The Taming Master

Muran suddenly gave out a hidden quest .

Rather than a hidden quest, the quest Muran gave was more like a hidden land mine .

And Ian was the one who would step foot on that land mine .

If Ian decided to take his foot off, that mine would end up making a huge explosion .

Ian read the quest window once again not being able to understand what he had gotten himself into .

‘What the hell is this crazy penalty…?’

Among the hidden quests which had great rewards, there often were cases that came with penalties for the failures .

However, its penalties were only a cut of experience points, fame loss, or a decline of affinity with the NPC that gave the quest .

The quest’s penalty of being dropped a tier in the hidden class for not clearing it was borderline robbery .

No kind of effort could recover that .

A user had to put a lot of effort into gaining that tier . Also, many things were needed in order to succeed in gaining a tier .

Ian was stunned .

On the other hand, Muran—who wasn’t aware of how overwhelmed Ian was—spoke to him with a very satisfied expression .

“I didn’t know my arrangements were fine . If I knew that there was going to be a strong hero as such in the future, I would’ve taken rest with a calm heart . ”

Muran’s encouragement was continuing to burn Ian’s heart furthermore, and Elcarix was about to pour gasoline over it .

“Woah! My dad is so awesome!”

Elcarix was laughing at Ian while hanging on his back .

Even the cute voice of Elcarix couldn’t raise Ian’s spirit

“Heuu…”

Ian took a deep breath to regain his cool .

Due to the sudden outbreak of an insane quest, he was in a situation where he had to revise all the plans he made for the future .

‘It looks like I’ll have to put off conquering the Elrika Kingdom as of the moment . I should ask for the understanding of our guild members, and I need to go to the Ulphir Mountains to upgrade the troops as soon as possible . I’ll be needing to make the most out of my ranker friends…’

Ian’s head was working and working .

It was clear that it was a quest with the highest level of difficulty, and it was also clear that it was impossible to avoid such a quest .

The only thing he could do at least was to increase the success rate of the quest as much as he could .

Things like giving up weren’t Ian’s style .

When Ian’s head was going through a trauma of its own, it wasn’t Ian who was in trouble .

Ian shared the quest with his party members too .

The other members of his party were reading the quest window of a weird quest very cautiously .

Their rewards and penalties were all entirely different from Ian, but the rest of the content of the quest was similar .

Ian’s party members suddenly noticed him .

After a while, Remir spoke with a lot of cautiousness .

“Ian-ah, can you not share this quest?”

Levya and Yu Shin then said,

“Ian, I will take a break . Thank you very much for sharing the hidden quest, but I don’t think this…”

“I’m sorry bro, Ian . I can’t do it . ”

Three lines of message suddenly emerged before Ian’s eyes .

[Party member ‘Remir’ has refused to accept the shared quest . ]

[Party member ‘Levya’ has refused to accept the shared quest . ]

[Party member ‘Yu Shin’ has refused to accept the shared quest . ]

Ian was struck with the feeling of betrayal .

“Noona, Levya, Yu Shin!”

However, the three simply avoided eye contact with Ian .

“Keu…”

Ian looked completely devastated .

He suddenly felt a hand that seemed to be comforting him .

Ian then heard a voice saying the thing he needed the most from an unlikely person .

“Hyung, I’ll follow you hyung!”

Everyone’s gaze went in the direction of that person’s voice .

There was Hoonie standing with a confident look .

The other party members were shocked at Hoonie’s attitude .

“Oh, Hoonie…?”

“Hoonie get your mind straight! Aren’t you overwhelmed with the stress of excessive hunting?”

Unlike his party members, Ian wasn’t surprised at all .

Ian knew exactly why Hoonie decided to do such a thing .

“Don’t overdo it, man . You’re in the same boat as me anyway, right?”

“…”

He did .

Hoonie was already in a situation where he needed to kill the Lich King for his 4th tier quest to be completed .

Even the time limit of the two was the same .

Unlike Ian though, Hoonie’s quest didn’t have such ridiculously unfair penalty for failing the quest .

“Huu, you don’t know me at all . You’re so mean…”

Hoonie was displaying a sad face, but that wasn’t what he was feeling . His expression changed right away .

“Noisy . Let’s clear the dungeon as quickly as possible . ”

Ian looked at all of his party members while he talked slowly to Hoonie .

Though he spoke calmly, he hadn’t forgotten the terrible thing that they did awhile ago .

“If you guys want to rest early, then go ahead . I’ll somehow manage . ”

Ian’s tone was rather threatening, and his party members were obviously feeling it .

* * *

“Wow! That’s crazy . Why didn’t he do the play in a normal way?”

Seeing the decision that Ian took, Na Ji-chan couldn’t help but feel ridiculous .

Ian who was playing very well took a decision that no one would have even chose to opt for .

‘I’m going to ‘give up’ a 4th tier hidden class . ’ was what Ian said .

No one including Na Ji-chan would have guessed that .

“Not that… this is…”

Na Ji-chan was pacing back and forth in the monitoring room restlessly .

The unprecedented choice of Ian was going to bring in heaps of work for the planning team .

Honestly, since they wanted to delay users from exhausting the new episode’s content as much as possible, Ian’s choice would greatly benefit them .

Apart from being a 4th tier hidden class, the ‘Summoner Knight’ contained a very important piece of the puzzle in dealing with the Richie King .

Without that piece, it would be hard to get rid of Richie King even if it was Ian .

That being said, the Richie King episode was going to last longer .

However, there was another problem .

The problem was the ‘Hero’s Responsibility’, the hidden quest that Ian got from the unexpected choice that he made .

It wasn’t a quest that the planning team had even designed .

The quest didn’t even exist in the first place .

‘Hu, I knew that we were going to have a problem…’

As Ian had taken a choice that the planning team wasn’t even considering to be in the option, a random quest got activated .

Kailan’s system was designed to cope with situations by judging its own algorithm if the situation wasn’t designed by the planning team .

So Muran used his own AI to make his own decision, and the quest was the result of his judgment .

‘Hu, if you’re going to make quests that you wish, at least make some sensible ones…’

Na Ji-chan held his head as it was beginning to hurt .

The quest had fatal problems in it .

The most lethal problem was the ‘Unique Dual Class’ .

The reward that Muran’s quest offered was the ‘Unique Dual Class’ .

It was as if the quest was giving out a class that never existed .

‘This is going to hurt us a lot . Just because of Ian, we will now have to make this unique dual-class thing?’

Adding a new class wasn’t an easy task .

A new hidden class always called for the addition of a few new skills and a special trait to the existing planned base .

“Hu…”

Na Ji-chan had already been working for Kailan’s planning team for 5 years now .

Na Ji-chan who had worked long before the opening of Kailan was always confident that his mind was as strong as a diamond .

However, all thanks to Ian, he was having his second mental breakdown in the middle of the night .

The first one was when Ian was close to clearing the Dragon’s Altar time attack dungeon and almost opened the Door of Dimension . The current one was this crisis Ian just brought in .

“Phew… let’s just hold that thought, maybe Ian will fail the quest?”

According to what Na Ji-chan was thinking, without the Summoner Knight class, the possibility of Ian clearing the quest was below 10% .

Which was why it could be seen as a good gamble .

If Ian failed the quest, then they could go back to the point where nothing had happened .

Taking off a tier from the Taming Master class was a bit too much of a penalty .

However, they could just give Ian an opportunity in the future to raise his tier again .

Na Ji-chan knew very well that Ian would fail this quest .

If Ian’s chances of success were even at 10% and he did finish the quest successfully, it was the end of the story .

Without taking his eyes off the monitor, Na Ji-chan mumbled and mumbled,

“10% success rate… I’ll have to spend the night here to see what’s gonna happen . ”

Ian’s quest was limited to 30 days, but the time limit for the planning team was much shorter .

Ian wasn’t going to complete the quest right away, but he would surely challenge the Richie King in the days that were going to come .

’27 days, no, maybe 25 days…? We’ll have to make a thorough plan within those days . ’

Even though Na Ji-chan enjoyed working in the night shift, he was now at a point where he couldn’t work happily at all .

Rather than the night shift, it was now a torture shift .

His cup ramen turned soggy and could now be mistaken for udon .

Hrrr-!

Na Ji-chan immediately dug into his cup ramen, but he couldn’t taste anything from it .

His eyes just kept moving .

“The Dual Class shouldn’t overlap with the planning… I need to think of how I’m going to connect it to the main class…”

The moment Ian refused the hidden class, Na Ji-chan felt like he aged for 10 years .

Na Ji-chan opened the door of the monitoring room and stared at the monitors one last time before leaving the room .

Ian’s figure that was on the screen came into his mind .

“Keu, does Ian God even know what he is doing now?”

At this very moment, at least for today, Na Ji-chan was an anti of Ian God