Chapter 74 – Hidden Challenge Part 11, Level 101 Ranker [Cold Hands]

After sundown’s culling, the next big thing would be several hours later during midnight–the gold invitation’s weather report perk, which would reveal tomorrow’s event.

I decided to fully utilize the hour until sundown by performing some reconnaissance around the castle. Summoning a portal back into the shop, I was greeted once more by the three foot tall elderly ghost shopkeeper with a rice hat on his head.

“Back already?”

“Er, I still need to earn some more tickets before I can afford to buy anything. I’ll be back.”

The shopkeeper nodded and bid me farewell as I pushed open the large door that led to the castle interior.

The moment after I stepped out, my surroundings began to melt and warp into the hill immediately outside the castle. It made sense to place players leaving the secret shop in random locations nearby, otherwise players would just camp the entrance to the secret shop and ambush players that came out.

There were even more bodies littering the ground than before. Warriors, a ton of archers, mages, priests, thieves, orcs, gadgeteers, blacksmiths… basically every archetype you could think of could be found among the dead.

And yet, there were still just as many alive and fighting. The sun was hanging low in the sky, meaning there was roughly an hour left until the culling, and not many players had the luxury of poaching a ten-ticket monster kill like me.

There were more squads this time around, but just as many solos. After all, a squad was more effective at killing, but ticket distribution could cause massive problems for team cohesion, so playing solo was still a solid strategy. You didn’t have to fight over ticket drops if you were the only player in your party. And plus, it was hard to find trustworthy teammates.

I began to slowly retreat away from the blasts and grunts, but a large rolling stone sphere was headed my way like a heat seeking missile adjusting its course towards me. Stepping out of the way just in time, the sphere rolled past me and then… braked?

Unfurling itself like an armadillo, the stone sphere revealed interlocking plates of armor, arms, legs, and a torso like a mole knight. It was unmistakably a golem, and judging by the color of its name, it was being controlled by a player. I laughed. Must’ve poached the [First Golemancer] achievement as well, seeing as how there were other golemancers now. The class or school of magic was still a secret, because I didn’t see a single forum post about golemancy when I tried to look online.

Although golemancers had some pretty incredible strengths such as being able to fight from a distance without risk, and having a renewable soldier that could be endlessly reconstructed as long as the core was still intact, I was privy to knowledge on how to take a golemancer down because I was one myself.

Fighting a golemancer was simple. There were two options, destroy the golem and interrupt the golemancer from reconstructing it from the core, or find and kill the summoner. Darting my eyes around the battlefield, I unsuccessfully tried to locate the summoner in the middle of all the chaos. [Blood Sense] was going haywire because of all the wounded and dead players, so I turned it off and relied on my regular senses instead.

Hm. Unlike summoners or necromancers that summoned skeletal soldiers, which had a certain maximum tether distance from their summon, golemancers did not need to be within a certain distance from their golem. In theory, Siege Tank Golem could operate completely autonomously even if I was here and he was still on the island.

But I was assuming that this player had as many perks as I did, with [Crown of the Forgotten King], the [First Golemancer] achievement that gave a shit ton of golemancy stat, and an ancient golem. It was very possible that this kind of low tier golem did not have an autonomous personality like Siege Tank Golem had.

If it didn’t have an autonomous personality, then the golem was just a glorified puppet, and the summoner needed to be nearby to control it.

Drrrrrrrrrr.

The mole knight golem revealed its arm to be a spinning drill, which it plunged into the ground and began to tunnel with. Now this was dangerous, and suddenly I felt that [Steel Thief Gauntlets β]’s grapple function could come into good use here.

The ground tremored from the vibrations of the drilling. Feeling a bit apprehensive about an attack from below, I opened Bjorn’s pouch and took out a purple orb, then crushed it in my palm as he instructed. Immediately, a thick purple gas that smelled and tasted like berries began to spread around me, obstructing my vision as well.

I activated [Blood Sense] to see through the smoke. Unfortunately, it only showed me bleeding or dead players, but there were so many bodies that the outline of their bodies on the ground could give me a sense of the shape of the terrain, and allowed me to keep my balance on this hilly battlefield.

Moving to the edge of the smoke, I summoned love whip and adamantite poleaxe, as well as Meat Shield.

“Cat,” I asked her. “Where’s the golemancer?”

Meat Shield coughed a bit since she was summoned into a ton of purple smoke, but soon realized that it was rather pleasant. She began to lick the air.

“Hey, concentrate!”

“Mmm….” Meat Shield replied. “Yummy…”

“Er, let me see if I can detect the golemancer. Although you should probably worry about what’s underneath us first~”

“No shit, sherlock!” I shouted. I didn’t need her to tell me that, since anyone could tell that the underground mole drill was on its way up towards the surface.

Sprinting out of the smoke, I ran head first into a tree.

-20 health.

[You have been stunned. The stun will last for .5 seconds]

Thanks for telling me, system.

Grabbing the tree trunk for a bit of stability, I regained my composure and looked for the mole knight golem. It was a bit far away, emerging on the other end of the smoke bomb. That confirmed that the mole knight did not have autonomous control, and it was a golemancer aiming its movements. If the mole knight was autonomous, it should’ve easily located me through the smoke, since it was a mole. Knowing that it was not autonomous meant that as long as I could fool the golemancer with things like smoke bombs, he wouldn’t be able to aim at me very well.

“Hey, Spoon…” Meat Shield said in a worried voice, pulling at my cheek.

“What?” I replied impatiently, still trying to figure out where exactly the golemancer was observing the battle from.

“I see [Steel Slice]...” said Meat Shield.

Upon hearing that, I instantly diverted my attention to where she was pointing. A powerful barbarian king equipped with wyvern bone armor and fur was hacking through another player with a ridiculously oversized battleaxe that he wielded with both arms, which I immediately recognized as the [Dragonlord’s Battleaxe]. It was one of the most expensive and high level melee weapons available at the moment on the auction shop, and Steel Slice bought it a week ago and flaunted it on death tube for the whole world to see.

Holy shit, the guy was truly a ranker now. Level 95, high on the leaderboards, guildmaster of the [Steel Guild]...

This guy was single handedly making Eclipse Online look pay-to-win. After killing a player with a diving axe blow, he stood back up and looked for his next target. As he looked around, his eyes locked with mine, and an aggressive smile flared up on his face.

“Look who it is,” Steel Slice called out from several meters away. He was walking towards me with the [Dragonlord’s Battleaxe] over his shoulder. “Spoon and his stupid little cat. Your cat scratched my face, remember? Now it’s payback time.”

My dignity told me to hold my ground. But the logical part of my brain began to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations. A level 95 ranker, geared out of his mind with epic heavy armor, with one of the strongest weapons in the game at the moment…

Steel Slice began running towards me, making ground at an unnaturally fast pace using some kind of movement enhancing ability like [Stride].

“Shadow.”

I didn’t need to think twice about my decision to run. If I had any dignity I’d try to fight back instead of run from the bully that screwed me over since level 1, but since it was clearly a losing fight, I decided to run to fight another day.

Before I could get too far, a player emerged from behind a rock and confronted the charging [Steel Slice]. I expected the barbarian king to run him over, but to my surprise even Steel Slice paused and eyed the newcomer warily.

The mole knight golem walked next to the heavily armored player, and he pet the golem in the head. Only then did I see his ID and level.

[Cold Hands], level 101. It was the legend himself. The first and only ranker to reach level 100 so far. Number one on the leaderboards.

“Step aside, Cold Hands…” Steel Slice growled, assuming a low offensive stance. “I have a personal score to settle with that fucker and his cat that just ran away…”

Cold Hands didn’t budge. “You don’t get to tell me what to do, number eleven.” His deep voice was calm, without a hint of wavering. The number one ranker in the world shifted his weight in his big heavy armor.

Steel Slice was number 11 on the leaderboards in South Korea.

“Tch…”

I tried to boot up my recording software to record a possible fight between a titan and a semi-titan, but it was blocked for the duration of the hidden challenge, just like in-game communications.

Steel Slice spat on the ground and turned around. Right before Cold Hands could return his attention back towards me, I stepped into the dimension room. He might’ve wanted to keep toying with me with his golem, but at least he couldn’t chase me into another dimension.

Landing back in the dimension room, I wiped the nervous sweat off my forehead and headed to the kitchen, which was linked to a common hallway that also led to the hot spring, so Rosalia could use the kitchen and storage room, just not the living room. The granite refrigerator was stocked up with some edible vegetables, nuts, berries, and other things, so I grabbed some of the snacks and began eating to satisfy a bit of my hunger craving. Now I was beginning to understand why there were so many food items in the shops. Food was not easy to come by during the challenge, not because the material needed to cook was rare, but rather it was because you always had to watch your back for other competitors while gathering materials.

I then checked the hot spring. Rosalia was there, lounging in the bath like usual. The three tickets I left on the fresh towels were left untouched.

“How did things go on your end?” I asked her.

Rosalia giggled and made a mischievous expression. “I killed two people with light magic when they were fighting a giant gorilla~”

Damn, she was making it sound easy to be a wolf. “How many tickets do you have now?”

“Fifteen~ they both dropped a lot, haha~ how about you?”

I retrieved the three tickets I originally set aside for her. “Thirteen right now.”

Rosalia took a ticket out of her inventory and blew it towards me. “You can take this back~ Now we each have fourteen tickets~”

“Thank you.”

I mulled over her ticket count for a bit. “Hey Rosalia, the players you killed, were they wolves or innocents?”

“They were innocents until a minute before I killed them. Some of them were trying to take the task completion ticket rewards for themselves~”

That confirmed my worst suspicions. It meant that my assumptions from earlier might not have been totally accurate. Two innocents dropping multiple tickets meant that they were getting far more tickets than I expected from task completions.

“Oh, I also got some tickets from giving the white flower to a lake spirit~”