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That night.
After returning to Hotel Snark through the 「Door Room」, Solomon immediately pulled out the documents in his room.
And he realized that what was written there, the information, the value of it all, was far beyond what he had imagined.
It had stunned him even the first time, but after seeing Downtown with his own eyes, it hit even harder.
‘…All of this is room service?’
Ghost Town, where the boundary between life and death blurred. A hotel for assassins who made a living by killing and being killed, served by the dead themselves.
There were a few things he could be sure of. There was an organization that ruled Guild City’s underworld. And that organization and Hotel Snark were inseparable.
In truth, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that the room service Hotel Snark provided was ultimately the organization’s power.
Even if he did not know what that organization moved for, he could feel in his bones that they were on a different level.
He could be even more certain because he had seen the Biotech Guild’s hall, that fortress, with his own eyes.
Because everything the guild had piled up, the fortress of metal pipes, gears, and springwork to protect with desperate walls, was all written here.
Their intelligence network was looking into the Biotech Guild as if it were in the palm of their hand. Internal facilities, restricted sections, top-secret projects, none of it was an exception. For Solomon, it was like he had suddenly gotten to eat the drippings.
Even after he finished this contract, it would be information useful in many ways for a long time to come.
‘It even lists a secret passage that was built back when it was designed and isn’t used now.’
It even described in detail passages that even the people using the Biotech Guild’s fortress now had forgotten existed.
Their existence was not just some obvious stroke of luck or fortune.
It was proof that this world was not one hundred percent unreasonable, in other words, something like a promise. As if this world was saying that in the end, success and failure came down to the player.
Because it was a promise guaranteed by the god of the game above them all, something even the organization and the Faceless One could not touch.
‘The Game Master….’
Without a word, Solomon stuffed the blueprint’s contents into his head. Again and again.
After that day, Solomon got to work in earnest.
In case things went bad, he found medical facilities in the district where he could be treated even if he suffered severe injuries late at night, and paid a large sum in advance. The city was overflowing with unlicensed doctors who did business for fixers and contractors.
Next, separate from memorizing the layout of the Biotech Guild’s hall, he waited for the moments listed in the documents when Gilbert Graham was out on external schedules and approached him.
He had no intention of doing anything right then and there. The security was too tight for him to do anything anyway. He just needed to see the target with his own eyes and imprint him in his mind.
‘…This is absurd.’
A monster. There were no other words that could be used to describe him.
That man, Gilbert Graham, was a monster.
A blood-red body swollen crimson as if it might burst at any moment, something no steroid injection could even dare imitate. It almost gave him the illusion that muscle fibers were exposed right under the skin.
The two legs supporting that impossibly heavy upper body looked relatively underbuilt, but only because the upper body was too monstrous. Those legs, by any normal standard, were still deep in monster territory.
That huge body twisted into something horrific and grotesque, went beyond anything one could call physique.
At this point, it was hard to tell who was protecting whom. Every time he moved, the guards following at his side looked pathetic.
‘It’ll be hard to target him outside the guild, for sure.’
No matter how you looked at it, he was not someone Solomon could fight and beat right now.
But that didn’t change anything. Solomon had never planned to ‘fight fair’ with him in the first place.
Yet in a sense, winning without fighting was the hardest thing of all. Especially against a monster like that.
‘Then I have no choice but to infiltrate the guild hall directly.’
The carriage drawn by two horses carried Gilbert away and vanished. They weren’t living horses, but mechanical horses with meshing gears, moving springwork, and steam puffing from their mouths.
Solomon stopped by a general store one last time and finished a few more purchases.
Only when he finally finished preparing did the morning of the third day arrive.
Solomon finished a fragrant breakfast in Hotel Snark’s restaurant along with the smell of rotting corpses, then spent the afternoon roaming the streets of District 6 where the Biotech Guild was.
As darkness deepened, Solomon was crossing District 6’s subway line, which had stopped running early.
The tunnels of the city subway, done for the day, were dark without a single light. Leaning against cold concrete, Solomon found the emergency evacuation route marked in the blueprint. It was an iron door, rusted and dulled.
‘Just like the intel.’
Solomon took out the oil flask he had bought earlier and oiled the rusted hinges. When he applied the oil and turned the handle, a faint sound of metal rubbing followed.
Leaving that faint friction sound behind, he lowered his body. It was a cramped passage. On both sides, metal pipes which were tangled like veins spewed endless steam.
After crossing the passage for a while, a dead end blocked him.
But the steam pouring from the pipes all around indicated that there was a ventilation shaft opened in the ceiling. It was not within jumping distance. Solomon took out a small grappling hook and tied a rope to it.
Kaang!
Solomon threw the hook and succeeded in climbing into the vent. He forced his body in and moved forward, bracing his elbows on the floor like he was crawling through a narrow cave.
Before long, the end of the vent appeared, along with a grated gap that let him look down.
This was where he had to go down.
Solomon carefully checked beneath the grate.
‘…Damn it.’
There was someone there.
‘
The spells Solomon could use in a day were four level 1 spells and one level 2 spell. Spell slots would not recover until he rested for the night.
Even though he had to use each one carefully, he had no choice but to use it now.
───Available spell slots
: Level 1 spells 3 uses (⚀⚀⚀■)
: Level 2 spells 1 use (⚁)───
The moment he activated
They didn’t look like they would move aside peacefully.
‘I guess there’s no other choice.’
Worse, the vent had a metal grate cover fastened with screws. He had to remove it to drop down.
Solomon carefully took out the oil flask and applied it, then loosened each tightly fastened screw one by one. He worked with his heart in his throat, afraid even the faintest clink would carry.
After loosening them, he carefully lifted the grate cover.
Then he dropped without hesitation.
“Huh…?”
Chwaaak!
As he dropped, Solomon’s blade slashed down across the guard’s back.
Taang!
His other hand fired the crossbow. The man a few meters away was pierced straight through the throat.
Through the gap torn by the bolt, a voiceless rush of air spilled out.
‘Both strikes just now went in as true ambushes.’
There was no message, no proof of any kind. Even so, he knew. It was different. The sensation etched into his fingertips gripping the hilt, the sensation etched as he pulled the trigger, the sensations that followed afterward.
The odd feeling, as if an ‘invisible force’ was pushing him from behind.
After dealing with the two of them, he moved their bodies into a room he had marked in advance with
The blood was cold. Strangely, he felt no guilt.
The place Gilbert was in was a restricted section that required passing several more procedures inside.
He crossed corridors and climbed floors until an entrance sealed by strict isolation procedures greeted him.
Solomon took out the lockpick set he had prepared in advance. Hook picks, rake picks, and a diamond pick set, tools that could release internal latches one by one or manipulate them in bulk depending on the type. There was a tension tool as well.
Lockpicking.
A skill that came as a passive when you chose a rogue-type class. A spell assassin was no exception.
At the table, all you did was tell the GM you wanted to attempt a lockpick. Here, it didn’t work like that. Just like killing someone.
Click, click.
Thin slivers of metal interlocked soundlessly between his fingers as they probed the lock’s grooves. There was no hesitation in his movements.
This was not an ordinary lock. Disarming it required real precision. And if you forced it the wrong way, it was rigged to deliberately trigger an alarm.
Fortunately, thanks to
It was practically impossible to pick with the lockpick skill alone without the spell.
Fortunately, Solomon had magic. And he didn’t have it just because he was lucky. This was the appeal of a TRPG.
‘If I can see the inside of the lock with
And he had seen the GM’s expression, like he was about to lose it, countless times in moments like that.
…Click!
‘Got it!’
With a satisfying sound, the latches aligned correctly and released.
From here on was the area called the restricted section.
Around then, the first
With that, two level 1 spells uses were spent. There were two left.
───Available spell slots
: Level 1 spells 2 uses (⚀⚀■■)
: Level 2 spells 1 use (⚁)───
‘Two level 1 spell slots left.’
Solomon crossed the restricted section where heavy darkness had settled. The temperature was unnaturally low. Dampness and the smell of unknown chemicals stabbed at his nose.
Glass cylinders filled with scarlet culture fluid lined the area, and inside them floated organs and body parts in an unpleasant suspension.
Abnormally large viscera, swollen brains, and some of them even seemed alive, squirming as they released bubbling streams of air.
‘Disgusting.’
Fortunately, the night was deep and there were no signs of people. Most people slept at night.
He had not been discovered yet.
Following the blueprints etched into his mind, he crossed several corridors and sections, and spotted a guard patrolling in the darkness.
Solomon hid in the dark like a chameleon and waited for the instant the guard passed, for the guard’s utterly defenseless back.
Pook!
A soundless death. He buried the body in the dark and moved on.
How much farther did he walk? Feeling along the blueprints in his head as he advanced, a room called Project Lab finally revealed itself.
‘Gilbert Graham.’
Gilbert was not the only thing in there.
Along with him, several monsters Solomon had seen before in the sewer were there, bound and restrained by unknown devices. Culture tanks holding monster organs and body parts were visible here and there too.
The man called Gilbert manipulated an unknown device as he examined the restrained monsters.
Magitech.
A blood-red body grotesquely swollen as if it might burst, far beyond anything that could be considered the body of a bodybuilder. Compared to him, a bear or a sewer monster looked cute.
He was more monster than the monsters.
A monster who didn’t sleep even this late into the dawn. One who knew nothing but work.
Solomon stared at his back in silence for a few seconds. Then he moved.
To the space behind him.
‘Stealth.’
Before he knew it, the new gear Maya had given him, the Nightweaver Coat, resonated like a living creature, and night and shadow slid down along the fluttering hems like they were flowing into place.
Only then did Solomon instinctively understand the minor spell said to be embedded in the coat,
The description of it as the latest-model tactical coat had not been empty bragging.
There were no footsteps. No presence. Even so, Solomon was there. As steps closed and distance narrowed, he approached the monster’s exposed back until he was right there.
He was there. Right behind someone he had to kill.
Gilbert Graham’s thick, blood-red lat muscles bulged up, staring this way like a goblin.
Even then, Gilbert didn’t notice Solomon standing directly behind him. Solomon adjusted his grip on the hilt. It was the Ghost Whale bone blade.
───<Glass Die ⚅>
Tag — Special die
: When attacking, roll the die and add the result as bonus damage. When being attacked, take bonus damage in the same way.───
The die rolled. The invisible die.
That was not all.
‘Blade in the Dark, activate.’
Pook!
An invisible blade lunged forward.
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