Chương 214: Chapter 211 - The [Strategist]

The world used to end in fire or flood, now I'm pretty sure it's going to end with one of the Tyrants losing their shit at a realmnet comment. I hope it's the Passive Tyrant. CRUSH ME WITH YOUR THIGHS. @Reldork (Unverified) —— Enzo, the Captain of Fighting Fancy, had gathered his team and was ready to go to San Kingsgrove. Confront John Furself, or rather, Ryan Robinson about their little encounter in Sector Three. When he had acted like a fool and gave them a false identity. Fighting Fancy had everything ready.

They were going to raise a loud, public stink about it and embarrass the so-called 'competent adventurer.' Unfortunately, the best laid plans of mice and adventurers were often waylaid. Right as they got their [Mage] to take a break from their study at the Institute of Magic, a courier interrupted them halfway towards the portal. A Realmer, but quick enough to be in the second realm. An Adventurer's Guild employee.

"I've got a delivery for Fighting Fancy."

"What?" The courier caught their breath.

"Adventurers of Fighting Fancy, under section 2. 13 of the Adventurers' Guild, you are all being called for emergency reserve duty. Please make your way to the nearest Guildhall for a briefing." Enzo cursed.

"Wait, emergency reserve? What hair-brained idiot puts fourthers as reserve for an emergency operation? —— A couple minutes later. Sang-Hoon sighed as Enzo barged into his office in Ulverra. The captain of Fighting Fancy had come for the highest ranking member of the Adventurer's Guild he knew and barreled straight through the secretary that tried to stop him. The Captain of his team was furious.

"Who in their right mind puts fourthers on emergency reserve? Tell me right now, Kiron, which idiot ordered this?" Kiron was his adventurer's name, the one he had used when he competed in tournaments on Earth." I did."

"What? But you're not an idiot." Sang-Hoon waved the Realmer away as the rest of Fighting Fancy entered the room, half trying to pull back their hot-headed captain, half looking at him suspiciously. It looked like Sang-Hoon was outnumbered, until you realized Sang-Hoon was a seventh realm more than capable of taking out a team of fourthers by himself. Something that would have garnered more respect if he wasn't so damned friendly most of the time.

"I'm not an idiot. Your team has the [Strategic Retreat] skill as well as a unique scouting skill." Fighting Fancy seemed to finally realize they weren't being sent into the field as fodder. At least the rest of his team had the appropriate reaction to look embarrassed. Enzo just looked surprised Sang-Hoon knew they had the skill. Sang-Hoon continued.

"You'll be meeting up with a group of three hundred thousand Realmers coming back from the city of Eltara. They're nearly at the border of Sector Seven right now and it shouldn't be too far from Ulverra. You'll be rotated with a team of Fivers within a month at most, though that might extend depending on other conditions. Your goal will be the same as with what you did with the Unwanted. Evacuate children with your skill if there is any emergency where the higher realm adventurers have to move. Understand?"

"Yes sir!" Now came the respect. Sang-Hoon internally rolled his eyes.

"Now, you would have gotten the rest of this briefing if you actually showed up to the Adventurer's Guild first instead of my office." He signalled to the piles of documents in his office. Enzo at least, finally looked a little embarrassed.

"Haha, sorry Kiron. I knew you weren't an idiot, I'll make it up to you later. Drinks on me later?" Sang-Hoon nodded politely and went back to his documents as the rest of the adventurers filed out of his room. He shook his head." Adventurers." It was the biggest problem with having adventurers as the main backbone of society. They were loud, raucous, and had a problem with authority that clashed with any sort of functional order.

And it was taking everything out of him to keep the entirety of the Adventurer's Guild from spiraling out of control. That was the thing that nobody knew about. Sang-Hoon had somehow become the de facto leader of the Adventurer's Guild. Before… well… The Adventurer's Guild was originally designed to be obscure and indirect, a continuation from the splinter cell organizations the Witch Tyrant had created to fight in the war against Earth.

It meant that a single head receptionist or admin getting assassinated would not cripple the Adventurer's Guild or even really damage its functions. It worked well until the Adventurer's Guild had become the monolithic entity where nearly a million adventurers had signed up. Not to mention the tens of millions of Realmers that worked directly under the organization. In that case, a decentralized organization meant that everything was hell to organize.

Even after twenty years at this, Sang-Hoon was still nowhere near close to detangling the web the Witch Tyrant had set up. She had forced this entire thing on him. Something he was certain she had managed with maybe a couple percent of her mind. All because she found out about the class he'd taken. A Realmer knocked on the door, Sang-Hoon's secretary, a realmer in the fourth realm of power entered and closed the door behind them, activating the silencing wards.

"Sir, we've got a sighting of an intelligent rogue spirit passing through Sector Ten and is approaching the border of Sector Six. They were shouting profanities about some savage wretch of a woman."

"Fuck." He went through quite a lot of dragonslayer tier adventurers in his mind. The Kellys were out, while they were good natured, they were often a little… unreliable. The Silver Purger was out, she was too much of a fanatic. Cinnabon [The Magelancer Extraordinaire] was out, always unavailable for some reason… Sang-Hoon had his suspicions but nothing he dared to say out loud. Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

Mezhar was on the other side of the damned realm. There were others the Guild could rely on… only they were out escorting large groups of civilians back to Ulverra, and the others he could rely on… he didn't want to risk. The problem was that a 'rogue spirit' could vary between dragonslayer tier to straight up wiping out some of the most competent dragonslayer teams without a trace. They needed someone that could do the job and not be a huge loss if they died.

"What about the [Stallmaster Thief]? We could offer her a removal of her blacklisting status."

"Hell no. I'm not checking with the Witch Tyrant if she'd be okay with that one. But it's a good start. Send a message to Oltier the Hunter. Tell him we'll give him a removal of blacklisting status if he can scout this rogue spirit and give us an assessment." Oltier the Hunter was one of the ones that had attacked the Dwarven Tyrant. The jolly dwarf wouldn't care too much about it as long as they weren't a threat to his friends.

"Oltier's deep in Sector Thirteen."

"Then use the Archmage Tyrant's observatory to send the message. Get the Archmage Tyrant to do it himself if it's not good enough, got it?" The Realmer bit his lip, as if not looking forward to requesting anything of the Archmage Tyrant. Sang-Hoon had been the same at first, the idea of asking the Tyrants for anything had been nerve wracking at first. Now? Sang-Hoon had done too many favors in organizing the Archmage Tyrant's Institute of Magic for the old man to just tell him to get lost.

"Get it done."

"Yes sir." Sang-Hoon sighed as the Realmer hurried away. He gave himself a small break of staring into the ceiling blankly for a second. A decentralized organization that had slowly turned into a centralized one under him. His eyes lost focus, remembering how he had ended up here. —— Twenty years ago. Sang-Hoon had stopped climbing the realms with his team. They told him he was being paranoid, he told them that a third near death experience this month was absurd.

Even from the beginning he had been suspicious, their dangerous encounters had been far too many to be statistically improbable. One apex monster ambushing them once in a while was fine. Three in a month? With one where they had accidentally triggered an Instant Trial? Everyone swore that they hadn't talked shit about the Witch Tyrant online. He even hired [Witch] Grettfield to check up on him and his team but she had found no hexes or spells cast on them.

Despite literally everyone telling him he was being paranoid he kept digging. He called in favors with Guild receptionists and used his sterling record to access the Guild's archive under supervision. It took three days, three days of reading through what seemed like unintentionally unorganized files and reports. There he found the truth. It wasn't just him. In fact, after 2001 incident reports had skyrocketed across the Adventurer's Guild. It took him a little bit more digging to connect the dots.

All of these incidents happened a few months after Mad Gamar's death. The madman that had become infamous for pushing adventurers beyond their limits. Taking their families on Earth hostage, attacking cities on Earth and attacking heroic adventurers acting like he was some Trial boss trying to squeeze the potential of other adventurers. After that year there had been a sharp increase in casualties amongst the adventurers.

The oddest thing was that those losing their safety lives were almost always between the most prominent of adventurers. It made no sense. Yes, the strongest adventurers often took the riskiest actions, but they didn't tend to die or get caught unawares more than other adventurers. Something didn't add up. There had been a steady decline in adventurer deaths before that incident, it was all trending down as more of The Realm and its threats were getting mapped.

Yet for some reason, after Mad Gamar's death, the casualty count had skyrocketed. The infamous quote still rang heavy in Sang-Hoon's mind.

'You call yourselves heroes and villains? HAHAHAHA I'LL SHOW YOU ALL A TRUE VILLAIN.' [Fireballs] raining down on cities of Earth, heralding the end of the heroic generation. Sang-Hoon remembered huddling with his parents as every nation got hit seemingly at random. Mad Gamar promised people power and threw them into the system portals, attacked family members of adventurers to incite hatred. Though he never killed adventurers directly, Sang-Hoon remembered how many dragonslayers rose so rapidly in those years.

And the rate hadn't gone down since. Just… casualty rates. Though, he did note that true deaths weren't as common. A discrepancy that didn't make sense. As if someone was fudging the numbers somehow and was making sure to keep everything disorganized so that nobody could find out about it. Sang-Hoon calmly and quietly put the files away. Acting as if he had seen nothing and figured nothing out. He tried to leave, only to find the Witch Tyrant standing there, smiling at him in white robes.

"I must admit, I had been hoping someone would have connected the dots sooner. Then again, I'm glad it was you, [Strategist] Sang-Hoon. What an interesting class you took." She knew. The Witch Tyrant somehow knew his class even though he had sworn his team to secrecy in the Trials. Sang-Hoon had been a professional player of Adventurer's Wargame. A realtime strategy game that took the craze of South Korea's young generation. He'd risen to the best of the best and stayed there for years.

Meanwhile someone in Norway had sponsored a Chess Grandmaster and they had gotten a [Child Prodigy] title when entering The Realm. That person had later grown up to be Atellion the Null Mage. That ended up placing a lot of expectations and pressure on Sang-Hoon's head. When young Sang-Hoon sat there in the Manager's Abode, staring at a fourth class in addition to the standard three, he couldn't help himself. He knew he should have picked [Mage] but the other class simply sang out to him.

The class he knew as himself more than anything else. [Tactician]. He would have been disowned by his country if they found out he took a non-combat class after being sponsored through government funding. Hence the secrecy. As far as he knew, nobody was able to just read your class, but here it was, as if the Witch Tyrant could read the class on his face. The Witch Tyrant smiled at him but all he felt was a chill run down his spine.

"Shall we have a discussion about the future of The Realm and what awaits it?" And you couldn't just say 'no' to a Tyrant. —— Present. Sang-Hoon went back to focusing on the paperwork. They did have more adventurers they could call, but that was the thing. He didn't want to use dragonslayers that were the most powerful and upstanding on unknown threats. They needed to be alive if they were going to protect The Realm when the real shit happened.

He flipped through pages reporting Artigan's last sighting over a new inter-realm system portal and then dismissed it after telling everyone to back the hell off. After all, Sang-Hoon had been the one spreading the rumors that he was the Witch Tyrant's project. He'd seen the reports in Lazhen, the destruction of the hill, the attack at the city of Defiance. Then the suspicious appearance of the Unwanted Elves while the Eternal Delvers that got clammy when grilled about their communications with him.

Sang-Hoon could connect the dots. He'd talked to the head receptionist at Sector One. Artigan could have killed a lot more people if he wanted to. Most likely he was an agent by the Witch Tyrant to cause chaos and bring the overall level of adventurers up. It made sense with what he was told and if you remembered Mad Gamar's actions. Clearly the Witch Tyrant had been perfecting a controlled form of chaos. The real question was whether or not Artigan was going to become a worse version of Mad Gamar.

Whether this whole thing was a build up to some monster that would end up as achievement fodder to the Tyrants or… It was only a couple minutes later when another knock rapped on the door. A different Realmer, though they too closed the door behind them. Her face was more grave than the previous one.

"The Dwarven Tyrant's Fortress just teleported away from Sector Eight." Sang-Hoon sucked in a breath.

"Where is it now?" The Realmer pointed out on a map. It was at one end of Sector Eleven. As far away from Sector Thirteen as possible. At the other side of The Realm. A chill went down his spine. He deactivated the wards and jumped out the window of his office and started leaping across the buildings. He got his phone out to call the Archmage's Observatory ahead of time.

"That damned bearded bastard! I told him to keep me updated if he found something out! Hey! Connect me to the Dwarven Tyrant's fortress right now!" The yelling admin in a rush across Ulverra caused everyone to look up in alarm. Those that knew him well enough were realizing something was seriously wrong. Then someone started a damned orange alert because of it. Sang-Hoon sighed. Sometimes, it felt like he was the only one trying to keep the entirety of the Adventurer's Guild afloat. —— Back on Earth…

"COME ON MUDRIFF. No threats on your team, it's just you and the enemy." The [Warrior] slammed his foot forward and thrust his shield, displacing the air and causing a sonic boom as the skill activated in full to block a slow sword swing. The attack shattered the sword and dented the shield in one. A full skill activation with no threats and no meditation. Mudriff had done it.

"YES, LET'S GO!" The [Warrior] had tears in his eyes as Ryan pumped his fist in the air.