Chapter 165
“Do-Jin, something is wriggling down there!”
Karin called to him while he stared upward with a sinking feeling. When he turned around, he saw exactly what she meant. The snowfield below them twitched like something underneath was trying to crawl out.
[The Buried Ones awaken.]
Red and blue energy churned together, twisted, darkened into black, and sank back into the snow. The white lumps pushed upward like something trying to break free and turned into black silhouettes that roared.
“Grrraaaagh!”
They lunged at Do-Jin and Karin the moment their roar ended.
“Fuck me.”
Nothing about this quest was normal. The fight broke out before he even had a chance to think about running. The only good news was that Do-Jin’s spells actually worked on them. If they had spawned according to local level instead of quest level, he wouldn’t have been able to scratch a single one.
“Karin, you good?”
“Yes! I am perfe—”
Just then, three Buried Ones exploded at once under Karin’s punch. The Sanctuary had sealed part of her power, but she still had more than enough strength to crush enemies of this caliber.
I don’t even know if this is lucky or unlucky anymore...
Judging by everything he had seen, the Sanctuary looked damaged or incomplete, so it likely couldn’t fully suppress an Elder’s power. Whatever the reason, the problem demanded his full attention. If they kept fighting like this, they would get buried under sheer numbers.
“How many of these things are there?!” he shouted in frustration.
The entire slope below them crawled with black snowmen. More kept dragging themselves out of the snow every second.
“Shall I try counting?”
The way Karin asked so innocently almost made Do-Jin’s blood pressure spike.
“Count my ass! Run!”
No matter how scummy this game got, there was no way the quest expected him to kill hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of these fuckers. That meant the only real option was to push upward instead of trying to break through the monster wave flooding the lower slope.
Do-Jin grabbed Karin and sprinted uphill.
“Gggrraaaah!”
The Buried Ones clawed their way up from the snow above them, making a harsh, metal-scraping noise like someone had slit their throats. Their numbers were still far smaller than the ones swarming below. Do-Jin cut down anything that tried to block him and pushed forward fast. That was when something caught his eye. It was a swirling mass of black energy.
It looks like these damn snowmen are spawning from that thing. In any fight like this, whatever looked the most suspicious always turned out to be the cause. Hence, Do-Jin pointed at the black vortex and cast Flash Lance.
After a blinding burst of light pierced through the air, the vortex vanished like someone had yanked the plug out of a drain. At the same time, dozens of Buried Ones in that area collapsed like their strings had been cut.
“If you spot a clump of that black crap, break it first!”
“Yes! I saw it too!” Karin scanned the area after seeing what Do-Jin did. She found another black vortex and threw her hand toward it, planning to blow the whole front open with a burst of blood.
“Ah.”
Instead of detonating anything, the blood just splashed uselessly across the snow and turned the ground red. The moment it left her hand, it lost all force and fell flat.
However, Karin looked far from discouraged. I am still strong enough to fight.
She kicked a jagged rock sticking out beside her and snapped it clean through the layer of ice and snow. Getting a good grip on the broken chunk, Karin hurled it without hesitation. The rock tore through a bunch of the Buried Ones and slammed into the black vortex, setting off an eruption of snow.
“How was that?!” she shouted proudly.
“Yeah, good for you. Must be nice having that kind of strength.”
Do-Jin raised a wall of flame to block one side. The next vortex was too far away for him to hit it, so that path was a lost cause. He burned every Buried One that tried to block him and pushed uphill as fast as he could.
The higher he went, the fewer enemies spawned. Meanwhile, the slope below them grew thicker with bodies. The black shapes started to outnumber the white snow entirely. It looked like someone dumped ants all over a scoop of vanilla ice cream.
This is supposed to be a Sanctuary? What a load of shit.
He had no idea what kind of disaster turned the place into this mess, but it was awful. Anyone should have been freezing to death in this climate, but here he was sweating bullets while melting black snowmen with fire like some idiot.
“Do-Jin!” Karin shouted, but he was already going full steam ahead.
As he sprinted uphill and threw out spells, all while complaining in his head, Do-Jin was suddenly lifted off the ground.
Karin had grabbed him by the waist and jumped straight into the air, having seen the giant made of packed black snow that just burst out of the slope. Its massive fist swung through the air where he’d just been. Looking down, he noticed that it was the same kind of monster as the Buried Ones, only much bigger and much meaner.
“The chest!” Karin jerked her chin toward it while they were still midair.
A tightly packed mass of black energy pulsed inside the giant’s heart, and it seemed to be the source of the trouble. With his target set, Do-Jin fired a Flame Shell midair, then dove straight for the giant’s core. Fire and black energy twisted together for a split second before the blast tore outward, instantly downing the giant.
When Karin landed and set Do-Jin down on the snow, he muttered, “This place just keeps fucking surprising me...”
He barely had time to think he’d survived one crisis before the next problem showed itself. More massive silhouettes pushed themselves upright in the direction they needed to travel. Giants had risen from the snow up to their waists, swords in hand, welcoming the intruders like they had been waiting for a fight.
[The Forgotten Ones awaken.]
He would have preferred if those things had stayed asleep forever and rotted in whatever forgotten hole they belonged in, but they had woken up for no good reason and were making everyone’s life a pain in the ass.
Do-Jin let out a long, exhausted sigh. “Karin, you can take the ones on the right, right?”
“Of course I can!”
He already knew she had plenty of strength today, so that answer didn’t surprise him. Do-Jin nodded once and rushed forward.
The attacks swept across the ground, crashed down from above, and stabbed in from every angle, like the whole battlefield wanted him dead. Their bodies had swollen to monstrous size, so every swing counted as a full-area hit.
Do-Jin poured every last drop of power into Psychokinetic Enhancement, then rolled, vaulted, and slipped past each strike that came flying at him. He moved through the pack and blew up the Forgotten Ones’ hearts in order of how close they were, mixing mana into each hit until the cores burst.
So weak spells do nothing against these bastards.
Their churning black hearts reacted the moment he pushed in enough mana, and the things overloaded on their own and popped like rotten fruit. That was the bottom line. If he hit their weak point with a spell that carried enough force, the things blew up by themselves.
For most players, this would have been a nightmare that felt outright impossible to clear. However, his firepower as a mage, paired with movement no mage should have had, turned the Forgotten Ones into collapsing piles of meat that fell apart as fast as he moved.
On the other side, Karin crushed everything that tried to hit her. She broke swords, smashed spears, shoved fists aside, and flattened giant snowmen with nothing but overwhelming force. She fought like the weight of their strikes meant nothing.
They pushed forward for a long time, and once they climbed far above the crash site, the flow of battle shifted. The smaller snowmen refused to cross a certain invisible line. They charged like wild animals, reached that point, and shattered into snow the moment they passed it.
Those things are contaminated. That boundary must block whatever is corrupting them, Do-Jin guessed. Even the bigger ones stopped showing up somewhere along the climb.
“So I guess we can actually breathe for a second,” Do-Jin said, although he still kept his guard up.
LOST was the kind of place where enemies could break their own rules and charge right over a boundary like that whenever the game felt like screwing him over. Something could just as easily jump out from the side at any moment.
“Alright. I need to recover properly first.”
Do-Jin figured he should handle his maintenance while he had the chance, so he topped off his HP and MP first. He chugged the potions as quickly as he could without taking his eyes off the area around them, ready for anything that might lunge out at him. As if in answer to his caution, a rumble rolled in from behind. Do-Jin tore his gaze away from the slope below and caught sight of a long streak of white dust rising in the distance.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me...”
It was an avalanche. He had been bracing for new enemies, and this cursed sanctuary decided to throw something even worse at them.
“Karin!” Do-Jin shouted while preparing a spell.
They were out in the open with nowhere to hide, so a direct hit from that massive avalanche could wipe them out. It wasn’t something they could dodge, either, so he chose to make some cover. He pressed his hand to the ground and cast Frozen Wall, and the snow around them hardened and surged up into a small dome.
This will never hold against something of that scale...
Do-Jin immediately cast Rock Shield to reinforce the dome, then layered another Frozen Wall over it, forming a second, smaller dome inside the first. That gave them three layers of protection. He strengthened that final Frozen Wall by activating the Destruction Rune, squeezing out every last drop of power. Once he was done, Do-Jin pressed his hand against the side facing the avalanche and braced himself.
“Karin, you need to keep pressure on it. If this thing collapses, we are dead.”
The impact from the avalanche hit before he even finished speaking. The first blow slammed into the dome, and a constant, crushing weight of snow piled on top of it as wave after wave rolled through. The tiny shelter Do-Jin built started to crack under the pressure. The walls buckled with a harsh crunch, and he poured every ounce of strength into reinforcing it on the fly just to keep the whole thing from collapsing.
Karin joined in, pressing both hands against the ceiling and pushing upward with her whole body. Shockingly, her strength eased some of the pressure that had been ripping the Magic Circuits apart a moment ago.
When this quest is over, I’m spending a week in some warm place and not moving a damn muscle.
Do-Jin hated both heat and cold, but right now, roasting under the sun sounded a lot better than freezing to death beneath a mountain of snow. The steady beat of death pounding on the dome suddenly faded.
“I think it’s over,” Karin said.
She twisted in the half-collapsed shelter and rolled her eyes up, like she was peering out from the rubble of a building that had pancaked. Do-Jin, who looked like someone who’d survived by squeezing through some random gap in a disaster zone, answered back.
“Give me a moment. I need to breathe.”
He was too tired to even lift a finger. He’d lived through all kinds of hell before, but today easily ranked near the top. He’d been flying through the sky before crashing, sprinted up a snowy slope with tens of thousands of monsters on his heels, wrestled snow giants, and now he’d gotten buried under an avalanche.
How was he supposed to make sense of living through things that would each be a once-in-a-lifetime horror story on their own, all within fifteen minutes, even in a virtual world?
“That was kind of fun! I’ve never even read anything like this in a novel, and I’ve never been stuck in such a tiny space either!” Karin’s cheerful voice stabbed him right in the chest.
Do-Jin stared at her with a tired smile and whispered back with no strength left in his voice, “At least one of us is enjoying this. Good for you...”