Master Swordsman’s Stream - Chapter 22

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Chapter 22

The moment Seo Jun’s foot crossed the boundary, he felt something shift.
And as if waiting for him, a guard rushed forward.
Seo Jun instinctively reached for his sword with his right hand from his Inventory.
But his left hand flailed uselessly through empty air.
‘Never got used to it from the start.’

-hahahahahaha
-What are you doing?
-Even the nameless can’t do THIS.
-It’s impossible if you’re just human.

Seo Jun stumbled backward in an awkward gait and clumsily drew his sword with his right hand.
Then he swung it.
Clang!

-Huh?????
-Wait? Why… a parry?
-How’d you block that when your senses are scrambled? hahahaha

Seo Jun laughed and swung his arm once more.
Clang!
“Yeah, got the feel for it now.”
Seo Jun adapted to the altered sensation remarkably fast.
For someone who controlled his body down to the millimeter, it only took a bit of conscious adjustment.
His reaction speed had slowed, certainly.
But a gap of this magnitude could only become a critical blunder against a master—against an NPC, it was negligible.
“Man, this game’s easy.”
As a right-hander now using his left, Seo Jun placed his sword against the Fireball
flying at him like poorly written calligraphy.
Awkward as it was, he traced the grain perfectly.

-omg omg omg
-What is this streamer actually bad at?
-Stream settings
-hahahahahaha

“Honestly, I’ve never seen a game easier than this. Just go in and fight.”
There’s always a way.
Seo Jun walked slowly forward, one step at a time, and disposed of the mage.
Whoosh.

-Is this that thing about how if your body is good your mind gets lazy or whatever
-hahahahahaha
-That physicality is seriously incredible
-Have you actually played any other games? Stop playing dumb!

After that, Seo Jun was fully acclimated, and he repeated exactly what he’d done on the 4th Floor.
Dropping random trash items into the experimenting mage’s test tubes.
Stealing the engrossed mage’s book and covering it without marking the page, and so on.

-Why are you doing this?
-???: Just pretend you didn’t see it and leave, PLEASE!
-Total asshole hahahaha

Of course, Seo Jun had his reasons.
He was experimenting to see if different reactions changed anything special.
Honestly, Seo Jun’s skill level was such that he rarely found combat difficulty entertaining.
Besides, if his opponent were human there’d at least be the satisfaction of instruction, but Assassination Squad’s Dawn wasn’t primarily a PVP game.
Fundamentally, this game wasn’t designed with combat in mind.
The fine details.
The open world.
That’s what Seo Jun enjoyed.
Finding the grain was the same.
“Well, unfortunately I’ve already found the stairs to the 6th Floor. Going up right
now.”
After exploring the 5th Floor, it felt like he’d already confirmed every spell that could be found on the 4th Floor.
Sure, it was better to search thoroughly, but since when had he been hung up on a spell or two?
Missing one wouldn’t mean he couldn’t find the grain elsewhere.

-Why “unfortunately”?
-The other mages are sweating right now, begging him to just leave.
-Feeling regret is genuinely insane hahahaha

When Seo Jun left the 5th Floor and climbed the stairs, his senses returned to normal.
“So that’s how it works.”
Seo Jun opened and closed his right hand while
adjusting to the restored sensation as he climbed the stairs.
The next floor was Slowness.
A debuff that slowed the body.
The moment he opened the door and entered, this time he felt as if iron rebar
had been placed on his body.
The gravity seemed to have more than doubled in an instant.
His entire body felt weighed down with fatigue.
Most players considered this debuff
significantly easier than the Confusion on the 5th Floor.
But Seo Jun, at least when it came to combat rather than infiltration,
found Slowness every bit as difficult as Confusion.
“Hmm, this is a bit frustrating.”
Seo Jun began moving by predicting enemy attacks in advance.
He judged that otherwise he’d dodge and still get hit.
Boom-boom-boom.
Stone erupted from the ground.
The sharp-tipped rock rushed toward him with blinding speed.
And Seo Jun’s sword met it at exactly the right moment.
Magic Breaking Along the Grain.
Seo Jun neutralized the spell and killed the guarding mages.
After that, he quickly found the stairs to the 7th Floor.

-Ugh, just watching this makes me tense hahahaha
-Sneakers getting slow was fun, but watching someone doing a rampage get slow is super frustrating
-Skip please

“Yes, reflecting your opinions, I’ll skip the 6th Floor.”
If this weren’t a broadcast, he might have explored leisurely, but Seo Jun didn’t particularly mind.
Rather, as he climbed the stairs, he was thinking about something else.
‘In my previous life, environments like these would’ve been excellent for training.’
The reason virtual reality users accumulated such high skill levels over roughly a decade wasn’t it because they’d gained experience without the fear of death in such diverse environments?
It was a passing thought, seeing professionals with abilities that would’ve required decades of training in his past life now streaming after only ten years of practice.
And the easy accessibility to martial arts played a role too.
Unlike his previous life, where martial arts were the exclusive domain of a select few, now anyone could enter a capsule booth and gain access to it easily.
“Already reached the 7th Floor.”
The debuff here was Darkness.
Vision was completely cut off.
Seo Jun opened the door wide.
Seo Jun could see the stairs leading to the 8th Floor directly across.
“Oh, no need to hunt around on the 7th Floor.”
Probably a considerate design choice by the developers, judging that finding the next staircase in a situation with no visibility would be unreasonable.
Even so, it wasn’t easy.
Two mage NPCs visible in the middle of the long corridor.
They, just as they had on the previous floors, waited for him to cross the threshold.

-Does he die here?
-Honestly Darkness is completely broken.
-Can’t see anything, how’s he supposed to do this?
-Just climb the outer wall at this point
-Even a spider-man couldn’t do this haha

Seo Jun glanced at the frantic chat for a moment, then smiled and stepped forward.
Recalling all the sensations he’d collected from the previous floors.
The screen instantly transformed into a space of pure darkness with nothing else.
Only Seo Jun’s own body was visible.
Exhale.
In the silent world where even the faint sound of breathing echoed loudly.
Whoosh.
The sound of a fireball being generated.
Seo Jun began walking forward slowly, visualizing the shape of the corridor.
‘Head.’
Whistle.
Seo Jun tilted his head to the left, and something brushed past where his head had been.
He felt the heat.
A second later, the red trace of the magic’s aftermath appeared as a solid line in the dark space, showing the path of the already-passed spell.
‘An effect maybe? They did make the visuals beautiful.’
Boom-boom-boom.
Seo Jun rotated his body and drove his sword into the stone erupting from the wall, splitting it.
Particles of shimmering brown dust scattered through the dark space.
Rustle-rustle-rustle.
He threw his body forward to avoid the vines creeping up from the ground.
Whoosh!
This time, two.
Seo Jun rolled forward, naturally bringing himself up, then leaned back to dodge one and destroyed the other with his sword.
Crack.
Red sparks flew.
Crackle-crackle-crackle.
He heard the sound of an ice spell being formed right in front of him.
Seo Jun immediately swung his sword upward from below against the incomplete Ice Arrow, and
upon hearing the defeated mage stumble backward, he brought his blade down right beside the empty space where blue dust was falling.
“I can hear it all.”
Then he began running at full speed.
‘Above? Below? Or both?’
The mage he’d just killed wasn’t the only one casting Ice Arrow.
The mage waiting at the stairs was casting simultaneously.
The problem was, the sounds overlapped so Seo Jun hadn’t caught it properly.
He sprinted as fast as possible, trying to finish off the caster before the spell completed.
But he was too late.
Whoosh-whoosh.
He felt the faint current of the atmosphere being drawn in like a whirlpool.
A sign that the spell was complete.
Still, it was manageable. He’d felt the wind, after all.
Whiz!
‘Good thing they’re in range. Three shots.’
Seo Jun spun diagonally to the side in midair and brought his sword down.
Two arrows passed through where his head and legs had been, and he felt the chilling wind following them.
And the arrow aimed at his heart was deflected by his sword, falling to the ground.
He’d determined the arrow’s position through the movement of the air.
Then he resumed wandering through the darkness with ease.
Step by step.
Only the sound of his footsteps echoed in the dark silence.
“Assassins are always stronger in the darkness, after all.”

-Wait. That’s not fighting in darkness, that’s just being blinded.
-hahahahaha
-Assassin? Nope. Darkness? Nope.
-Holy Roman Empire meta hahahaha
-Neither holy nor Roman nor an empire—’that place’

Whoosh.
A spell was cast right beside Seo Jun again.
Click.
Seo Jun grabbed the mage’s arm.
“Ahhhhh!”
The casting naturally interrupted.

-Spider-man is real and he’s streaming on Travle right now!
-???: You can never fool me now
-Info: The room owner was never fooled to begin with.

Seo Jun dispatched the mage and stepped onto the stairs, turning back.
As darkness retreated from where Seo Jun stood as its center,
the corridor he’d traversed came into view at a glance.
“Wow, good thing I dodged everything.”
What had shone as dust in the darkness were indeed all the remnants of spells.

-Did I just watch a circus or a game?
-This is insane
-Wait, all that dust was spells and he actually dodged them all? hahaha I’m laughing in disbelief

Heated reactions flooded the chat.
Donations began piling up in an instant.
He’d normally set it so donations wouldn’t appear during gameplay to avoid distraction, but he was taking a break now anyway, so it should be fine.

[‘OO’ donated 10,000 won!]
[That was cool.]

[‘Damn’ donated 10,000 won!]
[Damn!]

[‘The lucky one who saw this live’ donated
10,000 won!]
[is victorious]

[‘Couch Director’ donated 10,000 won!]
[Why are you making a movie solo?]

“Thanks to everyone for the donations.”
Seo Jun sat down on the stairs for a moment.
“But this level’s something you can do if you know how to do Sound Play, right? Isn’t that it? You all do it too, yeah?”
He began engaging with the audience.

-Here we go again;;;;
-Honestly if you do this well you could get away with bragging, but I wanna punch him
-The moment he makes one mistake everyone’ll rush in hahaha
-This isn’t Sound Play, this is psychic powers hahahaha
-Wait… I… couldn’t do Sound Play?

Sound Play refers to a style of play where you listen to sound and, based on that information, strategically understand things like enemy positioning.
But what Seo Jun had demonstrated came across to viewers differently.
As if.

[‘That one’ donated 100,000 won!]
[Is this that synesthesia thing? Even my Korean grade is 9, but suddenly I understand.]

-The joke is insane hahahaha
-The room owner’s gotta be a Korean teacher no matter how you look at it hahahaha
-That synesthetic expression is insane hahahahahaha
-hahahaha
-Mom! I’m studying! Mom! I’m studying! Mom! I’m studying! Mom! I’m studying!

Seo Jun couldn’t help but laugh too.
Yeah.
Streaming is fun.

—————
This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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