7-3. Combat Rewards
After gorging himself on souls and securing one more Beast trait, Suhyeok turned to collect his loot.
The chaotic sprawl of the annihilated pursuit squad.
If he'd had to gather the loot himself, it would've been a pain.
He'd have had to rummage through corpses, strip armor, and handle all manner of grunt work. But Suhyeok was spared that trouble.
"Here—I've gathered everything."
The young man had done it for him.
Well, more accurately, the bandits had already stuffed everything into sacks beforehand, so the young man had simply dragged those sacks to one spot.
Suhyeok said "Mm," and started digging through the sacks.
What did Juha put in here?
Most of the loot consisted of the pursuit squad's weapons—swords, bows, daggers, spears, axes—along with various sets of armor.
With a game developer's eye, Suhyeok immediately grasped the 'intent' behind these items.
'An initial equipment selection.'
Because every player had a preferred weapon.
If you liked fast attack speed, pick a dagger; if you preferred a heavy single hit over speed, grab an axe—that sort of thing.
To think that what the game had handled one way was delivered like this here. Savoring the fresh impression, Suhyeok selected a short sword.
"Excuse me a moment."
Then he peeled off his suffocatingly tight clothes.
Even though they'd been a generously cut monk-style robe, his frame had grown enough to restrict his movement.
Stripping down revealed a fur-covered chest and a rugged, muscular body.
Just two traits and I've changed this much. His arms had gotten somewhat longer too, driving home that this really was a fantasy world.
As a result, he had no choice in clothes and armor. Only one set fit his body, so he put that on.
'Feels good, though.'
With a manly physique and quality gear to boot, a swagger crept in—Maybe I'm actually strong?
Worth taking the Beast tech tree. He was thinking that as he rummaged further through the sacks...... when his brow furrowed.
"What? That's it?"
"Huh? What's wrong?"
Don't tell me the equipment selection was the whole reward? After more digging, coin purses and a decent amount of provisions emerged, but this couldn't possibly be all.
These days, a game built like this was a game that flopped.
You had to be generous and then some to even get people to play...... Suhyeok growled.
"Hey. What's your deal?"
"Me?"
The blunt phrasing came out because he was caught off guard, but the question was whether this kid might be some SS-rank character.
If they'd bundled a single SS-rank companion into the early start, he'd have been willing to accept that as fair—but after chatting briefly, that didn't seem to be the case.
"Hmm...... Right, Rowan. But listen, when you were gathering this stuff, was there anything unusual? Did those bandits pocket something when they were looting?"
"Me?"
"No, not you—the bandits. I'm asking in case it dissolved in the magic. You were there."
"Hmm? At the time, they told me if I helped gather, they'd knock down the ransom for my young master, so I was just stuffing things into sacks without thinking. Nothing that stood out...... Oh!"
"What?"
"That one who turned into a monster—he asked the others if they knew what something was."
"What was it?"
Rowan shrugged.
"How would I know? I think he stuck it in a coin purse, though?"
"A coin purse?"
Suhyeok untied the coin purses one by one.
He sifted through heaps of silver and copper coins of various sizes. Before long, he nodded.
That's right. Now we're talking.
In his hand was a coin distinctly different from all the others—a purple coin.
***
WHINNY—! BRRR.
The final piece of his first combat reward was a jet-black warhorse.
Dragon Count Damlir's ultimate had annihilated the pursuit squad, but one horse had survived.
How on earth did it survive? Baffling, but Suhyeok chalked it up simply.
'Juha threw in a mount. Packed it tight, I see.'
But unlike the initial equipment selection, this wasn't something to celebrate without reservation. Having a mount in a game carried implications.
It meant the map was vast enough to need one, that various regions and spots existed, and that—proportionally, if not more—there was a mountain of things to do.
As the developer, Suhyeok couldn't not know this, but.
'So what? I'll just do it. I've got plenty of time, and I'm a bachelor now anyway.'
He brushed it off.
After all, he was a freewheeling bachelor—well, divorcé—with nothing to answer for.
The knowledge that dying just meant restarting fanned that attitude further.
"Everything's loaded."
"Mm."
"Um...... Shall I lead the way, then?"
"Mm."
'Still, I should start making a plan sooner or later.' Suhyeok's thoughts chained on.
What to do going forward.
He had a rough idea of how to grow stronger, so next came learning how this world worked and whether there was a place for him in it.
I'll rescue this 'young master' first and see. The kid hasn't said it outright, but nine times out of ten he's a noble, so if I play this right......
As Suhyeok sank into thought and only petted the horse, Rowan pressed.
"Sir mage!"
"Hm? Oh, yeah. Lead the way. I'm not stalling because I don't want to help, so don't give me that look."
"......Of course. I also wasn't thinking you'd make me do all the work and then leave."
Kid says what's on his mind, doesn't he?
Earlier he'd been worried Suhyeok might not help, but now that he'd put in the labor, his attitude was: I deserve fair compensation.
Suhyeok smirked and waved for him to lead.
Rowan spurred his horse ahead.
They entered the forest and followed a narrow trail—likely the bandits' commuting path—for a while, tied the horses partway as a precaution, then walked the rest on foot.
After a fair bit of walking, huts came into view.
Ringed by wooden walls, the construction was crude but had a degree of scale.
"This is it." Rowan pointed at the hideout after finishing the approach and grumbled.
"Those bastards tricked my young master and me into thinking it was a village of woodcutters. We honestly believed them."
"That carriage parked at the front gate—that's yours?"
Rowan nodded.
And judging by the expectant look he was giving, he clearly hoped for something like <Fingers of Valmorgan>—but......
"Come here."
Without mana stones, that was out of the question.
I need to figure out where to get mana stones, too. As Suhyeok circled around to approach the hideout from the rear, Rowan muttered.
"You're not planning to go in, are you? It's dangerous. Wouldn't it be better to use magic from a distance? With that spell from before, four bandits would be......"
"Your young master's in there too, isn't he? I don't even know what your young master looks like, and you want me to fire that spell in there?"
Honestly, the fact that you weren't hit earlier was pure luck.
Swallowing those words, he chided, and Rowan seemed to snap to his senses.
"Ah...... you're right. I wasn't thinking. Just in case, let me tell you—my young master just came of age, with silver hair......"
"Shh!"
Suhyeok raised a finger.
The hideout below didn't look right. A moment later, Rowan pointed in alarm.
"Huh? Wh-what's that? That huge thing?"
A standoff was underway inside the hideout.
In the clearing surrounded by huts, five bandits were squaring off against a monster the size of a house.
That shape—boulders undulating. Suhyeok recalled something from the monster concept designs.
"A Stone Snake. That thing beat us to the raid."
"A Stone Snake? I don't know what it is, but it's a monster like that earlier one?"
"Like earlier?"
He must mean the Kobold Human.
Suhyeok started to explain, then laughed and gave up. Even though they might look like the same kind of monster, the Kobold Human and the Stone Snake were fundamentally different creatures.
public class Kobold : Character, IBeast { …
public class Stone_Snake : Monster, IReptile, IElemental { …
Different from birth—from the code level, in fact. The Kobold, despite its appearance, was a 'person' inheriting the Character class.
In plain terms, that meant NPC.
The Stone Snake, on the other hand, inherited the Monster class, making it a creature that was fundamentally a monster.
Barring a few special cases, it was the kind that unconditionally attacked humans on sight...... Suhyeok made a quick decision.
"We need to join forces with those bandits."
"What? Why? We could just let them fight it out......"
"Unless you want to watch your young master get squashed flat, you'd better move too. I'll hold that thing off."
With those instructions he ran—but not toward the hideout. He ran to where they'd tied the horses.
WHINNY—?
He needed to swap weapons.
He gave the still-skittish horse a gentle pat, then pulled a sack down from its back.
He drew a weapon from it, switched his grip, and ran back to the hideout—by which point the fight had already broken out and half the hideout lay in ruins.
The massive Stone Snake had thrashed its body in a frenzy. Suhyeok spotted the reason and shouted.
"Hey! Stabbing its eye was a good call, but if you're going to do it, you should've gotten the other one too!"
"Who the hell are you?"
A Kobold Human who'd been fighting the Stone Snake.
Another Kobold Human among the hideout's bandits, it seemed. Good—this works, Suhyeok thought, and rather than answer, he Growl();'d.
"Grrrrr......"
"Huh?"
public interface IBeast {
void Growl();
…
A low-frequency rumble rolled from Suhyeok's thickened throat.
Growl(), the default shared skill of Beast types, didn't paralyze fellow Beasts—instead, it served as friend-or-foe identification.
Suhyeok could do this because he knew the internal code of the Growl method. The bandit who'd turned Kobold, disarmed by a strange sense of kinship, reflexively Growl();'d back.
"Grr...... Huh? Why did I......"
"Focus on the fight. I'm here to help."
"Oh! Yeah, hurry up and help. That monster barged in out of nowhere!"
Suhyeok gripped his weapon and joined the fray.
But 'joining' was generous—the bandits aside from the Kobold Human were barely participating.
"Wh-what's going on? That monster's one thing, but...... that's Tolson, right?"
"I don't know. I think so, but......"
"It's because of the mage. I told you. I told you a mage showed up! He summoned a monster to attack us earlier! I barely escaped alive, and now here too......"
Those guys wouldn't be any help anyway.
Suhyeok ignored the confused bandits and focused on the fight.
"GRRR! My home! I'll kill you!"
The Kobold Human charged the Stone Snake as it smashed through a hut in a frenzy.
He'd given himself over to feral instinct and was clawing wildly, which might scratch an eye but had no hope of dealing real damage.
Because the Stone Snake was an elementally imbued monster.
using KingRPG.Basic.Elemental;
public class Stone_Snake : Monster, IReptile, IElemental {
public ElementType Element { get; } = ElementType.Stone;
…
The Stone Snake's element was Stone. Slashing damage barely did half of half. Maybe if he had an Aura Blade......
Which meant killing a Stone Snake required a way to counter that element—and that was exactly what Suhyeok was holding.
"You go for the eyes!"
He gave the order to the Kobold bandit and charged.
While the bandit clawed at the Stone Snake's remaining eye and drew its attention, Suhyeok closed in and raised his weapon. In his hands was—
A war hammer.
Steel that could shatter stone.
This was why the weapon selection was a blessing. On top of that, add the new [trait] Suhyeok had just acquired.
[ Combat Instinct ]
A trait he'd chosen despite the restriction: melee physical attacks only.
[Combat Instinct] turned every attack against an enemy into a 'critical hit.' And critical hits ignored defense, so...... Suhyeok brought the hammer down.
CRACK—!!
The sound of splitting rock. The Stone Snake screamed.