The Newly Reorganized Mission
The world created by the Constellation (9)
EP.25 The Newly Reorganized Mission
There were various differences between our previous mission and the one we had just received, but if I had to name the single biggest change, it was undoubtedly the complete absence of a ‘time limit.’
“Isn’t this actually easier now?”
“No way… It can’t possibly be that simple……”
Yet the reason the message lacked a time limit was far simpler than we had imagined.
Bang!
“They’re the ones who assassinated the king!”
“Arrest them!”
The door flew open and soldiers with half-mad eyes charged straight at us. The instant the mission changed, every soldier in the castle had transformed. We were no longer being hunted by the clock.
But now, quite ironically, we were being hunted by people instead, and I couldn’t decide whether that was better or worse.
“W-wait a second!”
“Get themmm!!!”
“Kill themmm!!!”
They had switched from “arrest” to “kill” in the span of a single breath. The injustice of it stung. It seemed every soldier in the entire castle had converged on the king’s bedroom, as if they had known we would be here.
Thud!
I kept my sword sheathed and drove a front kick into the lead soldier, launching him backward. These weren’t zombies. The people rushing me now were fully alive, hot blood pumping through their veins. Even though I had only kicked him, I finally understood just how much revulsion I felt at the idea of cutting another human being with a blade.
“Kuek!”
The soldier I had kicked let out a grotesque cry as he flew into his comrades. Thanks to my elevated overall stats, simply shoving one man was enough to throw their entire formation into chaos.
But the real problem was the sheer overwhelming numbers—so many it left my jaw hanging open, wondering where they had all been hiding. Namgung Cheonho, witnessing medieval human-wave tactics with his own eyes, turned deathly pale, clearly suffering from tutorial PTSD.
“Hoo……”
The memory of being trapped in the break room and desperately fighting the tutorial dummies overlapped with our current situation. There was no rear exit. Through the single entrance, enemies I felt reluctant to attack were pouring in, and this time we didn’t even have a barricade.
“Still… it’s different from the tutorial…!”
The circumstances had changed. The gap in ability between who we were then and who we were now was overwhelming. Besides, back then we had truly been trapped. That wasn’t the case now.
Of course there was still only one entrance, but there was more than one exit.
I turned and looked deeper into the bedroom. A window. A generously sized one that could easily let two or three people through at once!
“Cheonho! Grab Laurent! We’re escaping!”
The moment I called his name, Namgung Cheonho’s trustworthy eyes locked onto mine.
“Yes! Understood!”
He scooped Laurent up with both arms. Her red eyes widened like a startled rabbit. After confirming the sight, I immediately lifted the tea table beside me and hurled it toward the window with every ounce of strength I possessed.
Crash—!
Rustle!
The sound of shattering glass was followed by the rough scrape of leaves against my ears. The impact would be sufficiently cushioned. And if my memory served me correctly…
“Cheonho!”
“Yes!”
“There appears to be a large tree below!”
“Yes!”
“Jump toward it!”
“…Yes?”
After shouting the final instruction, I immediately scooped Han Gamin into my arms. Unlike me or Namgung Cheonho, she had no combat achievements to speak of. She had never fought the tutorial dummies, only fled from zombies, and had neither thrown herself in harm’s way to save anyone nor hunted the undead herself.
In other words—
“W-wait a minute!”
“We’re jumping! Hold on tight!”
—she had only undergone awakening. She did not possess the overwhelming physical stats that we did.
Han Gamin’s face drained of color the instant she understood the situation. I paid it no mind. Jumping out the window offered far better survival odds than facing the soldiers’ spears and swords.
I sprinted straight for the window. The king’s bedroom was roughly on the fifth floor—close to the seventeen meters that humans feared most. Yet compared to the Sky Games elevator I had once leaped from, it was almost cute.
“If you’re scared, close your eyes and hold your breath!”
“Kyaaaaaah!!!”
Whoosh—!
Stars filled my vision. The sun had fully set, revealing a sky painted in picturesque dawn hues. The golden hair of the woman in my arms fluttered, lending the moment an unexpected touch of romance. The cloudless, perfectly clear sky and the moonlight dancing across the windowsill seemed to be praying for our escape.
The scenery beyond the shattered window was ironically beautiful. It looked like something straight out of a fairy tale, and for a second I almost believed wings might sprout from my back.
“Somebodyyyyy save meeeeeee!!!”
If only the blonde kid clinging to my neck and screaming straight into my eardrums like a banshee hadn’t been there.
I used the moonlight to search for a landing spot.
There!
A steeply slanted roof that looked more like a slide came into view, and beneath it stood a massive tree.
—Uwaaaaaah!
Right after I jumped, a desperate cry from Namgung Cheonho echoed from above. It seemed he had made the bold decision to follow my lead.
Boom!
The fifth floor turned out to be lower than expected. Our bodies hit the roof sooner than anticipated. Naturally we began sliding down the slope, but the angle clearly helped absorb the impact.
I surrendered myself to the roof like a child on a playground slide. Balancing during the rapid descent was difficult, but fortunately the stone slide was short. When I reached the edge, I launched myself toward the tree I had marked as my target.
Rustle!
Leaves and branches whipped across my body. At some point Han Gamin, who had been holding her breath, buried her face against my chest.
And finally—
Thump!
I reached the ground. A moment later I saw Namgung Cheonho descend and get caught in the tree along with Laurent. Only then could I release the breath I had been holding.
“…Do you think the others are all right?”
Namgung Cheonho rubbed his face with dry hands, clearly worried about the rest of the group. His concern was understandable. The mission had changed so drastically because of us, after all; a part of him must have felt guilty.
But our priority right now wasn’t worrying about their safety. It was completing the mission before anything bad could happen to them.
“Judging by how many soldiers gathered in the king’s bedroom, the other rooms probably didn’t have nearly as many. Besides, the soldiers aren’t that strong. The others should have had enough time to hide.”
After fighting them myself, I knew the soldiers were ordinary humans—perfectly manageable for awakened players. The real issue was the psychological pressure of having to fight living people.
If they lacked the nerve to raise a sword against someone who genuinely wanted to kill them, running would be their best option.
“This is awkward,” Namgung Cheonho muttered. “The mission is to annihilate the boss, but the opponents are all human……”
I met his eyes and slowly shook my head.
“It won’t be.”
“Sorry? What do you suddenly——?”
“I’m saying the target we need to annihilate won’t be human.”
Not only Namgung Cheonho but Han Gamin as well stared at me with puzzled expressions. In a boss-annihilation mission, claiming the boss wouldn’t be human must have sounded strange. But after witnessing the history of the tower’s first floor through the illusion, I could make an educated guess about the boss’s true identity.
“When you play games or watch movies, what kind of being do you think the final boss should be?”
“Well… the strongest one?”
“Wouldn’t it be the most dangerous?”
Han Gamin’s counter-question wasn’t wrong, but it wasn’t the answer I was looking for. I stated my own thoughts clearly.
“I believe the boss is the one who inflicted the most damage on the first floor.”
Ever since the mission message arrived, I had been pondering it. What kind of creature was the boss? Namgung Cheonho had used the words “boss annihilation,” but the precise clear condition wasn’t actually that.
Annihilation of the Enemy
📍 Objective: Eliminate the enemy responsible for the catastrophe on the 1st Floor
The enemy.
Thinking back, when we first arrived on the first floor, we hadn’t really had any enemies. No one had shown us hostility—not the king, not the knights, not the soldiers.
And the reverse was also true. To the residents of this floor, we were simply unfamiliar visitors to be cautious of. We had not been enemies from the start.
But there was one clear enemy for the ‘residents of the first floor.’
“We have to capture the source of the plague.”
I recalled the memories stored within the Memorial Pieces I had seen. They were an arrangement left by the mage… He had told us that nowhere in the world was there a person who desired death, nor anyone who rejoiced at parting.
The citizens had lost family and friends to the plague that appeared without warning. The king lost his people, and the kingdom that lost its people lost both hope and direction. Everything had begun with the plague.
To end it, the mage had fought a lonely battle by himself. And in the end, through the illusion, he had given me one final hint.
“We need to return to the castle.”
Both of them let out startled gasps at my words.
“There is a mage’s laboratory at the top of that spire. If we go there, I believe we’ll find our answer.”
The enormous magic stone I had seen in the corner of the mage’s lab flashed through my mind, along with the Memorial Piece that had come from Noya’s Staff.
“We’ve entered, but… now what?”
Once inside the castle, we found an overwhelming number of soldiers stationed everywhere. Among them were people who had been captured; since they weren’t suspected of assassinating the king, the soldiers were simply dragging them off somewhere rather than executing them on the spot.
“Siin, there are far too many soldiers here. I don’t think we can get through that narrow corridor without being detected.”
“Hmm……”
It was a troublesome situation. We could probably force our way through if we sprinted like mad, but doing so without shedding blood seemed nearly impossible.
If I were alone, maybe.
But I wasn’t confident I could guarantee the safety of the three people beside me.
Quick Comprehension (C-)
My lifeline—the skill that had saved me from every crisis—activated naturally. But it was only helpful when I had enough information to analyze the situation. In the current circumstances…
“Um…”
Then the small child behind me spoke up quietly.
“Would you like to try the secret passage?”
Laurent Sagard, the red-eyed maid who had handled all the menial chores in the castle under the king’s orders, turned out to be a far more capable source of information than I had expected.