Two days after entering the game, Ronin reappeared in Battera's castle.
When Battera saw the three other players he had hired to enter the game being brought back under Ronin's control, he was utterly stunned by Ronin.
He had already gotten a rough idea of how powerful Ronin was from Sabazushi, but seeing that power with his own eyes still shook him.
If Ronin were willing to devote himself fully to clearing the game, then he should have a better chance than any of the people Battera had hired before.
But Battera could also tell that Ronin didn't really regard him, his employer, as all that important.
He even found himself wondering: if Ronin really did clear the game, would he actually hand over the two items Battera wanted?
Ronin had no idea what Battera was thinking.
But he did intend to honor their agreement. After all, they had entered the game under the pretext of accepting the job.
Battera had done nothing wrong on his end, so Ronin naturally intended to keep his side of the deal.
And honestly, neither Breath of Archangel nor Witch's Rejuvenation Potion interested Ronin all that much.
First, his own self-healing ability was already extremely strong.
Second, he was still young, and that rejuvenation effect came with some serious drawbacks. It might make him younger, but it wouldn't restore all the Nen he had painstakingly trained over the past year along with his body.
In other words, if Ronin swallowed a rejuvenation pill, there was a good chance his aura quantity would revert all the way back to what it had been before he ever learned Nen.
You could say that for Battera, the rejuvenation potion was practically an elixir of immortality.
But to Ronin, it was closer to poison.
That really fit the saying: one man's miracle herb is another man's deadly toxin.
Though when Ronin had seen that phrase before, it had usually been used in novels.
"It'll take ten days. Only after they're unbound can you enter the game," Ronin said as a reminder.
After that, he headed back into the game, which also showed how worried he was about Neon.
The three players left behind looked at one another and quietly let out sighs of relief.
What they had feared most, deep down, was whether Ronin might kill all of them just to free up the slots faster so his own companions could enter the game sooner.
Now that Ronin had left, and had openly said in front of them that they'd be released in ten days, they felt much more at ease.
Kurapika and the others didn't mind waiting a few extra days.
After reentering the game, Ronin once again came down the stairs from the starting point. The feeling of being watched clung to him the moment he appeared there.
He immediately summoned Book and used Magnetic Force, targeting Neon.
In an instant, Ronin was wrapped in aura, shot into the sky like a meteor, and vanished from the starting point.
The effect of Magnetic Force was to send Ronin flying directly to his target, which in this case was Neon's location. It was an extremely useful long-distance spell card.
Its difficulty rating was C-rank, and there were only fifty of them in the entire game. Ronin only had one.
When the effect of Magnetic Force ended and the aura around him dissipated, he found himself in a seaside town.
Ronin hadn't expected Neon to choose a place like Soufrabi. Other than its beautiful scenery, it didn't really have many distinguishing features. At least within the game, it counted as an extremely ordinary little city.
And it was also the place where Razor's pirate crew was stationed.
To obtain Strip of Beach, you had to go to where the pirates were based and complete the challenge against them.
Of course, anyone with half a brain knew that the lesser pirates were just filler. The real requirement for clearing it was defeating Razor during the match.
Ronin had no intention of challenging Razor yet. Besides, to even trigger Razor's quest, there was a prerequisite: fifteen players had to use Accompany to arrive in Soufrabi before the "Razor and the Fourteen Devils" scenario would activate.
Shadow clones obviously wouldn't work.
After all, shadow clones didn't have real game rings on their hands.
"So fast," Neon said in amazement.
She herself had only reached Soufrabi by using the spell card Drift, which let a player fly to a place they had never been before.
Neon had four Drift cards in hand, and she had fully prepared herself to immediately use another one if the first sent her to Masadora.
But to her surprise, a single Drift had taken her straight to the scenic coastal city of Soufrabi.
Without human organs to collect, Neon preferred indulging in good food, so when Ronin found her, she was sitting leisurely by the sea, enjoying a lavish seafood feast prepared by the waitstaff.
Ronin didn't bother being polite. He simply sat down across from her.
At that moment, he found himself regretting that he hadn't let Kurapika enter the game first. If Kurapika were here now, he could have taken Neon out into the wilderness to hunt monsters instead of letting her lounge around by the sea breeze listening to music.
But regretting it now was pointless.
It wasn't that he hated seeing Neon living comfortably. It was just that they weren't planning to stay in Greed Island for very long in the first place.
After all, he had already promised Michael that he would go explore the Mahawi ruins in the Kingdom of Aite.
And looking at the timeline, things were already getting tight.
After all, in January he still had to participate in this year's Hunter Exam.
With all that on his mind, Ronin tossed those concerns aside the moment the waiter brought the food over.
For the next few days, Ronin first enjoyed some downtime with Neon, then began searching through the game for traces of Phantom Troupe members, just as Kurapika had asked.
As long as a player in the game had come into contact with a Troupe member, that member's name would definitely be recorded in the roster of that player's card binder.
Find someone who had crossed paths with the Troupe, use them as a stepping stone, and you could locate the Troupe members.
That was Greed Island.
That was how the game worked.
Of course, this method had one flaw: if the target chose not to use their real name, then it became completely useless.
But based on the information currently known, the only person playing under a hidden name was Ging, one of the game's creators.
And considering how arrogant the Phantom Troupe members were, they probably wouldn't bother hiding their names either.
Sure enough, on the eighth day of waiting for Kurapika to enter the game, Ronin defeated a challenger and found three familiar names in the roster of that person's binder.
Bonolenov. Feitan. Phinks.
Their names were still lit up in the binder's roster, which meant those three were most likely still inside the game.
Shalnark's name wasn't there, and from that, Ronin could more or less guess why the three of them were still here.
No brains, only fighters.
If it was just a matter of beating enemies, that was easy enough for them.
But breaking through the various challenges inside the game?
That was a very different story.