The S-ranks of the Ultimate Line were powerful, especially the ten-man party made up exclusively of S-ranks.
With only 10–15% of their skill output, they had taken down an S-rank monster without any penalties.
In fact, if an attack force made up solely of A-ranks had fought outside the tower, in the real world where they suffered a 10–15% penalty, it would have been impossible to defeat an S-rank monster even with forty people.
An A-rank tank wouldn’t be able to withstand a single blow from an S-rank monster, while the attacks of the damage dealers would mostly bounce off—and one of them would die to a single hit before the healers could even heal them.
But S-rank parties were clearly in a class of their own.
Every team, from Team A to Team D, took down an S-rank Rock Golem without any trouble.
Damn, was this what years of combat experience and practical know-how looked like? Even Suho was honestly impressed.
‘Should I ask for an SS-rank Core Stone…?’
He even had the somewhat reckless thought of raising the difficulty by one more level, but decided he should only try that after equipping every clan member with SS-rank gear.
Even a 10–15% penalty was enormous.
As they headed back after completing their practical training, one thought occupied Suho’s mind.
Could he form a team consisting solely of Super Enhanced Androids and defeat an S-rank Rock Golem? If he could only pull that off, it would be a huge success.
Then the day would come when Suho alone could become a one-man army and conquer towers by himself as much as he pleased.
After all, he could simply produce as many Enhanced Androids as he wanted.
He would have to set up a production line soon.
* * *
The family had gotten together for the first time in a while.
Suho was always incredibly busy, and these days everyone else was busy with their own businesses as well. On top of that, Elysium Heights was far larger than anyone had imagined, so unless they set a date and gathered like this, even family members found it difficult to see one another.
There was nothing particularly special about a family gathering. It was simply a chance to share a meal, have a drink together, and exchange news about how everyone had been doing.
During the meal, Jiho casually asked Suho,
“Hyung, what do you think of Narae?”
“Jang Narae, the general manager?”
“Yeah. She’s cute, isn’t she? She’s sharp, friendly, cheerful…”
“True. I think so too.”
“Ho, could it be that you have feelings for her…?”
“Huh? Romantically?”
“Yeah.”
“Not at all. Nothing like that. Why?”
“Ah, well… I… kind of…”
“Oh-ho, you’re the one who likes her?”
“Yeah. Actually, I was thinking about confessing to her.”
“But Narae is probably a few years older than you, right? She’s my age, so that would make her two years older than you.”
“What does that matter?”
“True, I suppose it doesn’t. Anyway, I think it would be fine. Honestly, though, Narae would be settling a bit.”
“Ah, hyung!”
Click.
“Ahem… Jiho, that won’t do.”
Their father suddenly lowered his voice and spoke with great seriousness. Jiho widened his eyes and stared at him, wondering what he meant.
“The eldest son hasn’t married yet. In our family, the second son doesn’t get married first.”
“No, Dad! Who said I was getting married? We aren’t even dating. I just said I was interested in her. Interested.”
“Interest turns into a confession, a confession turns into dating, and dating turns into marriage in the blink of an eye. In any case, there’s no way the second son gets married before his older brother.”
Their mother frowned and waved her hand.
“Jiho, Jiho, do whatever you want. Don’t mind your father. Is this man’s sudden overreaction anything new?”
Their father had only made one unnecessary remark, but after being subjected to concentrated fire from their mother and his younger daughter Suji, he fell silent.
The warm family meal resumed, but after a while their father, who had been quiet, opened his mouth again.
“By the way, Suho, isn’t there any young woman you like?”
“Pardon? Me?”
Ah, so the stray bullet had finally come his way.
Suho looked at his mother in embarrassment, but this time even she wasn’t on his side.
“The media all over the world calls our son a man who has everything in the world, yet you’re the only one without the family everyone else has. Son, you’re already thirty.”
“Hmm…”
“I hear there’s even a rumor that your new-town project is making a major contribution toward solving the low birthrate problem, but you, Suho, don’t even seem to be thinking about marriage or children. Doesn’t that seem a little inconsistent?”
“Ahem…”
As Suho scratched his head, having never given the matter much thought, Suji cut in.
“Mom, is it really that easy? There aren’t any women who match Big Brother’s level. His level.”
“What do you mean, there aren’t any?”
“Then who is there? You could search the whole world and still wouldn’t find a woman who could meet Big Brother at eye level. The daughter of a first-rate chaebol family? A famous celebrity? How could women like that possibly be suitable?”
That’s right, keep it up, little sister. Suho silently cheered Suji on.
But, as always, the apex predator of the household was their mother.
“Child, what does level matter?! If you keep worrying about levels, then who in the world could Suho possibly marry? At this rate, we’ll have to bring a female alien from another planet and play matchmaker!”
“Pfft…!”
Suji burst out laughing at their mother’s remark and immediately lost all combat power.
“An ordinary person might be a little difficult. But I hear there are plenty of decent young women in the clan you’re putting together. Why don’t you open your eyes and look around properly, son?”
“Ah… Yes, yes, Mom…”
Haa, romance and marriage.
It wasn’t that Suho had never thought about them. He had simply been consciously pushing them away.
That was right. There had been a time when Suho possessed the reproductive urges and passionate romantic cells of a healthy young man.
He had even been a devoted romantic who had spent ten years harboring unrequited feelings for one woman, Cheon Yangwon.
But much had changed by now.
The greatest reason was, of course, the infinite wealth and the Curse of Emptiness.
Too much had changed for him to enter into a hundred-year union with one particular person.
When he had first started making enormous sums of money and the world had begun to lose its appeal, he had wondered if this was how the oil tycoons of the Middle East, who ruled like kings with more than a quadrillion won, felt in their emptiness.
But by now, even those men looked like the dirt beneath his toenails. His position had grown that immense.
It felt as though he had the entire world beneath his feet.
And that wasn’t all. Suho himself would live for a long, long time without ever dying or being injured, but every member of his family would die before him. That fact remained a heavy shackle around his heart.
His wife, his children, his grandchildren, and even his great-grandchildren would all leave this world before him.
Even if he possessed infinite wealth, infinite time, and infinite life, could a life in which he watched his beloved family and precious children depart one by one truly be called a blessing?
It made no difference whether they were ordinary people or high-rank Admites. In the end, humans grew old and died.
If he diligently fed them anti-aging elixirs, they might be able to remain together for around a thousand years—but that was all.
After that, he would have to live alone for tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of years.
Unless he broke free from the limits of human cognition and thought and acquired a post-human mindset like Ravi’s, it seemed unlikely that he could enjoy a sense of fulfillment commensurate with infinite wealth, time, and life.
And if he did acquire a post-human mindset, then he would be even farther removed from the ordinary life of building a family—the sort of life his parents wanted for him.
For now, he was afraid to begin loving someone.
He felt that he still wasn’t ready.
It was ironic.
He possessed immense abilities, wealth, space, time, life, and power—things no one else in the world possessed—yet he lacked the romantic partner that most people found so easily.
At this rate, someday… No, perhaps it was practically certain that only he and Ravi would be left together. The thought was somehow both melancholy and terrifying.
It was all because of Cheon Yangwon’s curse.
‘Ah… I keep calling it Cheon Yangwon’s curse, Cheon Yangwon’s curse. It makes it sound as though I developed trauma after getting played by Yangwon while she managed her fishpond…’
The thought struck Suho as so absurd that he chuckled to himself.
Yes, perhaps those days had been better.
Back when he had the small goal of finding a job and making money, the small wish of getting together with the woman he liked, and a bucket list built around trivial things like overseas trips.
The days when finding delicious samgyeopsal with Seongsik had filled him with pride and happiness.
Perhaps an appropriate amount of deprivation was an essential condition for giving meaning to human life.
In the past, he had thought the phrase “a proper amount of deprivation is necessary” was utter nonsense.
‘I have no appetite, so please just starve me. I need to be deprived in order to enjoy food.’
How foolish was that idea?
If you had no appetite, you should combine a variety of dishes with suitable exercise—not deliberately create deprivation. He had even wondered how someone could be so ignorant of how to spend money that they would come up with such a stupid thought.
But after actually acquiring an enormous amount of everything, he found that it wasn’t so simple.
The pleasure and satisfaction that money brought were more limited than he had expected, while emptiness continued to press in from every direction.
It was difficult.
In any case, as far as Suho was concerned… it was too late for him to throw away everything he possessed and willingly place himself in a state of deprivation.
If he made such a choice now, he would no longer be the only one who had to bear the consequences.
The repercussions would be worldwide, global in scale.
Creating artificial deprivation was no longer an option.
All he could do was try a wider variety of new challenges.
* * *
Russia had finally gone and done it.
The previous president, Petrov, had been a man with the viciousness of a dictator, but Markov, who had newly seized power, was no less a man—if anything, he was worse.
The countries of the world were already preoccupied with conquering towers, and Russia was no exception. Yet it had gone so far as to start a war, invading Kazakhstan.
Most nations strongly condemned Russia and began supporting Kazakhstan, but this was not a war that could be ended quickly with a little foreign aid.
“They’ve gotten far too full of themselves…”
Suho was in the sauna, watching the related news reports that continued to air, and irritation welled up inside him.
He was struggling to make the world even slightly more livable—partly to make money, and partly to overcome his own sense of emptiness—yet here was a war that could turn all of that into ashes in an instant.
Everywhere, there were people who thought only of themselves, steeped in rationalization and self-justification.
Russia cited such things as “protecting Russian-speaking residents,” “threats to Russia’s security,” “eliminating terrorism and extremism,” and “stability and economic prosperity in Central Asia” as the grounds and justification for the war, but it was all meaningless bullshit.
No one had ever asked Suho to play world police, but he decided to interfere secretly.
After all, there was nothing more frightening than “a bored man with absolute power.”
When he had carried out the Golem terror attack in Russia before, he had purchased and equipped the B-rank item [Hidden Shadow Ring] from the Arcane Arsenal. Wearing a mask, he had moved under cover of darkness and conducted his operations exclusively from within the shadows to maximize its effects.
But now, there was no need to use such a low-rank item.
He went straight to the workshop in the subspace and began hammering away at accessories with stealth effects.
He would have been satisfied if even a failed S-rank item appeared, and he was about to equip it and leave immediately when—
‘You have succeeded in crafting an Ordinary-grade Item (Medium).’
Along with that message, an SS-rank item appeared.
Excellent. This was more than good enough.
When the system prompted him to name the item, Suho called it [Ring of the Secret Void].
According to its description, the item made its wearer blend completely into the surrounding environment, rendering them entirely invisible. The results of testing showed that it not only provided visual invisibility but also evaded advanced detection methods such as thermal imaging and ultrasonic detection.
As expected of an SS-rank item.
With performance like this, he didn’t even need a mask.
He finished preparing to leave, thinking that he should take care of the matter quickly and return without dragging it out.
For Kazakhstan, each passing day would be a time of death.
Suho equipped himself fully with the [Extreme Powered Armor], [Tempestbane Wings], and other gear, then activated the stealth function of the [Ring of the Secret Void] on his finger.
He opened the subspace storage and crossed over to the coordinates he had marked in eastern Russia.
* * *
Nearly 100,000 troops from Russia’s Western Military District—including the 6th Tank Army and the 20th Combined Arms Army—the 41st Combined Arms Army and 2nd Guards Tank Division from the Central Military District, and the 7th Airborne Division from the Southern Military District, along with combined armored and infantry forces, artillery, and airborne troops, launched a massive invasion all at once.
More than 1,000 tanks, over 2,000 armored vehicles, approximately 800 self-propelled artillery pieces, and around 300 fighter jets…
It was an enormous force that made clear Russia’s determination not to let the war drag on in the long term.
After Russia deployed a massive force along the border with Kazakhstan and launched a surprise advance, Petropavl, a city in northern Kazakhstan, was the first to fall. In an instant, the Russian forces had pushed as far southeast as Pavlodar.
Advancing rapidly southward along the main road connecting Petropavl and Pavlodar, the Russian army seized Kazakhstan’s major transportation networks and infrastructure. At the same time, it advanced westward toward Atyrau and Aktau, pressing the capital, Astana, as it drove in from multiple directions.
In Aktobe to the west, the Kazakh forces facing the Russian army had gathered virtually every available soldier and launched a desperate defensive battle against Russia’s overwhelming offensive.
The city of Aktobe was steeped in the unmistakable shadow of war. The defensive lines on the outskirts had already come under attack several times.
Now, the Kazakh army had constructed its final line of defense and decided to commit every available force to halt the Russian advance.
Amid days of hair-trigger tension, with minor battles continuing without pause, another night fell.
Tanks and armored vehicles had taken up positions around the Aktobe defensive line, while soldiers could be seen digging trenches in various locations. Every one of them was exhausted, yet a firm resolve that would not allow them to give up shone in their eyes.
Ajat, standing in a trench and watching the front, spoke to his comrade Nurken.
“Nurken, do you know what day it is today?”
“Not really. What day is it?”
“The day the exam results are announced.”
“Hah.”
“Well, none of that matters anymore. I thought I might pass this time. Heh.”
“How can it not matter? We have to survive this, get our acceptance letters, and find jobs.”
“Yeah... But I don’t know if we’ll even make it through today. What do you think?”
“Do we have another choice? This is the last line. We have to stop them somehow.”
Ajat nodded and checked the radio, which was filled with static.
The radio was buzzing with activity.
—Krrt— An enemy tank battalion has been spotted two kilometers down the western road.
—Kssh— This is Second Company. More than two hundred tanks have been confirmed, along with over three hundred armored vehicles, all approaching the western defensive line.
—Krrt— They are less than five kilometers from the current defensive line. Requesting artillery support.
.... Real-time reports were relayed from every unit deployed along the front.
As the Russian army closed in, the order to prepare to open fire was issued from headquarters.
It was a hair-trigger situation, with a battle about to erupt under the utmost tension.
That was certainly how things had seemed.
But at some point, bizarre radio reports began to come in.
—Kssh— Uh... this is Second Company. All enemy tanks and armored vehicles have disappeared. Repeating: all enemy forces have disappeared...
—Krrt— Correction to the situation report. The enemy tank battalion on the western road is no longer visible either. Numerous unarmed soldiers have been spotted...
—Krrt— Russian forces are retreating from the encampment five kilometers away. Numerous soldiers are retreating on foot from the northwest, where the Russian tank battalion had been stationed.
The Aktobe Defense Command was at a loss as to what judgment it should make in response to the reports arriving in real time.
It was difficult to make a quick decision in a situation that had never been considered or anticipated.
All they could do was dispatch a reconnaissance team to determine the exact circumstances.
While concealed, Suho flew swiftly through the air, storing every visible piece of Russian armored equipment in his subspace storage.
Living beings could not be stored, so the soldiers were left standing alone, while the tanks, armored vehicles, self-propelled artillery, multiple rocket launchers, and all the other armored equipment vanished completely.
Then, when Suho passed through a second time, even the rifles, heavy machine guns, and mortars carried by the infantry disappeared without a trace.
It was as if someone were peeling away layers in a graphics program. Everything in sight began to vanish.
Every weapon that could be considered modern was collected, piling up like a mountain inside Suho’s subspace storage.
It didn’t matter. The subspace was vast.
“If you want to fight, use your fists. Fistfights are the best, after all. I won’t stop you from using a kitchen knife or a club, either.”
“But weapons of mass destruction and modern firearms are off-limits.”
As he swept up Russia’s weapons, Suho muttered to himself.
It was the moment the Worldline Prefect established a new set of rules for warfare.