The chat window, which had paused for a moment, began to boil over again.
— A GM died??? They said they were invincible though, invincible?? lol;;
— lol This ain't no joke, a dozen or so actual operators just got wiped in one shot
— What's Pantheon doing? The game's about to explode
— Hey look at the map, the ground's breaking, the sky's folding, a mountain disappeared and came back, is this normal?
— I just pressed exit, but it won't let me out, is it just me?
— No no, everyone's getting kicked; logout is blocked.
— More than that, the black guy and the red guy are staring like they're gonna kill each other, what's that about?
— You guys watching for the last hit angle lol, still watching now?
— You saw a GM go down in one shot too, you idiot, how the hell you gonna catch that?
— True, they didn't put that out for us to catch; they locked us in and are making us watch
Even on a screen plastered with death where even the operators got shredded, some still aimed for the last hit, while others laughed at those fools.
The screams of people unable to log out only grew.
Zero quietly scanned those messages from the high ground.
He too had initially thought those two were a bug.
Entities not on the coordinates, like errors with no ID.
But after watching for a long time, he knew that wasn't it.
Does a bug pick its opponent and fight?
Does it erase an operator, who supposedly can't die, with a single skill?
Is it just corrupted data?
Can you still say that after seeing this mess?
The chat window was still clamoring over whether it was a bug or a virus, but Zero had long since dismissed all three notions.
It wasn't a bug, a boss, or a GM.
'...Things like that shouldn't exist within this game.'
Hadn't he just seen it with his own two eyes?
The operators, said to be unkillable, vanished in an instant.
Consequently, real errors the system couldn't handle, and empty spots were occurring simultaneously.
Red logs were still streaming down one side of his vision.
Users above bosses, GMs above bosses.
That was the hierarchy of this game.
But the sword that mercilessly erased those GMs didn't fit into any category, any list, in this GOR worldview.
It wasn't just a reversal of the hierarchy.
'Couldn't they have rolled in from somewhere entirely different?'
Woooooong-!
Just then, the arena floor began to howl madly.
Azure Gold Qilin, which had been thrown back and silent, raised its head straight up.
Five-colored light surged back over its shredded scales.
It was the enrage phase Zero-to-Hundred had seen hundreds of times.
But this light was a shade darker than what they usually saw.
The Qilin charged at whatever that light hit.
It didn't distinguish between the one who hit it the hardest and the one standing far away.
The entire order of aggro and threat level had vanished.
It was a pattern not found in the optimal route Zero-to-Hundred had memorized.
Originally, the Azure Gold Qilin was a pattern-type boss that chose its first target perfectly.
But now, it wasn't picking.
The Qilin charged straight in between the black-clad man and the red one.
'Did that thing break too, for real?'
The black-clad man sidestepped the horn aimed at his nose, deflecting it by half a foot.
The red one raised his forearm and swatted away the charging mane.
Neither so much as glanced at the Qilin.
It was a gesture of brushing away something bothersome.
Yet even so, their eyes did not leave each other.
The tens of thousands of users packed in here, even the Qilin intervening, seemed beneath their notice.
As if they were itching to fight each other as soon as possible.
The two approached each other.
A low growl from the red one rose all the way to the high ground.
From the high ground, the two silhouettes were too close.
One black-clad man, one red one.
There was almost no distance left between them.
Zero knew they were about to clash.
He just didn't know how.
Neither of their movements matched any entity he knew.
A sound came from the red one.
It wasn't a sound from a human throat.
A guttural noise that scraped deep in a beast's throat, making your spine crawl just hearing it.
It crawled up the ridge.
Then his mouth moved.
Not a single word he said could be heard.
It wasn't a matter of distance.
It was the same when he heard it up close a moment ago.
Mixed with tones, it sounded vaguely like Chinese, but it wasn't Chinese.
Words he had never heard in his life.
No subtitles appeared, and nothing got caught in chat.
Only his lips twitched.
Except, you could see how the corner of his mouth twisted upwards.
And frankly, from Zero's perspective, the content wasn't really important anyway.
"Keukeukeukeuk."
The World-Ending Demonic Lord was simply enjoying this situation.
Things he hadn't yet fully crushed lay at his feet, but they were meaningless.
Things that were a thousand or ten thousand, all the same.
Cut them, and only imitation colors smeared; break them, and screams rang out at the same pitch.
Things so utterly tasteless that his stomach felt hollow no matter how many he consumed.
Well, it didn't matter anyway.
Whether this was the Heavenly Realm or Hell, falling into some unheard-of other world was no big deal.
Even treading this new ground for the first time hadn't stirred any particular feeling.
Was it some formation intruder, or beyond some other barrier of the Windshear Cliffs, what did he care?
Wherever he tumbled to, he only had one thing to do.
Tear, break, and crush everything in sight.
That was it.
If he kept at it, everywhere eventually became the same slaughterhouse.
Just one thing was regrettable: even this new place he'd fallen to was all completely tasteless.
A rare new hunting ground, and there was nothing to chew on.
There was, after all, just one.
The other thing.
"Hey."
He took a step forward, the mire bubbling.
Black smoke rose from wherever he stepped.
"...."
Dong Bongsu had no answer.
Not even a pretense of listening, just finishing off the things in front of him.
The World-Ending Demonic Lord liked that too.
He didn't need someone to chat with.
He needed someone worth crossing swords with.
His tongue slowly traced his fangs.
"Keukeukeukeukeuk. Well, fine. Good."
The better it was, the more he wanted to split it open.
So he wanted to tear into it quickly.
He wanted to confirm right away what was inside, what sound it made when it broke.
"So please, try to last a bit."
Blood-red light beaded at his five fingertips.
Spot-.
The black-clad man, Dong Bongsu, moved.
Zero's eyes snapped to him.
The very instant the red one began a terrifying offensive, the black one was already stepping inside.
There was no pre-cast delay.
More accurately, there was no animation to read any pre-cast delay from.
Five strands of red light shot out from the red one's fingertips.
One line per finger.
They snaked in to wrap around the black-clad man's limbs and neck separately.
The black-clad man did not draw his sword.
Instead, he took one more step forward.
The five strands shot out, aiming for their targets, but the man was no longer in those spots.
By a single step.
The strands clutched empty air, and the man flowed past their missed grasp with his shoulder, burrowing inside.
"...."
Zero carved that one move into his mind.
It wasn't an evasion skill.
It wasn't a counter.
It was simply 'not being there' where the hit was meant to land.
As if he knew in advance where the opponent would aim.
He couldn't understand how such a thing was possible... but one thing was definitely certain.
It absolutely wasn't a standardized technique like a skill.
A sword was suddenly in the black-clad man's hand.
That sword slashed once across the red one's flank.
Gray light scattered from the cut.
It was the light that typically burst out when you cut a person.
But the red one did not go out.
Dark red smoke leaked more fiercely from the torn flank, then filled the wound back up.
The recovery phase of a boss that doesn't die.
Yet there was no recovery motion, no recovery gauge.
The damaged part simply swelled back up.
The red one stepped back a pace.
Then he opened his mouth wider.
It was a face of pure, delighted joy.
Even though his own flesh had been ripped open.
Among the thousands of bosses Zero had seen, not a single one enjoyed having its health chipped away.
— Hey, that red guy just smiled, right?
— lol yeah he's actually enjoying it, the perverted bastard
— Is the black guy winning? He landed a solid hit
Chat started buzzing again.
Zero didn't look away.
Talk of winning and losing only mattered when there were health bars.
The space above those two's heads was empty.
There's no bar to chip; how can you know how the fight's going?
Idiots.
Meanwhile, the red one came back in.
This time, it wasn't five strands.
As he brought both hands together, a mass of blood-red light coalesced between them.
Then the distance between them simply vanished.
The one who had been over there was right under the black-clad man's nose the next moment.
He thrust that mass straight forward.
The black-clad man raised his sword and blocked it.
The blood-red mass and the black sword locked in place.
He couldn't unravel it in one stroke like when he slashed the flank moments ago.
The red one pushed, and the black-clad man held firm.
Around the meeting point, the crimson floor silently caved inward.
"...."
Zero held his breath.
Those guys called users—though he himself essentially belonged to them—wouldn't know, but Zero did.
The fact that the battle between these two would determine the fate of GOR.
In the eyes of others, it's just a commotion within a game.
But... he didn't know.
Those user bastards probably just found this situation novel and fun, but the inability to log out was quite a serious situation.
And.
Watching those two, something like that momentarily came to mind.
'If such things were to descend upon Earth, upon the real world...'
What exactly would happen?
Amidst it all, the black-clad man and the red one faced each other in a brief lull.
Glaring at each other.
At the nearly nose-to-nose distance, the blood-red light and the black sword trembled violently, still locked.
Right into the middle of that, the boss who had been shoved into a corner slowly raised its body again.
It wasn't one of those 'scraps of data' Zero had known until now.
The Qilin's eyes, eyes swirling with five colors, were saying it.
I am no longer such an entity.
Grrrrrrr....
The beast swelled its throat, growling low.
The ground shook from the reverberation alone.
Kwooooh-!
Its eyes twisted toward the center where they were locked.
From two, now back to three.
They were about to tangle in one spot.
It wasn't about who would win.
He couldn't gauge what would be left of this world after those things clashed.
Isn't it just a game?
Those people chattering about advantage and disadvantage in the chat window still didn't know.
Even what the blocked logout meant.
Zero didn't know exactly either, but he, at least he, felt fear and a shudder.
As if somehow foretold...
"...Please."
He was praying his thoughts and instincts were wrong.