At the starting point, Ronin was there with Neon to receive the three who had just entered the game.
Kurapika still had no idea that Ronin had already found the Troupe trio inside the game, but when he saw the smile unconsciously tugging at Ronin's lips, he could more or less guess that something had happened.
"Looks like you had a good haul?" Kurapika said after giving Ronin a quick hug.
"Yeah." After letting go of Kurapika, Ronin hadn't expected Shizuku to step forward and hug him too. Not wanting to play favorites, he gave her a hug as well. "I found traces of Troupe members. Three of them. This should make for a pretty solid trial run."
"Three?" Kurapika said. "That really is right on the edge of what we can handle."
Then he lowered his voice.
"You didn't expose yourself, did you?"
"No." Ronin shook his head.
"There wasn't a Shalnark among the people who entered the game?" Kurapika asked, as if he'd just thought of something.
"That's right."
"Figures. If Shalnark were inside the game, getting Breath of Archangel probably wouldn't be difficult."
Kurapika hadn't been idle while waiting outside. He had memorized all the card information related to the game.
And based on each card's effect, he had also made his own analysis and predictions.
Figuring out where information about a card's acquisition method might be found wasn't especially hard. And once the correct location was identified, someone with Shalnark's kind of mind-control ability should have had little trouble testing every possible trigger condition.
Only if Shalnark wasn't in the game would it make sense for the Troupe's collection of Breath of Archangel to be progressing this slowly.
And if Shalnark wasn't here, then he was probably still out on the road collecting Scarlet Eyes. Who knew how many pairs he had managed to get by now.
"But even without Shalnark, they're probably close to completing the set," Ronin said with a shrug.
Honestly, he didn't care whether Bonolenov got healed by Breath of Archangel or not. If anything, he'd much rather fight Bonolenov at full power than in his current injured state.
Kurapika only needed one glance at Ronin to guess what he was thinking.
"The key issue isn't the healing," he said. "It's whether, after getting healed, they'll immediately use Leave and quit the game."
By then, the group had already gathered together.
Ronin pulled out Accompany from his binder and set the target to Masadora. The moment the spell card activated, the whole group shot into the air and vanished.
Recently, the game had changed drastically.
Players felt a level of danger they had never felt before. On one side were the powerful enforcers Battera had hired, who were cleaning out players they viewed as parasites contributing nothing toward clearing the game.
On the other side was someone launching indiscriminate attacks on players and stealing spell cards and designated-slot cards from them.
The former, people could understand as Battera making a new move.
The latter, though, were like terrorists.
Because anyone who had encountered them and survived knew one thing: collecting designated-slot cards was just something they did along the way. Their real goal was never actually clearing Greed Island.
What they truly wanted were the forty different spell cards.
Especially because they had taken over the game's only spell-card shop, something that had made ordinary players furious.
After all, spell cards had long since become woven into nearly every aspect of life for the players surviving in Greed Island.
Genthru was one of the people affected by this.
He had entered the game three years ago. At the time, he hadn't been using Nen for very long, and he had needed real practical experience.
The two who entered with him were his close companions, Sub and Bara.
But once he decided to infiltrate other people's groups to gather clear-condition cards, he temporarily split up from the other two.
Still, the three of them had jointly created the Nen ability Sound of Life.
That was their combined finishing move. Once they fulfilled the necessary conditions, they could plant a time bomb on a target, one powerful enough to kill anyone bound by it.
But now, before his name as the Bomber had even spread, someone else had beaten them to the punch and started collecting cards using far more extreme methods, and that deeply irritated Genthru.
Especially because some of the people killed by that trio had been members of his own organization.
After all, the current group was something Genthru and Nikens had painstakingly built up bit by bit, recruiting people one at a time. Every member even held quite a few designated-slot cards.
Now that those people were dead, their cards naturally had changed hands.
And in Genthru's eyes, that was no different from those three stealing directly from him.
Inside a cave, the organization's fewer than ten members were all gathered together.
Nikens, who looked somewhat worn down and world-weary, spoke first.
"We should cut back on activity for the time being. Those three killers won't spare anyone who's come into contact with them."
At first, they had only blocked off the spell-card shop in Masadora and robbed people there.
But in the past two days, news had already spread that they had gone to Dorias and started robbing and killing there too. That was enough to make Nikens uneasy.
The people he had worked so hard to gather here might not be great at direct combat, but they all had their own useful talents. They were still good at collecting cards.
He didn't want the entire organization to be wiped out at the hands of a bunch of killers.
Genthru swept his gaze over the group, then raised a hand and lightly pushed up the triangular glasses on the bridge of his nose.
Once Nikens finished, Genthru stepped forward before the others could start discussing things and said:
"Has anyone here come into contact with those three murderers?"
After hesitating for a moment, two people stepped out from the group.
"I got robbed once at the shop in Masadora," one of them said, blushing slightly as he admitted it.
What he meant, of course, was that all the cards in his designated slots had been taken.
Genthru nodded. He had expected something like this. Once no one else stepped forward, he continued:
"I'm sorry to say this, but the moment you had contact with them, you became their 'grain store.'"
Everyone's expressions changed. They all immediately understood what he meant.
But they still weren't quite sure why he was bringing it up now.
When Genthru saw the confusion in their eyes, he finally explained his plan.
"My suggestion is that we temporarily consolidate all our cards onto one person. Then the one carrying all the cards should suspend all activity and hide somewhere safe. I have a feeling those three killers won't stay in the game for very long. They might not even be trying to clear it at all."
"How long they'll stay, I don't know," Nikens said, offering the information he had. "But I do know that people have already started organizing a group to hunt the three of them down."
He paused, then nodded.
"But I agree with your suggestion. We can't let two years of work go down the drain."
~~~
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