Return of the Sword God-Rank Civil Servant

Huh?

He was really using gods as wardens?

That, Grid had not seen coming.

But now that he heard it, it made sense.

Maybe that was why the shock hit this hard.

He had never imagined Su-ho would actually finish preparing for the entire war all by himself.

Most of all, he had never expected him to bring in dozens of Demi-Constellation-level native gods from his own world as a countermeasure for aerial combat.

Watching the gods spread apart from one another and assign their sectors, Grid opened his mouth again.

“How is this even possible?”

“What’s impossible about it?”

“Ordinary Players have a hard enough time earning recognition from even one Demi-Constellation. But you...”

“That’s by the standards for ordinary Players. I’m not an ordinary Player, am I?”

“Well... that’s true.”

At Grid’s admission, Su-ho grinned.

“If I were ordinary in the first place, would you have given me qualifications like Incarnation of the Demon King? It was only possible because it was me.”

“Even if you had partnered with Pride of Arrogance instead of me, you still would’ve made it big.”

“Well, my confidence might actually be greater than your possessiveness.”

“What?”

“Haha, I’m joking.”

“But how in the world did you talk that many Demi-Constellations into this? Don’t tell me you placed them all under your command? If that’s the case, then by now your power should be...”

“I didn’t dominate them. I just asked.”

“What? You didn’t dominate them, and they still came all the way to another world just because you asked?”

“Yeah. You’re seeing it with your own eyes.”

It was true.

After freeing them from Tartarus, Su-ho had gone to see them again in time for the East-West War.

Of course, he had no worries about the Olympian gods, because he had already secured their promise as mercenaries in exchange for freeing them from Tartarus. So the ones he had deliberately gone looking for were Cronos’s side.

‘Honestly, I didn’t think they’d really help.’

Su-ho recalled the time he had gone to see Cronos after he was freed from Tartarus.

Cronos had settled with his people in a suitable place that did not overlap with the domain of the Olympian gods, and they were living there on their own.

They looked happy.

Compared to Tartarus, that bottomless abyss below where there had been nothing but darkness and blackness, the surface world filled with fresh vitality, lush greenery, and bright skies was a paradise among paradises, a heaven among heavens.

There, Su-ho and Cronos had spoken.

“You want us to lend you our strength?”

“Yeah. A great war is about to break out in a world I care about.”

“That’s your situation. It’s not even our world, so why should we help it?”

“I’m not asking you to help that world. I’m asking you to help me.”

“What?”

“I won’t unreasonably tell you to help me no matter what just because I helped you once. I came here purely to ask. I need to successfully finish this war so I can grow greatly once more. And you know very well why I’m so obsessed with growing stronger, don’t you?”

“...”

Cronos, who was not tied to Su-ho by any quest, was merely one of the ordinary Demi-Constellation-level native gods who understood all the rules of the system.

So even without a long explanation, it was something he could grasp instantly.

Because on the Earth he belonged to, there was no Player as powerful or outstanding as Su-ho.

And because he knew very well what the next track was for a High-grade Player to step onto.

More than anything, what moved his heart was the fact that Su-ho was not using domination through strength, not threats, and not even a transaction based on old debts and grudges. He had simply asked.

That was why Su-ho had been able to draw Cronos’s camp into this East-West War as well.

‘I thought about making an offer to Nyx too, but...’

He should hold back on that.

And on top of that, Hades and Persephone were not participating either.

They said they needed to maintain the order of the world in the underworld, or something like that.

Well, it wasn’t like he needed them.

At this level, it already felt sufficient.

After revealing every card he had, Su-ho finally started asking Grid questions.

“So then, what did you prepare while I was away? Did you at least issue a global quest to the Players?”

“I rallied the demons and devils based around the Six Great Demons. But honestly speaking, compared to what you prepared, the scale is far too small. You could practically call it giving up.”

“Why give up? This is the Demon Realm you care about, isn’t it?”

“It may sound cruel and irresponsible, but I no longer want to drag out a hopeless fight. From the feel of it, after losing this East-West War, the Demon Realm would probably be reset once again. So I was planning to prepare for the East-West War much earlier starting from the third run.”

“By finding a promising new Player?”

“That’s right.”

“I see.”

Grid had called himself cruel and irresponsible, but Su-ho felt like he understood what state of mind had led him to say that.

It wasn’t that he was truly cruel and irresponsible. He already knew from having gone through it in previous runs.

That if you fought and resisted for a long time while lacking the power to win, all it did was prolong sorrow and pain.

‘He probably went through every kind of hardship with the previous Demon King.’

When suffering becomes too horrible and goes on for too long, there are people who beg to be killed instead.

To Grid, this run had probably been that kind of run.

That was why, even though he had become the only Constellation of the Demon Realm and its symbolic Demon King, he had not even issued a global quest to the Players of the Eastern Demon Realm.

And yet, unexpectedly, Su-ho had overturned the situation.

“To be honest, since I couldn’t reach you at all, I naturally assumed you’d vanished. It wasn’t even your world to begin with, and no separate quest had appeared for you either. And you’d already squeezed everything there was to squeeze out of me, so I thought you’d taken a decent profit and cut ties. To put it bluntly, there’s no fool who would risk his life fighting in someone else’s world’s war just to gain a few levels.”

At those words, Su-ho frowned.

“Your eye for people is seriously warped. You stayed by my side and watched me, and you still managed to see me like that?”

“They say you can know ten fathoms of water, but not the heart of a single person.”

“You sure do talk well.”

“So then, did you really spend nearly a hundred days talking all those Demi-Constellations into this?”

“No way. It didn’t even take a day to persuade them.”

“Then what were you doing the rest of the time? I couldn’t contact you at all.”

“Training.”

“Training?”

“Yeah. I met my real master, the one who’d only ever been hidden behind a veil, and all I did was train to death.”

That was the truth.

It wasn’t that he had used Sword Demon’s Realm to meet him in the unconscious and train. He had never once left the space where he first met Sword Demon. He had shut himself in there like someone undergoing secluded training and done nothing but fight Sword Demon like mad.

‘Those really were unbearable times.’

He couldn’t even count how many times he’d been slashed, stabbed, and cut apart.

If he hadn’t been a High-grade Player healer, anyone else would have turned into minced meat long ago.

But he had gained a great deal too.

Su-ho recalled the last status window he had seen before coming here.

[An Su-ho]