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Join the Server“We should probably take turns attacking that light,” Na Eun-hyeok suggested. “This blindness state is getting pretty suffocating.”
“I completely agree on that part.”
“The boss seems to alternate his attacks between us, so the second his strike ends on you, sprint straight for the wall.”
“What about the environmental fire damage?”
“Since we can’t gauge the exact distance, we’ll just have to dive in and adjust if it’s ticking too hard. I threw a grenade over earlier just to test it, but the structural trigger didn’t recognize the projectile.”
He had already tested that out in the middle of this chaos? The ‘remote detonators’—commonly referred to by players as grenades—were items designed to let melee damage-dealers like Na Eun-hyeok and me output chips of ranged damage. However, due to their incredibly underwhelming performance, they were practically a dead asset in the current meta. The fact that Na Eun-hyeok had actually used one meant he kept at least one of those highly off-meta niche items sitting in his inventory at all times. The guy was terrifyingly thorough.
Wait. There was something I was pondering a moment ago. What the hell was it?
BOOM!
My train of thought was violently cut short as the priest lunged toward my position, leaping into the air to viciously swing his stone scepter. Yeah, whatever. If it were truly that important, I would have remembered it. The very fact that it slipped my mind entirely explicitly proved it wasn’t a thought worth retracing. I re-immersed myself fully into the flow of combat.
The absolute millisecond the priest’s presence dissolved after unleashing his assault on me, I sprinted straight toward the flickering light exactly as Na Eun-hyeok had instructed. A wave of intense, blistering heat flushed against my skin. Although chunks of fire damage began to steadily chip away at my health bar, I firmly drove my sword straight into the light.
CLANG!
A sharp sound, like steel violently striking heavy glass, echoed through the dark void, and the faint light visibly expanded.
“Switch.”
“Yeah.”
Hearing Na Eun-hyeok’s voice rapidly closing in, I immediately pulled my character back to prevent him from getting caught in the residual hitbox when he executed his strike. Because it was a deeply ingrained, standard tactical movement for us, the rotation executed as naturally as flowing water. The exact same fluid synchronization held firm when I smoothly stepped back in after evading the priest’s subsequent counterattack. Under our relentless, alternating strikes, the dim luminescence steadily expanded until the massive silhouette of the priest finally began to materialize through the darkness.
“Looks like we’ve practically maximized the trigger.”
“Perfect. Then let’s……”
The exact millisecond I raised my blade to deliver what I assumed would be the final blow to the light—
[Submit before the eternal flames.]
A piercing voice violently ruptured the air, and the light I had just struck shattered into a million fragmented pieces. The entire world instantly bleached into a blinding flash of absolute white before my screen ruthlessly bled into a dull shade of grey.
It was an instant-death wipe mechanic.
“Ah, seriously. I cannot get used to these one-shot mechanics.”
Na Eun-hyeok muttered, audibly scratching his head. It seemed Mr. Sephiroth—who had spent the last three years thriving in a game completely devoid of instant-death mechanics by out-maneuvering every single threat through pure mechanical control—was struggling to adapt.
“It looks like continuously attacking the light past a specific threshold triggers the wipe sequence.”
“Yeah. We need to halt our strikes right before the exact level of illumination we hit just now. We’ll just have to fight using that specific amount of visibility.”
“As long as we can discern his physical outline, it won’t be an issue anyway.”
“Exactly. That……”
Mid-sentence, Na Eun-hyeok abruptly trailed off, his avatar staring dead at me through the screen.
“Why did you suddenly stop talking? What are you staring at?”
“……Never mind. Regardless, if we maintain our damage output under those parameters, we should be able to force out his next attack pattern.”
“You’re stating the glaringly obvious. I just highly hope his next phase doesn’t include another one-shot mechanic. As long as there isn’t an instant-death trigger, this clear should be a breeze.”
“How’s your condition?”
“My condition is fine. I’m completely warmed up now.”
At my response, Na Eun-hyeok let out a faint, amused chuckle. It distinctly sounded like he found my bravado endearing, which aggressively grated on my nerves. Stop overanalyzing everything. You’re being self-absorbed. Chiding myself internally, I immediately initiated our next attempt at the boss fight.
“Wow, he literally only possesses the most toxic, irritating patterns imaginable,” Na Eun-hyeok yelled out in pure exasperation a few minutes later.
As if to explicitly mock my earlier assumption that the blindness state was the worst of it, a succession of debuffs heavily disguised as ‘blessings’ systematically rained down on us. Among them, the burn debuff and the confusion debuff were absolute masterpieces of psychological torture. The burn debuff merely ticked down our health through standard damage-over-time, so it wasn’t particularly game-breaking, but the confusion debuff was a work of pure, malicious art.
“Wow, this is genuinely throwing my brain for a loop.”
“Tell me about it.”
“My right hand and left hand are operating entirely independently inside my head.”
The confusion debuff explicitly inverted your left and right directional controls. Compared to a standard monitor-and-keyboard setup, executing this inside a full-dive system magnified the difficulty to a completely dystopian level. If you instinctively wanted to lift your right hand, you had to consciously force your left hand to move; if you wanted to step with your left foot, you had to manually engage your right. Because my intended actions were constantly getting tangled up inside my brain, my character’s movements became incredibly rigid and awkward. In the midst of my clumsy hesitation, the priest rapidly closed the distance.
Is he already here?
As I stood there completely frozen, staring blankly at the massive stone scepter coming down with terrifying momentum, my character was violently shoved to the side.
“What the hell are you doing? Pull yourself together.”
“Ah, thank you.”
Having aggressively pushed me out of the trajectory, Na Eun-hyeok firmly raised his battleaxe to parry the crushing weight of the priest’s scepter. Quickly stabilizing my posture in that brief window, I immediately re-entered the fray. Ultimately, humans are creatures of pure adaptation; after forcing myself to move continuously through the inversion, my muscle memory began to override the mental lag, allowing me to regain a decent level of mechanical control. Even if……
“Bleewee-ya!”
“Ah, damn it……”
Even if it explicitly cost me about two additional deaths to fully internalize the timing.
Fortunately, once we successfully conquered the psychological hurdle of the confusion debuff, the remainder of his attack patterns didn’t present any insurmountable challenges. The boss attempted a brief invulnerability sequence, a magnetic pull mechanic that dragged us inward before unleashing a massive AoE strike, and an explosive firework pattern that spat crosswise streams of elemental flames from all directions—but not a single one of those assets was un-evadable. As long as an attack could be dodged through pure mechanical control and the target actively registered damage numbers, there wasn’t an enemy in existence that Na Eun-hyeok and I couldn’t utterly demolish.
“The mid-boss was infinitely harder.”
The final priest statue finally crashed heavily onto the stone floor with a thunderous boom. Brushing off his gauntlets, Na Eun-hyeok casually strolled over to my position. Perhaps because this victory hadn’t drained every single drop of our sanity the way the mid-boss had, I didn’t suffer from another momentary lapse of reason that almost drove me to sprint over and hug him. I simply offered a dry, concise nod.
“At least this guy let us dodge his attacks.”
“If you can dodge it, you have zero reason to ever take damage.”
“Yeah.”
While it sounded incredibly arrogant, it was a sentiment I could completely align with. Seeing me nod in agreement, Na Eun-hyeok crossed his arms with a deeply satisfied look.
[You have successfully defeated Telemus Sabien, the High Priest of Fire.]
The system notification materialized a beat late, rapidly followed by a succession of subsequent alerts.
[The seal on the Fire Temple has been completely dissolved. You have successfully reclaimed your forgotten memories and experiences. To honor the returned hero, the God of Fire bestows his divine blessing.]
Uh, no thanks. I really don’t require any more fire blessings.
I braced myself for some absurd elemental gimmick, but the actual reward that manifested was something entirely beyond my wildest expectations.
[Level Up!] [Level Up!] [Level Up!] …
“What…… What is this?”
“What the hell is up with this sudden storm of level jumps?” Na Eun-hyeok retorted, sounding equally bewildered.
In Zelfia, executing a level up triggered a visual effect where a pair of radiant white wings unfurled from your character’s back amidst a blinding flash of light. Right now, those wings were frantically unfurling and folding over and over again like a bird caught in a violent gale. My level—which had been awkwardly hovering somewhere in the low 60s—shot upward with terrifying velocity, tearing through the 70s, 80s, and 90s before finally grinding to a halt only after crossing solidly into triple digits.
“What just happened?”
The moment the visual madness finally concluded, Na Eun-hyeok asked again. I offered a completely stunned response.
“The system log says we reclaimed our forgotten memories and experiences.”
“Forgotten memories and experiences? So it’s explicitly functioning as a level-jumping mechanic to fast-track our progression.”
“Mm.”
The God of Fire had technically granted an actual blessing, but that detail was completely eclipsed. The massive structural shift brought about by this sudden level jump was infinitely more impactful than any standard buff.
“Does this mean clearing the other elemental temples will trigger the exact same level-jumping mechanic?”
“The wording heavily implied that. The notification explicitly tied the experience reclamation to the dissolution of the temple’s seal.”
“Then the progression path is clearly structured to automatically jump us straight to the maximum level cap the second we fully clear all the temples. It makes sense. Considering the game explicitly predicated this hidden quest line on a veteran player re-cultivating a character from level 1, the developers had zero reason to force us to manually trudge through a story sequence we’ve already fully experienced.”
“I haven’t actually seen the main story though.”
“Then make sure to steadily clear your main scenario quests ahead of time. If you run into any mechanics that require a solid strategy guide, just ask me.”
“Yeah. Thanks……”
The word left my mouth before I could catch it, and I froze. A beat late, a look of sudden realization flashed across Na Eun-hyeok’s face as well. Up until only a few hours ago, the two of us weren’t even on speaking terms, so how on earth did we suddenly slip back into acting like absolute best friends?
“Ahem.”
An incredibly awkward cough echoed as Na Eun-hyeok cleared his throat. Finding myself in the exact same state of intense awkwardness, I firmly clamped my mouth shut. Seriously, video games are nothing short of a societal menace. The government needs to hurry up and officially classify gaming addiction as a clinical disease so I can comfortably submit a medical absence slip to my school.
Even so, the level jump was undeniably a massive win. With my stat pool heavily reinforced, I was no longer restricted to functioning strictly as an evasion-tank during guild wars; I could actively branch into alternative combat roles now. It almost felt as though the blessing the God of Fire had bestowed was explicitly optimized to help us dominate the upcoming guild war.
Furthermore, when it came to the actual dungeon itself—
“Regardless, when are we hitting the next temple?”
It was undeniably thrilling.
Na Eun-hyeok: Un-ha-ya Na Eun-hyeok: Let’s meet up during lunch Na Eun-hyeok: Un-ha-ya? Na Eun-hyeok: Don’t even think about dodging me.
Waking up incredibly late, the absolute first thing that greeted my eyes was a string of text messages from Na Eun-hyeok. Because I had been deliberately manipulating my schedule to avoid any physical crossover with his daily routine, I had been skipping school entirely at my own whim lately, making a timely morning awakening an incredibly rare occurrence. To top it off, I had crawled back home at an ungodly hour last night solely because I was dead-set on clearing the Fire Temple. As a result, roughly an hour had already bled away without me even reading his initial messages. The final text had landed a mere ten minutes ago.
“Seriously, what is that guy’s actual problem……?”
Reflecting on yesterday, the version of me who had confidently declared that I wouldn’t actively dodge Na Eun-hyeok just to clear a few dungeons felt incredibly foolish. What was so special about a stupid dungeon anyway? Then again, looking back at the run, the mechanics had been genuinely fascinating. Especially that mid-boss encounter.
“……Ugh.”
I really am an idiot.
However, looking at our current circumstances, it was an undeniable fact that our guild strictly required Na Eun-hyeok’s combat power. His absolute, single-handed suppression of Ciel_o yesterday was definitive proof. Even with the massive level jump I had received, the structural level disparity that still existed between the veteran players and myself wasn’t a gap I could easily close on my own. For the sake of maintaining Seon-hwa nuna’s peace of mind, it was infinitely better to keep Na Eun-hyeok firmly anchored to the guild roster for the duration of the guild war. Alternatively, I simply needed to blitz through the remaining temples to trigger the rest of the level jumps as fast as humanly possible.
You think this chapter was thrilling? Wait until you read How a Reincarnated Villain Wins the Audition! Click here to discover the next big twist!
Read : How a Reincarnated Villain Wins the Audition
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