"This is taking entirely too long..."
Suzuki crossed his arms over his chest, sighing helplessly as he plummeted through the pitch-black void. He casually looked around, perfectly relaxed, as if he were just taking a long, boring Shinkansen trip from Tokyo to Kyoto.
Actually, the Shinkansen is vastly superior, he mused. At least on the train, you get to look out the window at the passing countryside. Here? It's just endless, boring darkness.
The fall into the true abyss of the Great Orcus Labyrinth took a terrifyingly long time. For a normal person, it would be a descent into pure, primal madness—screaming until their vocal cords tore, desperately clawing at the empty air before gravity finally smashed them into the bedrock.
Yet, for Suzuki, it was just an annoying commute to his new, highly hostile office space.
"If I were just a standard Merchant, I really would be dead right now," he muttered into the roaring wind.
Fortunately, he had been aggressively expanding his corporate portfolio since the moment he arrived in Tortus. He fully believed that even falling from an impossible altitude, he would be completely fine. Equipped with the lethal precision of his [Assassin] class, the newly liquidated Wind Magic he had forcefully taken from Hiyama, and the spatial perfection of the stolen [Acrobat] job, the fundamental laws of physics were no longer a lethal threat.
Gravity was just a math problem. And Suzuki possessed the ultimate calculator.
Actually, do I even need to do the math myself?
Suzuki was the [Manager]. Even if he completely shut his brain off, the system's hyper-optimized AI would automatically pilot his body, instantly calculating the exact aerodynamic adjustments required to keep him alive. He could practically take a nap and wake up safely at the bottom.
But he preferred to stay in control.
As the faint red glow of the broken bridge faded entirely into the suffocating, freezing darkness above, terminal velocity kicked in. The wind roared violently past his ears, whipping his suit jacket around his chest, but he didn't flail in a panic.
Among the skills within the [Acrobat] job, he possessed a passive trait called Equilibrium. Because of this, his inner ear and spatial awareness were practically indestructible. Even in absolute, pitch-black sensory deprivation, he knew exactly which way was up, which way was down, and exactly how close he was drifting toward the jagged canyon walls. He smoothly shifted his body into a professional skydiver's tracking position, minimizing his drag to speed up the fall and get this annoying commute over with.
Suddenly, about two hundred feet from the absolute bottom, his Danger Perception—a core skill from his [Assassin] job—pinged violently in the back of his skull.
Ah. Company.
But before he could deal with the locals, he had to nail the landing.
The cavern floor was rushing up incredibly fast. He didn't panic. He calmly raised his left hand, aiming his palm downward, and cast a highly compressed sphere of Wind Magic directly beneath him.
Wooosh!
He didn't use the wind blast to stop his momentum entirely—the sudden, violent deceleration would have instantly shattered his legs. Instead, he treated the compressed air like a massive, invisible bounce pad.
As he hit the sudden updraft, he engaged his Acrobatic Kinetic Redirection, twisting his body violently in mid-air. He converted the lethal, downward vertical momentum into a horizontal spin, launching himself softly toward the cavern wall.
The exact second his reinforced Oxford shoe kicked off the stone wall, erasing the very last fraction of his lethal kinetic energy, his unnatural Night Vision activated.
"Hmm?"
The bottom of the abyss was a horrifying graveyard of crushed white bones and glowing, toxic moss. Directly below him stood a massive, ten-foot-tall Nightmare Claw Bear. It was staring up into the dark, drooling, eagerly waiting for its bruised, battered meal to drop from the ceiling.
"What a nuisance..."
Suzuki sighed. Suspended mid-air, exactly fifty feet directly above the massive bear, Suzuki mentally pressed the "mute" button on his own existence.
[Presence Concealment].
It was the absolute bread-and-butter skill of the Assassin class. With this single, heavily optimized skill, Suzuki became practically invincible.
His heartbeat instantly slowed to a microscopic crawl. He used a faint breeze of Wind Magic to perfectly envelop his body, catching the scent of his sweat and the rustle of his bespoke suit, blowing the sensory data straight up into the canyon draft. To the Claw Bear below, the falling human it had been tracking simply vanished from reality.
"Ra?"
The massive beast grunted in deep confusion. It sniffed the air aggressively, turning its head side to side. Assuming its prey had been snatched by a flying monster higher up in the darkness, it slowly dropped its guard.
But Suzuki, completely invisible in the shadows above, had absolutely no intention of landing safely on the ground. The bedrock was hard, and he didn't want to waste precious kinetic energy executing an acrobatic roll.
Instead, he aimed directly for the bear.
He fell the last thirty feet in absolute, terrifying silence, entirely undetected by the beast's predatory senses. He smoothly drew a single black-and-orange dagger from his spatial storage, holding it firmly in a reverse grip.
In the [Acrobat] skill tree, falling from a high altitude wasn't considered a danger; it was mathematically classified as a massive damage multiplier. As he dropped, Suzuki channeled the remaining kinetic energy of his descent entirely into his right heel and his blade arm.
He landed Oxford shoe-first directly onto the back of the Claw Bear's massive neck.
CRACK!
The sheer, concentrated kinetic force of the acrobatic drop instantly crushed the monster's thick cervical vertebrae. But before the beast's nervous system could even register the sudden paralysis, Suzuki hooked the razor-sharp dagger into the microscopic gap beneath the bear's heavy armored jawbone.
Slash!
Using the collapsing beast's massive weight as a fulcrum, Suzuki casually stepped off its back. He let gravity do all the work, allowing the momentum to drag his blade cleanly through the monster's thick carotid artery and windpipe.
BOOOOOOOM!
The ten-ton Nightmare Claw Bear crashed heavily onto the bedrock, completely dead before its brain even realized it was under attack.
Suzuki landed softly next to the massive corpse, his Shtar Ore-reinforced shoes making absolutely zero sound on the stone floor. He stood up slowly, rolling his shoulders and stretching his neck until it popped. He adjusted the collar of his suit, completely unbothered.
He wasn't breathing heavily. He didn't pump his fist or celebrate surviving a terrifying drop that would have instantly turned the Kingdom's strongest knight into chunky salsa.
He simply flicked the dark monster blood off his dagger with a sharp snap of his wrist, looked around at the suffocating, highly toxic darkness of the true abyss, and let out a long, heavy sigh.
"The air down here is absolutely disgusting."
He muttered into the pitch-black environment, genuinely grateful he had possessed the ruthless foresight to forcefully liquidate the Kingdom's corrupt nobility and steal their Jobs before the expedition started.
If Nagumo wasn't the protagonist... that kid would have died the second he hit the floor.
Unlike Suzuki, who possessed the [Manager] AI and a terrifying arsenal of stolen, unique classes, Hajime Nagumo was just a standard Synergist. No matter how desperately Nagumo trained, his base stats were brutally capped by the system because it was a non-combatant job.
While it was highly probable that Nagumo possessed a hidden aptitude for guns, Suzuki found the concept entirely underwhelming. Mages and Assassins could effortlessly out-scale firearms in Tortus. If Nagumo fell down here without the ability to instantly craft modern weaponry... he would be eaten alive in minutes.
But Suzuki had completely derailed the plot. Nagumo was safely on the surface, meaning the boy would likely forge a vastly different path to strength, entirely driven by the crushing guilt of Suzuki's "sacrifice."
Suzuki didn't really care. He was focused entirely on his own massive profit margins.
He looked down at the massive, bleeding corpse of the Claw Bear at his feet.
"Let's see if my new skill works..."
Suzuki extended his bare hand toward the corpse. He was about to test a highly experimental skill. It was a custom, brute-forced combination of his corporate [Hostile Takeover] and the standard [Steal] skill inherent to the Assassin class.
Normally, Steal was a highly unreliable, RNG-based skill that randomly snatched a single item or gold coin from a target based on the user's Luck stat. But Suzuki's version was vastly different. Because his [Manager] AI had actively rewritten the system's code, combining the thievery with the ruthless legal liquidation of a corporate takeover... the results were terrifying.
"[Snatch]."
The moment the dark word left his lips, a violent surge of golden energy ripped out of the dead bear's body and flooded directly into Suzuki's hand.
Ding!
Suzuki's eyes widened slightly as a flurry of notifications flooded his vision. He could instantly feel his baseline physical stats skyrocketing. The monster's raw, feral strength, its thick durability, and even a faint trace of its predatory instincts were violently downloaded directly into his soul.
He realized in that exact moment that the abyss wasn't a nightmare. It wasn't hell.
It was an entirely unmonitored, deeply exploitable grinding zone. He was going to forcefully acquire the stats of every single apex predator in the labyrinth.
"Damn... that is an incredible skill."
A dark, highly predatory smirk crossed his handsome face. He casually unsheathed his second dagger, entirely unbothered by the oppressive, suffocating darkness pressing in from all sides. He began walking deeper into the abyss, fully prepared to slaughter and liquidate every single monster on the floor.