Chương 93: Reborn as the Dragon — Chapter 93 - Between Life and Death

Facing a hail of spears and poison arrows raining down on their heads, the Sakura Island players had taken all the humiliation they could stand. They were done being live target practice. They rallied, surged upward, and hit back. Warrior players started climbing the pit walls. Mage players threw up shields, summoned whatever low-level spells they had, and lobbed them through the incoming fire at wherever the monsters were thickest. And it worked. Credit where it's due.

The monsters had trained hard — their strength was up, their bodies could take a beating. But their magic resistance was still garbage. Combined with the fact that most players outleveled them, those spells hurt. Every hit landed with real pain. Faced with a sky full of incoming spell fire, the monsters started scrambling — weaving, dodging, breaking formation. Which meant they couldn't hold the pit as tightly as before. Then one player finally hauled himself over the edge.

Standing in front of him was the Gnoll leader, Grey Wolf.

"I trained kendo at my middle school club for years, and now is the moment to prove my worth!" The player sneered and dragged his tongue along the blade of his longsword. His expression died. Because there was shit on the sword.

"Guh — bleh!" His throat lurched. He gagged once, hard, then clamped it down through sheer force of will. Iron discipline. He was not going to let the enemy see that. He could not let the enemy see that. He stepped back half a pace, raised the longsword diagonally in both hands in front of his eyes, and dropped into a proper katana stance.

"Yosh! Fight me like a man! Bleh..." He charged at Grey Wolf anyway. He wasn't afraid, more warrior players were scrambling up over the edge behind him. They were fearless. They were invincible. His sword came down in a vertical slash, carrying every ounce of strength and faith he had left in his body. This strike would break through anything. He was fast, too, for a warrior player. A flash of white light, a clean whistle of steel through air, CLANG!

The sword struck the Rock-Armored Crocodile leader Rekton square on the top of its enormous skull. A calm little [Miss] drifted up from the impact. It wobbled in place, swaying side to side, as if laughing at him. The player's snarl slowly solidified into nothing. Rekton looked back at him with cold, crimson vertical pupils. A breeze passed through. A ripple traveled the length of the longsword. Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation. CRACK! The blade snapped in two.

Rekton didn't wait for a reaction. It lunged forward, jaws swinging open, and swallowed the player whole in a single gulp. Honestly, what did they expect? Getting smacked on the head daily by the Black Dragon Boss had done wonders for Rekton's skull. The hardness up there was in a completely different bracket now. And these humans thought they could crack its defense? While it was even holding back on its level? Hilarious.

With that thought, Rekton's reverence for the Black Dragon Boss swelled in its chest like a flooding river, vast, endless, surging without limit. The Boss had to have foreseen this day. That's why he'd been knocking Rekton on the head all this time. Seemingly for no reason. But there was always a reason. The Boss was truly magnificent. Even if Rekton offered every last female crocodile in its possession to the Boss, it would have no regrets. And even if it offered... itself...

That wouldn't be entirely out of the question, either... Rekton pressed both claws shyly over its own head.

The monsters were still wary of the mages pelting them with spells from below, but the warrior players climbing the edge were a different matter. And watching them struggle up gave Grey Wolf an idea.

"Ugh~ Ah! ♂" The Gnoll leader let out a howl and launched itself in a single massive leap, landing directly in front of two Sakura warrior players. Every muscle in its body surged. Its huge wolf paws snatched a player's head in each hand. Then it spun its arms two and a half full rotations, swinging them like nunchucks, twisted its hips, cocked its waist, took aim at a mage player down in the pit, and hurled both warrior players like bombs. WHOOSH!

The two players spiraled through the air, the wind battering their mouths into shapes no human face should make. They blurred into a single streak of limbs and screaming, BOOM! They pile-drove straight into the mage below. The mage player's eyes nearly exploded out of their skull. Crushed to death on impact. The two warriors hit critical HP and both lit up with stacking Dizzy debuffs. The other monsters nearby watched this happen, processed it for a moment, and immediately started doing the same thing.

Some of them figured out an upgrade: hold the warrior players by the ankles and use them as living shields against incoming arrows. The battle at Sakura Island Newbie Village No. 1 went fully off the rails from there. With every player they killed, the monsters leveled up, and even accounting for their own casualties, the numbers kept ticking upward. The players had started the engagement with a slight advantage. That advantage was gone now. The monster army smelled blood. The monsters camped the pit without rest.

When they got hungry they grabbed something nearby and ate. When they needed to relieve themselves, they walked to the edge of the pit and took a dump on the players below. Three days straight. The player count kept dropping. Death penalty timers were stacking. The player who'd died the most was looking at a full twenty-four-hour respawn wait.

Yamaguchi Murakichi sat alone in a viewing booth at the World Plaza, face dark. The place was built like a private cinema, individual booths for each player, with shared public restrooms in the halls outside. Food and water you handled yourself through the System store. It was dead quiet in there. He'd walked the whole hall before sitting down and hadn't passed more than a handful of people. Every single one of them was from Sakura Island Newbie Village No. 1.

That meant the rest of the otherworld invasion was fine. Every other zone, every other server, doing just fine. It was only them. Only their village that had been buried like this. He stared at his respawn timer. Three hours and change remaining. He exhaled slowly, pushing down the frustration coiling in his chest, and tapped open the livestream of the highest-level player in the Tianchao region. ID: Zhang Yifeng. Equipment: hidden. Skills: hidden. Level: 23.

On screen, Zhang Yifeng was leading a pack of Tianchao players through a monster hunt. He cut through the horde alone, sword in one hand and shield in the other, carving in and out of the mob seven times without breaking stride. And he had three priestesses jogging alongside him the whole time, keeping his HP topped and his shields refreshed. Laughter in the background. Easy chatter. Relaxed and breezy. That was what this was supposed to look like. That was what a player was supposed to be. But him...

Yamaguchi Murakichi's mind drifted back unbidden, to those monsters with their grotesquely overdeveloped muscles, to the shit pellets, to his own shattered eggs. The more he sat with it, the angrier it got. The angrier it got, the more suffocated he felt. It built and built until it had nowhere left to go.

"BAKAYAROU!" He drove his fist into the seat. ➤ Next: Forgive Her