Chapter 66
<World of Arseria Gallery – General>
<Featured Post>
[Nightmare 10/10/10 Part 1 Boss Jin Chronicle]
Author: Anonymous
That's the priest who cleared Vallum earlier, yeah.
(Nightmare (10/10/10) Jin Chronicle Entrance Cutscene.mp4)
Are those ice spears really that huge? Each one is the size of an acoustic guitar.
-Wasn't the gimmick that you lose 10% HP and start stunned? Getting hit by that looks like instant death.
ㄴEven a full-health tank with 3,000 HP would probably die instantly.
-What kind of bait is this? Why are they even talking about a game in the WoA Gallery?
ㄴPlease stop opening faction wars and talk about the gameㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
ㄴRead through the featured posts.
ㄴUgh, that's a pain;;
-How much combat power would you need at minimum to clear 10/10/10?
ㄴ150,000?
ㄴWhat do you mean, 150,000ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ You can steamroll Challenger with 120,000 power.
On Sunday evening, when the crowds were at their largest, the ACK pro tournament happened to feature a match between two boring weak teams, leaving everyone to spend a dull evening.
It started with a post written in the ‘Healer Class’ section of a famous user's profile.
A streamer was going to challenge Nightmare 10/10/10 as a priest.
Since that was one of the most common ways for streamers to bait attention, nobody could even find a reason to click the post.
Just when it seemed the post had been buried, other posts began popping up like weeds.
[I'm seeing Priest 10/10/10 for the first time in my life]
[What the hell is this NoName bastard doing?]
[Woohoo~~~ He's about to get brutally owned by Vallum as a priestㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ]
One or two posts weren't enough to attract anyone's attention.
But as the mentions continued, people who couldn't resist their curiosity eventually checked the posts, expecting to be disappointed.
(Observatory Guard Knight Perfect Clear Screenshot.jpg)
(Video of stabbing a sword into her arm.mp4)
(Four-Element Combined Cast, 5-Second Clear.mp4)
Every now and then, I'd seen videos of foreign streamers with extraordinary minds brute-forcing their way through boss fights with incomprehensible magic.
But the magic this blonde woman was casting now was faster and more precise than any of them.
(Final Attack Critical Damage 1807.jpg)
A single attack had taken away roughly a quarter of the boss's HP.
So they asked who she was.
[ㅇㅇ: ipfs://
www.twish.ch/noname
]
People clicked the link as if hypnotized.
There, even in the WoA Gallery, the rumored female streamer was fighting the final boss of Part 1, Jin Chronicle, alongside ‘Adella,’ who was known as the gallery owner.
* * *
Adella trembled like an aspen leaf.
Her ears flattened backward, and her tail hung straight down.
It was the behavior she commonly displayed when fear overwhelmed her.
-Everyone quiet everyone quiet everyone quiet everyone quiet
-Focus on the fight, guys. Read the room.
-Something big is coming if she clears this.
-I wonder how strong Jin Chronicle is.
-It's impressive that she managed to drag Adella all the way to the boss fight.
-Seriouslyㅋㅋㅋ She's so weak it wouldn't be surprising if she died at any point.
-I've only ever seen this on VTube, but now I'm watching it live.
-Boss, should we turn the chat off again altogether?
[▶Chat Window – OFF]
NoName took the viewers' advice and closed the chat window as well.
How grueling the fight would be was anyone's guess.
“So you were the culprit behind this incident. You still haven't let go of your lingering attachment, tsk tsk... If you'd stayed buried in the sewers and kept living quietly, you wouldn't have had to suffer the pointless death awaiting you.”
Jin casually spat out his barbed words.
“You were the one who drove me out, weren't you...!”
“No, you were unqualified. Your place was the hero's from the very beginning. And furthermore.”
Jin stretched out his hand, and the laurel cherished in NoName's arms flew toward him as if resonating.
It was the Laurel of Life that Cisciela had given her.
“Aren't there an awful lot of thieving strays coveting what belongs to others?”
Jin Chronicle carefully placed the crown on his head.
The crown scattered into thousands of clusters of light and was absorbed into his body.
[Remnant Academy Vice Dean · Jin Chronicle (0/1)]
“Even though I never granted you a place as my child.”
Jin Chronicle's pocket watch flashed.
“Dodge!”
A palpable killing intent.
NoName lunged at Adella and rolled across the ground with her.
KWA-GWA-GWANG-!
She couldn't even begin to guess what kind of magic it was.
The watch suddenly flashed, and a searing beam split the earth in a straight line.
The boss's true name had appeared above his head, so the battle had already begun.
-Destruction beeeeeam!!!!!!!
-The streamer dodged that.
-If you make a rough prediction, you can see it coming and dodge it.
-I knew it was coming and still got hit by it twiceㅋㅋㅋ
An instant-death skill.
An absurd asymmetric advantage capable of ending the game in a single hit.
From now on, NoName's party would have to fight the boss while keeping the laser that returned whenever its cooldown ended in mind.
“Is this Yggdrasil's true power...? From the looks of it, you lowly wretches know absolutely nothing about the essence of the laurel.”
Jin Chronicle, who had completed his synchronization with the laurel long ago, kept bursting into laughter.
He was the academy's vice dean, but he had always been nothing more than second-in-command.
After receiving a secret order from the higher-ups to steal the laurel, he had abandoned his lectures and left without telling anyone, so the academy had imposed a severe punishment on him.
Yet he had been intrigued.
An object worth betraying the academy's trust over had fallen into his hands.
As a scholar before he was a professor, he felt genuine curiosity.
He had known that the laurel existed, but if someone asked whether it was a valuable object, he would have put a question mark after it.
But the sharp-minded Jin Chronicle grasped the truth in a short time.
“A pass to another dimension. If you know the way, you can use magic without limit.”
It was no exaggeration to say that it could alter the world and its history.
“Was Yggdrasil a disciple who worshiped reason?”
Red light shot out of the pocket watch once again.
This time it formed an X, and then a T.
Holding on to Adella, who was half out of her mind, NoName hopped from one safe zone to another.
-That's fucking terrifying ㄷㄷㄷㄷㄷㄷㄷ
-What does what Chronicle is saying mean?
-More lore gets revealed later, but basically he's talking about how the principles behind magic in the WoA world differ from those in the real world we live in.
-Is it something like the fourth wall?
-ㄴㄴ The story doesn't go that far off the rails.
-But why can't we use infinite magic even if we have the laurel?
-You have to think about balance, you know;;
-If you've got a head, try thinking before you speak.
-ㄴLook at him getting pissed off above while still answering every question so kindlyㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-Can this really be dodged just by watching for it?
-Dunno? I'm scared now too.
“Forest Keepers. How long did you think you could continue hiding the truth from us? When we finally realize that everything we are learning, every piece of knowledge humanity has accumulated, is false, hollow, crooked, and corrupt.”
The light of doom replaced the full moon.
“Did you hope we would collapse in despair?”
Jin Chronicle's attacks couldn't be defeated by dodging alone.
The beams grew more powerful by the moment, and Jin Chronicle's mastery of the laurel increased every second.
How could they overcome the time limit?
The orthodox strategy was to look for openings between each attack and steadily accumulate damage.
The elements the Part 1 boss tested players on were none other than ‘dodging’ and ‘distance control.’
It was designed to make players learn the effective range and movement speed of each character, as well as how to respond when they encountered an enemy whose combat power exceeded their own.
Above all, the most important virtue was to make quick decisions without hesitating.
It suggested that postponing a decision could sometimes lead not to maintaining the balance of battle, but to weakening it.
Watching NoName continue to do nothing but dodge, the viewers concluded that she had reached her limit.
Four beams, then five, and eventually ten would come flying at her; at that point, even if she could foresee the future, there would come a time when dodging them physically became impossible.
“What a complete beginner.”
It was the first thing NoName had said.
“Are you excited now that you've finally learned how to use magic?”
It was a phrase she muttered unconsciously, mixing irritation and frustration, but the viewers were kind enough to hold an entire discussion over a single line.
-?????
-Why is she suddenly putting on airs?
-Calling an academy professor a newbieㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-A priest-dominated reverse world ㄷㄷㄷㄷㄷ
-You failed to teach me, so I'll give the professor an F.
-Then it's not a course evaluation—you're getting a student evaluationㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-Professors who get one-point course evaluations every time don't get kicked out of school anyway, so what's the difference?
-When the boss says it, it somehow sounds kind of cool.
-Not cringey at all.
“Are you being reckless, Forest Keeper? I'm tired of playing with you.”
The damage NoName had carefully accumulated on the boss was not even half of his health.
Meanwhile, Jin Chronicle's laser skill attack had already surpassed the system's limits, to the point where every shot was an instant death sentence.
-It's really over.
-The hard part is getting close. Jin has low HP, so he's not that impressive once you do.
-His HP is higher than Lord Vallum's from earlier, though?
-Don't unfairly trash himㅋㅋㅋㅋ How could she hit him any more than she already has?
Only after learning do you realize what you lack, and only after teaching do you realize what you don't understand.
There were bound to be limits to the laurel's abilities when analyzed by herself alone.
NoName realized the true nature of the magic the boss was using.
This wasn't a laser.
An ordinary laser wasn't powerful enough to split the earth. Furthermore, the diffraction limit theoretically restricted the range it could achieve.
Suspicious that the ground had merely split without any embers igniting in the grass, NoName bent down and touched the fissure with her hand.
Unexpectedly, the ground was mushy, like it had just rained.
“You used water magic.”
Though he dressed it up in long-winded words, Jin Chronicle too had ultimately failed to break free from familiar conventions.
After all, a laser—light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation—was not a concept that someone encountering magic for the first time could come up with on their own.
A microparticle self-replicating propulsion synthesis technique disguised as a laser.
He had embedded a linked-array mechanism in the pocket watch that accelerated and spun water particles to their limit, increasing their cutting power, while repeatedly making magic ‘replicate and vanish’ in the direction of travel until it collided with the enemy.
Just as electromagnetic waves travel in a straight line, with electric and magnetic fields serving as each other's cause and effect, two parallel cluster arrays automatically generated the next magic circle, making them look like a laser stretching straight ahead.
A trick that was anticlimactic once you saw through it.
It had only been a powerful water cannon, so NoName offered her condolences to anyone who had mistaken it for a laser and tried to use reflection magic.
NoName stood still in place and waited for the next attack.
“I shall annihilate all the descendants of Yggdrasil.”
Just as it had with Vallum, the final line of Professor Jin Chronicle was revealed.
The system marked the skill's hitbox in red.
A circle with a radius of 25 m. Casting time: one second.
An unavoidable attack.
NoName gently closed her eyes and recalled the runes one by one.
The viewers watched the scene through narrowed eyes.
A violent wave of mana surged over her, but—
[Counter: Elemental Decomposition]
The laser was pathetically annihilated by the eighteen-direction dihydrogen monoxide counterformula.