Episode 47

[Party] Honey Bread: ???

[Party] Honey Bread: Didn’t the trade go through?

[Party] Retake: No

It was enough to make a ghost wail. Someone had initiated a trade, handed over the item, and survived, yet the person who was supposed to receive the trade hadn’t received anything?

I scrolled up and down through the chat window, digging through the system log. It was certain that I’d opened a trade and handed over the item. But there was no proof left in the log that a trade had happened. If I’d initiated a trade, there should have been a record saying, “Trade request sent,” but that phrase was nowhere to be found.

Had I been so exhausted after trying for an hour that I’d started seeing things? But my character’s HP was perfectly fine. I had made a trade, but there was no log saying I had, and while I wondered if I’d seen something and misunderstood, it hadn’t been a misunderstanding either.

Sinking into a swamp of confusion, I checked the system log once, then my HP value once, alternating between the two. Like when I was young and received a score of 14 for the first time after taking a test, I looked again and again, but nothing changed.

In the meantime, the boss scattered particles of light around its body and used an AoE skill. Unlike me, who had somehow lost the bomb somewhere, Retake had failed to deal with the bomb and had been left with 1 HP. He was hit by the AoE and let out a short, dying scream. Then, on the spot where he had been standing, a clump of light popped out with a boing.

[System] Retake has died.

[Party] Retake: We’re different races to begin with. Would trading even be possible?

……That was true. If our races were different, would the system really have left trading available, even for a hidden dungeon and a hidden boss?

“…….”

[Party] Honey Bread: If it’s Dusk

[Party] Honey Bread: wouldn’t it be possible?

If it were another game, maybe not.

For a moment, silence hung over the chat window.

[Party] Retake: '0')

[Party] Retake: You’re right...

[Party] Honey Bread: lol

Honestly, it was quite a talent for a grown man to use emoticons so cutely.

[Party] Retake: Still, one thing’s certain. No trade window popped up for me at all.

If Retake said he hadn’t seen it, there was nothing I could say. Since a notification sound played when a trade window popped up, it wasn’t easy to miss the fact that a trade had come in. Besides, he was streaming, so if any viewers had seen a trade window appear, they would have told him in chat right away.

Then who had I traded with? I quickly retraced my memory. I’d definitely confirmed there was no “cannot be traded” message, and since I was pressed for time, I’d been frantically clicking Retake, then pressed the trade request hotkey when the trade window popped up…… and shoved the bomb in without thinking.

While frantically clicking Retake. Recklessly. While frantically clicking…… had I clicked “something else”?

Like fragmented disks coming together, the pieces of memory that had felt distant and blurry assembled themselves into a scene and replayed. As I recalled it, I argued with myself that there was no way that made sense, yet at the same time, my head began to clear and my field of vision seemed to open up.

What if, while clicking Retake with my mouse, I had clicked the “boss” right beside him? What if, because the trade window opened, I thought Retake had been selected properly, but instead, I had actually sent the trade to the boss? What if that was why I’d been able to get rid of the bomb through a trade even though no trade window had appeared for Retake?

[Party] Honey Bread: I think I’m a huge genius

[Party] Retake: All of a sudden?

Retake typed in a tone of utter disbelief, but I didn’t even glance at it. I was a genius among geniuses.

[Party] Honey Bread: We trade with the boss

[Party] Honey Bread: and play hot potato with the bomb

[Party] Retake: ?

[Party] Retake: Ah

[Party] Retake: Ah

[Party] Retake: lololol ahhhh lolololololol

Retake immediately understood what I meant and burst into admiring laughter. Of course he’d be dumbfounded. He probably never imagined we’d have to initiate a trade with the boss. I’d solved it by accident and found it absurd too. But more than absurdity, what I felt was relief.

With my heart much lighter, I ran over to the spot where Retake had collapsed. Since it seemed unlikely I’d be able to withstand the auto-attacks alone and see the next mechanic anyway, I intended to revive him, who was lying there laughing, with a resurrection scroll.

Since I didn’t know when an auto-attack would come flying, I put up one survival skill in advance, then found an Emergency Resurrection Scroll in my inventory and used it. Unlike ordinary scrolls, its casting time was the same as a healer’s resurrection skill, and it was a rare item that could even be used when my own character died, so it was more expensive than most bundles of potions. But that was none of my concern.

[Party] Retake: Isn’t that an emergency rez (*Emergency Resurrection Scroll)?

[Party] Honey Bread: yup

[Party] Retake: That’s expensive. What a waste...

[Party] Honey Bread: It’s cheaper than

[Party] Honey Bread: hiring Chongchong to 1v1 you

[Party] Retake: Ah..

[Party] Retake: That’s true too

[Party] Retake: - "-)

As I used the scroll, I turned the camera and stared intently at the boss. It was to check when its auto-attack would come out. But even after quite some time had passed since I began the resurrection, and golden haze had risen thickly around Retake’s clump of light, the boss showed no sign of attacking.

[Party] Honey Bread: Why isn’t it hitting me

[Party] Retake: Right? It should be about time for it to hit you...

In the end, the nameless boss merely stood there without any sign of doing anything while I revived Retake. It wasn’t doing absolutely nothing…… It did at least show the courtesy of bringing a finger to its chin and thinking hard about something.

It couldn’t possibly be doing that out of consideration for us. It was unusual for a boss mob to go this long without attacking.

While watching Retake be reborn from the clump of light and resurrect, I recalled cases from other games that had occasionally been mentioned online under the title of “buggy god game.” There had been a bug where a character moved around in a T-pose like a scarecrow while hitting users, and another bug where something froze in the middle of an animation and stopped without attacking.

However, all the examples I could think of were a little different from what that boss was doing right now.

[Party] Honey Bread: For now

[Party] Honey Bread: I don’t think it’s a bug or an error

It happened the very moment I casually tapped the keyboard.

The boss suddenly stretched its arm toward me. At the same time, above my character’s head appeared the same huge needle of white light it had used to attack Retake on our very first attempt.

When the boss turned its hand over, the needle dropped in the blink of an eye, and the instant I caught the motion, I reflexively pressed my dodge skill.

[Combat] You used the Step Back skill, applying the evasion effect.

[Combat] Evaded the ( ) used by ( ).

Fortunately, it must have been a skill that could be evaded, because I was safe and didn’t die. That took ten years off my life. If I had been even a little late, I would’ve died right after reviving Retake. It was a good thing I’d seen how the boss moved when it fired that big needle at Retake in the beginning; otherwise, I almost would’ve died at a timing where I didn’t have to die and pointlessly ruined the retry.

Retake didn’t budge even after seeing that. Even after the needle appeared, he didn’t use a single healing skill and calmly put buffs on himself, as if he knew I would dodge it. At times like this, he really wasn’t cute at all.

[Party] Retake: That’s the thing from earlier, right? The one that attacked me at the start.

[Party] Honey Bread: yeah

But why had it appeared again? Aside from when it had suddenly attacked Retake at the very beginning, when we knew nothing, it was a pattern that hadn’t shown up even once throughout all our attempts.

Maybe it was a later-phase mechanic that appeared after the reverse-pickpocketing mechanic, or perhaps it was a completely random mechanic. Though if it were the former, it had been the very first attack on our first attempt. Otherwise, there was no way it would suddenly attack at such a speed without any warning signs.

After that, the boss neither created another huge needle to attack nor used any other threatening patterns, so we set the incident aside for the moment and quickly returned to our original pace, beating up the boss again. We had to deal damage steadily to make up for the time spent reviving Retake.

What was strange was that even though the boss’s HP kept dropping, it still only darted its eyes around busily and left us alone. For a whole 5% of its HP.

Watching it simply take hits like a scarecrow from 19% down to 14%, a sense of doubt slowly crept in. Was my…… damage really that terrible? Bad enough for the monster to openly offer itself up for me to hit? No, that couldn’t be.

Or was it because we were a tank-and-healer combination, so our damage was too lacking for the next mechanic to come out? This was actually more believable. We were even a Guardian and Military Physician combination, the pair with the lowest single-target damage among all tank and healer classes.

Right. It was because we were a Holy Knight and Military Physician combination. Thinking it over, I was immediately convinced.