Chapter 14 - Who’s Next?

“Hear me.”

“...!”

Kang Jeong-su swallowed without realizing it. It wasn’t because the quiet voice rang in his ears like a great temple bell.

“Those who would attack me, abandon hope. Those who would fight me, prepare to die. Those who want my life, stake your own. If you lack the courage, get on your knees now and beg for your lives.”

Limon delivered the warning in a voice so calm it was almost flat, as though reading a textbook he had gone over hundreds of times and memorized.

“This is my final act of mercy.”

His golden eyes were utterly still. The radiance within them was chillingly pure—and, for that very reason, terrifyingly clear. It made Kang Jeong-su instinctively take a step back.

“Remember: anyone still standing after this warning will not survive.”

It was less a warning than a threat. One man armed with nothing but a sword was pronouncing a death sentence on two hundred people equipped with every kind of firearm and item. At any other time, everyone would have laughed at a claim too absurd to count as a joke.

GULP.

But at least in this moment, not one of the roughly two hundred people gathered there laughed. Their dry mouths filled with saliva, their knees threatened to buckle, and goose bumps rose on the backs of their necks. Their bodies told them what they needed to know.

‘He isn’t bluffing.’

‘Get on your knees now.’

‘This is your only chance.’

It was instinct whispering to them, a premonition their bodies delivered before their minds could think. Had they been ordinary people, the pressure of impending death would have broken them at once.

There were two unfortunate facts. Everyone there was an elite fighter with enough skill and arrogance to withstand that pressure. And their commander had far too much faith in his own judgment—enough to ignore instinct’s warning and issue an immediate order to steady their wavering morale.

“Why the hell are you standing there listening to his bullshit? Attack!”

Right or wrong, Kang Jeong-su’s decision worked. The instant they received the order, every last one of those wavering between instinct and reason resolved to fight Limon. Their unity was almost uncanny.

The first to open fire were those most accustomed to following orders.

“All personnel, fire!”

RATATATAT!

* * *

THUD-THUD-THUD!

Unit 909. In terms of level alone, its members were among the weakest gathered there. They were soldiers first and foremost; naturally, their average level was lower than that of players who made a living raiding dungeons. But in raw combat power, no other group present could match them. The secret lay in their equipment.

The KIM-S009 powered exoskeleton. Made from materials harvested from monsters in the seventies—including Bone Knight bones, Living Army armor, Metal Golem fragments, and Shadow Hunter arrowheads—and combined with cutting-edge technology, it was a masterpiece of the Agency for Defense Development. Each unit was notoriously more expensive than a fighter jet, but its performance justified the cost.

It let a seasoned player in the thirties fight on even terms with a player in the sixties. Its standard-issue Shadow Gun was especially feared, even by high-level players: its shadow bullets dealt damage that bypassed defenses.

And a simultaneous volley from fifty Unit 909 members wearing KIM-S009s? It was as good as a death sentence. Without a special skill such as 『Absolute Defense』, even a high-level player could not stop hundreds of shadow bullets pouring in at once.

“... What?”

That was why Mira, the guild master of [Stardust], could only stare in a daze.

“What just happened?”

She couldn’t understand why Limon was still standing there unharmed after Unit 909’s volley—or why all fifty members of the unit had fallen immediately after opening fire. The sight was so baffling that, for an instant, she wondered whether they were carrying out some kind of deception tactic.

Blood trickled down.

Shattered heads. Eyeballs rolling across the ground. Above all, the hot blood splashed across her cheek. It left no room for her to mistake what had happened.

‘Wiped out? Unit 909?’

Unit 909 was no ordinary military unit. Every member could rival a high-level player, and five of them could crush most guilds. Even Mira, a level 93 duke-class player, would have struggled against more than ten of these combat specialists.

Yet the entire unit had been wiped out in less than a second after firing. She could hardly believe it, even after seeing it happen. And, of course, she wasn’t the only one appalled.

“... Good God.”

“Mr. An Dong-gwon?”

“That’s insane... How could he do that...?”

“Do what? What skill did he just use?”

An Dong-gwon, the guild master of [Heavenly Bell], had gone as pale as a corpse. Thanks to his unique skill, he was the only person there who had seen what Limon had done. He forced the words out.

“No.”

“What?”

“It wasn’t a skill.”

“... What kind of nonsense is that?”

Mira was dumbfounded.

She had naturally assumed Limon had used a skill. Of course, that would have meant he was both a Sword Master and a duke-class player. But she believed it anyway. As she understood the world, nothing short of a skill like 『Time Stop』 or 『Word of Power』 could produce something so inexplicable.

An Dong-gwon rejected everything she thought she knew with a scream that seemed to tear from his throat.

“That monster knocked the bullets flying at him back into Unit 909 with his sword!!!”

For a moment, Mira failed to understand him. Once she did, her face twisted in utter disbelief.

“He knocked them... back? Fifty shadow bullets fired at supersonic speed almost simultaneously, and sent every one straight back to the person who fired it?”

“Yes.”

“Without a skill? Just with... swordsmanship?”

“... Probably.”

“H-how is that even possible?!”

An Dong-gwon gave no answer to Mira’s wide-eyed demand. Whether she accepted it or not would not change reality.

“That... That can’t be. Even a player who’d mastered a swordsmanship skill couldn’t...”

She pressed a nail between her teeth to calm her nerves, then abruptly fell silent. Only then did she remember whom she was up against.

‘Limon Aspelder.’

A relic of a bygone era who knew nothing but how to swing a sword. A symbol of an obsolete past, cast aside as the times changed. She had thought disposing of one washed-up man would be a bargain if it meant putting the PAB director in her debt and earning the Infinite Monarch’s favor.

Limon had only been regarded as a guardian deity because players hadn’t existed back then. Warriors had their day in the distant past, but they had fallen as firearms advanced. There was no need for a master of the sword in this day and age. Surely dealing with an “ordinary person” who happened to be a little good with a blade would be easy.

... But had she been right?

‘Why?’

Mira. Guild master of Stardust. A duke-class player, one of fewer than a hundred in the world. She had prided herself on knowing more than most, but only now did a profound sense that something was wrong strike her.

‘Why did I believe a Sword Master would be weaker than me?’

Players could wield powerful skills and bring enormous wealth and progress to the world. By comparison, all a Sword Master knew was how to swing a sword. That was why Sword Masters were treated as obsolete.

But put another way, it meant they were good at that one thing.

A successful businessman might command society’s respect, but that didn’t make him stronger than a soldier or a martial artist. Likewise, a player’s fame and wealth didn’t mean they could naturally defeat a Sword Master in a fight.

And yet she had never questioned it. Just as a rich man saw no reason to be wary of a soldier, she had assumed that someone who was merely good with a blade could be no match for her skills.

But was that swordsmanship something she could call “merely” good? Had he truly reigned supreme only because players hadn’t existed yet?

Had she misunderstood something utterly fundamental about Limon Aspelder? No—had all of them, trapped by what they thought was common sense? Like some idiot nouveau riche who believed he could hit an armed soldier over the head with a bag of money and be fine because he was rich?

Or... like a marionette that didn’t know it was a puppet, pulled by someone else’s strings into a raging fire?

“So.”

As though he had no need even to set her down, the man who had wiped out Unit 909 with the sword in one hand still held a woman’s corpse in his other arm.

“Who wants to die next?”

He was the unrivaled figure who had saved the world time and again and protected humanity’s peace for centuries. Mira shuddered beneath the ice-cold gaze of humanity’s last Sword Master.

* * *

“... This...”

Kang Jeong-su had stood frozen in shock for a long time, unable to breathe, as though someone had clamped a hand around his throat. At last, his lips moved.

“How could... This makes no sense...”

When he saw Unit 909 wiped out in an instant, Kang had kept his composure. Expensive equipment might have increased their combat power, but they were still mid-level players. If caught off guard, they could fall with shocking ease.

Even when the criminal players and killers who rushed in afterward were slaughtered in the blink of an eye, he had been surprised but could understand it. They had charged in however they pleased, without coordinating, just as one would expect of criminals with no combat training. They had brought it on themselves.

Until then, he had believed things would change once the remaining 120 high-level players showed what they could do—and once Mira and An Dong-gwon, the duke-class players he had secured only by promising them enormous rewards, joined the fight.

He had believed it until just a few minutes ago.

“You stupid bastard.”

“Gah!”

Kang recoiled in terror and fell. He spun around to crawl away, only to freeze in horror again. A severed head lay right in front of his face, both eyes burst. And it was far from the only one.

A mercenary split down the middle. A PAB agent with a hole through his chest. A player with a shattered skull. All around him, corpses in every imaginable state of horror were piled high.

“You thought two hundred small fry like these could take me down?”

“... Wh-what have you done?!”

Kang stared at the white-haired young man responsible for the mountain of corpses, a man who still didn’t have so much as a drop of blood on him. Before he knew it, he was shouting as though in anguish.

“Do you have any idea who these people were?! They were this country’s future! They were the pillars that would have supported it for nearly half a century to come!”

It was no exaggeration.

Thirty elite PAB agents. Fifty fully equipped members of Unit 909. Thirty-eight raid-team guild members from [Stardust] and [Heavenly Bell]. Add to them fifty S-rank mercenaries from [Black Wolf] and around thirty criminals and killers.

Even setting aside the last two groups, 118 players affiliated with the country had died here. Sixty-eight of them were high-level players.

In this age, every high-level player was a business unto themselves and a form of asymmetric military power. Sixty-eight of them being killed at once was unprecedented since the dawn of the Iron Age. If word got out, the country would reel from the blow.

“So what?”

Limon met Kang’s anguished cry with a cold sneer.

“If this country’s future mattered so much to you, you shouldn’t have sent them after me.”