God-Tier Enhancement: My Upgrades Never Fail-Chapter 148: Episode 29_Kenji Performs, Simin Profits (3)

Chapter 148: Episode 29_Kenji Performs, Simin Profits (3)

4.

This was only possible because it was a game.

Even after their guildmates—practically family—had been killed, they were willing to join hands with their enemy for a bit of cash and a rare quest they couldn’t normally obtain.

After all, everyone would just revive.

Killing their enemy wouldn’t leave them with any lingering rage, pain, or fear.

In other words, it was a waste of emotional energy.

You couldn’t avoid that kind of friction entirely; it was part of what forged and maintained guild unity. But once you threw eighty gold—a serious sum—into the equation, the calculus changed.

“Are we even going the right way?”

“Who knows. I don’t really know the roads around here.”

The bizarre party, each side harboring its own thoughts, headed deeper into the mountains.

’Eighty gold, I’ll snatch those ores, and I get the dwarf quest on top of it. Perfect.’

Such were the Kaiser Guild Master’s true intentions.

He hadn’t planned it this way from the start.

He had simply felt that eighty gold was more than enough to justify mobilizing the entire guild. They could always take the gold and avenge their comrades afterward.

But as they traveled and he listened to the story of how the dwarf quest had been accepted, his inner thug began to surface.

’Screw it—stab them in the back and take everything.’

In the real world, plenty of people lose their minds over money. In a game, it went without saying.

Fantastic World even had a saying: “Don’t entrust your items to family.”

It was a half-joke that spoke volumes about how little protection the system offered against scams.

So, of course, the Kaiser Guild Master started plotting as if it were the most natural thing in the world, then announced his plan in the guild chat.

His guild members cheered.

“An ore that even human blacksmiths don’t know about? And dwarves are involved? That’s gotta be worth a fortune, right?”

“Wow. That’s insane. They look like a bunch of random scrubs—how the hell did they get this?”

“There are always people who buy capsules just to do weird crap in FW. Those three in the back look like they joined up for that reason, too.”

“Guild Master, we’re getting a cut of this too, right?”

“Of course.”

With such an unexpected windfall on the table, who was going to step up and say, “Guys, this is wrong, let’s not do it”?

From the start, the Kaiser Guild was a gathering of people who enjoyed monopolizing hunting grounds and shaking down other players for pocket change.

The Specialists looked at them with pity.

Han Simin, meanwhile, watched this juicy new content unfold, plastering his stream with ads and smiling in satisfaction.

After a long trek, they finally arrived at the dwarven village.

* * *

A strange tension immediately descended for two reasons.

First, the squat dwarf guarding the entrance had raised his weapon in alarm at the sight of dozens of humans.

Second, it was almost time to execute their plan.

’When do I hit them?’

The Kaiser Guild Master hesitated.

The fact that there really was a dwarven village beyond the hunting ground they controlled was shocking, but he quickly realized that this surprise did nothing for him.

What mattered was figuring out how to maximize his profit.

The key was to monopolize the gains he would otherwise have to share with Han Simin.

It was the classic mindset of a thief.

’Now? No, not yet.’

He needed to handle this as quickly, cleanly, and precisely as possible.

If people started talking, their already-terrible guild reputation would crater even further.

Not that he cared about their image, but if things dragged on and the plan went sideways, he knew he would regret it.

So he chose caution.

And he decided.

’Not yet.’

This was the dwarves’ home base.

They were NPCs living deep in the mountains, in a place even the Kaiser Guild had never dared to enter. Who knew what traps or defenses might be set up? If they started a brawl right at the entrance, the odds of failure were high.

It was better not to waste this chance to enter the dwarven village without a fight.

With that judgment made, he took a step back.

“We came on the recommendation of a human blacksmith who has ties with the dwarves in the previous town.”

“You mean Kallo?”

“Yes. We happened to acquire this ore by chance, and when we asked around about what it might be used for, we were told that if anyone would know, it would be the dwarves.”

While he spoke, Han Simin approached the dwarves and tried to strike up a conversation.

He even sprinkled in the polite speech he rarely used, doing his best to lower their guard.

It seemed to work. One of the wary dwarves cautiously stepped forward and accepted the ore Han Simin pulled from his magic pouch.

He sucked in a sharp breath.

His eyes rolled back in his head.

Even at a glance, his reaction made it clear that this was no ordinary ore, and Han Simin’s expression brightened.

’Just as I thought.’

“P-Please wait here for a moment.” 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

Clutching the ore with trembling hands, the dwarf hurriedly ran into the village.

Han Simin, who had been standing with his hands clasped respectfully, shifted his stance.

He cocked one hip, resting both hands on his waist.

“That damn otter. After all the hell it put me through, this is its way of giving me a present.”

He was the one who had tormented the otter, the thief who had robbed it blind—yet he shamelessly claimed this, even though the mine was on the opposite side of the continent.

While he was busy daydreaming about the fortune he was about to make, the Kaiser Guild Master walked up.

“Are we going to be allowed in?”

“Yes. You’re ready, right?”

“...What?”

A quiet, separate conversation unfolded between the humans.

“What do you mean, what? You came all this way to the dwarven village with a quest in hand, and you were just going to do the quest and go home? In Fantastic World?”

He was speechless.

“First, we sell off the ore and pocket the money. Then we immediately attack the dwarves. Pure profit, right?”

“Uh...”

’Well, yes, but—’

The Kaiser Guild Master, who had been timing his own backstab, found himself nodding in a daze.

’What the hell is this guy?’

He was grateful that Han Simin was setting the table for him, but hearing it said out loud made him feel incredibly dirty.

It felt like they were partners in crime.

He was spoon-feeding him the plan so kindly that, for a moment, the Guild Master wondered if they should just split the loot.

The thought alone was enough to throw him off.

After a brief internal struggle, the Kaiser Guild Master decided to deal with Han Simin later and focus on the feast laid out before him first. He gave a nod.

“Come in.”

A short while later, dozens of dwarves appeared, and their chieftain spoke.

Led by Han Simin, the players started forward.

“No. You alone may enter.”

Of course, it wasn’t that easy.

The chieftain’s short finger pointed squarely at Han Simin.

The Kaiser Guild members all scowled.

The air grew tense.

It wouldn’t have been surprising if things had exploded right then and there, but Han Simin stepped up.

“Wait. Wait!”

He winked at the Kaiser Guild Master, as if to say, ’Leave it to me,’ then walked up to the dwarves and whispered something.

The dwarven chieftain frowned, then swept his gaze over the waiting Kaiser Guild.

And then—

“Come in.”

Permission was granted.

5.

Convincing them hadn’t been difficult.

Trash understands trash best, and Han Simin—who was nuclear waste among trash—could read the thoughts of these recycled garbage bags banded together to scrape up some pocket change. It was child’s play.

It was the most basic pattern in the book.

Pretend to be tempted by money, join up, then stab them in the back.

Even outside a situation like this, anyone who had played games for a while had seen it happen plenty of times when partying with randoms.

All he did was relay their thoughts to the dwarves.

“They’re people we ran into along the way. Once they found out we were going to meet the dwarves, they started threatening us. The moment we’re inside the village, they’ll turn into raiders. So please, let us all in together.”

“...Then why bring them inside at all?”

“We can’t just let such a wicked bunch walk away, can we? My companions and I are actually very strong. We will kill every last one of them for daring to defile your village with their impure thoughts, and make sure they never try it again.”

On the surface, his story didn’t make much sense.

He claimed they had been forced to bring them along under threat, yet now he was saying he would defeat them. If he had that kind of strength, he could have just refused to bring them in the first place.

On top of that, adventurers didn’t truly die. Once they knew where the village was, they could return to harass it endlessly.

“Hmm. Very well.”

But the dwarves had no time for such logical analysis.

For one, they possessed considerable combat power themselves and were prejudiced against humans, seeing them as weakling adventurers.

More importantly, the ore in their hands was radiating a faint emerald light.

They were dying to see how much of it there was, to analyze it, to smelt it.

“Come in.”

So they granted the human’s request.

Once they stepped into the center of the village, with its wide streets and individual forges, Han Simin gave the signal.

The Kaiser Guild, their eyes practically rolling back in their heads at the sight of dwarven-made weapons and armor scattered everywhere, lunged at the bait.

The sound of drawing steel shook the village.

They had no thought of losing.

The Kaiser Guild might have been morally bankrupt, monopolizing a hunting ground despite other players’ complaints, but that also meant they had the strength and numbers to do so.

Their overconfidence met the dwarves’ own self-assurance, creating a tense standoff.

The Specialists, the only ones who could be called neutral in this mess, quietly drifted toward Han Simin.

All eyes naturally followed the three of them as they moved.

At the center stood Han Simin.

He spoke.

“Just as I thought! You approached us with this in mind from the very beginning! If I hadn’t been suspicious, we would’ve been in real trouble.”

He looked confused.

“In the name of justice, I will not forgive you!”

Even Han Simin himself had no idea what kind of bullshit he was spewing.

He simply let whatever popped into his head bypass his brain and flow straight out of his mouth, without any filter.

It didn’t matter.

What mattered was that the dwarves would lower their guard toward him and see him as the human who protected their village from the humans who tried to attack it.

Han Simin, standing at the very front, charged in with his hammer.

From the Kaiser Guild Master’s perspective, the whole thing was absurd, but what could he do?

Life was like that.

Before anyone realized it, Han Simin’s hammer, blazing with a brilliant crimson aura, was sweeping across the battlefield. He hadn’t looked particularly impressive lately, constantly rubbing shoulders with high-level monsters, but against players of his own level, his gear was absurdly overpowered.

Wiping out an entire guild by himself was something he had graduated from six months ago.

“Give me forty gold, and I’ll let you live.”

Even in the middle of it all, he didn’t forget to shake them down.

For no other reason than that they happened to be the ones monopolizing the hunting ground he was passing through, they were publicly executed in front of thousands of viewers.

“He said he’d let us live for forty gold...”

“And you believed that?”

It was unfair.

But there was something even more unfair.

“I’m avenging all the players you’ve screwed over, you punk. Try living like a decent human being for once. If you’ve got a problem with that, bring a fat sack of gold and come declare a territory war against the Rich Territory in the Ain Kingdom.”

The sheer gall of a fellow piece of trash talking like he was some apostle of justice.

Before the Kaiser Guild Master could even muster a rebuttal, his vision went black.

* * *