MMORPG: Surviving a Death Game with a Glitched System

The thick white haze rolled in.

No longer held back by the barrier, it poured up the stairs until it reached Ash at the top and spread across the polished obsidian landing before the black temple’s entrance, swallowing his view of the countless monsters charging up from below.

With the sleek black katana in hand, Ash readied himself as the silhouette of a towering, four-armed humanoid burst from the fog and stormed onto the landing.

It had a broad torso and two pairs of muscly, broad arms, each ending in an oversized, grasping hand. It’s large body covered in soot and it had a thin head of a dog atop its broad shoulders.

It was the first of many to greet Ash personally.

Wasting no time, Ash cast [Focus].

Using the brief moment before the soot-covered beast crossed the landing, he turned his attention inward and tried to sense mana.

The instant his skill activated, mana seemed to engulf him, leaving him adrift in an unseen ocean.

What surrounded him suddenly became overwhelming — so dense that it felt harder to ignore than to sense.

Maybe his constitution had really been the issue. Or maybe [Focus] heightened what he’d already learned by leaps and bounds. Perhaps both.

Either way...

Ash homed in on everything he could sense.

As best he could, he separated the environmental mana saturating the landing from the mana contained within living beings. The moment he succeeded, countless thin lines seemed to draw themselves through the haze, each leading toward an especially dense cluster. One of those clusters loomed directly ahead — the charging four-armed beast.

His mana sense was nowhere near as precise as [Danger Sense], but it was by no means useless.

During the final second of [Focus], the four-armed behemoth closed the remaining distance.

Ash abandoned his mana-sensing objective and shifted into attack mode.

He rotated the katana and thrust its point toward the foremost of the beast’s outstretched hands.

All he managed was a shallow cut across one knuckle before [Focus] ended, causing their bodies to lock against one another.

Confusion held the monster still for a heartbeat longer, giving Ash time to hop backward across the landing. A wisp of purple light slipped from the katana’s petal-shaped guard and began circling the hilt.

A single stack of [Fate’s Hand].

’It’s time to test this blade’s potential.’

More specifically... he had a theory to test. First, however, he needed to determine how [Fate’s Hand] performed against this new beast.

A control test.

By then, more monsters were spilling from the haze and onto the landing, most of them Seal Scrawlers. They streamed past Ash and through the black temple’s entrance, several failing to notice him at all.

He made for a pretty shitty guardian, allowing the mob to reach Idolan with little interference.

Once Idolan culled this initial charge, however, whatever came next would reach the landing one by one.

That was when Ash would actually have a major role to play.

For now, the only monster truly focused on him was the one he had tagged with his blade.

Several Seal Scrawlers lashed out as they rushed past, joined by a child-sized fish-human hybrid with glassy, bulging eyes and fins jutting from its hunched spine. Ash slipped between their attacks and gave ground across the obsidian landing, but none pursued. Some quickly turned away and continued through the temple entrance, while others swung on one another after their wild attacks accidentally connected.

It hadn’t been entirely calculated on Ash’s part, but the result was exactly what he’d hoped for.

Unlike them, the four-armed beast barreled after him. It bounded across the landing, sprang high into the haze, and descended with all four hands reaching for Ash.

Ash stepped toward it, slipping beneath its trajectory, and met its descent with an upward swing. The katana sliced across both feet, pausing the beast’s momentum.

The behemoth tilted forward before crashing headfirst onto the polished obsidian.

After a quick glance confirmed he was safe-ish from the monsters streaming past, Ash cast [Focus].

With the beast still staggered, Ash rushed alongside it and unleashed a flurry of strikes against its legs. Each one carved a thin laceration that did little, while his position near its feet kept him safely beyond the reach of its four grasping hands.

By the time it planted its palms against the landing, hauled itself upright, and regained its footing, Ash was already retreating. He kept moving until [Focus] ended.

Nine purple wisps now orbited [Sealed Fate].

Ash didn’t have the best gauge of how much stronger the weapon had grown, but he could faintly tell that its next well-placed strike would be enough to incapacitate the beast.

The beast opened the slimy maw splitting its dog-like head and roared before lumbering after him again.

Yet as it crossed the landing, Ash noticed something strange.

Although his attacks had inflicted little more than superficial cuts, the beast had slowed ever so slightly.

’Ah... makes sense.’

The wounds hadn’t meaningfully damaged its anatomy, but each one must have still depleted its HP. As that HP fell, the beast’s overall condition deteriorated with it, regardless of how harmless the individual wounds appeared.

Combat in a game-like world wasn’t necessarily about slicing off an opponent’s head or piercing its heart. If repeated attacks drained the entirety of its HP, even inconsequential wounds might eventually kill it without a single truly lethal blow.

’I can only hope that logic is unique to monsters.’

He’d rather not have to worry about his own HP being whittled down that way...

Death by papercut seemed like such a pitiful and undeserving way to go.

However, having experienced no minor wounds — only critical injuries, such as having a limb pierced, gouged, or torn off — he had no basis for judging whether it was universal.

In any case, even if it were universal, his glitch made the phenomenon somewhat beneficial, since he didn’t exactly have to worry about it most of the time.

Breaking free of his internal tangent, Ash rolled across the obsidian just in time to evade the beast’s four sweeping hands as it lunged to grapple him.

Its lower pair slammed into the landing. The upper two immediately followed, whipping around toward him.

Ash raised [Sealed Fate] and blocked the blow.

Having realized their bodies staggered whenever they directly collided, the beast wasted no time twisting at the waist and hurling a backhand toward Ash’s head...

Without the helmet, its massive palm harmlessly passed through empty air.

With its back now exposed, Ash activated [Focus] and layered [Dragon Fear] over it. As expected, the latter had no effect due to the likely level difference, but it was worth a shot.

Before the beast could realize what was going on, Ash slashed diagonally across the back of its leg.

The empowered blade passed cleanly through flesh and bone, severing the limb at the knee.

The beast completed its turn on its remaining leg and threw a desperate punch. Ash deftly wove around the attack and watched as the behemoth’s momentum dragged it off balance.

It crashed face-first into the landing. Ash immediately leaped onto its back and spun [Sealed Fate] in his grasp.

He drove the blade down with the full force of ten accumulated stacks.

The katana tore cleanly through bone and flesh until its tip struck the obsidian landing below.

The monster thrashed beneath him, its four arms scraping and hammering against the ground as it tried to throw Ash off, but it had already grown much too weak.

With the last second of [Focus], Ash twisted the embedded blade, then tore it sideways through the beast’s torso. Fetid black blood erupted from its back and splattered across his body.

The blood failed to cling to him for long. It had already begun to shimmer.

[You have slain Seal Centurion]

[First Kill Bonus]

[+66 EXP]

[Condition...]

The Centurion’s massive body fractured and dissolved into black shards beneath him, slowly lowering Ash onto the landing.

A couple of slabs of meat and a tome appeared at his feet.

He didn’t get to pick up the drops, though, as a sudden Seal Scrawler appeared from the haze, bounding toward him, followed by another, then another.

Even a Spire Serpent appeared in the charge toward Ash, driving him away from the drops.

Like the savages they were, the beasts fought over the meat, snatching it up for themselves, with the Spire Serpent eating a Seal Scrawler before all of their attention turned back to Ash.

Well... attention.

The Seal Scrawlers hadn’t magically gained sight.

As Ash fled and waited for [Focus]’s cooldown, he tried to sense mana again in his current state.

While it was nothing like when he had [Focus] activated, he could tell something... The mobs before him were the last of the initial horde.

All he had to do was take care of this group or get Idolan to do it, then his job would become much simpler and easier.

Then, finally, he’d also be able to test out his other quandry...

Attacking a new target caused [Fate’s Hand] to reset its stacks. However... would the new target receive the full power of a stacked attack?

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!