Taming Master

Muran suddenly gave out a hidden quest.

Rather than a hidden quest, the quest Muran gave was more like a hidden land mine.

And Ian was the one who would step foot on that land mine.

If Ian decided to take his foot off, that mine would end up making a huge explosion.

Ian read the quest window once again not being able to understand what he had gotten himself into.

‘What the hell is this crazy penalty…?’

Among the hidden quests which had great rewards, there often were cases that came with penalties for the failures.

However, its penalties were only a cut of experience points, fame loss, or a decline of affinity with the NPC that gave the quest.

The quest’s penalty of being dropped a tier in the hidden class for not clearing it was borderline robbery.

No kind of effort could recover that.

A user had to put a lot of effort into gaining that tier. Also, many things were needed in order to succeed in gaining a tier.

Ian was stunned.

On the other hand, Muran—who wasn’t aware of how overwhelmed Ian was—spoke to him with a very satisfied expression.

“I didn’t know my arrangements were fine. If I knew that there was going to be a strong hero as such in the future, I would’ve taken rest with a calm heart.”

Muran’s encouragement was continuing to burn Ian’s heart furthermore, and Elcarix was about to pour gasoline over it.

“Woah! My dad is so awesome!”

Elcarix was laughing at Ian while hanging on his back.

Even the cute voice of Elcarix couldn’t raise Ian’s spirit

“Heuu…”

Ian took a deep breath to regain his cool.

Due to the sudden outbreak of an insane quest, he was in a situation where he had to revise all the plans he made for the future.

‘It looks like I’ll have to put off conquering the Elrika Kingdom as of the moment. I should ask for the understanding of our guild members, and I need to go to the Ulphir Mountains to upgrade the troops as soon as possible. I’ll be needing to make the most out of my ranker friends…’

Ian’s head was working and working.

It was clear that it was a quest with the highest level of difficulty, and it was also clear that it was impossible to avoid such a quest.

The only thing he could do at least was to increase the success rate of the quest as much as he could.

Things like giving up weren’t Ian’s style.

When Ian’s head was going through a trauma of its own, it wasn’t Ian who was in trouble.

Ian shared the quest with his party members too.

The other members of his party were reading the quest window of a weird quest very cautiously.

Their rewards and penalties were all entirely different from Ian, but the rest of the content of the quest was similar.

Ian’s party members suddenly noticed him.

After a while, Remir spoke with a lot of cautiousness.

“Ian-ah, can you not share this quest?”

Levya and Yu Shin then said,

“Ian, I will take a break. Thank you very much for sharing the hidden quest, but I don’t think this…”

“I’m sorry bro, Ian. I can’t do it.”

Three lines of message suddenly emerged before Ian’s eyes.

[Party member ‘Remir’ has refused to accept the shared quest.]

[Party member ‘Levya’ has refused to accept the shared quest.]

[Party member ‘Yu Shin’ has refused to accept the shared quest.]

Ian was struck with the feeling of betrayal.

“Noona, Levya, Yu Shin!”

However, the three simply avoided eye contact with Ian.

“Keu…”

Ian looked completely devastated.

He suddenly felt a hand that seemed to be comforting him.

Ian then heard a voice saying the thing he needed the most from an unlikely person.

“Hyung, I’ll follow you hyung!”

Everyone’s gaze went in the direction of that person’s voice.

There was Hoonie standing with a confident look.

The other party members were shocked at Hoonie’s attitude.

“Oh, Hoonie…?”

“Hoonie get your mind straight! Aren’t you overwhelmed with the stress of excessive hunting?”

Unlike his party members, Ian wasn’t surprised at all.

Ian knew exactly why Hoonie decided to do such a thing.

“Don’t overdo it, man. You’re in the same boat as me anyway, right?”

“…”

He did.

Hoonie was already in a situation where he needed to kill the Lich King for his 4th tier quest to be completed.

Even the time limit of the two was the same.

Unlike Ian though, Hoonie’s quest didn’t have such ridiculously unfair penalty for failing the quest.

“Huu, you don’t know me at all. You’re so mean…”

Hoonie was displaying a sad face, but that wasn’t what he was feeling. His expression changed right away.

“Noisy. Let’s clear the dungeon as quickly as possible.”

Ian looked at all of his party members while he talked slowly to Hoonie.

Though he spoke calmly, he hadn’t forgotten the terrible thing that they did awhile ago.

“If you guys want to rest early, then go ahead. I’ll somehow manage.”

Ian’s tone was rather threatening, and his party members were obviously feeling it.

* * *

“Wow! That’s crazy. Why didn’t he do the play in a normal way?”

Seeing the decision that Ian took, Na Ji-chan couldn’t help but feel ridiculous.

Ian who was playing very well took a decision that no one would have even chose to opt for.

‘I’m going to ‘give up’ a 4th tier hidden class.’ was what Ian said.

No one including Na Ji-chan would have guessed that.

“Not that… this is…”

Na Ji-chan was pacing back and forth in the monitoring room restlessly.

The unprecedented choice of Ian was going to bring in heaps of work for the planning team.

Honestly, since they wanted to delay users from exhausting the new episode’s content as much as possible, Ian’s choice would greatly benefit them.

Apart from being a 4th tier hidden class, the ‘Summoner Knight’ contained a very important piece of the puzzle in dealing with the Richie King.

Without that piece, it would be hard to get rid of Richie King even if it was Ian.

That being said, the Richie King episode was going to last longer.

However, there was another problem.

The problem was the ‘Hero’s Responsibility’, the hidden quest that Ian got from the unexpected choice that he made.

It wasn’t a quest that the planning team had even designed.

The quest didn’t even exist in the first place.

‘Hu, I knew that we were going to have a problem…’

As Ian had taken a choice that the planning team wasn’t even considering to be in the option, a random quest got activated.

Kailan’s system was designed to cope with situations by judging its own algorithm if the situation wasn’t designed by the planning team.

So Muran used his own AI to make his own decision, and the quest was the result of his judgment.

‘Hu, if you’re going to make quests that you wish, at least make some sensible ones…’

Na Ji-chan held his head as it was beginning to hurt.

The quest had fatal problems in it.

The most lethal problem was the ‘Unique Dual Class’.

The reward that Muran’s quest offered was the ‘Unique Dual Class’.

It was as if the quest was giving out a class that never existed.

‘This is going to hurt us a lot. Just because of Ian, we will now have to make this unique dual-class thing?’

Adding a new class wasn’t an easy task.

A new hidden class always called for the addition of a few new skills and a special trait to the existing planned base.

“Hu…”

Na Ji-chan had already been working for Kailan’s planning team for 5 years now.

Na Ji-chan who had worked long before the opening of Kailan was always confident that his mind was as strong as a diamond.

However, all thanks to Ian, he was having his second mental breakdown in the middle of the night.

The first one was when Ian was close to clearing the Dragon’s Altar time attack dungeon and almost opened the Door of Dimension. The current one was this crisis Ian just brought in.

“Phew… let’s just hold that thought, maybe Ian will fail the quest?”

According to what Na Ji-chan was thinking, without the Summoner Knight class, the possibility of Ian clearing the quest was below 10%.

Which was why it could be seen as a good gamble.

If Ian failed the quest, then they could go back to the point where nothing had happened.

Taking off a tier from the Taming Master class was a bit too much of a penalty.

However, they could just give Ian an opportunity in the future to raise his tier again.

Na Ji-chan knew very well that Ian would fail this quest.

If Ian’s chances of success were even at 10% and he did finish the quest successfully, it was the end of the story.

Without taking his eyes off the monitor, Na Ji-chan mumbled and mumbled,

“10% success rate… I’ll have to spend the night here to see what’s gonna happen.”

Ian’s quest was limited to 30 days, but the time limit for the planning team was much shorter.

Ian wasn’t going to complete the quest right away, but he would surely challenge the Richie King in the days that were going to come.

’27 days, no, maybe 25 days…? We’ll have to make a thorough plan within those days.’

Even though Na Ji-chan enjoyed working in the night shift, he was now at a point where he couldn’t work happily at all.

Rather than the night shift, it was now a torture shift.

His cup ramen turned soggy and could now be mistaken for udon.

Hrrr-!

Na Ji-chan immediately dug into his cup ramen, but he couldn’t taste anything from it.

His eyes just kept moving.

“The Dual Class shouldn’t overlap with the planning… I need to think of how I’m going to connect it to the main class…”

The moment Ian refused the hidden class, Na Ji-chan felt like he aged for 10 years.

Na Ji-chan opened the door of the monitoring room and stared at the monitors one last time before leaving the room.

Ian’s figure that was on the screen came into his mind.

“Keu, does Ian God even know what he is doing now?”

At this very moment, at least for today, Na Ji-chan was an anti of Ian God