Ronin didn't act rashly. Everything could wait until Kurapika and the other two entered the game.
At Shizuku's current level, she was still a little short of being able to face a Phantom Troupe combat member head-on.
But if Neon and Kurapika supported her from the side, then they should still have a chance to take one of them down.
As for the remaining two, they were all Ronin's.
Ronin didn't assign Abachi any role for now. He figured Kurapika would handle that once he entered the game.
After all, with spell cards in play, battles inside the game could become far more complicated, so they would probably need to prepare a lot in advance.
At the very least, they couldn't let the enemy have a chance to pull out Leave and activate it during a fight.
Even though he wasn't planning to make a move before Kurapika entered the game, that didn't mean he would do nothing. At minimum, he had to find out exactly how many Troupe members were here.
So Ronin had someone whose card book contained the names of Troupe members activate Magnetic Force to fly to wherever the Troupe was. Then, the moment they landed, they would use Return to go back to the starting point.
Ronin would lie in wait near the starting point.
If the Troupe members chased after them, then Ronin could use the Telescope Technique to confirm their exact situation.
After all, of the three members currently identified, he had already been in close contact with all of them and knew their aura signatures. That alone was enough to satisfy part of the activation requirements for the Telescope Technique.
The only other factor was distance.
If the Troupe didn't chase after them, then Ronin would have the returned person use Again to go back to the place where they had previously encountered the Troupe members.
If the Troupe was gone, Ronin would use the Transformation Technique to disguise himself and head to the location personally.
If the Troupe was still there, then the person who had flown there would activate Return again and go back to the starting point.
In any case, Ronin had four Return cards, two Magnetic Force cards, and sixteen Again cards on hand.
That was more than enough for him to work with.
…
From the moment they entered the game, Bonolenov and the other two had been investigating Breath of Archangel.
But progress had been slow.
This game had been running for ten years already, yet there were still plenty of cards whose acquisition methods remained completely unknown.
And Breath of Archangel was one of them.
Fortunately, after some investigation and after contacting Shalnark to explain the situation inside the game, Bonolenov finally managed to find a clue.
The clue was in a shop in Masadora.
As long as they kept paying to buy the spell cards sold there, then after making purchases for more than ten consecutive days, and buying at least forty spell cards every day, they would receive a message:
"It is said that if one gathers all spell cards, they will receive the blessings of heaven."
That one simple sentence was enough to establish the basic condition for obtaining Breath of Archangel.
They had to collect all forty spell cards.
Bonolenov's group used stolen money to complete the prerequisite task. Now the difficulty lay in actually gathering every spell card.
Some of the easier spell cards could be purchased directly from the shop.
But the rarer ones had to be obtained by buying spell-card packs.
Each pack contained three spell cards, but exactly what came out depended on luck and on which spell cards were still out in circulation.
Bonolenov's group's solution was to secretly take over the area outside the spell-card shop. Anyone who went in to buy spell cards would lose those cards to them the moment they came back out.
That method only worked for three days before it became unsustainable.
On one hand, the city marked the three of them as red-named players—unwelcome people.
Every NPC who saw them now looked at them with contempt. Of course, that was after the guards had been beaten up by the trio, turned into cards, and put away.
The three of them didn't care about those looks at all.
On the other hand, once people realized that anyone who went to buy spell cards mysteriously vanished, no one came to Masadora to buy spell cards anymore.
That forced Bonolenov's group to change tactics.
They left Masadora, went to the gambling city Dorias, and got hold of Risky Dice and a large amount of money.
Naturally, the money was stolen.
For the three of them, robbery was the fastest, most familiar, and least troublesome way to make money.
Then they returned to Masadora and started capturing players there, forcing them into the shop to buy spell-card packs.
After that, they made those people roll the Risky Dice.
If the result was great luck, they opened the pack.
If it was terrible luck, they threw the person out of the shop and let them die on their own.
Before long, there were no players appearing around Masadora anymore. Anyone with good information knew that a demonic trio had appeared there—people who were utterly unreasonable and treated human life like dirt.
Under those circumstances, the unlucky bastard Ronin had caught—someone Bonolenov's group had robbed before in Masadora—used Magnetic Force and appeared directly at the entrance to the spell-card shop.
His sudden appearance caught even Shalnark, who had been idly watching people roll the Risky Dice inside the shop, off guard. When he turned his head, surprise flashed through his eyes.
Then that surprise turned into delight, and he immediately wanted to catch the man.
But in the very next second, the player who had just landed seemed to take in the situation inside the shop and instantly activated another spell card, soaring back into the sky.
"Hm?" Phinks let out a puzzled grunt.
They were already out of Risky Dice by now. After all, it was still a B-rank designated-slot card with only thirty copies in the entire game.
Even though they had duplicated it, it still wasn't enough.
The good news, however, was that after making people use seven dice in a row, they now had thirty-six unique spell cards in hand.
In other words, they only needed four more to complete the full set.
Those four were Prison, God's Eye, Mimic, and Leave.
The first two had S-rank acquisition difficulty, and each only had ten copies.
The latter two weren't especially hard to obtain, but they were still fairly rare.
"What was that about?" Bonolenov turned to look out the window. His body was wrapped in bandages, and his whole presence gave off a gloomy aura.
"Probably someone checking out the situation," Feitan said with a shrug.
They hadn't exactly been keeping a low profile. In a game that had been relatively peaceful, guys like them—people who ignored all rules and acted however they pleased—were bound to attract a lot of attention from other players.
"Good timing. We're running low on both Copy and Risky Dice. Want to chase after him and take a look?" Phinks rolled his wrist.
"Sure." Bonolenov had already summoned his card book and taken out the spell card Accompany.
That brief instant of eye contact had been enough for Bonolenov to recognize that unlucky guy they had robbed before.
Back when they were robbing people outside the shop, every player they let go was, in their eyes, just free-range sheep—people who could keep supplying them with resources over and over.
Just like now.
~~~
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