Chapter 317

"A Legendary class has been inherited."

The voice came from the speakers set into the boardroom ceiling. It was cold and even, neither male nor female, and it carried no feeling at all.

Yoon Sangmin didn't wait for the rest. He opened his desk drawer, took out the plastic bottle of antacids, and shook three tablets into his palm before the main monitor had even finished lighting up.

[Legendary class inherited: Kruger's Successor]

[Player: Viper (Eliot Harving)]

"Kruger's Successor," Yoon Nahee read off her tablet. She pushed her orange glasses up her nose. "He cleared the hidden trials in the Ashfall Region and came out with the class. Genesis Guild."

Sangmin chewed. The tablets tasted like sweet chalk and did nothing at all for the burning under his ribs. "Genesis," he said. "Of course it's Genesis."

"Player Viper is the fourth Legend registered to the territory of Stormbreak," Morpheus said.

"I can count." Sangmin held up one finger at a time. "The Zenith. The Dual Legend. The Magic Saint. And now a Legendary Tailor." He stared at his own hand like it belonged to somebody else. "Four Legends. In one territory."

"Six Legendary classes," Nahee said, without looking up. "Rudra and Piaro have two each."

Sangmin put his hand down very slowly. Then he swallowed the chalk, which took two tries.

He had spent years helping plan how territories in Satisfy were supposed to grow. A player who got a territory was meant to spend a long, patient stretch of real time turning a village into a town, and a town into something that deserved a name on the map. Rudra had been handed a ruined border city full of starving survivors. Only over two years passed and now that city held four Legends, a budding army, three knight division, two towers, a half a dozen allied races, and enough raw strength to swallow a kingdom whole if its lord ever wished.

He didn't like that last part. He didn't like any of it, but he especially didn't like that part.

"It gets worse," Nahee said.

She said it in her usual flat voice, which somehow made it worse. She swiped her finger across the tablet, and a new chart slid onto the main display. A green line dropped hard into a deep red valley, then climbed back up steeply on the right.

Sangmin closed his eyes. "Please tell me that isn't Stormbreak's economy."

"It's Stormbreak's economy." Nahee tapped the bottom of the valley. "After the Devil Monarch's clone attacked, our projection gave them a six-month slump at the very least. Most of their buildings were destroyed, and Rudra had burned through the treasury on enhancement stones. That slump was supposed to be the thing that slowed them down for a while."

Sangmin opened one eye. "And?"

"They're already most of the way back. At this rate, they'll be fully recovered in another month. Two months, instead of six."

Sangmin let his forehead drop onto the desk. It made a hollow little thump. He spoke into the wood. "How."

"Two things." Nahee brought up the territory logs. "First, the Sage's Tower. Players and NPCs sell their skills to Rudra's clone for credits, and guild members buy them back. Gold moves in and out of that building every single day. He didn't wait for the treasury to refill. He made his own knowledge into something people would pay for."

"And the second?"

"Genesis Breath. He taught a breathing technique to his citizens. It roughly doubled how long a worker can keep going before they need to rest. Their builders cleared the rubble and put the walls back up faster than any city we've ever recorded."

Sangmin turned his head sideways on the desk so he could see the screen without lifting it. "Fine. They rebuilt fast. But that line isn't slowing down. By the end of it, they'll be higher than they were before the attack."

"That's the Orcs."

There was a pause.

"The what?"

"Rudra cleared Mellory's Grand Trial," Nahee said. She pulled up a short clip from the replay: Rudra in a sunlit hall, looking deeply uncomfortable, while a goddess beamed at him like he was the best thing she had seen in a century. "He became the goddess of beauty's Muse for this generation. As a thank-you, she helped him recruit her worshipper tribes to his territory. Orcs. Ogres. Centaurs. More are still being recruiting."

"Monsters," Sangmin said.

"Very good-looking, very motivated monsters." Nahee scrolled to a page of numbers. "Each one of them does the work of about five human laborers. They want to work, too. They think a hard day's work keeps their muscles looking nice. So the city isn't just recovering. It's about to boom."

On the far side of the table, Lee Gookrae sighed, took out his phone, and sent Nahee some money. A second later, her tablet gave a quiet chime. She glanced at it, nodded once, and went back to the chart. Neither of them said a word about it. Sangmin decided he didn't want to know how long they had been betting on Stormbreak's slump, or which of them had picked two months.

At the head of the table, Chairman Lim Cheolho laughed, a deep, warm sound that filled the room. He had his chair tipped back and his hands folded on his stomach, and he was smiling at the green line with open pride.

"This is why I love it," he said. "We build the world as carefully as we know how. Then someone walks in and finds a door we never drew, just by being stubborn and a little bit nice."

"Nice isn't the word I'd use," Sangmin muttered. He finally sat up and pointed at the trial log still glowing in the corner of the screen. "And I still don't understand the tailor. Kruger's trials were built so almost nobody could finish them at this point in time. Morpheus, how did he get through?"

"The primary factor was the food buffs he consumed," Morpheus said.

Sangmin stared at the ceiling. "Food?"

"Without the buffs from Stormbreak's food, Player Viper's probability of reaching the fifth trial was below five percent. The first four trials required hours of continuous work without a single error. A Unique-rated item on the first attempt. Fifteen distinct Rare-rated items from five materials. An item rebuilt from a damaged blueprint. Most craftsmen fail these trials due to fatigue, not a lack of skill."

"And he didn't," Nahee said.

"He maintained a three-stack Genesis Meat Pie buff throughout. The Focus bonus prevented fatigue errors. With it, his probability of reaching the fifth trial was 43.2 percent. Once he reached it, his probability of clearing it was 82.4 percent. The fifth trial required an original design. Player Viper had already begun drafting one before entering the hall, based on Player Rudra's Ultimate Enhanced coat and the Devil Monarch clone's suit. The condition was partially satisfied before the trial began."

The Chairman smiled. "So the pies got him to the door, and the coat he was already making opened it."

"Correct," Morpheus said.

Sangmin rubbed his temples. That was the part that kept him up at night. Not the tailor. Not even the four Legends. It was the building in the middle of the city with the clone standing inside it.

"Then explain the Sage's Tower to me," he said. "Because the way I see it, Rudra can copy any skill anyone performs in front of him. Every player, every NPC, every knight. Give it a year, and he'll have every skill in the game."

"He has copied a little over a hundred so far," Morpheus said.

Sangmin reached for the antacid bottle.

"Of those, seven fit his combat style and can be relied on."

Sangmin's hand stopped halfway.

"Seven?"

"Seven," Morpheus said. "The Deep Sage class allows him to learn nearly any skill. That does not make every skill useful to him. Many of the skills he can technically use are incompatible with his combat style, and several interfere with his Staff Saint skills. Others cannot be used at all, because he does not meet their requirements. Most of his knight's sword techniques require Sword Energy, which he does not possess. Player Gold's Berserker skills require the Madness stat. Player Echo's assassination skills require Killing Intent Resource. Based on the combat style he has shown so far, only seven of the copied skills are reliable."

"What about the magic?" Nahee asked. "He has Mumud's whole tree."

"He does not have a developed magic core. He can cast only the five spells Mumud imparted to him personally. That exception exists because of the Magic Saint's talent. The rest of the tree remains unusable until his [Mana Core] has reached the sufficient stage using the [Mana Core Development] skill has been properly used. The one spell he created himself consumed a knowledge-creation slot. Those slots are limited."

"So what did he actually get?" Sangmin asked.

"The basics of cooking, alchemy and arcane work, which he never had a reliable way to learn without those classes. Mana Core Development. The High Witch's Supreme Witchcraft. The Night Tiger Chieftain's True Silence. Golden Lion Chieftain's King's Roar. Two eyesight skills that came from the Sky Roc Chieftain. Player Red's Phantom's Domain. And a basic light armor mastery, which is useful, since light armor is all he wears."

The Chairman laughed again. "A hundred tools in the shed, and he only carries seven."

Sangmin let out a long breath, and a little of the tension went out of his shoulders. It wasn't good news. It was just less bad than he'd expected, which in this job was close enough to good news.

"I can only hope he finishes Asterion's quest soon," he said, mostly to himself. "If we want any kind of balance at all."

Nobody answered that. Morpheus said nothing.

"Still," Sangmin went on, because he couldn't stop now that he had started. "Look at the whole picture. His guild members eat food that makes them stronger than anyone else at their level. They can buy skills that other players would need a year to find. They're climbing the rankings faster every week, and people are starting to notice. And the city behind them keeps growing, because five-human Orcs keep showing up asking for work. If this keeps going, what does every other player in the game think when they look at Stormbreak? That the race is already over. And then they stop logging in."

"Director Lee?" the Chairman said. "You're quiet."

Lee Gookrae looked up from his tablet. He was grinning, which was not the face anyone else in the room was making. "Sorry. I was redoing the southern regional timeline. All of it. Again." He tapped the screen happily. "Four Legends in one city wrecked about two years of my planning. I'm going to be working nights for a month. I love it."

Sangmin looked at him with real pity. "You're a sick man."

"I'm a happy man," Gookrae corrected.

Lim Cheolho sat forward and rested his arms on the table. When he spoke again, his voice was gentle.

"Director, you worry the other players will give up. But look at what we built. These people care about this world. They argue about it, and they save it from each other, and they treat our NPCs like their own families. Rudra isn't growing in an empty room. Everyone else is running too." He nodded at Nahee. "Show him Lubana."

Nahee brought up a new window. It showed a group of players led by a middle-aged man gathered in a camp outside Lubana.

"The Ares Army," Nahee said. "They found a special quest in Lubana a few days ago."

"And from the look of it," the Chairman said, "Ares is currently capable of earning that item's approval."

Sangmin turned around in his chair. "That item? Wait. You mean..."

The Chairman only smiled.

Sangmin knew that smile. It meant he wasn't going to get anything else. He sighed and turned back to the screens.

"Fine," he said. "If we're talking about balance, there's one more name. The other Legend who leads a guild full of even more talented players boosted with the legendary blacksmith's items. Morpheus, bring up Grid."

"Displaying Player Grid's current location," Morpheus said.

Sangmin leaned back in his chair.

The feed switched.

The bright plazas of Stormbreak vanished. The main monitor went pitch black.

A split second later, the audio caught up, and the boardroom filled with the sound of a grown man screaming at the very top of his lungs while flailing his arms and legs.

Slowly, the picture adjusted to the dark. Rough stone walls rushed past on every side. In the middle of the frame, arms and legs flailing, cape snapping above his head, Grid was falling down a hole so deep that the bottom wasn't anywhere in sight.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"

Nobody said anything. Gookrae leaned closer to the screen with real interest. Nahee quietly lowered her tablet. The Chairman pressed his lips together hard, trying not to laugh.

Sangmin looked at the screaming, falling man who was supposed to be their great balancing factor.

Then he picked up the antacid bottle again and shook out four.