Chapter 80: The Magic of Turning Back (3)
“Ahahaha!”
Idra’s laughter echoed in Sehan’s ears.
Sehan felt the urge to silence that mouth of his.
While he was fighting seriously, the frivolous voice continued to ring in his ears.
“It seems I have a talent for video editing. Look at the number of observers appearing in the sky!”
Idra, obviously thrilled, seemed elated that the video he posted was starting to grab attention.
Sehan couldn’t access the community, so he had no idea how Idra had uploaded the video. But the response indicated it had surely garnered interest.
“I should’ve uploaded something like this earlier. It’s a pity to realize this so late. Right! Once I leave the Dungeon of Dreams, I want you to tell the me in that world about this.”
‘I don’t want to. Why should I even do that?’
Though they had friendly conversations in the Dungeon of Dreams, in reality, Sehan and she were merely acquaintances.
This world was a dream, so Sehan had nothing to lose, but it would be different in the real world.
Nevertheless, realizing Idra truly respected him more than he thought, if that were a harvest, then so it was. But those feelings didn’t apply to the real-world Idra.
“How cold. Anyway, I will continue editing videos. With editing skills that have reached the realm of the gods.”
Of course.
Being a god, having divine editing skills was only natural.
Idra apparently finished saying what she wanted and cleanly stepped back.
Finally able to concentrate properly, Sehan looked at Rin in front of him.
‘You truly could become a full-fledged proxy.’
Looking at Rin’s shining golden figure, Sehan realized his thoughts had been correct.
It should’ve been Rin, not Luke Taylor, who became Astraios’ proxy.
Had he realized this talent sooner, the situation would’ve unfolded entirely differently.
‘But I can’t just stand in awe.’
Complacency leads to death, especially when facing a monster that grows stronger in real-time.
Snap!
Sehan raised his right hand and lightly flicked his fingers.
Two black spaces opened in mid-air.
Idra’s legacy skill, False Space, sprang open, and two swords Sehan had stored in his inventory shot out toward Rin.
Each sword flew at nearly supersonic speeds. However, Rin swung away both the swords coming at her with the same speed.
Clang!
But that was just the beginning. Dozens of black spaces appeared in mid-air, surrounding Rin in a spherical formation. Rin saw them.
Dozens of rifts to different worlds opened in the air.
Holes connected to the world of the false.
Boom boom boom!
Objects like black pillars fell from the holes toward Rin.
These were massive amounts of metal Sehan had brought from a metal vein buried in a nearby dungeon.
After swallowing them into False Space using Idra’s skill, he altered them with the ‘Transmutation’ skill and shot them toward Rin.
Thud thud thud! Clang!
Rin either dodged them all or sliced them with her sword. From 360 degrees, she blocked every attack fired from unimaginable angles, pressing on.
Faster, even faster.
Rin’s golden locks shone even more radiantly.
A golden trail wove behind Sehan, chasing him.
Her speed surpassed that of Min Suho, who had reached supersonic speeds.
Even Sehan could only see her afterimage.
A solid line drawn from left to right displaced the air, unleashing a powerful shockwave that enveloped Sehan.
Sehan’s figure, swept up in the storm, seemed to dissolve into the air.
Suddenly, dozens of Sehans stood in the sky, all pointing at Rin with their fingers.
“…!”
Rin saw the space around her twist and spiral.
Chasing the path of the golden trajectory, space warped.
Sehan blocked her at the end of that trajectory.
He swung down the sword in his hand, striking vertically.
Boom!
As Rin, who glided through the sky, plummeted to the ground, a huge semi-spherical crater formed, and the earth shook. Sehan flicked his fingers at her again, fallen and lying there.
Larger than ever before, a rectangular hole opened in the sky, and a gigantic object fell.
Commonly known as ‘eternal iron,’ it was a metal with extraordinary hardness and mass.
A massive artificial meteorite, made entirely of eternal iron from a vein in a nearby dungeon, was transferred into False Space and then lumped together, now falling toward the ground.
An ordinary player would have been crushed instantly.
The center of the square iron split in half, emitting light.
Tiny filaments formed on the entire surface of the split eternal iron meteorite, and light began to escape.
Boom!
The falling mass shattered into dozens, hundreds of fragments.
Eternal iron, regarded as one of the toughest metals, crumbled like cookies, scattering fragments in all directions.
Sehan gathered the broken pieces around him.
He used the shards to counter Rin’s attacks from behind.
Then, with his right hand wide open, he clenched his fist towards her.
“Ugh!”
The remaining shards clung on to Rin’s body.
Not just the fragments of eternal iron.
Using Idra’s ‘Transmutation’ skill, Sehan had given the surrounding area the property of a giant magnet, pulling all the metal towards her.
Of course, Rin wasn’t one to simply take it lying down.
The light emanating from her intensified.
Her blue eyes burned even brighter, and she charged at Sehan.
Dodging all the incoming metal and eternal iron, she ran.
Rin gripped her sword.
Gold light converged in her hand in an instant.
“Ah──!!”
Flash!
The concentrated light freed itself as the sword swung, tracing a golden arc.
Even buildings in the distant isolated district were sliced in half.
Not just the isolation zone. A distant mountain split in half, its top disintegrating.
Boom boom boom!
The thread of light extending over tens of kilometers left the observing players in shock. Among them was Minah.
“Am I dreaming right now?”
She pinched her cheek at the unreal fight.
The power of King Nuada, who she had possessed, was strong, but this was beyond any anticipated level.
This was not a fight that could be placed on the same scale.
The players questioned whether this was the same game they had been playing.
That’s how extraordinary it was.
The unidentified spaces emerging from the air, the objects flying from those spaces.
Sehan was most likely conjuring those.
And there was Rin Taylor, who deflected them all, flying around like light.
Her last attack had erased half a mountain tens of kilometers away.
It was beyond comprehension.
There was, however, something to note.
Sehan had once been a player who saw humanity’s end.
Idra’s skills burdened the mind rather than the physique.
That was why Sehan relied on skills rather than physical prowess to fight Rin.
He couldn’t keep up with her physical capabilities.
Only his refined spirit, the only asset the future Sehan had for the present, could be used.
He exploited that to fight Rin with Idra’s skills.
And Rin fought with equal desperation.
She was burning through her talent in an instant.
Balancing on a burning rope.
The moment she lost consciousness, Rin would perish.
Rin knew she couldn’t win against Sehan here, so she fought knowing that she would die in this quest.
“Huh?”
Minah, watching the fight, suddenly realized that the attention wasn’t only on the fight but also on something in the sky.
What was up there?
Looking up, she saw innumerable observers.
Observers controlled by gods, not the GM.
It had been a long time since she saw so many.
The early days of the game, when many gods had shown interest, had been like this.
Players were mesmerized, and understandably so – among them might be a long-lost deity.
‘Maybe.’
Minah finally realized what Sehan was aiming for.
“He truly is remarkable.”
It seemed his goal was not simply to clear the quest.
‘Now….’
Sehan, dodging the gold sword light from all directions, thought.
It was time to end this.
The number of observers had increased sufficiently.
Furthermore, continuing to use the Proxy and Divine Descent skills was becoming too taxing.
And it wasn’t just Sehan feeling the strain.
Rin, who hadn’t fully awakened her talents, was in even more danger.
She was hanging on but could go berserk at any moment.
He took out a small dagger from the inventory.
A dagger forged by Song Siwoo, which Minah enriched with a special ‘poison’.
If he could transmute the item and imbue it with the dagger’s effect, that would be ideal, but ‘item effects’ couldn’t be mimicked by Transmutation.
However, piercing the swiftly moving Rin with the dagger wouldn’t be easy.
In terms of physical specs, Rin was far superior to Sehan.
‘The theatrics are enough.’
Sehan calmly watched Rin’s attacks.
The moment the golden light was shot at him, he flicked it with a finger into False Space.
Rin’s body twisted at an odd angle as if anticipating it, and aimed for Sehan’s side.
In an instant, Rin’s blue eyes met Sehan’s black ones.
Locked in continuous combat, Rin aimed her worn sword at Sehan’s chest as he reached out toward her.
‘Block here and then immediately move to the left to target the neck.’
Rin expected Sehan to block the attack, as before.
And Sehan read her thoughts.
A half-hearted strike from Rin, which he fully took to his chest.
Thunk!
“Ah?”
Feeling the sensation of being pierced, Rin’s eyes widened in shock, frozen in place.
A perfect stiffening occurred in an instant.
It wasn’t an illusion or space created in her chest to divert the strike.
The sensation of flesh being torn transmitted through her hand, leaving Rin no choice but to freeze.
‘Kugh!’
Sehan, enduring pain as if being burnt, thrust the dagger toward the stunned Rin’s chest.
Even fast-moving Rin couldn’t dodge it, frozen in shock.
“A-uncle?”
Sehan wasn’t about to do something redundant like mutually assured destruction.
He was the man to choose either his own survival or the death of his opponent – never pointless gestures.
But the dagger embedded in Rin’s chest was reality.
“Cough.”
Rin stumbled back, watching Sehan cough up blood.
Strangely, the chest where the dagger had struck didn’t hurt.
Her consciousness just began to fade.
Thump.
Sehan watched as Rin crumbled to the ground.
The golden glow enveloping her disappeared, and she collapsed as an ordinary human.
With the dual collapse, observers buzzed.
The end of the battle had come so anticlimactically it was unsurprising.
‘I miss my Thousand Kill Star and Healing skills.’
Those would prevent death from a sword stabbed in the heart.
He couldn’t even touch the sword in his chest.
Pulling it would surely mean death.
Only Sehan’s superhuman willpower stopped him from losing consciousness.
‘I need to take out the elixir.’
He was about to search for the elixir in his inventory when a familiar fanfare echoed through the air.
The quest had been cleared.
Hearing the sound, Sehan, forgetting the pain, couldn’t help but smile.
It worked out, after all.
The quest was over. Cheering from the players reached his increasingly hazy consciousness.
It was a success.
But it wasn’t over.
Sehan lifted his head.
There were countless observers in the sky.
If left alone, they would leave.
Most had probably rooted for Rin.
Sehan knew. So they didn’t want this kind of ending.
‘No time for the elixir then.’
Sehan stopped searching for the elixir and pulled out something else instead.
It was a round bead.
Sehan lifted the bead towards the sky, where all the observers could see it.
Now the quest was over, there was no more need to use this.
His abrupt, strange action puzzled the observers – as did the players.
Only Minah, who had crafted the bead, knew the reason.
“Gack!”
The pain surged as he squeezed the bead.
Still, he couldn’t stop. Sehan broke the bead with all his might.
It was a magic that could turn a failing game around.
Chapter 80: The Magic of Turning Back (3)
“Ahahaha!”
Idra’s laughter echoed in Sehan’s ears.
Sehan felt the urge to silence that mouth of his.
While he was fighting seriously, the frivolous voice continued to ring in his ears.
“It seems I have a talent for video editing. Look at the number of observers appearing in the sky!”
Idra, obviously thrilled, seemed elated that the video he posted was starting to grab attention.
Sehan couldn’t access the community, so he had no idea how Idra had uploaded the video. But the response indicated it had surely garnered interest.
“I should’ve uploaded something like this earlier. It’s a pity to realize this so late. Right! Once I leave the Dungeon of Dreams, I want you to tell the me in that world about this.”
‘I don’t want to. Why should I even do that?’
Though they had friendly conversations in the Dungeon of Dreams, in reality, Sehan and she were merely acquaintances.
This world was a dream, so Sehan had nothing to lose, but it would be different in the real world.
Nevertheless, realizing Idra truly respected him more than he thought, if that were a harvest, then so it was. But those feelings didn’t apply to the real-world Idra.
“How cold. Anyway, I will continue editing videos. With editing skills that have reached the realm of the gods.”
Of course.
Being a god, having divine editing skills was only natural.
Idra apparently finished saying what she wanted and cleanly stepped back.
Finally able to concentrate properly, Sehan looked at Rin in front of him.
‘You truly could become a full-fledged proxy.’
Looking at Rin’s shining golden figure, Sehan realized his thoughts had been correct.
It should’ve been Rin, not Luke Taylor, who became Astraios’ proxy.
Had he realized this talent sooner, the situation would’ve unfolded entirely differently.
‘But I can’t just stand in awe.’
Complacency leads to death, especially when facing a monster that grows stronger in real-time.
Snap!
Sehan raised his right hand and lightly flicked his fingers.
Two black spaces opened in mid-air.
Idra’s legacy skill, False Space, sprang open, and two swords Sehan had stored in his inventory shot out toward Rin.
Each sword flew at nearly supersonic speeds. However, Rin swung away both the swords coming at her with the same speed.
Clang!
But that was just the beginning. Dozens of black spaces appeared in mid-air, surrounding Rin in a spherical formation. Rin saw them.
Dozens of rifts to different worlds opened in the air.
Holes connected to the world of the false.
Boom boom boom!
Objects like black pillars fell from the holes toward Rin.
These were massive amounts of metal Sehan had brought from a metal vein buried in a nearby dungeon.
After swallowing them into False Space using Idra’s skill, he altered them with the ‘Transmutation’ skill and shot them toward Rin.
Thud thud thud! Clang!
Rin either dodged them all or sliced them with her sword. From 360 degrees, she blocked every attack fired from unimaginable angles, pressing on.
Faster, even faster.
Rin’s golden locks shone even more radiantly.
A golden trail wove behind Sehan, chasing him.
Her speed surpassed that of Min Suho, who had reached supersonic speeds.
Even Sehan could only see her afterimage.
A solid line drawn from left to right displaced the air, unleashing a powerful shockwave that enveloped Sehan.
Sehan’s figure, swept up in the storm, seemed to dissolve into the air.
Suddenly, dozens of Sehans stood in the sky, all pointing at Rin with their fingers.
“…!”
Rin saw the space around her twist and spiral.
Chasing the path of the golden trajectory, space warped.
Sehan blocked her at the end of that trajectory.
He swung down the sword in his hand, striking vertically.
Boom!
As Rin, who glided through the sky, plummeted to the ground, a huge semi-spherical crater formed, and the earth shook. Sehan flicked his fingers at her again, fallen and lying there.
Larger than ever before, a rectangular hole opened in the sky, and a gigantic object fell.
Commonly known as ‘eternal iron,’ it was a metal with extraordinary hardness and mass.
A massive artificial meteorite, made entirely of eternal iron from a vein in a nearby dungeon, was transferred into False Space and then lumped together, now falling toward the ground.
An ordinary player would have been crushed instantly.
The center of the square iron split in half, emitting light.
Tiny filaments formed on the entire surface of the split eternal iron meteorite, and light began to escape.
Boom!
The falling mass shattered into dozens, hundreds of fragments.
Eternal iron, regarded as one of the toughest metals, crumbled like cookies, scattering fragments in all directions.
Sehan gathered the broken pieces around him.
He used the shards to counter Rin’s attacks from behind.
Then, with his right hand wide open, he clenched his fist towards her.
“Ugh!”
The remaining shards clung on to Rin’s body.
Not just the fragments of eternal iron.
Using Idra’s ‘Transmutation’ skill, Sehan had given the surrounding area the property of a giant magnet, pulling all the metal towards her.
Of course, Rin wasn’t one to simply take it lying down.
The light emanating from her intensified.
Her blue eyes burned even brighter, and she charged at Sehan.
Dodging all the incoming metal and eternal iron, she ran.
Rin gripped her sword.
Gold light converged in her hand in an instant.
“Ah──!!”
Flash!
The concentrated light freed itself as the sword swung, tracing a golden arc.
Even buildings in the distant isolated district were sliced in half.
Not just the isolation zone. A distant mountain split in half, its top disintegrating.
Boom boom boom!
The thread of light extending over tens of kilometers left the observing players in shock. Among them was Minah.
“Am I dreaming right now?”
She pinched her cheek at the unreal fight.
The power of King Nuada, who she had possessed, was strong, but this was beyond any anticipated level.
This was not a fight that could be placed on the same scale.
The players questioned whether this was the same game they had been playing.
That’s how extraordinary it was.
The unidentified spaces emerging from the air, the objects flying from those spaces.
Sehan was most likely conjuring those.
And there was Rin Taylor, who deflected them all, flying around like light.
Her last attack had erased half a mountain tens of kilometers away.
It was beyond comprehension.
There was, however, something to note.
Sehan had once been a player who saw humanity’s end.
Idra’s skills burdened the mind rather than the physique.
That was why Sehan relied on skills rather than physical prowess to fight Rin.
He couldn’t keep up with her physical capabilities.
Only his refined spirit, the only asset the future Sehan had for the present, could be used.
He exploited that to fight Rin with Idra’s skills.
And Rin fought with equal desperation.
She was burning through her talent in an instant.
Balancing on a burning rope.
The moment she lost consciousness, Rin would perish.
Rin knew she couldn’t win against Sehan here, so she fought knowing that she would die in this quest.
“Huh?”
Minah, watching the fight, suddenly realized that the attention wasn’t only on the fight but also on something in the sky.
What was up there?
Looking up, she saw innumerable observers.
Observers controlled by gods, not the GM.
It had been a long time since she saw so many.
The early days of the game, when many gods had shown interest, had been like this.
Players were mesmerized, and understandably so – among them might be a long-lost deity.
‘Maybe.’
Minah finally realized what Sehan was aiming for.
“He truly is remarkable.”
It seemed his goal was not simply to clear the quest.
‘Now….’
Sehan, dodging the gold sword light from all directions, thought.
It was time to end this.
The number of observers had increased sufficiently.
Furthermore, continuing to use the Proxy and Divine Descent skills was becoming too taxing.
And it wasn’t just Sehan feeling the strain.
Rin, who hadn’t fully awakened her talents, was in even more danger.
She was hanging on but could go berserk at any moment.
He took out a small dagger from the inventory.
A dagger forged by Song Siwoo, which Minah enriched with a special ‘poison’.
If he could transmute the item and imbue it with the dagger’s effect, that would be ideal, but ‘item effects’ couldn’t be mimicked by Transmutation.
However, piercing the swiftly moving Rin with the dagger wouldn’t be easy.
In terms of physical specs, Rin was far superior to Sehan.
‘The theatrics are enough.’
Sehan calmly watched Rin’s attacks.
The moment the golden light was shot at him, he flicked it with a finger into False Space.
Rin’s body twisted at an odd angle as if anticipating it, and aimed for Sehan’s side.
In an instant, Rin’s blue eyes met Sehan’s black ones.
Locked in continuous combat, Rin aimed her worn sword at Sehan’s chest as he reached out toward her.
‘Block here and then immediately move to the left to target the neck.’
Rin expected Sehan to block the attack, as before.
And Sehan read her thoughts.
A half-hearted strike from Rin, which he fully took to his chest.
Thunk!
“Ah?”
Feeling the sensation of being pierced, Rin’s eyes widened in shock, frozen in place.
A perfect stiffening occurred in an instant.
It wasn’t an illusion or space created in her chest to divert the strike.
The sensation of flesh being torn transmitted through her hand, leaving Rin no choice but to freeze.
‘Kugh!’
Sehan, enduring pain as if being burnt, thrust the dagger toward the stunned Rin’s chest.
Even fast-moving Rin couldn’t dodge it, frozen in shock.
“A-uncle?”
Sehan wasn’t about to do something redundant like mutually assured destruction.
He was the man to choose either his own survival or the death of his opponent – never pointless gestures.
But the dagger embedded in Rin’s chest was reality.
“Cough.”
Rin stumbled back, watching Sehan cough up blood.
Strangely, the chest where the dagger had struck didn’t hurt.
Her consciousness just began to fade.
Thump.
Sehan watched as Rin crumbled to the ground.
The golden glow enveloping her disappeared, and she collapsed as an ordinary human.
With the dual collapse, observers buzzed.
The end of the battle had come so anticlimactically it was unsurprising.
‘I miss my Thousand Kill Star and Healing skills.’
Those would prevent death from a sword stabbed in the heart.
He couldn’t even touch the sword in his chest.
Pulling it would surely mean death.
Only Sehan’s superhuman willpower stopped him from losing consciousness.
‘I need to take out the elixir.’
He was about to search for the elixir in his inventory when a familiar fanfare echoed through the air.
The quest had been cleared.
Hearing the sound, Sehan, forgetting the pain, couldn’t help but smile.
It worked out, after all.
The quest was over. Cheering from the players reached his increasingly hazy consciousness.
It was a success.
But it wasn’t over.
Sehan lifted his head.
There were countless observers in the sky.
If left alone, they would leave.
Most had probably rooted for Rin.
Sehan knew. So they didn’t want this kind of ending.
‘No time for the elixir then.’
Sehan stopped searching for the elixir and pulled out something else instead.
It was a round bead.
Sehan lifted the bead towards the sky, where all the observers could see it.
Now the quest was over, there was no more need to use this.
His abrupt, strange action puzzled the observers – as did the players.
Only Minah, who had crafted the bead, knew the reason.
“Gack!”
The pain surged as he squeezed the bead.
Still, he couldn’t stop. Sehan broke the bead with all his might.
It was a magic that could turn a failing game around.
