Thoom...!!
"Whoa, whoa, whoa..."
That scared the hell out of me. I almost died.
I barely rolled to the side and dodged at the exact parry timing.
Obviously, parrying the bed was not an option.
I had just bought the thing, and you wanted me to break it?
If I so much as punched it, something would definitely break.
My fist, of course.
A single bed probably wouldn’t have killed me, though.
Even if the bed had fallen on top of me, it probably wouldn’t have killed me... No, wait. I might actually have died.
I let out a hollow laugh as I looked at the bed, now sitting in place as though it had always been there.
It was more luxurious than I had expected. It looked like a pricier item than it had in the sample photo.
The overall finish, design, and materials all looked better than I had imagined.
...But is this thing actually okay?
I had just bought it. If it was already broken somewhere, I’d be too upset to sleep.
Swoosh.
When I checked beneath the bed, the pillow and blanket that had been there before were gone.
They were neatly arranged on top of the bed, as though they had never been underneath it, and as though they had been there from the start.
I didn’t know whether they had simply moved onto the bed or whether they came as a set with the [Single Bed].
Tap, tap.
The legs aren’t broken.
At least, it looked fine on the outside.
I checked by tapping the bed legs here and there and pressing down on the mattress.
I couldn’t be certain from that alone, but it seemed okay for now.
"...Okay."
I squeezed my eyes shut, opened them, and swallowed—
Boing!
"You alive?!"
I dove onto the bed with all my strength.
"...Phew."
Fortunately, it didn’t collapse.
Man, I almost ended up spending another 3,000 TP just from lying down for no reason.
"This feels nice."
Even if it was a single bed, it was definitely on a whole different level.
It was better than the bed I had slept in at the Tower of Wisdom.
Maybe it was the difference between a fantasy world and modern products, but the softness was on another level.
If I’d known beds could be this good, I would have bought one ages ago...
I regretted my past self for refusing to buy anything just to save a little TP.
Plop.
"Oh, right."
After rolling over several times and happily enjoying the feel of the bed for a while, I belatedly remembered that the delivery outside my hideout had arrived too and sat up.
*
Swoosh.
"Oh..."
I moved into the common area and picked up the practice steel sword.
It was definitely heavier than the wooden sword.
An iron sword would be even heavier than this, so it was almost fortunate that it was expensive.
I could have bought one for no reason, then found myself unable to swing it and ended up with a useless burden.
Whooom!!
"...Wow."
The feeling of swinging this sword was on another level.
With the wooden sword, it had felt like a kid’s toy, but now it felt like I was swinging a real sword.
It didn’t exactly feel sharp, so I still couldn’t shake the impression that it was more of a blunt weapon, but...
Maybe I look kind of cool?
I finally felt like the protagonist of a novel or comic.
Thud.
So the important thing now is how I build my character...
Should I keep pushing forward with swordsmanship, or gamble on magic?
Which was the right answer?
How far exactly did the wiki’s assistance apply?
Of course, I wasn’t planning to challenge the Tower of Trials right away. I intended to climb the Tower of Mindscape or the Tower of Fate first, but I still needed time to practice.
I wanted to buy at least one or two skill books and train every day as a form of exercise.
There’s a limit to what I can learn from the gallery.
It wasn’t easy getting advice from an unspecified mass of people.
Everyone had different goals and had honed different things so far. Receiving instruction solely through posts and comments was never easy.
It had helped, though.
It’d be nice if I could learn directly from someone.
Practically every gallery user was the equivalent of a martial arts master.
Archmages, Swordmasters, priests, fighters... If I looked hard enough, there were probably even beings like Heavenly Demons.
If I could just receive one-on-one instruction, I felt like I could get a free ride without spending TP, which was a little disappointing.
It’s not easy to offer something like cola as a reward and learn that way, either.
It was hard to tell who was a "real master."
I could ask for proof of their run count, sure, but then literally hundreds of people would apply for the position. Sorting through them one by one would be work in itself.
And whether that person could actually teach well was an entirely separate issue.
There was definitely a limit to learning from the gallery.
So, the swordsman route or the mage route...
If I were certain the wiki would assist me, I’d go mage, but I couldn’t be sure.
[StarWiki]
[Skill]
-A collective term for techniques that manifest a user’s will and energy into a particular form.
[Skill Book]
-A medium containing the information needed to learn a specific skill.
No matter what I searched on the wiki, nothing came up about the conditions for synchronization.
There was no particular explanation in the [Skill Book] category within the wiki, either.
Honestly, it made sense. The activation notification had only appeared once at the beginning and never showed up afterward.
Having to buy a staff bothers me a little too.
I had just bought a practice steel sword, so the thought of needing to buy a staff as well made me lose some enthusiasm.
It wasn’t pocket change; it was 1,000 TP. That was enough money to order chicken every day for five straight days.
Swoosh.
For now, it’s probably better to just focus on swordsmanship, right?
[Royal Palace Knights Basic Swordsmanship Form 1] - 1,000 TP
[Royal Palace Knights Basic Swordsmanship Form 2] - 2,000 TP
[Royal Palace Knights Basic Swordsmanship Form 3] - 3,000 TP
First, I should make sure my fundamentals were solid. Build up from the basics.
Just as I was about to buy the Royal Palace Knights swordsmanship series I had put in my cart—
[Introduction to Lightning Magic] - 5,500 TP
"..."
One magic book, the last thing I had put in my cart, caught my eye.
Lightning magic sounds cool as hell.
Firing a railgun while flipping a coin would be insanely badass.
"Isn’t that electromagnetism? I don’t really know."
Anyway.
Since it was an introductory magic book, it probably wouldn’t contain anything amazing, but it sounded more fun than learning by personally swinging a sword around.
...Do I really need a staff?
At the thought that suddenly occurred to me, I folded my arms and closed my eyes.
Since ancient times, there had always been special classes known as magic swordsmen somewhere.
Something like telekinetic sword control could be called part of magic too.
Doesn’t the very name Sword Mage acknowledge that sword techniques are part of magic? The gloriously named "Sword Mage."
So all I had to do was hold a sword and cast magic.
Parry an enemy’s attacks with my sword, then swing it in close quarters.
And at range, use my sword to cast magic. Wouldn’t that make me an all-purpose character?
[Royal Palace Knights Basic Swordsmanship Form 1] - 1,000 TP
[Introduction to Lightning Magic] - 5,500 TP
[TP Owned: 7,093]
...What if I do this?
One offensive swordsmanship skill for emergencies.
And one magic book, so I could see how magic skill books worked and test how far the wiki could assist me.
My next goal isn’t the Tower of Trials anyway.
After climbing the Tower of Mindscape and the Tower of Fate, I would accumulate TP again.
Knowing my personality, I’d definitely buy it someday.
There wasn’t much difference between testing it now and testing it later.
What if I needed a staff, or the wiki’s assistance wasn’t all-powerful?
Wouldn’t learning those things in advance actually help me plan for the future?
It’s a little expensive, but—
[Your order has been completed.]
[Time Remaining Until Delivery: 5 minutes]
Well, it would work out somehow.
Even if I bought all of Swordsmanship Forms 1, 2, and 3, I’d have to learn them one at a time anyway.
Thanks to the gallery users, I knew very well that my talent for the sword was abysmal, so I didn’t have even the slightest expectation.
Still, who knows about my talent for magic?
For all anyone knew, the seed of an archmage could be sleeping within me.
[Your delivery has been completed.]
[Delivery Location: Outside the door]
Five minutes later, a notification from Starpang arrived.
Just like with the parry skill book, nothing had changed in the common area.
It was probably automatically inside the wiki.
Ding!
[StarWiki Updated]
"Phew..."
Seeing the same notification I had seen when I got Parry, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.
Please don’t let my 5,500 TP have been wasted.
*
[Lightning Magic]
-A collective term for magical techniques that convert magical power into electrical energy and give it tangible form.
-A versatile school of magic whose range of applications differs greatly depending on proficiency.
"Hmm..."
I pressed a hand to my brow as I looked over the information that had been added to the wiki.
For now, I got it. There were countless explanations, but the rough summary was, "Versatile, but a little weak."
When trained to the extreme, it lagged behind other magic in both firepower and suppressive power. In exchange, it was effective at both.
Of course, this was just the basics, and it might take me decades or centuries to train anything to the extreme.
Besides, I could learn other magic too, so it wasn’t a huge problem.
[If suppression or disruption is your objective, there is no need to obsess over the output of lightning.]
[An enemy’s attack is always accompanied by a shift in the flow of magical power, and interfering with that process using lightning is the most reliable method.]
There were even proper tips for lightning magic.
What worked best in what situations, and how it should be used in actual combat.
[However, if you intend to use lightning as firepower, you must focus the current at a single point rather than dispersing it.]
[Concentrating lightning into a brief moment is more effective than continuously channeling it.]
Just like the parry manual, it was organized in detail and easy to understand.
I didn’t know if the wiki had separately reprocessed it for me or if it was originally this high-quality, but...
[The essence of lightning magic is not destruction, but 『disrupting action』.]
That wasn’t the real problem.
"..."
I had felt a little uneasy because it was nothing but basic theory as I read, but there was at least an explanation at the end for how to actually use lightning magic.
[Lightning Bolt]
[Chain Lightning]
Maybe the wiki really was incredible. Incantations, silent casting, magic circles, and so on.
It clearly described all sorts of ways to use them, but—
"Magical power, mana, magical power, mana..."
The recipe was there, but nowhere did it tell me how to get the ingredients.
So how am I supposed to gather mana...?
No, damn it, you need to tell me what magical power even is first.
Shouldn’t explaining how to gather mana come first?
With that thought, I hurriedly searched Starpang for [Mana] and [Magical Power], but—
"There’s nothing..."
Nothing remotely useful to me appeared.
Only a long list of magic books sharing those search terms came up. There wasn’t a single manual—not one—that taught you how to sense mana or increase magical power.
Was mana simply a basic thing for mages?
Like how nobody learns how to breathe from a book?
"..."
Step.
As if possessed, I moved my feet.
There was no way I had been scammed.
A full 5,500 TP.
There was no way I had been scammed out of the equivalent of 550,000 won.
It wasn’t technically a scam, of course, but still.
[Tower of Trials]
"..."
If I went in here, the wiki would go ding! and tell me.
It would pop up a notification about automatic activation or synchronization, and when I clicked it, I’d use the skill and shout, "The wiki is amazing!"
Clench.
It was the twenty-first floor, after all.
As long as it wasn’t a multiple of ten, it wouldn’t be dangerous.
Gripping the practice steel sword tightly, I entered the tower in a somewhat dazed state.
Thooooom!!
The door closed, and I found myself in a place filled with unidentified trees.
Maybe I was supposed to chop down trees or something. It was probably just another grind, and I had no curiosity about the twenty-first floor.
Right now, I only—
"Please!!! Please, Wiki!!!"
Knelt before the door, raised the wiki high toward the sky, and waited for a notification.
Ding!
"Ooooh!!"
Grinning from ear to ear at the notification that finally sounded, I checked the wiki—
[Tower of Trials]
-Run 1, Floor 21 Guide: Marking trees with weak trunks. Clear the marked trees.
"That’s it...? Really...?"
I squeezed my eyes shut at the sight of the wiki just tossing me one guide and calling it a day, with no automatic activation or anything.
I’m fucked.
*
[NewbieImSorryNewbieImSorryNewbieImSorry] (2)
[Ah I’m So Fucking Pissed] (11)
[Newbie Stop Bullshitting and Come Back] (6)
[I Haven’t Even Gotten to Try It Yet, Fuck] (5)
[17-Year Newbie Analyst: Looking at This, It’s Obviously Fake, So Chill] (31)
"Wiki..."
He had left another post and disappeared again.
After handing out Bugi—no, hamburgers and cola—he had even sent orange juice to the person complaining, then vanished.
My heart hurt at the sight of him being hurt and saying he wouldn’t hand anything out anymore.
Wiki was such a kind person. What were they all so dissatisfied about?
Of course, it might not suit someone’s tastes, but why would they say something like they wanted to send Wiki to hell?
He must be suffering because he’s so soft-hearted...
Not being able to receive cola anymore was not the big problem.
I was more worried that this might make him lose his motivation, or that he might stop showing his face in the gallery.
In the end, this is because of me too...
After all this time, I regretted my own decision to ban him because of the Irregular.
Wiki could have gone home, but it was all because of me.
I realized I had only failed to dwell on it because he had taken it so cheerfully and enjoyed himself in the gallery.
[This ID has been banned by an Infinite Regression manager.]
[Ban Duration: 14 days] / [Reason: Deception, threats, and death threats.]
[Handled by: Not an Eraser]
I banned the anonymous user who had posted proof of receiving orange juice and then gotten cursed out by the other gallery users for a long time.
There had been so many requests, and I was upset too, so I added a little personal feeling to the ban.
So I had done everything I could.
I hoped he would at least reply now, but he hadn’t come back for hours.
"Wiki, please come back and at least see how I handled it..."
It was only a ban, but I hoped it would ease his feelings even a little.
Ding.
[A new post by UselessWiki]
"Ah...!"
As though my prayer had been answered, a new post by Wiki appeared.
I was bothered that he had changed his username again, but more than anything, I just needed to check what it said.
[MAGES ASSEMBLE!!!!!!!!!]
[Author: Useless Wiki]
Mayday, mayday!!
Mana, magical power <<<<< how the fuck do you gather this stuff?????
I’ll hand out cola, Bugi, chicken, whatever later, so please help me
Fuck, please save me, all you god-tier magic experts, ASSEMBLE!!!!!!!!!!!
"............"
So he wasn’t actually hurt...?
I’d been worried sick for hours...?
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