Chapter 797 – First Sortie
Students sitting in a pub built for students. They were celebrating their victory by eating and drinking to their heart’s content using the public points they had gained this time. Seeing the sight of such young hunters, Seong-il smiles softly without realizing it and watches the scene.
‘Me too… Someday…’
Seong-il feels his heart sink when he sees the blessing of his youthful days that he should have enjoyed. He reassures himself that once he completes all these tasks, he will return to his normal life.
‘It’s a good thing I brought a lot of entertainment…’
Afterward, Seong-il watches students enjoy the entertainment he brought from various worlds. After watching the students quickly adapt to life in Eden, Seong-il turns on the Game Master again and begins to investigate the locations of dungeons in Seoul.
***
Seong-il took a break in Eden for a while. He now attempts reconnaissance as before for his second sortie.
“Ha… After this mess, it’s true that not even a day has passed in real time…”
Seong-il feels once again that Eden’s power differential is overwhelmingly weaker than that of the Transcendence Church, but that Eden Hunters are truly a fraud in that they can stop time except when taking direct ‘action’. He resolves to make good use of this overwhelming asymmetric power and begins to calmly scout the surroundings.
Tiring!
While Seong-il is concentrating on reconnaissance, an alarm suddenly rings on his smartphone.
‘Ah, I guess you’ve finished digesting the dungeon core?’
One of the other reasons why Seongil recommended taking a break for about a month. Seong-il was in a situation where Eden Hunter generously invested the grade A to C dungeon cores he had secured this time and requested the game master to replace it with a dimensional pineapple house.
‘Oh… Twenty?! There are so many…’
If you add the existing houses, there are a whopping 24 different levels of houses. Considering that there were nine game worlds that Seongil played in, Seongil could now use as many as 15 extra dimensions of Pineapple House.
‘Now you won’t have to worry about the dimensional pineapple house.’
Even if we sprinkle one house into each game world, there are a whopping 15 left. Therefore, Seong-il thinks that he should spread this dimensional pineapple house all over Korea and create ‘scouts’.
‘Right now… I’m doing reconnaissance alone… But I can’t keep doing it alone like this forever. I’ll have to select trustworthy guys and give them a reconnaissance mission.’
Seong-il naturally develops a plan to create a base by planting five Pineapple Houses in the metropolitan area and three to six in each other major city.
‘After selecting 10 scouts who will be given administrator privileges to the houses scattered like that, we have them scout.’
Seong-il naturally imagines scouts traveling around the country seeking regional information, and secretly planting branches of Withgrasil to find a place to summon the Eden Hunter.
‘After doing that, we use the overwhelming mobility provided by the Withgrasil branch to spread hunters across the country. It will require quite a long and arduous preparation time, but… In real time, it will only be a single moment, so from the perspective of the Transcendental Church, it will feel like a lightning bolt in the dry sky.’
However, since Seong-il is not with her, she realizes that the hunters in the area are vulnerable to administrators and higher-level government hunters.
‘… I guess I should be the bait for the freedom and stability of hunters who will operate separately in the region.’
After Seong-il quickly wraps up her work underground in Seoul, she realizes that she must draw the attention of the Transcendental Church by causing trouble above ground in Seoul to ensure the safety of the hunters who will be active in the province.
‘… Anyway, Seoul is a major area where a lot of administrators are active, so there is a high possibility that we will have to confront them head-on, unlike now when they are operating underground.’
In any case, rescuing people living on the ground in Seoul is not an easy task unless you are prepared to collide openly. Therefore, Seong-il plans to attract the attention of the Transcendental Church by creating a ruckus on the surface once the underground work is completed, but instead dispatch a team of hunters to the countryside to clear the dungeon or quickly kidnap the people in the area.
‘… Is it because of the way we read causality? I’m bursting with ideas like crazy.’
Although Seong-il came up with the idea in a very short period of time after receiving the reward, he senses that this plan is a very effective plan. Therefore, he thinks he will have to make a serious plan with his executives based on this idea soon.
Tiring!
“Hmm…?”
That was when Seongil finished thinking for a moment and was about to take his steps again. Suddenly, the game master’s alarm rings again. Therefore, Seong-il tries to check the message through augmented reality.
『Game Master: Good idea.』
“… Then will you give me a reward?”
When the game master makes people expect the most and then blurts out an insignificant compliment, Seong-il mutters to him in an incredulous tone.
『Game Master: Next time, give the core you secure to me without any conditions. If you absorb more core energy this time, you will be able to be promoted to C grade.』
“… Was there a grade?”
Since he has never heard of game masters having levels before, Seong-il looks a little puzzled by his answer.
『Game Master: You bastard. That’s because you only roamed around the game world and gave the minimum amount of core energy… Your current grade is D, the lowest level.』
When the game master absorbs enough core energy and has enough energy to qualify for a promotion, he or she will receive congratulatory information and items and inform him or her that the grade system will be unlocked.
‘… Actually, I focused too much on strengthening my power in the game world.’
Seong-il reflects on the fact that even though the game master sang about the core every time, the period of time when he properly took care of the core was very short.
‘At most, except for this time, proper core hunting was completed after about a month of activity on the Ark…’
Perhaps sensing Seong-il’s reflection, the game master abandoned his grumpy tone and answered Seong-il in a much softer tone.
『Game Master: That’s enough. Anyway, you will be promoted soon, so make sure you know that. With the cores brought by the kids you trained last time, you should be able to fully upgrade next time. Then, I will bring you an item that will be useful for your plan.』
“Oh…!!”
Since the game master has never let him down before, Seongil feels anticipation rising at his words. Therefore, Seong-il, motivated, quickly scouts the northeastern part of Seoul’s underpass and does his best to devise his next plan.
***
“What! Why on earth is the passage collapsed!? If the damage was this severe, shock waves should have been felt on the ground!!”
The time when Seong-il was scouting northern Seoul. Near the underground city where Seongil and Eden’s Hunters went on a rampage not long ago, people who appeared to be association hunters were stationed there and investigating the area.
“Well… I don’t know… This is the first time I’ve seen a reaction like this… Did the dungeon run away as a group?”
When dozens of dungeons located underground in Seoul disappeared in an instant, the government and the Transcendental Church did not understand the wave of loss. At first, they thought it was due to a malfunction of the psionic detection device, but they attempted to explore the underground to check the state of the dungeon, but they were confused when they realized that the Seoul underground was completely ‘filled’ and they could not enter.
“Get out of the way.”
“Yes.”
When the government agents and the association’s hunters seem to be at a loss, a hunter with an unusual aura comes forward and bites them, trying to survey the scene.
“… It’s not a collapse like this.”
S-class hunter Noh Soo-il. No, the priest of the Transcendental Church, who has now become the administrator, was able to quickly understand that the current underground cavity was not collapsed but was literally ‘filled in’.
“… Why do you think that?”
“Because the soil composition is different.”
The ‘hunting dog’ next to him was annoying, but Noh Soo-il, a seasoned manager, knew that only if the hunting dog was given enough information would it be able to track its target well. Therefore, he endures disgust and annoyance and answers the hound’s questions in a kind manner.
“Ingredients…?”
“Yes. Composition. If the ground collapsed, a substance similar to the composition of the nearby soil should have been released. However, the soil that has been filled now is mainly ‘never destroyed’ granite. Do you think this makes sense?”
“!!!”
Although granite is one of the most common rock formations in Korea, the granite in front of them, which is made up of a huge ‘lump’, is not something that could be found in the ‘old subway’ at all, so the hunters realize something after listening to Noh Soo-il.
“It’s strange… I can’t feel any psionic waves to say I used superpowers… What on earth happened? Did a dimensional overlap occur…? Or ‘those guys’?”
