Chapter 275

└ It straight-up feels like the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.

└ Even if other raid teams drag their asses up here, they are all going to get fucked in this exact spot.

└ Is there some special gimmick? It looks like they are supposed to interrupt that black energy when it charges, but that timing window is tight as hell. One screw-up and you are done.

└ It’s just shit damage, plain and simple. The lineup Spear sent to Floor 4 is not a high-DPS setup at all. They dumped everything into balance while cracking Floor 3 and now they are eating that mistake.

└ The boss was never designed to let you turtle behind tanks or spam heals. It’s just a damage brawl. It’s basically asking who hits harder. If you don’t stack burst classes, you are absolutely screwed.

The Ghost Spirit Blade blocking Floor 4 was a boss that demanded an obscene damage output. If the party let it stack energy even once during the fight, the run was over on the spot. There was no room for recovery, since one failed charge meant their entire strategy would collapse.

The Spear Guild who first set foot on this floor immediately got shut down, and every raid team that climbed up after them ended up smashing their heads against the same wall that was the Ghost Spirit Blade.

└ But seriously, if you just slap Do-Jin into that fight, feels like that shit would’ve been cleared instantly.

└ Yeah, it really does feel that way.

└ You can see it in your head without even trying. The second the Ghost Spirit Blade starts coughing up smoke, spells would just unload nonstop and blast it to hell.

As soon as damage became the key word, everyone naturally brought up Do-Jin. Right now, in LOST, when people thought about insane burst damage, his name was always the first to come up. That was just the reality.

However, every time he was mentioned, the same group of haters showed up like they had been waiting in the shadows, ready to unleash their unwarranted opinions.

└ Why the fuck are we even talking about that guy who has been useless this entire event?

└ How the hell would you know whether he has been useless or not?

└ There has been zero news about him so far. That already says everything. What more proof do you fucking need?

└ Calm down. We still need to wait and see. And forget just Do-Jin for a second. That party composition is brutal as hell. They are not that far behind. This whole thing could flip upside down at any moment.

The fans and haters were bickering nonstop, and behind the scenes, people were monitoring every single one of those reactions.

“Sigh. We’re not getting a good response from the public...” Kim Young-Hee flicked through her phone screen over and over and let out a sigh. “More than anything, I am worried Do-Jin himself might get stressed out.”

The people at Rael Entertainment had been riding high on anticipation. After the PvP tournament, they had been convinced something massive would explode out of LOST too, and they had been almost giddy with it. Now that excitement had been replaced with an equal weight of anxiety.

Oh Young-Sik chewed on the rim of his empty coffee cup before speaking, “It will be fine. Do-Jin... handles things well, you know that.”

“Team Lead, were you just about to say he doesn’t care?”

When Oh Young-Sik said nothing, Kim Young-Hee let out a short breath. They had been in this industry long enough. They had seen plenty of rising stars who were flying high one day and completely shattered the next over what looked like a minor setback.

“Honestly... I don’t think Do-Jin will be shaken that easily, but...” Oh Young-Sik clicked his tongue. He had seen someone who smiled brightly every single day suddenly collapse without warning too many times. “It would be nice if we could at least check what is actually happening in there.”

They tried to access the in-game footage, which was being recorded in real time, but failed. The recording settings had been locked so that no one could review them. Sending a message wouldn’t help either. Game streamers were notorious for ignoring their phones during events like this.

Neither bothered hoping for a reply. In the end, there was nothing they could do except wait quietly.

After checking that their lunch break was almost over, Oh Young-Sik tossed his empty coffee cup into the trash can. “Let’s head back.”

***

While the entire outside world was in the middle of losing its mind over the Ghost Spirit Blade raid, while countless people were busy hyping him up, feeling disappointed in him, mocking him, defending him, and worrying about him, Do-Jin stepped into a world that was already on the verge of complete collapse.

The darkness that had swallowed his vision at some point finally lifted. The first thing he saw was a giant that looked like someone had stacked several massive mountains together and then told them to stand up.

It was so enormous that unless one stood an absurd distance away, there was no way to take in the whole thing at once. Half of its body was buried in the earth, yet parts of it still punched straight through the clouds.

He was just about to let out a stunned breath at the sheer scale when a different voice came from beside him.

“Oh my... this is seriously making me dizzy as hell.”

A woman stood there with black hair whipping in the wind and silver armor gleaming along her body. For a split second, Do-Jin thought of someone else.

Is that Starsea Princess?

It seemed his loading wasn’t fully complete yet. He could see and hear, but his body hadn’t fully transferred over, so he couldn’t move or speak.

Never mind... That’s not her.

As his blurry vision slowly cleared, he realized it was a completely different person, from her face to the color and length of her hair. Even the armor was entirely different. He couldn’t even understand why he had made that mistake in the first place.

“Could they not send me somewhere at least a little easier? Why the hell do they always pick places that demand this kind of brutal labor?”

The black-haired woman kept grumbling. Even so, she drew her sword and fixed her blue-tinted eyes straight on the giant that was forcing its way up through the ground.

Do-Jin could tell immediately that she was getting ready to fight that massive mountain head-on.

“Alright. Fuck it. Let’s go—”

Just as she finished preparing and kicked off the ground, Do-Jin’s loading completed.

“What the—!”

Sensing a presence that had appeared out of nowhere, the black-haired woman reflexively swung her blade sideways, only barely stopping herself. She had realized at the last second that Do-Jin was a person.

The shockwave from her near-miss slash ripped across the space right in front of Do-Jin’s face, close enough to feel the air getting shredded.

“What is this? When they need bodies, they work people like dockhands short on manpower, and now they stick me with a kid like this?”

The black-haired woman let out an exaggerated sigh. She gave off the exact vibe of a battle-hardened soldier who just found a scrawny teenage recruit dumped into an active warzone.

“Do you really just sigh the second you see a person...”

The moment Do-Jin finally managed to speak, her expression stiffened like stone. She felt her strength dropping off a cliff almost instantly. Her grip tightened around her sword and the veins along her hand stood out as the flow of power inside her body twisted violently.

[Trial difficulty adjustment procedure has begun.]

As the cold system message rang out with mechanical indifference, their surroundings began to change. The scenery flipped violently like someone was slamming the rewind button on a video. It jumped back one minute, then three, and then several more, each shift snapping into place with brutal speed.

The colossal giant that had been clawing its way out of the earth began sinking back down into the ground, as if some invisible hand was dragging that massive bastard underground again. The sight was so surreal that both Do-Jin and the black-haired woman fell completely silent. Then, all at once, the changes stopped.

“I’m honestly too fucking tired to even be surprised anymore...” The black-haired woman muttered bitterly.

Just moments ago, the world had been seconds away from total annihilation. Now time had rewound itself and rolled everything back to a point before the destruction sequence had even started.

[Prevent this world’s Ruin from awakening.]

The system message hovered in front of Do-Jin’s eyes.

He read it and thought to himself, The others are not fully loaded in yet.

The semi-transparent outlines of his party members were slowly becoming more solid as their forms gained color and weight. Soon, their voices could be heard overlapping one another.

“It looks like we are going to have to work together—”

“As much as I don’t like it, judging from how this is playing out—”

Do-Jin tilted his head slightly and gestured with his eyes at the woman. “Looks like your side and mine are in similar situations. And this mess seems tied to you as well. So how about you start explaining?”

From her words, Do-Jin picked up a few things immediately.

She isn’t a standard guide NPC. She is in a position similar to ours.

She had been thrown in here without knowing exactly what would happen. She was a problem-solver type, just like him.

“I’m not sure what you mean by similar situations exactly. But it is true that I’m here to fix whatever the hell went wrong in this place.”

Her eyebrow twitched slightly. She clearly didn’t take well to what Do-Jin had said. Perhaps it was his tone.

Do-Jin didn’t care, however, as she was the one who started talking informally. “Come on, now. It’s obvious, right? Are you also being taken advantage of?”

The woman raised a finger and pointed toward the sky. “Look at that ██████████.”

The moment she tried to explain, her words shattered. The audio glitched violently, and parts of the sentence broke apart into static. The space itself warped and twisted as if reality was being corrupted.

The distortion was so intense that both Do-Jin and the black-haired woman recoiled at the same time, assaulted by overwhelming visual and auditory noise.

She let out a dry scoff. “Seriously? Two people in the same damn line of work can’t even have a proper fucking conversation?”

At the woman’s mutter, thick with disbelief, Do-Jin decided to test the boundary one more time. “By any chance, are you also a █████—”

The distortion slammed into them again before he could finish. The sound that left his mouth tore itself apart and exploded into violent static, and the space around them warped like reality itself was glitching out. The air cracked and twisted, visual noise tearing across their vision so aggressively that it felt like the world was about to split open.

The black-haired woman scowled. “Stop. If we keep pressing it, we’re going to get kicked out of this place entirely.”

Do-Jin nodded slowly while his thoughts were spinning.

The filtering started the second I mentioned “Apostle of the Star”...

If that term triggered the system’s censorship, then whatever she had tried to say earlier had probably been brushing up against the same forbidden topic.

Her eyes suggested she had reached a similar conclusion. There was a sharp glint there, thoughtful and irritated at the same time. Then she wiped it clean and spoke as if none of it mattered.

“There is no point digging deeper. You are obviously getting dragged around for your own reasons too. As long as we handle the mess in front of us and don’t let this world go to hell, that should be enough.”

Do-Jin gave a small nod. “Agreed.”

If the system was going to censor every useful word, then obsessing over it would only waste time. The only thing that mattered right now was the catastrophe about to blow up in their faces.

Without either of them saying it outright, their gazes shifted forward almost simultaneously. The giant that had sunk back into the earth during the rewind now had only its head, shoulders, and one massive hand exposed above ground. Even in that half-buried state, it still felt like that thing could crush the entire continent just by standing up.

New structures had appeared around it, scattered across the land. They glowed with unnatural light and spewed thick black smoke into the sky like industrial plants designed to manufacture apocalypses on an assembly line.

“Do you not think this is painfully predictable?” the black-haired woman said in a tone that suggested she had seen this exact flavor of catastrophe too many times. “Ignorant locals digging up a buried extinction event without having the slightest clue what it’s going to do to them.”

A system message rose before them.

[The Chaturam Tribe seeks to excavate an ancient weapon in order to invade and conquer other races. However, this decision will bring about not only their extinction but the end of all life in this world. Stop them and prevent the Ruin from beginning.]

The moment Do-Jin read it, the situation clicked into place cleanly. The scene he had witnessed upon entering this world must have been right after the ancient weapon had fully activated.

The Chaturam Tribe had probably been wiped out by the very thing they dug up. After that, the rest of the world must have followed within minutes.

Now we have been rewound to before the ancient weapon awakens.

Stopping it before it blows everything up seemed to be the goal of this trial.

The black-haired woman said dryly, “Whether this difficulty spike happened because of your arrival or whether the mission was always built this way, my strength has been nerfed down to something close to a sealed Demon King. So do me a favor and pull your weight. If we work together, we should be able to deal with this.”

So that was how the system balanced things. Do-Jin assessed everything in one sweep.

He knew what had to be done. The smoke-belching, light-spewing factory structures had not existed before the rewind. They were the trigger points, the ignition system for the coming disaster.

I gotta destroy them before the weapon wakes up.

“Here is the good news,” Do-Jin said evenly. “It’s not just the two of us.”

As soon as he finished speaking, the translucent figures behind him solidified completely. Theresa, Soso, and Tanto finished loading in.

“We are a party of four.”

For a brief moment, something flickered in the black-haired woman’s eyes. It was not hostility or suspicion, but envy.

“Four, huh... Then you’re not fighting this alone.”

That day, the Chaturam Tribe walked straight toward a catastrophe they had brought upon themselves.