Ronin hid himself about a kilometer away from the starting point.
He didn't try to look around with his own eyes. He just waited patiently.
He had placed a marker on the bait and used the spell card Tracking, whose effect was to keep tabs on a target's location.
So as long as the bait came back, Ronin would know immediately. After that, all he had to do was wait—wait for the Troupe to show up, or wait for them not to, and then move on to step two.
The wait wasn't long.
After all, the bait's job was simple: arrive, then use Return to go back.
Ronin sensed from the card binder that the bait had returned to the starting point, and began counting. At the same time, after arriving there, the bait pulled out another spell card from his binder—Magnetic Force.
His body trembled slightly.
Having been in close contact with the Troupe before, he knew very well just how terrifyingly strong those people were.
The man who had captured him was certainly strong too, but he hadn't given him that same crushing pressure, because he could clearly tell there was a fundamental difference between that man and the three Troupe members.
That difference was simple: Ronin still treated people like people.
The Troupe didn't.
What he had seen in their eyes was that he was no different from merchandise. Once they got his name out of him, they just tossed him aside as casually as discarded goods.
But he knew they remembered him.
Everything he did in the future could become their property at any moment—unless he became strong enough to beat them, or managed to leave the game entirely.
But he had no way to obtain either Leave or a Pass.
So all he could do was keep living every day in fear inside the game.
Being used as bait now was dangerous, but the man who had captured him had already left him a Pass. If he completed this task properly, he might finally get the chance to leave the game and return to the real world.
The killing intent coming from the sky made the bait relax a little despite his nerves.
He wasn't afraid that the Troupe wouldn't come after him. What he actually feared was the opposite—if they didn't chase him, he would fail the mission.
Now, he could leave.
At that moment, a voice sounded in his ear through Communication, another spell-card ability that worked basically like a phone.
"The Pass is on the harbor gatekeeper. Once you get there, say the code word 'Narudo,' and he'll hand over the Pass to you. But you need to move fast."
"Got it."
The bait felt his heart pounding wildly.
He swapped the Magnetic Force in his hand for Again, a spell better suited for solo movement to a designated location.
Target destination: the harbor.
The instant the light carrying Bonolenov and the other two landed, the bait turned into a new streak of light and shot straight into the sky, heading for the harbor.
And the moment the glow surrounding Bonolenov's group dispersed, all three of them reacted at once, going on guard.
Because just as the bait fled, all three of them had simultaneously felt a chill crawl down their spines—as though something horrifying had locked onto them.
It was an awful feeling.
But no matter how they scanned the open grassland, they couldn't spot anything hidden there, let alone whoever was watching them.
Ronin, meanwhile, had already locked onto all three of them through their aura and activated the Telescope Technique, switching to observing them through his crystal ball.
The first person to appear in the crystal ball was Bonolenov.
Because based on Ronin's guess, the reason the Troupe had entered the game in the first place was probably because Bonolenov had been burned by Amaterasu.
But from a visual inspection alone, he couldn't spot anything unusual about Bonolenov's appearance.
Before a fight, Bonolenov always wrapped his entire body in bandages. He only unwrapped them once battle started, exposing his body full of holes.
A guy like that—even if he really had been burned by Amaterasu—you couldn't judge the severity of the injury just by looking at him.
As for Feitan and Phinks, they looked completely fine.
Ronin also didn't sense any other aura nearby, and through the crystal ball, he detected nothing else abnormal.
So he could conclude that the only Troupe members currently in Greed Island were these three.
Good.
Their names did not appear in the card binder. That gave Ronin the distance he needed to confirm his test result.
One kilometer.
As long as the target was more than one kilometer away, then even if he could still see them by special means, their names would not appear in the card binder's roster.
That was also to prevent the Troupe from using the binder's "once you've encountered someone, they get recorded" property to figure out that he had entered the game.
Or worse, use that fact to activate Accompany and come straight to him.
But the fact that they couldn't be recorded in the binder also meant Ronin himself couldn't directly use spell cards to jump to their location either.
Still, that didn't trouble him, because the bait had already told him where the Troupe had been standing when he first used Magnetic Force to find them.
As long as he started from that location, it should be easy enough to find someone who had come into contact with the three Troupe members.
"This feels like a trap," Feitan said, umbrella in hand as though ready to strike the moment he found the target. "But we don't see the one who set it, and we don't know what they want by luring us into following."
"I've got a bad feeling," Phinks said, voicing the most immediate sensation he had.
Bonolenov nodded in agreement.
He felt it too—a vague but ominous foreboding, the kind that made his heart grow restless for no clear reason.
Should they keep chasing?
None of them said it aloud, but all three thought the same thing.
Still, they only hesitated for a second before Feitan pulled out Accompany and activated it again.
He wanted to see just where that fleeing ant thought it could run.
After the three of them vanished, they also disappeared from Ronin's crystal ball.
They were too far away now. At his current level, with his growing strength, the Telescope Technique's observation range had expanded to roughly three kilometers.
Ronin opened his Book, took out Again, and quickly disappeared from the grassland as well.
Meanwhile, after the light from Accompany faded, the expressions on the three Troupe members' faces turned grim.
Because they had arrived at the harbor.
And all three of them knew exactly what the harbor meant:
leaving the game.
And not just leaving the game, but choosing one of the real-world ports outside. Among all those countless ports, trying to find the target there would be absurdly difficult.
So the three of them cursed their luck and could only each activate Again to return to Masadora.
Two days passed quickly.
Ronin now had a special card in hand called Roster, which could tell him how many people possessed a specified item and the total number of copies of that card in existence.
And at the moment, the number of people who had obtained Breath of Archangel was still zero.
Which meant that even after camping the spell-card shop, the three Troupe members still hadn't gathered all the cards they needed.