The Most Dangerous Creature in the World… (6)
Those guys are actually pitching in. Harder than I figured.
The enthusiasm caught him off guard. He had leaned on an old connection, sure, but he had never seriously imagined the thing would go this smoothly.
I only made the offer because they still smelled a little like human beings...
If it had been Number 5 and Number 6 still alive, and not these two, he would never have proposed anything like an alliance. Those bastards reeked of blood far too thickly, and he knew too little about them besides. Every organization sorted itself into circles. In Lee Han's case, the ones he could halfway call familiar had been Number 7, Number 11, and the likes of Number 9 and Number 10.
Of that lot, Number 9 and Number 10 had tried to take him from behind, and their lives had been cut short in his hands.
Anyway, it was a relief the plan was working. If it hadn't—
Whoosh!
Crash!
"Watch yourself, Number 8! Even you won't walk away if you take that curse head-on!"
"And if I do?"
"Someone precious to you might come down with a disease that never heals. Failing that, your fingers might turn into tree limbs."
"...Then I'd better not get hit. Ever."
He would have had no way to answer the curse.
That thing is terrifying.
Somehow it was trickier than magic. Most spells you could simply meet head-on and endure. Curses and shamanic arts were hard to dodge, and harder still to deal with once they landed. It was a good thing he had not killed Number 11. No—Yan.
Part of it was that he made a point of leaving shamans alone, and he had already known what Yan was. More than once a clean chance to finish him had come and gone, and Lee Han had let it pass. Poke a shaman for no good reason and there was no telling what curse might slam back into you like a counter. People didn't say that meddling with a shaman ruined three generations for nothing.
But now that shaman was no longer an enemy. He was solid reinforcements, and that was nothing short of—
Yeah. A monster raid needs one reliable caster on the team!
Lee Han felt a steadiness he could hardly put into words.
That, he was told, was the thing before them.
"A hell-beast is exactly what it sounds like. Think of it as a monster that lives in the Underworld. I heard it in the order: because it belongs to the Underworld, it covets the bodies of the living, and even when it can't get those, it devours the flesh of the dead down to the last scrap. In the world of the living its power and its influence are suppressed, so it can't act as it pleases."
"What's it good at?"
"If it has specialties, regeneration and gluttony."
"How do you kill it?"
"You keep hitting it. Then you hit it again. Once everything it's eaten has been digested and it starts to tire, it vanishes on its own."
"So all we can do is outlast it."
"More or less."
"...A nasty piece of work."
Lark let out a rare, empty laugh.
Heard one way, the thing almost sounded easy to fight. Stop it from feeding, wear it down, and it erased itself. Heard another way, it meant the creature could not actually be killed at all. Born of the Underworld, the world of death, it was an absurd and contradictory life upon which the very idea of death did not take. Piled on top of that were monstrous strength, monstrous recovery, stamina that showed no sign of flagging, and a chilling killing intent laced with curses. Horrific, plain and simple.
"...On par with the Ghost King?"
A monster that matched, all at once, the strength and the stubborn difficulty of the troll king they had fought the day before. That one had been nightmare enough. That something its equal had shown up made a man want to shudder.
Still, if this clash had one mercy yesterday's brawl had lacked, it was this.
BOOOOM—!!
Fighters he had no choice but to acknowledge were watching his back.
"Hahaha! Die, you monster!"
Maximus's battle-axe hammered the hell-beast without pattern or mercy, and as if to help him along, Dina's pinpoint explosions struck it in a rapid chain.
"To think I'd have to do this again."
Lark's spear split down its length and became something like a pair of short staffs, and the staffs, steeped in Red Tu-gi, crashed into the monster. A bladed thrust only regenerated in an instant, so all that mattered was hitting it hundreds of times. Thousands.
Lee Han was no different.
WHAM!
"...This is actually doing damage, right?"
He was throwing everything he had into each punch. The blows blasted out a fierce pressure of wind, worked through with the principles of the Hundred-Pace Divine Fist. And yet every strike felt as meaningless as punching rubber, and he could not shake the sense that he was not winning at all.
"No. You're definitely winning. Every time you attack, that thing's presence thins."
"...For real?"
"If you can't trust yourself, trust me. I may not look it, but I am the Gatekeeper of the Sacred Relics."
The proud little long-tailed tit declared it without a shred of doubt. Faced with those earnest eyes, Lee Han could only nod.
Right. Just think of the bastard as a game monster.
The kind from the old days, when you built a character dot by dot. No matter how hard a player beat on them, they never showed a wound, but the gauge that proved the damage was landing shrank, little by little.
That's what this thing is.
The only difference was that, unlike a game, there was no gauge to see. Lee Han decided to keep it simple. He trusted the little bird and beat on his opponent without a pause.
Yeah...!
I'll just hit it till it dies. What else is there?
Stamina, at least, he had confidence in.
...Frightening people.
Meanwhile Yan, clearing curses from the rear and supporting them as best he could, could only stare in blank astonishment.
KEEE!?
The hell-beast was being beaten senseless.
Someone seeing it like this might suspect the thing was weak. Nonsense. A hell-beast's strength multiplied explosively with the number of lives it had devoured. At the very least, it stood near the starved Ghost King summoned the day before—that troll king which, hungry as it was, had still destroyed an ordinary minor kingdom in less than half a day.
So the reason the hell-beast was losing now was simple.
Because those three are strong.
"Don't come at me!"
"You're the one coming!"
"Ahaha! A sandbag like this, I could pound it for a month...!"
Yan was canceling the curses, yes. Even so, he could not block the killing intent the hell-beast poured out—the aura of death itself. And those three endured that deathly pressure and struck the creature anyway.
Shhhk!
Spines burst without warning from the hell-beast's body, bristling like a porcupine and lashing out at them. The three knights smashed the spines, pared them away, and crumpled what remained as if it were paper.
Knights overwhelming a hell-beast. It was a moment almost impossible to believe.
A shockwave blew across him with a low whoosh, and Yan clicked his tongue.
"So this is what they were..."
He had known the three knights were strong. How many times had he heard it in the order? That in the present age they were the ones closest to an Aura User—that is, the realm of the Superhuman—and the only ones with any chance of reaching it.
...Hearing it and seeing it with your own eyes are this far apart.
Knowing and witnessing were entirely different things, and Yan, granted a close view of their performance, was breaking into a cold sweat. A thrill like this...
I don't think I've felt it from anyone but the First Apostle and the archbishop.
But if he had to say it plainly, the grain of their strength was different. These three were pure humans climbing toward the peak. The heads of the order had stepped a little outside humanity. They were evolving into grotesque things.
...Well.
Fwoosh!
"...That one's a bit grotesque too, though."
Watching Number 8—no, the knight who now went by the name Lee Han—put a hell-beast more than nine meters tall into a suplex with impossible skill, Yan wore a hollow smile.
In truth, he was starting to suspect that the factor injected into Number 8 had not been a troll's at all, but a troll king's.
"......By now they should still be fighting like mad."
"Cruel of you. They're important officers of the Black Moon, and you offer them up as sacrifices."
"They are sinners anyway, are they not? The Fifth Apostle and the Sixth Apostle in particular crossed the line. From the Seventh Apostle's perspective, and the Eleventh's, it may be unfair.... Well. A necessary sacrifice."
"You do know that's a cowardly excuse?"
"Call it hypocrisy. We are going to die and fry in hellfire regardless. What does it matter if we do something vicious?"
"......You won't be going alone. I'll be there too, so the road to hell won't be lonely."
"Comfort. That's not like you."
"Heh heh."
The middle-aged man laughed, and the young boy laughed with him.
More than thirty years seemed to lie between them, and yet an air clung to both that looks alone could not define—old, cunning, and melancholy. They even gave off something of enlightened monks as they stood on the roof of a building and took the wind and the rain.
Only a little while ago it had been a quiet night, the crescent moon clear overhead. Now, by some trick, black clouds boiled up and swallowed the moon, then spat thunder and poured down rain.
Tap. Patter-patter.
At first the drops only dampened the ground in timid spatters. Now it was a downpour, and in a moment even seeing ahead became difficult.
"Don't tell me you predicted this rain as well?"
"However much they call me the Prophet, you know I am not a true one."
"Then this is..."
"Even the Light of Radiance, great Creator of the heavens and of life, must know..."
Splash. Squelch.
Through the sound of the rain, the middle-aged man heard the wet slap of footsteps. Countless feet, cutting through the downpour, striding without hesitation through the mud as they gathered.
A resonance grander and vaster than any orchestra. He insisted he was no prophet, and yet the future already seemed visible behind his eyes.