Chapter 344: Episode 344_Life Is About Coming Empty-Handed and Leaving Loaded (5)

8.

Every skill has a duration and a cooldown.

Unless it is a passive, only a handful of skills can be used indefinitely. The more a skill is expected to impact game balance, the shorter its duration and the longer its cooldown. That is how balance is maintained.

This isn’t a principle that applies only to games. It is how the world works.

High risk, high return.

A skill with tremendous power requires a corresponding period of downtime.

Runes are no different.

Effects vary by type, but in general, runes are extremely impactful in combat. The difference is simply whether Simin’s class can squeeze extreme efficiency out of a given rune or not. In any case, Sudal’s runes gave Simin the ultimate answer to his lack of area-of-effect skills. In exchange for letting him use abilities he normally couldn’t, he couldn’t enjoy the rune’s effects again after the 300 seconds were up.

Of course, from an outside perspective, "high return" was bullshit. The skills didn’t belong to Simin in the first place; they were more like a bonus tacked onto his existing strength.

Above all, even without rune effects, Han Simin was strong.

His level was low, but his stats had long since blown past the limits of ordinary users. His gear was not only covered in items that current players would struggle to obtain, but it was also caked with absurd +15 enhancement values.

And that was the hammer he was swinging.

It ignored level, stats, and everything else, felling one person per hit. Now, rune effects were stacked on top of that.

Human perception is always relative, so after experiencing Simin with runes, they might briefly feel that the rune-less Simin was noticeably weaker once the duration ended.

On top of that, this battlefield was filled with allies on all sides.

With his ability to send dozens, sometimes hundreds, flying with a single swing, and the crowd packed so tightly that there was no room to step back, he was nothing less than a savior to the soldiers who had been resigned to their deaths.

“Raaah!”

In an instant, Han Simin was swallowed up by soldiers and disappeared from view.

Even the demons watching couldn’t hide their bewilderment.

“What is that human?”

“Is he on our side?”

“He looks human, so why?”

“I don’t think he’s with us. We’ve taken no small amount of damage from that. His power is at least on par with an upper-rank demon.”

The demons fell silent.

From their perspective, too, they couldn’t help but feel both curiosity and tension toward a human who had suddenly joined the battle and was unleashing unexpected firepower.

Normally, they would have just watched the humans fight among themselves and wondered how best to cook and kill both sides. But even they were rattled by the humans’ fierce resistance and unanticipated power.

An uncalculated variable was something a warrior race had to treat with caution.

That was why the demons didn’t touch Simin or the humans within his attack range.

They were not stupid. In matters of battle, they were smart. For the sake of victory, they became cunning.

They certainly possessed great power, but instead of trying to show it off with hundreds of thousands of enemies at their backs, they were thinking first about how to kill the enemy more efficiently.

Of course, not every demon was like that. The battlefield was vast, and there were many demons.

So, the demons took a step back and watched the situation unfold.

“No matter how strong a human is, there are simply too many of them.”

“That power from earlier must have been a one-off.”

“There’s been no reaction since, so it seems that way.”

“In our terms, it could be an Awakening state.”

“A power that draws out hundreds of times one’s strength for a limited time... even among demons, that is rarely seen.”

Swept up in the crowd, Han Simin was no longer visible even to the demons. Humans occasionally flew out of the mass, but only briefly, to report that he was still alive. They judged that things would quiet down soon enough.

It didn’t take long to prove that judgment wrong.

Twenty seconds.

Long if one were counting, but on a battlefield like this, it felt like twenty years. After that span passed, a cataclysmic force slammed down from above, punching a hole through the dense crowd and momentarily blotting out the sky.

And it exploded.

The center of the teeming mass of bodies blew open.

“Nice! They’re all dead!”

Han Simin appeared in the gap, his entire body drenched in blood and caked in dirt.

*

He had bought a truly massive number of items from Nodaji.

The types were varied, and so were the options. Among them, just as before, were items that were high-grade in name only, with options that made one wonder what on earth they were for. But as always, he had instinctively scooped up anything his gut told him would be useful somewhere, even if it seemed like crap.

He hadn’t expected to be able to use all of them in this war.

What was certain, however, was that there were a few items he could use to devastating effect right now.

SQUEAK! SQUEAK!

SQUEAK-SQUEAK-SQUEAK!

The Rabbits darted across the battlefield, targeting openings, biting the throats of humans who looked weaker than them, then snatching up anything that looked expensive in that brief moment before slipping back into the crowd.

And in a safe hiding spot were Han Yeori, Sudal, and one Rabbit.

They had been given a single mission.

First and foremost, protect their own lives and maintain a distance from which they could cast buffs on Simin. After using buffs, they were to recover mana as quickly as possible to extend his combat uptime. And Sudal was to use runes as if they were infinite.

Obviously, the runes couldn’t literally be used infinitely. For Simin, they were like a bonus ability, but for Sudal, there was still such a thing as a cooldown.

Until he met Nodaji, Simin hadn’t even considered using them infinitely. Not because he didn’t want to, but because there had been no way.

Now, however, there was.

SQUEAK!

GRUNT?

The Rabbit that had been excused from running around the battlefield pulled a small vial of purple liquid from its magic pouch and held it out to Sudal.

Sudal, resting after using a rune, took it with a puzzled look.

SQUEAK! SQUEAK!

The Rabbit shoved the vial into Sudal’s mouth. Sudal, not understanding what was happening, swallowed the liquid.

“What are you guys doing?” Han Yeori asked cautiously, watching in fascination.

SQUEAK! SQUEAK!

The Rabbit didn’t even look at her; it just patted Sudal’s back to help him swallow.

“Um... guys?”

The Rabbits, just like their owner, were brutally realistic and didn’t even glance at anyone who looked to be of a lower status than them. They didn’t care whether the person was a beauty or not.

Before Yeori could even feel properly sulky about being completely ignored by her brother’s pets, light burst from Sudal’s body as he swallowed the purple potion.

At the same time, Sudal leaped up.

GRUNT?

He couldn’t see a hologram in front of his eyes like a user could, but he could feel it. Sudal had once been a boss monster that formed one pillar of the Main Quest. His combat ability was lacking, but his level was still high.

He checked his own body. There were no physical changes. Instead, what had been added—or rather, what had been doped—was an ability that was far more necessary in the current situation.

GRUNT!

The rune activated. The jewel on Sudal’s body, which had lost its light due to the cooldown, regained its glow.

And the effect triggered again.

A potion that reset cooldowns.

An ultra-rare item of which Nodaji had managed to obtain only ten vials. Its grade was even Special. Even then, it was only ten because he had divided it; in truth, it was the concentrated essence of a treasure he had only managed to dig up after risking his life, dying more than ten times, and finally getting lucky in a tomb.

And as befit such a treasure, its effect was absolute.

On this battlefield, where every second counted, waiting out cooldowns was less predictable than just betting on when Simin would die.

Another series of dazzling explosions followed.

“Hey! We won! Shit! I’ll wipe them all out in ten shots!”

Han Simin’s shout, overflowing with confidence, shook the battlefield. On top of that came the joy of finally leveling up again after a very long time, overcoming his experience penalty.

“Oppa! I’m leveling up a lot too! Hehe!”

Han Simin was speechless.

Of course, that joy was quickly doused by the cold reality that she was a buffer specialized in leveling, getting a free ride on experience just by casting buffs from the back line.

9.

Everyone wishes that dreams could last forever.

Because in dreams, you can do anything.

Someone without a single dollar to their name can, in a dream, become Kenji, stand atop the 63 Building, and rain down twenty thousand $50 bills in ecstasy. Someone whose mechanics are so bad they can’t even clear a game tutorial can, in a dream, single-handedly mow down tens of thousands of enemies regardless of stat differences.

That is the power of dreams. A place that lets you experience what you cannot do.

For Han Simin, this battlefield was a dream.

He had spent over a year playing Fantastic World, desperately longing for an area-of-effect skill. After becoming an Enhancer and a Tamer, he had only been able to watch from afar, imagining scenes he could now paint for real. And he had been painting that picture here for over an hour.

There had been times in between when the Explosion Rune didn’t appear, but at his current specs, no rune could put him in a losing situation. His performance was so overwhelming that it wouldn’t have been strange to call him the ruler of the battlefield.

Without the slightest exaggeration, he had killed enemies numbering in the hundreds of thousands within that hour.

Whether "enemies" was the right word was debatable, but in any case.

Han Simin wanted that dream to last forever. At this rate, it felt like he really could conquer the continent in two months, just playing the game nonstop without sleep.

But dreams, by their nature, have an end.

Unless you fall asleep forever and pass on to the next world, you have to wake up.

He fell silent.

And Simin, who made money so he could eat well and live well, was never going to sleep forever. So, of course, the dream ended.

The fact that rune effects were no longer chaining together led to only one conclusion.

“It’s already over?”

On a battlefield where one minute felt like a year, the fifty minutes he had spent rampaging had felt like five seconds. For the first time in a while, 『Fantastic World』 had felt like a game, not like reality.

A deep sense of regret washed over him.

’Just a little longer.’

He wanted to whine like a child, but fortunately, his rational mind was colder and clearer than ever.

His gaze swept his surroundings quickly.

No one came within sixty-five feet of him. This was the result he had carved out over fifty minutes in a battlefield gone mad. It was an achievement that even the countless demons had failed to accomplish.

There were so many holograms in front of his eyes that he couldn’t even count them all. A surge of pride washed over him.

But he had no time to bask in it.

After fifty minutes, silence finally fell.

For a brief moment, people tried to understand what that silence meant. Then, a bit later than Simin, they reached the same conclusion.

“I-is it... over?”

“I think it’s over!”

Those who had once charged in with the singular thought that they could win, only to be bloodied for it, could not recklessly rush in again.

Instead, they took a step.

For the first time in fifty minutes, their steps were not backward, but toward Han Simin.

He frowned and raised his hammer again.

The thousands of people closest to him flinched.

In that split second, Han Simin sprang forward.

’Son of a bitch.’

The fantasy of single-handedly breaking through an army of millions to conquer a continent was the stuff of cheap novels, not reality. It was never going to work.

“Everyone, fall back!”

He had expected them to retreat by now. He had thrown the demons at them as bait, figuring they would withdraw their forces to focus on the demons instead of Rich Territory. In that gap, he would move the demons elsewhere to protect his home.

He was speechless.

But the world didn’t always move according to Han Simin’s plans.

Which meant...