Shepherd Wizard

Side Story - Dawn of the Gods (1)

Hong Yun-seong's occupation was full-time investor, which was to say, unemployed.

If asked why he couldn't just get a normal job and live like everyone else, he could offer quite a few reasons.

Because he was born half-Korean, half-Japanese, and after being shuttled back and forth between two parents who divorced early, both his Korean and his Japanese had come out clumsy.

Or because he'd spent his childhood saddled with the nickname "half-jjokbari" at Korean schools and "chon" at Japanese schools, so naturally his social skills and his grades had been wrecked. [TL: "Jjokbari" is a Korean slur for Japanese people; "chon" is a Japanese slur for Koreans.]

Or because, on top of all that, he'd never had a docile bone in his body, taking factory jobs several times only to end up trading punches with his supervisors.

If there was one thing that set him apart from others in similar straits, it was that his investment success rate was fairly high.

High enough, at least, to live on his own without ever holding a hand out to his parents. No, to be honest, quite a bit more than that.

While other people blindly threw themselves at crypto and futures, blew through their entire fortunes, and jumped into rivers or filed for personal bankruptcy, Yun-seong was one of the rare few predators who had managed to devour those corpses and grow fat off them.

But just like predators in the wild, an investor's investments couldn't succeed every time, and this round the results were a little poor.

Staring at a graph crowded with red and blue lines, Yun-seong soon clicked his tongue, tch, and closed the program.

"Looks like this month's going to end in the red......."

Of course, he wasn't so hard up that failing to earn for a while meant starving to death.

If he had been, he couldn't have dumped enormous sums of money into the game he was now booting up to kill time.

Instead of going to sleep, Yun-seong decided to play for a bit to blow off some stress, then turn in.

The Song of the Sun, Moon, and Stars.

A third-rate RPG that had been out for years, its player base so stagnant that by now practically everyone knew everyone else.

He was one of the reasonably well-known users in this game.

All thanks to the overwhelming stats he'd secured through a staggering amount of spending.

He didn't belong to any guild, but whenever the top-ranked users set out to clear a newly released raid dungeon, he was the first one they called.

His character's name was Otas.

An anagram of Sato, the surname his Japanese father had given him.

He held no particular affection for a man who'd cheated and divorced only a few years into the marriage; he simply used the name because he liked the sound of it.

After logging in, Yun-seong was running his weekly dungeons as usual when a message in the chat window caught his eye.

[Caesar : hyung did u see the new event that just dropped?]

[Otas : yeah]

[Caesar : wanna run it together if you have time???]

[Otas : no]

[Caesar : why tho ;]

[Otas : nothing good even if u run it]

"What is this kid even doing, gaming at the crack of dawn instead of sleeping?"

The user messaging him now, Caesar, was one of the very few people he actually knew in the game.

They'd gotten close after a bug multiplied a boss's defense tenfold in the special dungeon required to advance into the same class as his, Night Hunter, making it impossible to clear, so he'd run it in Caesar's place.

Of course, in games, stats meant status, so plenty of people wanted to get close to Yun-seong, but thanks to his characteristically indifferent-looking manner, they all inevitably drifted away in time.

Caesar, however, paid no mind to that attitude of his and always struck up conversation as eagerly as now.

Sometimes even going so far as to suggest meeting up offline.

Caesar might call him "hyung" all the time, but Yun-seong knew the person on the other end was a woman, and that made it something he wanted to avoid.

He had no intention of turning the strange rumors circulating about the two of them into fact.

Maybe it's time I quit this one too.

He'd sunk hundreds of millions of won into it, and the game's nature made it hard to recoup, but a loss of that size was one he could stomach.

The money he'd already spent wasn't going to stop being a loss just because he kept playing, anyway.

As he leisurely ran the game while mulling it over, Yun-seong somehow got the sense that his monitor was glowing brighter.

Had some new gimmick been added to the weekly dungeon? No, for that, this was far too-

Before the thought could finish, light flashed, and Yun-seong's body vanished.

*

"Ugh......."

Opening his eyes to a throbbing headache, the first thing Yun-seong noticed was how foreign his body felt.

He was in his mid-thirties, and even with the exercise he'd taken up to maintain himself, his body had been creaking and growing sluggish, yet now it felt lighter than it had at twenty, when he'd been at his healthiest.

After instinctively rubbing his eyes, he realized his vision, too, was on an entirely different level than before.

Eyes that had struggled to make out letters five meters away without glasses were somehow picking out the insects clinging to trees dozens of meters off.

Wait, trees and insects?

Only then did Yun-seong realize he was sprawled not in his apartment but in the middle of some dense forest.

His clothes weren't pajamas either, but a medieval-style outfit of leather and cloth, draped with a black cloak.

"No way."

Following the guidance of his sharpened nose straight to a nearby stream, Yun-seong looked at his own face and let out a hollow laugh.

The character from the game he'd played so much, the Night Hunter Otas, was staring back at him.

Does this even make sense?

He'd ended up inside the body of the game character he played.

No, wait. Could this place be the game's world too?

Had he entered the game, or had the game become reality?

He'd barely begun frowning over the tangle of thoughts when Yun-seong sensed a foreign scent growing steadily stronger.

The moment he grimaced at the strange unpleasantness of it, a rustling sound came from directly behind him.

"What......."

It wasn't easy to tell at a glance that the thing was a crocodile.

Unlike an ordinary crocodile, its teeth were sharp as freshly honed blades, and its gaping maw was large enough to swallow not just a human but a tiger in a single gulp.

His eyes flew wide in shock, but only for a moment; Yun-seong realized the charging crocodile was slower than expected.

Nearly slow motion, slow enough to dodge with room to spare.

He slipped past the closing jaws and instinctively kicked at its chin.

In that instant, with a bang, the crocodile's protruding snout was severed clean along the arc of his kick.

"Huh?"

With blood and chunks of flesh spattering down his leg, Yun-seong stood frozen for a moment, unable to make sense of the situation.

Had a single kick really just severed the snout of that super-giant crocodile?

Even as he marveled at the surreal scene, his body moved on instinct, like a well-trained beast.

One light leap put him above its head, and when he brought his hand down, the blow didn't cut like before, but with the sound of splintering bone, the crocodile's brain was crushed and its movements stopped.

Standing before the corpse, Yun-seong looked down at his own body for a moment.

So it wasn't just my senses that got sharper.

His movements just now were beyond comparison with any trained fighter.

A movie superhero, maybe, if that.

Between that giant crocodile and this, the odds that someone had used incredible technology to knock him out, give him plastic surgery, dress him in his game character's clothes, and dump him in a swamp had dropped considerably.

The thought lasted only a moment before Yun-seong noticed a human scent drifting in from far away, cutting through the smell of the crocodile's blood.

All of his new body's senses ran sharp, but its sense of smell in particular seemed exceptional.

What do I do?

He'd just confirmed how mighty this body was, but he still had no proper grasp of this world's power balance.

If that crocodile was just some common mob you could find anywhere, killing it wouldn't prove anything about his strength.

But his deliberation was brief; a thought suddenly occurred to Yun-seong, and as he put it into practice, he looked down at his own body.

As expected, his flesh was turning transparent.

Concealment.

The basic technique of the Hunter, one of the Night Hunter's four archetypes, activated and hid him from view.

Apparently, a game character's skills could be used through thought alone.

In that state, Yun-seong leapt lightly and moved along the tree branches.

As expected, both his jumping power and his sense of balance were at inhuman levels, and this was more sanitary and comfortable than trudging across the muddy swamp.

What an incredible body. If I could actually buy one, I might even take this over my original.......

Mid-thought, Yun-seong finally arrived before the presence he'd sensed and quietly studied him.

An outfit similar to his own but slightly different in style, and a young man with short black hair swept upward.

Even accounting for the differences between a game character and reality, he'd seen this look often enough to find it quite familiar.

It was Caesar, the younger friend he'd been chatting with right before the possession.

"That you, Caesar?"

"Wh-Who......! Wait, Otas-hyung?"

When he dropped down, dispelling Concealment, and asked, the young man, who'd jolted like a startled rabbit, looked at him and asked back.

Yun-seong nodded in confirmation.

"Looks like I'm not the only one this bullshit happened to......."

Before he could finish, Caesar lunged at him with terrifying speed.

Ordinarily he wouldn't have been able to so much as react, but Otas's superb reflexes were more than enough to catch it.

He was about to dodge on instinct when he noticed the tears welling in the other's eyes and hesitated.

"Hngh......."

Caesar slammed into his chest with an audible thud and sobbed against him.

Holding a blubbering grown man was well outside his comfort zone.

Then again, the soul was woman.

Yun-seong sighed inwardly but patted the other's back all the same.

Judging from how they usually talked, Caesar was just a kid barely past twenty, and a situation like this must have been terrifying.

Even he, more than ten years older, was rattled enough to wish someone, anyone, would explain what was going on.

"Calmed down a bit?"

"S-Sorry. I was just so shocked."

"It happens. So, any idea why this happened to us?"

"I really don't know."

Yun-seong asked Caesar, who'd stopped crying, whether he knew anything about the situation, but the answer that came back was, as expected, a no.

"Is that so......."

"I'm sorry."

"Nothing to be sorry about. Let's check a few things first."

The first thing that came to Yun-seong's mind was testing their abilities.

He'd tried out Concealment a moment ago, but he still didn't know whether their abilities faithfully carried over from their game character days.

The two lightly pitted their strength and agility against each other, and the results left them both shaking their heads in amazement.

"Wow, you're on a whole different level......."

"Seriously. Looks like our stats from the game carried over as-is."

There was a considerable gap between Caesar's stats and those of Yun-seong's character, Otas.

Both were max-level, fourth-advancement Night Hunters who had learned all four archetypes, but the money and time they'd invested were different.

In particular, among the paid options in their game, SSMS, there were several that boosted not equipment but the character's stats themselves.

Of course, Caesar was only weak by comparison; among the player base, he was hardly on the weak side.

Finally, as a test, Yun-seong cast Prophecy of Destruction, one of the Night Hunter's exclusive skills, and his jaw dropped at the result.

So did Caesar's, right beside him.

"Uh......."

"Is this supposed to be okay?"

"No idea."

The moment he expertly gripped a bow he'd never once held in real life, drew, and loosed, a pitch-black vortex erupted from the arrow and surged forward, pulverizing everything it met.

It even seemed to carry over the skill's original poison damage; areas that hadn't been directly hit melted away in an instant, across a span of dozens of meters.

As a result, even though it hadn't felt like he'd fired at anything close to full power, a zone sixty or seventy meters wide and stretching at least a kilometer ahead had been reduced to scorched earth.

Considering that even beyond that boundary things were dissolving from the poison and plants were dying, he'd practically wrecked an entire forest in a single shot.

Fortunately or not, this forest-swamp seemed vast enough to absorb even that.

Please let there not have been anyone living in there.

Even as he thought it, Yun-seong could already guess there were no people inside.

If there had been, he'd have caught their scent first, just as he had when he found Caesar.

Just then, Caesar staggered and stepped back beside him.

"Urgh......."

"What's wrong?"

"I-I think I'm poisoned."

"Damn."

The Alchemist archetype should have come with a poison-resistance passive, but the venom of the arrow he'd fired was apparently more than even that could handle.

Yun-seong quickly hoisted the swaying Caesar onto his back.

"Ah!"

"Get on. Let's put some distance between us and that first."

Fortunately, this body was so sturdy that carrying a single person didn't even register as weight.

When he set Caesar down again after gaining some distance, the younger man's face was flushed red.

"You okay? You seem to be running a fever."

"No, no, not at all! More importantly, what do we do now?"

"For now, we move carefully. We know we're absurdly strong, more than we thought, but we still don't know where that puts us around here. And more than anything, we made way too much of a racket back there, so we'd better get away from that spot."

If, say, things on the level of raid dungeon bosses were roaming around in droves, he couldn't win even with Otas's power.

Those things were never designed to be taken down solo in the first place.

After a quick discussion, the two immediately headed in the direction opposite the area he'd devastated with the arrow.

Just as before, rather than walking across the swamp, they leapt their way through the dense trees.

Caesar's stats were lower than his, so he did have to slow down a bit out of consideration, but even then they were moving faster than a car speeding over land, so it never felt stifling.

How long had they been moving like that?

Just as before, Yun-seong caught a human presence up ahead through his sense of smell and paused.

"Caesar."

"Yes?"

"People. Let's approach under Concealment."

"I don't sense anything......ah."

"Got it?"

"Yes. Just now."

Following the human presence, the two soon exchanged a look at the scene that unfolded before them.

"This is......."

"Cavemen? I think."

The humans they'd found were, quite literally, close to primitives draped in crudely stripped hides.

Watching them diligently pound fruit and dress meat with primitive tools of stone and wood, there was really no other way to describe it.

The dwellings that made up their village weren't proper log cabins or brick houses either, but closer to hovels clumsily piled together out of straw.

"I'm not sure approaching is the right call."

"Yeah......."

If they'd had even a medieval level of civilization, or at least ancient Rome's, he would have approached and tried to learn something, but at a glance, these people clearly weren't anywhere near that level.

They looked like they couldn't work bronze, let alone iron.

While the two were deep in deliberation over whether to make contact with the primitives, a shout rang out from the far side.

"The ones who command the Wind Spirits are coming!"

"Everyone, on your knees! Prostrate yourselves!"

The primitives stopped what they were doing and threw themselves to the ground, trembling.

What appeared before long was, astonishingly, a human with elongated ears; in other words, something like an elf.

With his green hair grown long, he wore fairly respectable cloth garments, apparently enjoying a civilization more advanced than the humans'.

"Caesar."

"Yes?"

"Were there ever elves or spirits in SSMS?"

"Uh......no?"

"Right?"

It wasn't the kind of game where the story mattered, so he'd never read it closely, but at the very least, no such lore had ever appeared in-game.

The unidentified elf made a circuit of the primitive village, then pointed at one of the children.

"Good. Today, it's you. Your flesh looks nice and tender."

"N-No, please!"

"You wretch, how dare you!"

When a man who appeared to be the chosen child's father cried out in desperation, the human serving as the elf's attendant flew into a rage and clubbed him with a cudgel.

Under a merciless beating that seemed not to care whether a wrong blow killed him, the man screamed and crumpled to the ground.

The elf watched them with the indifference of someone observing insects fight, then extended a hand toward the child.

"Now, come here. Humans really are best when they're young; the flesh doesn't take on any stink."

The trembling child looked five or six years old at most, and at the gesture, he suddenly floated up into the air and drifted toward the elf.

The translucent something carrying the child along was presumably the Wind Spirit they had spoken of.

"Ah, aah......."

The elf gazed with satisfaction at the child, whose eyes brimmed with frightened tears, then opened its mouth wide, revealing sharp teeth like a carnivore's.

It pulled the child's arm toward it and was about to bite down when-

"Huh?"

Crack, with the sound of breaking bone, the elf's head flew off, and the faces of everyone watching went blank.

"Th-The Green Elf......."

"H-How? Why?"

They could not easily accept what had happened.

An absolute being who ruled over all their lives, a member of the great Green Elves, had suddenly lost his life in their village.

If the others came to interrogate them, what were they supposed to say? That his head had just flown off for no reason at all?

While everyone was mired in confusion and terror, the brush rustled and two men walked out, drawing every gaze toward them.

Their appearance resembled the villagers' own, but from the black cloaks down to the clothes underneath, a single glance was enough to tell that everything they wore was the product of advanced craftsmanship.

At this, the humans naturally knelt and bowed their heads in submission, just as they did before the other non-human races.

Whatever those two were, it was clear they were not of the lowly slave race; that is, not their own kind.

In this world, it was only natural for humans to show deference to every race that was not human and beg for their mercy.

It was the very moment the Players, those who would one day be called the Preah God Tribe, came face to face with humanity.

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