an unfortunate change in genre

Part 54

A World Without a Hero was a poorly written novel in comparison to its predecessor. Perhaps the author was exhausted with the concept or maybe he regretted the way he'd portrayed certain things or maybe he was just a mischievous bastard who decided to make it a romance novel for a good laugh.

It really didn't matter what was going through that shitty writer's head and no one wrapped up in the world the novel portrayed would ever have the opportunity to learn very much about him at all.

It could have been out of mercy or out of cruelty that he'd made it clear within this novel that taking on more than one ancient power was an excessively dangerous thing to do.

And thus that was why Roksu Henituse had never once considered doing so. Among the powers written about in the novel, he'd chosen the one that best suited his needs and dealt with the others in a reasonable manner.

Perhaps if Roksu really was as self-centered as he proclaimed himself to be, he would have chosen the powers of overwhelming strength or the ones that would heal his body.

But Roksu chose the shield.

Ultimately, no matter what happened, Roksu was always going to choose to protect. He justified it by claiming that he only intended to selfishly protect himself or even with the logic that he wouldn't feel at rest if he didn't protect those around him.

He really and honestly viewed himself as selfish.

And that's because he was. Roksu was a selfish and greedy person who wanted to live a happy life. And he was self aware enough to know that he couldn't feel happy atop a growing pile of corpses occupied by all those who had been sacrificed for him to achieve that peace.

He wasn't kind enough to have mercy on an enemy and he wasn't selfless enough to sacrifice himself unless it was absolutely necessary to do so for his goals.

Roksu was a selfish bastard no matter what anyone thought about it. It was just that all of the things he selfishly wanted were so intrinsically selfless that the entire matter made a full circle.

Roksu had taken the shield for his paradoxically selfish and selfless reasons. He hadn't expected anything more from it.

And for the most part the glutinous priestess didn't talk to him. She only had choice things to say when she spotted something that truly bothered her.

Black despair was just one of those things that really wrinkled her composure and sent her on a tirade. If not for her guidance, he really wouldn't know that the shield had any other capabilities at all.

He'd only used the second ability once and doing so had nearly killed him. And the amount of black despair trapped inside of the branches of so many stretching trees was significantly less than the mass that resided inside of the unranked monster that was annoyingly unstoppable.

Unfortunately Kim Rok Soo would always be Kim Rok Soo and he would act in a way that was impossible and risky because to him, walking on glass was as natural as walking on the ground below.

He was really a troublesome person.

With each new companion that joined up with them, more of his fractured soul returned to him and he was able to gain a firmer grasp of the situation and what had to be done. It was helpful as well as disorienting.

Kim Rok Soo just put one foot in front of the other though. The ramifications of the current situation would have to wait.

'Choi Han is going to be pissed.'

Kim Rok Soo really was putting all of his focus into the current battle. It was made apparent that the monster would drop everything to pursue him when he entered a certain radius of it so they were using that to their advantage to lure the monster into an ideal position.