An unexpected encounter with the Sword Saint.
Thanks to it, I had acquired the very Skill that had earned the Sword Saint the name ‘Sword Saint.’
Now it was time to test it.
Brimming with anticipation, I left the 3rd Floor Waiting Room and headed to the Mission Area.
“To the Mission Area.”
The Waiting Room beneath my feet immediately crumbled like a mirage.
A yellow plain unfolded before my eyes.
Behind me lay a massive canyon.
It looked as though I had emerged from the canyon and entered the wasteland.
As I swept my gaze over the stage where the 3rd Floor mission would unfold, I spotted a small group ofGoblins far ahead.
‘For a solo entry, the enemies are oneHobgoblin and fiveGoblins. One of them is an archer, so exercise caution. It matches perfectly.’
The 3rd Floor mission was to wipe out theGoblin raiding party.
It was exactly as described in the widely known strategy I had studied beforehand.
‘And there’s the cart, plain as day.’
Among them stood a huge, muscular ox and the cart it was pulling.
‘They said the 3rd Floor’s rewards are so good because of that cart.’
The 3rd Floor was famous for offering generous rewards for how early it was in the Tower.
I had heard that whatever spoils were loaded onto that cart—regardless of whom they had been stolen from—were included in the rewards in their entirety.
Apparently, that was why this floor was also considered the cradle of countless salaried Awakened.
“Then shall we get going?”
CLICK.
Nocturne made a crisp sound as it slid free of its sheath.
Its deep-blue blade poured out stream after stream of razor-sharp energy, followed by a chilling cold.
“Now then, shall we get a taste of just how incredible our dear Sword Saint’s Skill is?”
Without hesitation, I raced across the wasteland.
My target lay straight ahead. The enemies in the distance.
***
I had learned one thing while climbing the 1st and 2nd Floors.
There was no need to break a sweat using Covert Movement or even Flash on a Basic Mission.
Pouring my heart and soul into one only drained my mental energy.
‘I’ll clear Basic Missions quickly as a warm-up. They’re beneath my level anyway.’
That had been true of both the 1st and 2nd Floors.
The 3rd Floor? If the enemies before me were all there was to it, this would be no different.
TheGoblins spotted me charging toward them and eagerly rushed out to meet me.
“SKREEE!”
“KREEK! KREEK!”
With both sides charging at each other, the distance rapidly narrowed.
Then we clashed!
The one in the lead was aGoblin armed with a crude round shield and a rusty sword.
“SKREE! SKREEEEK!”
The instant it let out a shriek and thrust its sword with its shield held out front.
“…!”
For a split second, I saw the optimal path of evasion.
The moment the path appeared, my body naturally followed it without hesitation.
Half a step to the side. It was just half a step, not even a full stride.
It was quite literally the smallest possible movement. Yet that alone was enough to send the bastard’s blade slicing uselessly through the air.
‘I dodged that like this?’
It was unlike anything I had ever experienced.
This had to be the effect of the Skill I had just stolen from the Sword Saint.
My surprise lasted only a moment before the ink-black blade swept across the neck of the staggeringGoblin, which had lost its balance.
SLICE!
Struck by a blade from outside its field of vision, theGoblin’s head fell before it even realized it was dead.
I brushed past the lifeless corpse as it crumpled and headed for my next target.
WHIZZ─!
An arrow hurtled straight at me with a sharp whistle through the air.
“Hup!”
I tilted my head slightly and let it fly past.
The wind brushing my cheek made every hair on my body stand on end, but my heart raced at the same time.
‘This is it…!’
‘The Beginning of Training’—this Skill.
When I had only read its description, I had wondered how it could possibly help.
It made minute corrections to my movements? Honestly, the effect had seemed as good as useless.
‘I was just going to put up with it because it was a Growth-Type Skill….’
But using it in a real battle was different.
The destination of an incoming arrow and the endpoint of a swinging blade stood out clearly, as if each followed a predetermined path.
Until now, I had simply swung my sword while concentrating vaguely on cutting, thrusting, dodging, and blocking.
But now it was markedly different.
It was as though I could feel how to cut deeper with less effort, or how to thrust so that I struck a vital point precisely.
It felt as if an invisible master stood beside me, correcting each and every aspect of my form.
“For now… its performance gets a passing mark!”
I swung my sword at the secondGoblin as it drew near.
The slash began at its right shoulder and cut diagonally across its body.
SLASH!
By the time the green body, split in two, struck the ground, I was already right in front of the one that had fired the arrow.
“Krrk?”
Did bewilderment spread across its face because I was faster than expected, or because it sensed its own death?
SLICE!
There was no way to know now. The dead told no tales.
After dispatching three of them in an instant, I found myself in the middle of their formation.
Three enemies remained.
“SKREEE!”
Three pieces of metal came at me simultaneously, intent on stabbing, cutting, and crushing me.
Amid the barrage of attacks, I saw a single path.
The Skill that had led the Sword Saint to become the strongest Awakened in the Republic of Korea whispered to me.
It told me to evade like this, block like that, and then counter.
Before I could even comprehend it, my body followed that path.
“Hup!”
I took one step back from the dagger thrusting toward my abdomen.
I met the barreling horizontal slash with my blade and knocked it aside, then answered the club hurtling toward my knee by slicing cleanly through its wielder’s wrist.
Their combined offensive came to nothing in a single breath.
One counterattack was all I needed in return.
The ink-black blade traced a long arc from left to right.
SLICE!
The three remainingGoblins, already within my reach, were sliced cleanly into six pieces.
There was no dazzling flash and no death cry. Only wet splats followed one after another, each a beat apart.
It was a one-sided massacre too pathetic to even call a battle.
Even what came afterward felt unfamiliar.
‘I caused all that chaos, but I’m not even out of breath.’
Perfect movements, devoid of wasted strength or motion.
I had cut down sixGoblins in the blink of an eye, yet my heart rate had not wavered in the slightest.
‘This is a cheat Skill wearing the mask of D- Grade.’
Its absurd performance nearly made me laugh in disbelief.
I had expected it to be on the level of Covert Movement or Flash Cleave, but its effects were more palpable than those of any Skill I had ever used.
I had invested in its future because of the Sword Saint’s reputation, yet it was already my greatest combat asset.
‘If this is only D- Grade right now, what will it even become once it grows to S+?’
At that point, might I actually be able to cleave a mountain with a sword?
I had already split a boulder, but it was still difficult to imagine.
‘It’s a little disappointing that Healing Touch is gone… but it can’t be helped. This was still a profitable trade, wasn’t it?’
In any case, the Basic Mission was now over.
I flicked the blood from the tip of my sword and headed toward the cart that theGoblin raiding party had treasured.
“I wonder what’s in here…?”
The cart was filled with crude odds and ends.
There were several rusty, worn-out weapons that onlyGoblins would be pleased to use, unidentified dried meat, and even tableware from the human world that had somehow been stolen.
I had been brimming with anticipation after hearing that Common Grade equipment occasionally appeared if one was lucky, but it was obvious at a glance that I had not been so fortunate.
“Well, that’s disappointing, but….”
[Basic Mission complete.]
[Calculating rewards.]
“Auto-Storage.”
At once, most of the odds and ends haphazardly piled in the cart vanished into my Inventory with a ‘POOF.’
Thanks to that, only things that had not even qualified for Auto-Storage—things barely worth treating as items—remained in the cart….
“What’s this?”
One of them looked far from ordinary.
A smooth, black, oval sphere. This was clearly….
“An egg?”
It was a black egg unlike any I had seen before, larger than a chicken egg but smaller than an ostrich egg.
I could not be certain, but it did not look like useless junk.
The moment I picked up the egg, thinking I would put it in my Inventory and check it later, another System message appeared.
[You have demonstrated outstanding performance on the Tower’s 3rd Floor.]
[The Tower’s ‘Gaze’ turns toward you. A new Trial or Opportunity may be granted.]
I had expected those messages. What followed was a little different.
[Challenge the 3rd Floor Trial?]
Unlike the first Trial, the warning was fairly brief. It seemed the Tower had issued all the warnings it intended to give on the 2nd Floor.
I grinned.
At the bastard called the ‘Gaze’, wherever it might be watching from.
“I’ll take the challenge.”
Punk. As if it had to ask when it already knew.
***
[Commencing ‘Gaze’s Trial’.]
BWOOOO─!
A horn sounded from somewhere as soon as the message appeared.
“…?”
Somewhere?
Normally, you could tell which direction a sound came from.
Yet this one had come from somewhere.
The moment I turned my head at that strange question, horns blared from every direction—front, back, left, and right.
BWOOOOOO─!
A tremendous reverberation filled the entire sprawling wasteland.
“Ah.”
Far off on the horizon, clouds of dust were rising everywhere my gaze could reach.
It resembled the situation during the 2nd Floor Trial, but the scale of the approaching enemy force was entirely different.
Even adding another zero to their number would not have been enough.
[Mission Objective: Survive the all-out assault of the onrushing ‘Sandclaw Raiders’ and carry the ‘Strange Egg’ to the Safe Zone (canyon).]
[Failure Conditions: Destruction of the ‘Strange Egg’ or death of the Gaze Target.]
The mission description appeared a beat late, as if taunting me, instead of telling me immediately after the Trial began.
“Damn it! Took you long enough to tell me!”
I did not even dare attempt to go beyond the Trial’s stated objective as I had during the 2nd Floor Trial.
THUD, THUD, THUD, THUD!
The horde ofGoblins charged toward me, shaking the earth with a thunderous din.
I had to make a choice immediately.
‘Give up or press on.’
At that crossroads, I first checked the location of the Safe Zone, the mission objective.
Far along the path I had traveled, I could indeed see a canyon.
‘When did it get so far away?’
It was the same canyon that had been behind me when I first entered the 3rd Floor.
The problem was that even if the canyon was a Safe Zone, the path leading to it was not.
The route to the canyon was already crawling with those green dwarfs.
“Trial and Opportunity, my ass…!”
They might as well honestly say they wanted to kill me.
I had vaguely realized during the 2nd Floor Trial that there was an enormous gap between the difficulty of a Basic Mission and a Trial, but this was excessive.
The 3rd Floor’s Basic Mission was to wipe out sixGoblins, while its Trial required me to break through hundreds ofGoblins and escape?
“To hell with this. I’m not doing it.”
Just as the word surrender rose to my throat and I was about to spit it out.
CRACK!
“…?”
An odd sound came from directly below, and my gaze naturally shifted toward the egg.
“What, it was fertilized?”
No sooner had I said it than the hairline crack on the egg’s surface widened slightly.
TAP, TAP.
“…Huh?!”
Another small, adorable sound followed.
Something was moving inside.
‘Wait… they called it a Strange Egg… could that have been a hint?’
An old memory suddenly surfaced.
When I was young, there was a certain game I had played at the orphanage on a very old console that was more than a decade old.
It was a game based on the most successful IP in the world, unprecedented before or since.
Since several of us had shared a single console, our progress became jumbled every time we played, making the story impossible to follow.
Because of that, I had half given up on enjoying the game and did not know much about it, but I was certain of one thing.
‘Something incredible came out of that egg.’
― Hey, Kim Si-hyeon, you carried the egg over, right?! Something super strong came out of it. Want to see?
I had never touched the console again after delivering the egg, but even now I could clearly remember how excitedly the kid who had hatched it themselves had bragged to me.
‘…Come to think of it, I wonder if they’re doing well.’
It was as if he had saved the country in a past life. They were a lucky kid who had somehow been adopted even after reaching an age when his prospects of adoption had all but vanished.
‘I should’ve at least taken a look when he showed me what came out of that egg.’
While I was blithely lost in old memories, theGoblins that had looked the size of peas had grown to the size of chestnuts.
Facing the approaching green wave, I adjusted my grip on Nocturne.
It, too, was fully prepared.
Prelude’s chill had already faded, and the now-active Crescendo was slowly radiating heat.
Bolstered by that heat, I rekindled the fighting spirit that had gone cold.
“Fine. Maybe I’ll crack it open myself and see just how incredible the creature that comes out is.”
I might as well take a look too.
Let’s see what that super-strong creature looks like.