God-Tier Enhancement: My Upgrades Never Fail-Chapter 72: Episode 14 _ My Lord, You Know Best (3)

5.

Workshop operators were competitors, but they also maintained close ties.

After all, what they were doing had been illegal, and they still wanted to uphold a minimum code of conduct. That code had only grown stronger when they moved into Fantastic World.

Now, it was no longer illegal, and even if they wanted to do something illegal, they couldn’t. Naturally, they needed a lot of information, and people in the same business agreed to stick together at the start.

No one was about to lay all their cards on the table and split profits, but they at least maintained contact points, observed basic courtesies, and operated side by side.

Then, a message went out from a workshop. Most of the recipients were workshops that, like them, were roaming the continent as bandits and making a tidy profit.

“What? Where?”

“I’ll send you the coordinates. Go there and cause some trouble.”

“Why would we?”

“I’ll pay you.”

“Where is it?”

They had an unwritten truce, but that didn’t make them allies. No one would come and go just because someone called. But if money was involved, that was a different story.

“We get to keep whatever we loot?”

“Do as you like. All I want is for that village to be burned to the ground, not even a speck of ash left.”

“What the hell happened?”

“Personal grudge.”

“Damn. Whoever it is, I feel sorry for them.”

Everyone was just trying to make a living, yet here was someone who didn’t care how much it cost to rally his fellow operators.

Why gather a crew notorious for its viciousness? The answer was obvious to cause destruction.

They were the type who, as long as they were paid properly and up front, would get the job done cleanly and leave no loose ends.

“When do we start?”

“Right now.”

“Fine. The payment’s solid, right?”

“I’m putting my entire workshop on the line.”

There was nothing more to say. What was the point of interrogating someone who was openly willing to take a loss?

All they had to do was go, watch the fireworks, and grab as much loot as they could carry.

“Guys, send a message through the capsules. We’re going on an expedition.”

“Yes, sir.”

News that Han Simin’s developing Rich Territory was ripe for the picking spread quickly among the bandit network.

* * *

At the same time, Simin was thinking, “Now that I’ve bought a place, I need to get the paperwork sorted out and start on the interior design.”

Having just signed a contract on a home with his entire net worth, he immediately summoned the rabbits.

If a player logs out and their character disappears, their tamed monsters and summons disappear as well, but if the player stays logged in, their pets can continue to act.

Taking advantage of that, he had let the rabbits roam free, and they came bounding in from all directions.

“Oh! You hunted too?”

“Kkyu!”

The rabbits lined up in neat rows and spat out everything they had been carrying.

As expected of his pets, they had been hunting in the nearby fields and were now dumping out piles of materials.

The level range was high enough to be dangerous, but they had the sense to only pick off monsters that didn’t seem too threatening.

“We’ll have to go to a carrot buffet later.” 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

“Kkyu! Kkyu!”

Smiling at the delighted rabbits, Simin started walking.

“Leave twenty of you in the territory. If you see anyone suspicious, crush them immediately.”

Hunting was good, and collecting protection money was good, but from here on out, the job was war.

The punks who invaded were dead, but he doubted that was the end of it.

He didn’t know the scene in detail, but just opening an item-trading site showed him dozens of posts selling gold coins.

If he assumed one group per post, there could easily be tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of players whose sole purpose was to sell gold coins.

’What a pain.’

The thought alone made him frown.

Maybe it was because this was another world.

The deeper you dug, the more it revealed an onion-like charm you couldn’t escape.

Some players slept less than four hours a day just to hunt monsters, and others didn’t hesitate to become bandits for money.

Beyond them, there were people who had become travelers, determined to see every corner of the vast continent, and lunatics who sang songs and lived leisurely lives.

As a hardcore gamer who had played countless games over twenty-five years, he could say with confidence: Fantastic World was never going to die.

That only made Simin more passionate. They had dared to touch the territory that would be his lifelong pension. Not only that, they had the gall to brazenly declare they would take revenge, as if he were the one in the wrong.

He would show them. At least within the game, he would show them just how petty and vindictive he could be. He would make sure that no one even thought about playing bandit on any road leading out of Rich Territory ever again.

* * *

It was true that Rich Territory had a geographical advantage, but that didn’t mean every workshop flocked there. Workshops had their own territories.

If they really liked a spot, they might take it by force, but unless it was a place where money practically grew on trees, there was no reason to stir up conflict and risk losses.

Everyone had started in different places, after all.

On such a vast continent, there was no compelling reason for them all to crowd into the Rich Territory—at least not yet.

“...Why is there no one?”

More importantly, the area around the land was crawling with high-level hunting grounds.

The bandits, who were in their mid-twenties or low thirties at best, would get swatted by a passing monster and logged out in an instant if they loitered there.

It was no surprise, then, that Simin was running into nothing but monsters and no humans.

“Damn it. This isn’t what I wanted.”

As a result, only the rabbits were racking up EXP points.

The monsters Simin and his soldiers met were strong, and their drops sold for a lot, so he couldn’t really complain, but still.

It was like going out to catch sharks and finding nothing but freshwater fish swimming around.

His enthusiasm deflated.

He had even treated this as a long-term project and taken a whole day off before coming back in. Was there really no additional prey? Should he just wait forty-eight hours for them to come back?

“That’d be boring.”

Come to think of it, he thought he might have been overreacting.

No matter how furious they had seemed, these were people who scraped together gold to make a living.

After getting stomped that hard, would they really come back? He told himself he was probably being paranoid.

“Ugh. Damn it.”

He thought he had been an idiot for getting his hopes up. Even he wouldn’t consider going back after being humiliated that badly.

“I’ll just go enhance the egg or something.”

Once his interest cooled, it was hard for him to reignite it. He wandered around for another thirty minutes just in case, but the deeper he went, the more swarms of powerful monsters he encountered, so he headed back to the territory.

With his stats, he might have been able to handle the hunting, but for the rabbits, the risk was still too high. He had no intention of risking them just to raise his level, so he decided to end his scouting there.

“Mr. Aide, I’m going to be away for a while, so keep developing the territory.”

“Yes, don’t worry, my lord.”

“Do you think you can develop up to where the magic circle is installed before I get back?”

“...Well. Development doesn’t happen that fast... and we’re having a bit of a funding issue at the moment.”

I stared at him in silence. His gloomy face made my perfunctory question feel awkward.

“As you know, the more funds we have, the faster we can develop. But lately, monsters haven’t been approaching as easily, and while merchants are coming and going, we have no capital of our own. We have to rely solely on the money they spend while staying here to develop...”

“So what do you need?”

’Ha. So, in the end, I had to ask. Damn it.’

“You know that better than I do, my lord.”

“How much?”

Simin’s tone automatically turned sour. The two thousand gold coins that had just landed in his pocket yesterday seemed to scream at him not to abandon them, but he ignored their pleas.

He had bought them to spend them anyway, so there was no point in hesitating.

“The more, the better.”

The boldness hidden behind that flabby exterior was enough to impress even Simin and render him speechless.

Yeah, he had a point. A man needed at least that much guts.

“Here’s two thousand gold coins. Shit.”

“...Pardon?”

“Nothing, just an exclamation of joy. Thanks to you, it feels like our territory has a bright future. Shit.”

“Ah. Thank you, my lord. I will do my utmost to assist you.”

If Simin had never handled $1 million before, he never would have made this investment.

He was handing over $200,000 in cash to someone who wasn’t even family. Honestly, even with family, he thought, that would be hard in this day and age.

’If you secretly blow it on entertainment or skim any off the top, you’re dead.’

He gave him a suspicious once-over, but doubting him would only give Simin a headache.

He was an NPC, after all. If he embezzled it, there was no one for him to complain to; Simin’d just be known as the idiot who handed it over. Since he had given it, he might as well trust the man.

“Then I’ll be off.”

“May I invest a bit in public safety first?” the aide asked.

“Invest it or blow it, just show results.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Simin quickly left. Staying any longer would just give him a stomachache.

“Hey, rabbits. Guard my land well.”

Taking out the egg, he left the territory. From the faint sense of where the prime spot was, he could tell this was going to be another long journey.

* * *

As time passed, workshops began to gather one by one in Rich Territory.

Unlike in PC games, where one could pay ten copper coins and teleport wherever one wanted, here one had to physically travel, which caused a delay.

In the meantime, all the bandit players who had been killed by Simin had ressurected.

“Wow. This many people? Is this really necessary?”

“The monsters we ran into last time were strong. Our levels are low, so we have to push with numbers.”

“He’s really going to pay us, right?”

“He’s betting his whole workshop on this. If he could, he’d dig up the guy’s real-life info, but since that’s impossible, he’s going to completely destroy everything that guy owns.”

There were over a thousand of them.

Though there were fewer than ten workshops, the total number of players attached to each one was immense.

It was more than enough to inspire confidence. Naturally, their confidence surged. Their levels were low, and their gear was lacking, but they felt as though they could take on anything.

“Let’s go.”

“Just like this? Out in the open?”

“We already attacked once. They’ll know we’re coming back. It’s better to head straight in than to circle around and get picked off by monsters.”

“Fine by me. Alright, guys, get ready.”

“Yes, sir!”

Their booming voices rang out.

Nothing stood in the way of their charge. They advanced unimpeded until the silhouettes of buildings rose ahead.

“So they really did chicken out and run?”

“What the hell? Isn’t this a little too easy?”

“We don’t know yet. Just watch out for those weird rabbits. I don’t see any, but don’t let your guard down.”

“Rabbits? We’ve been killing those since day one.”

“I’m telling you, they’re not your average rabbits.”

They scanned their surroundings with uneasy eyes.

If the lord of the land had truly abandoned the territory and fled, that would be one thing. But if those rabbits they had seen last time launched a surprise attack, the fight would inevitably become a serious struggle.

They had far more people this time, but at the end of the day, Fantastic World was still a game. Levels and gear could easily overcome a numerical advantage.

“If the rabbits show up, do not scatter. Stay together and fight as a group. If any rabbit breaks from the pack, swarm it and stomp it to death.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

With at least a rough plan in mind, they moved in cautiously. Suddenly, someone called out.

“Enemies! The enemies his lord warned us about are here!”

“There’s a ton of them!”

“Emergency! Emergency!”

From the watchtower at the village entrance, urgent shouts rang out as the approaching force was spotted.

At the same time, the bandits broke into a run.

They had told each other to stay on alert, but to them, this whole affair was just easy money.

They got paid even if they died, so why would they be nervous?

But they had to worry about those damn rabbits! If they showed up, they would just crush them underfoot!

RUMBLE!

It was as if someone had heard their thoughts.

“Aargh!”

“What the hell!”

The ground suddenly collapsed on a massive scale.

The pit wasn’t large enough to swallow all thousand-plus players at once, but it was wide enough to cleave their massive force in two.

The real problem came next.

Shrill squeals echoed from the sunken earth. From the wide, dark space below, the cries of rabbits filled the players—who had just sworn they wouldn’t get nervous—with sheer terror.

It was the beginning of hell.

* * *

Episode 73