caught my eye from a fair distance ahead: shoulder-length crimson hair, a ruby set into a short wand. Hong Yeon-hwa.
"...?"
As though struck by a sudden premonition, she slowed her steps and glanced around—and the instant she spotted me, every muscle in her body locked rigid. Judging by how she usually carried herself around me, I half expected her to bolt straight for the Dungeon Hall. Instead, she shuffled toward me, hesitant, and managed a careful greeting.
"U-um... hello?"
Had fighting alongside me in last week's PvP helped her conquer her fear, even a little? Considering that until now she hadn't managed so much as eye contact, let alone a greeting, it counted as a full step forward. We'd been building a little common ground through my dealings with the Ruby Magic Tower, and she was in my mentoring circle besides—an improving relationship could only be a good thing. And whatever else might be true, you don't leave a greeting hanging, so I returned it lightly.
"Hello."
"...!"
Hong Yeon-hwa's face lit up like a struck match. Getting a hello back probably wasn't grounds for that much joy, but if it made her happy, far be it from me to object. Still, she seemed to have no courage left to take things any further—maybe even that greeting had cost her a squeeze of everything she had. She kept fidgeting and stealing glances the entire way, so, purely as an experiment, I opened the conversation myself.
"Something you wanted to say?"
"Huh? S-say? N-no, um, nothing! H-haha..."
Having stammered that out, she shriveled right back up. So anything beyond this was still beyond her, apparently. I decided to give her time. If she managed a greeting every time we met, the word count would climb bit by bit on its own.
We passed through the awkward silence and arrived at the upper levels of the Dungeon Hall, where Dang Gyu-young, Song Cheon-hye, and Gwak Ji-cheol were already waiting for us.
"Full house. Let's get started."
Dang Gyu-young lined up her four mentees—myself included—and pulled up the environment window.
"You all heard the rundown from your Raid instructor, so we'll skip straight to the extra rules. That fine with everyone?"
Having literally just heard the rundown, everyone assented in silence. Dang Gyu-young snapped her fingers—
A new rule: Melee. Every face read, so it's come to this. Last week had been nothing but melee, and she'd even said we still had 'plenty of rough edges to smooth out'—anything else would have been out of character.
Dang Gyu-young tugged me gently by the arm, planted me in one spot, and stepped back a pace or two. The distance from me—the reference point—to her.
"Up to here counts as 'melee' range. Inside this distance, your skills deliver one hundred percent of their power."
She retreated slowly, one step at a time, still talking.
"And the farther you drift from your target, the more that power keeps dropping. Land a hit from the safe distance you usually cast at, and you're dealing less than half."
At less than half power, most skills weren't worth casting at all. In other words, Melee meant exactly one thing: whatever skill you use, get in close and use it. A harsh constraint, no question—but the faces around me weren't all that grim. They'd seen it coming, so the shock was dulled; surviving last week's ordeal had tempered them, at least a little, for melee work; and besides, this time the opponents were monsters, not Dang Gyu-young. That made it survivable.
Except the Arbitrary Rules line in the window still hadn't vanished—which meant something was still waiting to be added.
"And next—"
Dang Gyu-young snapped her fingers once more.
Snap.
"I'll be the one commanding the monsters."
[95] The Support Ate It All