1.

He'd dismissed the 'Mount' system and never considered using it in the event for one simple reason.

[Mount]

▶ Grade: Legendary

▶ Level: 1

▶ Trait Slots: 0

▷ You can spend 1,000 gold to increase its level.

▷ At level 2, you can spend 1,000 gold to expand its trait slots.

There was no useful information.

The name alone sounded decent. In most games, one of the ultimate fantasies for players is riding monsters. Soaring across a continent on the back of a dragon—a symbol of terror—was an awesome image to even imagine. Taming such a rare beast was a guaranteed way to earn the envy of other players. And to do so in reality? That was another matter entirely.

Beyond just being cool, countless ways to make money immediately sprang to mind.

However, one must always draw a cold, hard line between fantasy and reality.

'What kind of conditions are they going to tack on this time? Are they going to charge gold just to register it?'

Unlike pets, there was no limit on how many mounts you could have, but there wasn't a single word about any precautions or advantages. Part of that was the hologram's fundamentally unhelpful nature, but the biggest reason was that the system was still at level 1.

So he had put it off.

Unless Hwangdo grew large enough to ride, there was no practical stat increase to be gained from using a mount in a dungeon right now.

That hadn't changed.

He did, however, register the ogre chieftain as a mount.

'Yeah, nothing special.'

The basic skills that came with it—Ride, Command, and Communicate—were as unimpressive as he had expected. At best, Communicate was mildly interesting, allowing him to interact with non-verbal monsters, but he had far too much to do to marvel at such sentimental details.

He had planned to be satisfied with simply "riding" on its shoulder, showing off his twenty-four-hour field boss pet that had cost him over three thousand gold.

That was it. At that moment, the usefulness of mounts seemed to extend no further.

At least, that was what he thought until he watched the sludge of filth vanish after its twenty-four hours were up, just as the third day's Blessing was announced.

"Huh? Why isn't it disappearing?"

The sludge had vanished without a trace. Considering how much gold he had poured into it, he felt he had gotten more than his money's worth and even gave it a little wave goodbye.

Next up was the ogre chieftain.

He had been on the verge of tears, thinking about the absurd cost for so little utility, when he met the creature's blank, staring eyes.

Thirty seconds, one minute, two minutes passed.

"What the hell?"

He glanced to the side. The lump of filth was long gone, but the ogre chieftain showed no sign of vanishing, no matter how long he waited.

The hologram explained why.

[Field boss 'ogre chieftain' will be destroyed.]

[Taming effect is interfering with destruction.]

[Mount effect is interfering with destruction.]

[Ogre chieftain has been bound as a Mount.]

[This mount cannot leave the Event area. It will be destroyed when the Event ends.]

This was the moment the Mount system, which he had assumed would be completely useless, powerfully asserted its presence.

"Holy shit."

The Curse slipped out on its own. It was inevitable.

If people could see through Kim Buja's eyes, if they could see what was happening right now, they would all say the same thing:

"Now this is a game."

He had found a way to exploit a loophole in the system, to turn the Curse given to players into a Blessing.

'You're all dead.'

Kim Buja, who had been scowling after blowing thousands of gold, was gone. In his place was only an artist, eyes gleaming with fighting spirit as he sketched out a devious masterpiece of how to dominate this event.

The ogre chieftain and Kim Buja began their unrestrained advance.

* * *

On the third and fourth days, players who had seemed to be clinging to pacifism slowly began to move. Most of them had passed level 20, and flashy skills were starting to appear one by one in their battles.

Their growth was steady.

The players who had picked up speed seemed determined to make up for the quiet days, flaunting their power and accelerating their progress. This quickly led to a visible gap between them.

—How is Fly almost level 40 already?

—The event island's scaling is insane.

—Look at Fly hunting. There's no way he wouldn't be that level.

—He's not even sleeping. Plus, a bunch of things just lined up in his favor.

They were packing a year's worth of growth into every day. The players' development in the event felt like watching the entire six-year history of player evolution compressed into a few days. Just as before, the event provided a clear answer to the question: 'What would happen if every player were reset to the same starting line and told to run?'

—Where are the people who said the frontrunners get everything? You all started together, but Fly's already left everyone in the dust.

—Honestly, being a frontrunner probably hurt Fly more than it helped.

Fly's fans were triumphant.

Sure, on the first day, he had suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of some nobody named Kim Buja, but they could console themselves by shouting that it had only been a cowardly ambush. In the end, Fly hadn't died but was growing steadily, and when the late game came, he would win by an overwhelming margin.

—Even among Legendary classes, there are tiers. Something that's good early on is trash later.

—If they fought right now, Fly would stomp him. The number of skills he can use now is dozens of times what it was a few days ago.

Hope. Confidence. Certainty.

This wasn't some self-soothing born of anxiety; it was a guarantee based on everything Fly had shown so far. They had absolute faith in someone who had never once failed in a hundred attempts. Along the way, there might have been moments that looked shaky or dangerous, but that was only an illusion created by the narrow perspective of the onlookers.

Fly was that good—good enough to justify that belief.

He was that good, but his fans didn't know.

The world is a big place.

—Yeah, sure. Anyway, Kim Buja just hit level 60 and started cleaning up the island. If you don't want to get wiped out and embarrassed, you'd better run for your lives.

And it's full of lunatics.

2

In truth, Kim Buja's goal was to see what lay at the end of this island.

'Level 99. What's waiting there?'

There was no way to find out except through an event like this one. Even if it was technically possible in reality, it had taken Fly, the number-one player, six years to reach level 69. Reaching 99 would likely take at least that long, if not more.

However, he started moving in earnest once he hit level 60.

Personal goals were just that—personal. What mattered right now wasn't what kind of monsters would appear at level 99. If he wanted to handle the crisis that would one day hit Earth more wisely, then in this miniature version of the world, he needed to gather as much information as possible on how higher-level monsters appeared and how strong they were, even if it meant delaying his event results a bit.

Yet humans were too selfish to unite over such distant concerns.

Competition and cooperation. In a world where both had to coexist, very few players could prioritize cooperation over competition, and even then, it was rarely efficient. Cooperation only worked when everyone was truly of one mind. If even one person decided to sabotage the effort, everyone who had wanted to cooperate would end up worse off.

That was true even in a simple game. So what about a situation where profits, personal lives, and even the interests of entire nations were on the line?

This was where the event became interesting.

The end of the tutorial. And this place, Hunting Island, could at least hint at how things would unfold from here. It might be a stretch, but if you could grab even a single clue, you could start the next phase a step ahead of everyone else.

Even so, players were fixated only on the rewards right in front of them.

Kim Buja was no different.

He knew all this, but he didn't act on it.

"I only believe what I see and feel for myself."

He had invested his life into games, but he had never invested money into them, because the real-world Kim Buja was more important. His desire to grow stronger and the drive that had allowed him to sell expensive items even when they were perfect for his character all came from that principle.

The event was no different.

No matter how much information he gathered here, it might or might not apply in reality. Rather than putting faith in uncertain information, it was better for his future to burn through gold and secure tangible benefits.

That was why he moved. The moment he hit level 60. The moment day five began. The day the Curse reappeared.

"The Curse of day five is me! Mwahahaha!" he bellowed an utterly cringeworthy, villainous line and charged forward from atop the ogre chieftain's shoulder.

Behind him, dozens of elite monsters followed. Nothing stood in their way.

It was a monster army. Their levels were all over the place, and they came in every shape and size, but they all had one thing in common: they were Kim Buja's loyal tamed monsters, and they fought with fearless ferocity.

It was a reassuring sight, to say the least.

This was the power of gold, made possible only because this was an event, and because he had let go of his sanity for the sake of winning it.

"Let's go, my ten-thousand-gold monsters!"

Who could possibly stop them?

His relentless march, trampling everything in his path, could only be described as tyrannical. If it was this devastating for monsters, how much worse would it be for players?

"Argh! What the f—! This is bullshit!"

All Kim Buja did was shout from the ogre chieftain's shoulder, pointing and telling them to kill that guy or head over there.

Even so, his safety was completely guaranteed.

"This is way too boring."

Safety and excitement were inversely proportional. The national team selection finals had been more nerve-racking than this. With his gold fully charged, with the perfect sacrificial targets and the perfect stage, he had turned what should have been a fair match into a one-sided massacre.

His confidence swelled. He couldn't help but think of Fly, the one he had failed to catch a few days ago.

That was the real reason he had started moving the moment he hit level 60.

'I really need to get him before day seven if I can.'

This might have been boring for spectators and victims, but from the perspective of the one doing the slaughtering, he could enjoy this tensionless hunting all day long. The problem was the unpredictable variables that would pop up as they approached day ten.

There had been no separate announcement, but since the individual competition was set for days one through ten and the team competition from day eleven, there had to be some mechanism to ensure the individual portion ended on time. And even if there wasn't, he wouldn't be able to participate in the team competition if he didn't finish things by then.

One way or another, it had to be over before day eleven.

The fact that Kim Buja's guess was correct became clear with the Curse on day six.

[The Curse of day 6 has been applied.]

[The locations of all players surviving on the Hunting Island have been revealed.]

[Time remaining: 119 hours 59 minutes 59 seconds]

* * *

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