A Fight Won by the Neck
There was a sensation of something splitting at the tip of the dagger in his right hand.
But it was shallow.
It wasn’t the heavy, satisfying bite of flesh giving way.
He knew at once that he had only cut off the end of a fluttering hem of cloth, never even opening the skin beneath it.
'So it's not a boss monster. It's an Awaker.'
The evasive movement from a moment ago, the flow of its presence.
It had been the motion of a human being with intelligence.
That only made it more baffling.
Had there ever been an Awaker with a stealth skill who gave off such a nauseating aura?
'A stealth-type Awaker leaking this much presence... heh.'
He snorted.
In his mind, he quickly ran through the Awakers he knew who possessed stealth skills.
Mostly, the faces that flashed through his head belonged to people of the same rank as him, or lower.
If it had been someone higher-ranked and stronger than him, his neck would already be rolling on the floor from that ambush just now.
Compared to the flawless concealment of his body, its ability to hide its presence was pathetic.
It was beginning to seem likely that this was just an Awaker who had awakened recently.
'I'll kill it first, then investigate it slowly.'
He kicked off the ground and slashed with his dagger, and felt the other presence retreat in a hurry.
“What good does hiding your body do when you’re leaking your presence all over the place?”
A mocking laugh slipped out of him.
When humans awakened, their physical abilities surged beyond their normal limits.
Strength, speed, endurance—everything improved, and even their vision and hearing rose far beyond the reach of ordinary people.
And he was a C-class Awaker who had already stepped beyond the human realm.
Some shabby stealth type had no way of fooling his senses.
“I’ll kill you soon enough, rat.”
He expanded the muscles in his legs and activated his Awaker skill, Swift Footwork.
Then he dragged up Slaughter in succession, and a chilling red light shimmered from the dagger in his hand as his arm grew feather-light.
He swung the blade toward the faint presence in the dark.
Before the bastard could even evade, dozens of Slaughter strikes burst out like a storm.
It was, quite literally, a brutal butchering.
He drove the blade wildly, as if he meant to tear the rat hiding in the darkness into chunks of meat on the spot.
But something was wrong.
The sharp blade was only flailing uselessly through empty space.
The presence that should have been right in front of him was suddenly behind his back.
“...How?”
The word burst out before he could stop it.
That bastard, leaking presence all over the place, had gotten behind him faster than he had?
Without even the split second needed to catch the movement of that presence?
It made no sense.
Another sharpened killing intent brushed his skin.
'My neck?!'
Without hesitation, he triggered Acceleration as well, wrenching his body around in a rough spin.
Every nerve in his body locked onto the edge of the blade as he thrust the dagger across horizontally.
Shk—!
This time, the bastard must not have managed to avoid his speed in time, because a heavy, unmistakable sensation of contact traveled up his grip.
In the darkness, a few drops of blood caught on the tip of the saw-toothed dagger and glittered.
He raised the dagger before his eyes and grinned with savage delight.
“Heh-heh-heh. So you had a movement skill too. That’s a rare Awaker skill... pfft. You’ve got a stealth skill so good even I can’t see you, and a movement skill on top of that, yet you’re the one leaking your presence everywhere? Your movements are obvious too. Looks like you’ve only just awakened, huh? Hahahaha.”
It had been troublesome, yes, but it only confirmed what he already knew: the bastard was weak, and he would eventually bleed out under his knife.
Now that he’d read the pattern, all that was left was to cut off its limbs and kill it.
He once again squeezed both Swift Footwork and Acceleration to their limit and lunged forward.
The instant he thrust in, he felt the other presence dart sharply to the side in a panic.
'He'll slip to the side and move behind me.'
He perfectly anticipated the bastard’s obvious pattern and twisted his own body the opposite way instead.
He hurled Slaughter with all his strength toward the heart that would appear behind his back.
“Huh...?”
There was nothing there.
The blade that had cut through empty space came to a helpless halt.
He couldn’t sense the bastard anywhere—not behind him, not to the side, nowhere at all.
And then, in that instant—
Thud!
A horrifying, piercing sound slammed into his eardrums.
It wasn’t an attack aimed at him.
“Aaaaargh!”
At the shriek of agony, he spun around—and saw his brother collapse miserably onto the ground, a massive jet of blood erupting from the side of his neck.
“Brother!!”
He roared like an animal and ran to him.
A horrible, wheezing sound came from his brother’s throat as he lay sprawled in the dirt.
Hrk... kuh.
Blood from the torn carotid artery sprayed over his hands and clothes in an instant, staining them a dark, ugly red.
He threw away the two daggers in his hands and quickly clamped both palms hard over his brother’s neck.
“No! Brother! Stay with me! You son of a—!”
But the hot, sticky liquid kept pouring out between his fingers without end.
His brother’s eyes had already lost focus and drifted into the void.
The force of life itself was scattering helplessly through his hands, as if mocking him.
'He wasn't losing to me in a straight fight.'
Only then did he understand completely.
This cowardly rat had been aiming for his brother from the very beginning.
After tying his attention down completely, it had used a movement skill he couldn’t even perceive to leap straight behind the real prey.
He had been nothing more than the bastard’s perfect bait, its plaything.
“Grrr... Tae-su...!”
A final groan escaped his brother, vomiting blood across the back of the hand he had pressed to the wound.
Then the brother’s body went limp, and even the convulsions that had been shaking it like a fit came to a stop.
“Aaaagh!!”
Reason shattered completely.
His pride—built on hunting humans, not monsters, and surviving as Abyss—was slammed into the mud and trampled without mercy.
He snatched up the two saw-toothed daggers that had rolled across the floor.
The world in front of him was dyed a furious, blood-red.
“You cowardly rat!! Where are you hiding?! Get the hell out here now!”
He screamed at the empty air, but there was no answer.
He couldn’t sense the bastard’s presence anywhere behind him, to the side, nowhere at all.
The thing that had been leaking its presence all over the place just moments ago, evading his blade, was nowhere to be found.
Right after severing his brother’s neck, the bastard had erased its presence and merged perfectly into the darkness.
“Fuck!! You won’t come out?! I’ll tear you apart and kill you right now!”
He lunged madly in every direction, slashing the daggers through the empty night.
But the only thing the saw-teeth cut was cold air.
Standing in the middle of the floor, slick with his brother’s blood, he panted hard, unable to contain the killing intent and rage boiling inside him.
“You cowardly rat!! Where are you hiding?! Get the hell out here now!”
Kim Tae-su’s voice tore through the silence of the abandoned hospital yard.
From the shadow of a distant tree in the dark forest, Su-hyuk quietly watched him scream into the void.
'That stings.'
Su-hyuk looked down at his right hand.
The hem of the Reaper's Robe had been cut away, and a deep, clear slash had opened across the back of his hand, deep enough to show bone.
It was the trace left by Kim Tae-su’s dagger.
But the torn muscle was already knitting back together, and skin was pushing up over the wound; it healed at a speed that was almost visible to the eye.
So long as the brain itself wasn’t destroyed, the healing power of the reaper’s body made it as good as immortal.
“Fuck!! You won’t come out?! I’ll tear you apart and kill you right now!”
Leaving Kim Tae-su behind as he flailed his saw-toothed daggers wildly into the air, eyes bloodshot, Su-hyuk reached toward Kim Kyung-su’s corpse sprawled on the ground.
Judgment of Sin and Punishment.
When the two men had first gotten out of the car, Su-hyuk had already tried using Judgment of Sin and Punishment on both of them.
When used on an Awaker, the activation chance of Judgment of Sin and Punishment decreases. The rate of decrease varies depending on the target.
With that message, it hadn’t taken hold on either of them, and failure messages had followed one after another.
Failed to use Judgment of Sin and Punishment.
Failed to use Judgment of Sin and Punishment.
But now things were different.
There was no warning message for Kim Kyung-su, whose carotid artery had already been torn apart by the reaper’s scythe and whose breathing had long since stopped.
A dead body was subject to the same hundred-percent conditions as any ordinary person.
Black energy surged up from the ground and began greedily devouring Kim Kyung-su’s corpse.
You have judged an Awakened sinner.
You gained 100 Hell Points as a reward for judgment.
“Huh...? Brother? Brother!!”
Kim Tae-su flinched and fell on his ass.
He stared blankly at the sight of his brother’s body, which had been bleeding only moments ago, crumbling into black dust and scattering into the air.
Su-hyuk’s cold eyes flashed sharply.
'That was easier than I expected.'
The exchange with Kim Tae-su, an Abyss Awaker.
Being detected by his presence had been expected from the start.
To be honest, he had been a little thrown by the sheer speed with which the bastard had pressed in, chaining skills together like a storm.
But the perfect concealment of the Reaper’s Robe, the instant movement created by Reaper's Steps, and the recovery of the reaper’s body had allowed him to continue fighting on roughly equal footing with Kim Tae-su.
'It's the presence. The bastard couldn't see me at all, but he was pinning down my location exactly through my presence.'
The Reaper’s Robe was an absurdly overpowered item, one that completely blocked even an Awaker’s sharpened vision.
And unlike a skill, it didn’t consume mana.
In the first place, Su-hyuk wasn’t even sure whether something like mana existed for him at all.
Reaper's Steps had no cooldown, either, and it didn’t consume mana.
'Cheol-gamen is stronger than this one, they said.'
If Jo Gi-hoon’s testimony was correct, then Cheol-gamen was stronger than these two.
It would be a much harder fight, but with the reaper’s body on his side, he thought it was a fight worth taking on.
'Feeling and reacting to presence leaves a very small opening. I still can't erase my presence completely, but if I can exploit that opening, I can win.'
That was also the real reason he hadn’t killed Kim Tae-su yet and had left him alive.
Thread of Sin.
As he murmured the words inwardly, red lines began stretching out beneath Kim Tae-su’s feet as he stared dumbly at Kim Kyung-su’s corpse dissolving into black motes of light.
Kim Tae-su suddenly looked back.
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