Debuff Master

Inside the crashing airship…

“D-Don’t worry! We can still safely land even though we lost one of the engines!” the captain shouted, and he hurriedly ran into the cockpit to try and land the airship.

Unfortunately, an emergency landing was difficult.

[Alert: A storm is raging up ahead!]

The powerful winds from the storm that appeared out of nowhere shook the airship.

It would be extremely difficult to control the airship when it was missing an engine while being battered by the raging storm’s powerful winds. Even a veteran pilot with twenty years of experience would find it tough to perform an emergency landing in such conditions.

“Huh?” the captain muttered with a look of disbelief.

Whooosh!

The airship started spinning in place as if it were a pinwheel the storm’s powerful winds swept it away.

[Alert: The airship is about to crash!]

A message popped up in front of Siegfried.

“You told us not to worry while flaunting your twenty years of experience or something, but you couldn’t even maintain your airship…” Siegfried grumbled while glaring at the captain.

“What can I do when I have so much on my bar tab?!” the captain angrily retorted, and then he shouted, “Do you really think that I didn’t want to maintain my airship?! Ha?! I was aware that the bearing on my right engine was cracked! I knew it, but the bar threatened to tell my wife if I failed to pay my tab within the week!”

“You call that an excuse?” Siegfried muttered as he covered his face with his hands before retorting, “This isn’t because of human error in maintenance; you simply didn’t maintain it at all!”

“What do you know? Ha?! Punk!” the captain angrily shouted and scoffed.

“Shut up and just drive if you want to live. I will come back to life if I die, but aren’t you going to really die?” Siegfried nonchalantly said.

“Ha…?” the captain tilted his head in confusion.

“Then, thank you for your hard work,” Siegfried said. He leisurely held onto a handgrip and said with a smirk, “It’s a matter of life and death for you, so I’m sure you will try very hard to get yourself out of this, right?”

“T-This punk actually dares to…!” the captain angrily muttered.

“You should’ve maintained your airship properly, then… Tsk…” Siegfried clicked his tongue.

He had to right to be brazen toward the captain since this entire problem happened because the captain chose to pay his bar tab instead of paying to maintain his airship. It was a relief that this happened in a virtual reality game rather than in real life since this incident caused by carelessness and a carefree attitude would surely be plastered all over the evening news, and the media would blame the entire industry for its lack of discipline and management.

‘What is it to me if an old man like that makes it out alive or not?’?Siegfried grumbled inwardly.

His attitude toward the captain was cold since he would suffer a penalty if he died. He would lose a level if he died, but the worse part of it was the fact that he had no idea where they would crash land. If he ended up trapped on an uninhabited island, he would have to waste a few days without being able to play the game properly.

While Siegfried was grumbling, the airship started to spin even more violently.

Whoooooosh!

“Noooo!” the captain cried out while tightly holding onto the airship’s steering wheel in desperation. He was trying his best to regain control of the airship, but…

Whoooooosh!

The airship had already left the captain’s control a long time ago.

[Alert: The airship is about to crash! Brace for impact!]

A message popped up in front of Siegfried.

‘Just hurry up and crash… I’m getting dizzy from this fiasco…’?Siegfried thought. He prayed that the airship would crash as soon as possible while suppressing his pent-up frustration and anger.

***

Surprisingly, the airship neither crashed nor broke apart into pieces.

“We are landiiiiing! Hold on tiiiiight!” the captain shouted while tightly gripping the airship’s steering wheel.

Was it out of pure luck, or had his twenty years of experience played a part?

It was probably out of pure luck, but the captain managed to safely land the airship that was being flung around by the storm while missing an engine.

Swooooosh!

The airship flew in an arc and tilted forty-five degrees.

Baaaam!

Splash!

It landed and splashed onto the surface of the water.

“Ahuehuehuehuehuehue!”?The captain let out a strange peal of laughter that sounded closer to a cry after successfully performing an emergency landing.

“You saw that, you punk? Did you see my skills? Don’t you go around looking down on a veteran with twenty years of experience! Keke!?I’m a veteran captain who can always guarantee my passengers' safety!” the captain exclaimed proudly with his chest out.

The captain seemed quite proud of the fact that he was able to safely land the airship. However, the words he said just now weren’t something that should have come out of the mouth of someone who had paid off his bar tab rather than buying spare parts.

“Wow, I can’t believe he survived,” Siegfried was dumbfounded.

However, their relief lasted only for a short while.

Shwaaaaa!

The sound of raging water could be heard from somewhere nearby.

Siegfried looked outside the airship window to see where the sound was coming from.

“Ah…”

He did not have the habit of cursing or saying crude things, but he couldn’t help but cuss right now.

“What a place to land… we’re fucked…” he muttered.

Shwaaaaaaaa!

The airship was currently being carried by raging waters toward the edge of a cliff. Yes, they were about to fall down a waterfall.

***

Ten minutes later, Siegfried gnashed his teeth while pulling himself out of the water onto the riverbank.

“Ugh!”?

“All sorts of stuff do happen when you have shitty luck,” he grumbled.

Who could have imagined that even though they managed to safely land the airship, they actually landed right on top of a waterfall?

“I’m never going to ride one of those ever again. Never,” Siegfried complained while swearing to take a boat next time, even if the journey would be longer.

“Did that old man die?” Siegfried muttered while looking around in search of the veteran captain, but he couldn’t find any signs of the captain.

There was a high chance that he had already become food for the fish underneath the waters or he plopped somewhere down the riverbank if he were fortunate enough to have survived. As expected, he could not find any signs of the airship anywhere around him since the piece of flying metal was probably smashed into pieces when it fell down the waterfall. The waterfall’s pressure would have dragged it down the water as well. Only a few planks littered across the water's surface remained from the airship that managed to survive a storm.

“It’s not my business whether he survived or kicked the bucket. More importantly, where the hell am I?” Siegfried complained while looking around before opening ‘World Map’ on the interface to check his current location.

However, Siegfried couldn’t figure out his current location. He couldn’t even make a rough guess because the World Map wasn’t showing him anything aside from…

[Erengel: Area 9]

Only the word [Erengel: Area 9] showed up on the World Map.

“Where in the hell did we crash land…?” Siegfried grumbled and bit his lips. He contemplated for a moment before muttering, “Let’s just reconnect…”

Siegfried decided that it would be better for him to reconnect to the game instead of wandering around an unknown area without a map. In addition, finding his way out could cost him a few hours.

There was a feature that transported players to the nearest village four hours after logging out of the game. Siegfried decided to take advantage of that feature.

***

Four hours later, Tae-Sung reconnected to the game after resting for a bit. Then, he opened his eyes as Siegfried in an Intervention Hotel room.

“It’s a relief to find myself here at the Intervention Hotel,” Siegfried muttered with a sigh of relief after looking around the room. Since he got teleported into an Intervention Hotel, it meant that he wasn’t stuck in the middle of nowhere. He left his room and went down to the lobby.

“What the…?” he mumbled in surprise

“Welcome, customer-nim. How may I help you?”

The hotel receptionist who greeted him wasn’t human.

[Reception9]

[Type: Creation] 𝒃𝙚𝙙𝙣𝙤𝙫𝙚𝒍.𝒐𝙧𝒈

[Race: Marionette]

[Level: 1]

[Affiliation: Erengel Area 9 Intervention Hotel]

[Position: Senior]

[Title: Kind Marionette]

[Additional Information: An extremely kind Unmanned Intervention Hotel Receptionist. Can only do basic conversation and service. Cannot surpass the limits of a marionette.]

Surprisingly, the hotel receptionist was a wooden doll, and Siegfried could tell at a glance that it was a humanoid doll being operated by magic based on the mana stone embedded at its heart, or rather, at its chest area.

“Where is this?” Siegfried asked.

“You are at the lobby of Erengel Area 9’s Intervention Hotel,” the receptionist replied.

“No, what I mean is… where is Erengel located at?”

“This place is Erengel Area 9’s Intervention Hotel.”

“No, I’m asking you where in the Nürburg Continent is Erengel located?”

“This place is Erengel Area 9’s Intervention Hotel.”

“Ah…”

Siegfried asked multiple times, but he could not get any satisfactory response from Reception9. He decided to give up on trying to get any answers from it since it looked like it was macro-programmed to give the same response over and over again.

“There’s no point asking till I get sick and tired of that thing’s response…” Siegfried groaned and gave up. He eventually left the hotel since he knew that there was no point in asking Reception9 or the other marionettes at the hotel.

However, his troubles didn’t end there…

“Is this a ghost town or what…?” he mumbled in disbelief when he was greeted by a desolate town as soon as he left the hotel.

The town had no traces of life in it as if it were an empty movie set. Siegfried entered a building just to make sure, only to find it void of any signs of human life as well.

“Welcome to the Erengel Area 9 smithy.”

“Welcome to the Erengel Area 9 general store.”

“Welcome to the Erengel Area 9 restaurant.”

The only thing that existed in the town was a bunch of marionettes dressed in uniforms befitting their job description, similar to Reception9 back at this place’s Intervention Hotel.

‘Where the hell am I…?’?Siegfried wondered with furrowed brows.

‘The world map is not working, and there’s no one to ask… I have no idea where the gateway is as well. Just where in the hell did we land…?’?

Siegfried felt like he was about to go crazy.

In the end, Siegfried decided to leave the town out of frustration.

Siegfried was walking along a shoreline road thirty minutes later.

“What the hell is that…?”

He came across a horse standing in the middle of the road, but the horse wasn’t a living, breathing creature. It was similar to the marionettes.

[Steel Horse]

[Level: Tier 3]

[Fuel: 10/10]

[Additional Information: A horse made out of steel. It will keep running without getting tired as long as it has fuel.]

First a humanoid marionette and now a steel horse? Siegfried—a seasoned veteran of anything related to BNW—couldn’t make heads or tails of where he was located and just what in the hell this place was.

“Where in the hell am I really…?” Siegfried mumbled. He decided to hop on the horse and take a look around.

Clop! Clop! Clop!?

Siegfried rode the steel horse and looked around for a gateway, but he couldn’t find anything resembling a gateway nearby.

“Ah… where the hell is that gateway…” he grumbled in frustration.

He eventually reached the coastline while looking for a gateway, and something caught his eye in the distance.

‘Hmm? Is that a boat?’?he thought as he squinted to try and get a better look.

He saw a boat instead of a gateway quite a distance away from him. Then, he realized that there were multiple ships coming to the coastline.

‘One… two… three, four… what the hell? Why are there so many ships?’?he wondered while observing the ships coming closer to the coastline.

More ships started to appear in Siegfried’s view, and there were so many of them that they sailed in a long single file that almost covered the entire horizon.

However, that wasn’t the only thing that surprised Siegfried.

‘Airships?!’?he inwardly exclaimed in absolute shock when he looked up and saw that the sky was covered by a great multitude of airships, and their numbers were so great they covered the sky like a swarm of locusts, or in this case, it seemed like there was an upcoming air raid.