The Age of Chaos
Crack!
The Death Spoil’s head toppled to the ground.
Its murky eyes somehow seemed to be saying thank you.
[You have earned 257,300 points.]
Even as a mature specimen, the Death Spoil was still only level 6.
Thanks to the layers of luck that had stacked on top of each other, the bounty he’d been able to claim was still only about half the points given by the level 7 creature Soji had brought down.
Still, that’s a hell of a lot.
The floor gave a faint tremor beneath his feet.
Yoo Sung-jun immediately sensed that the Defoils were closing in.
First things first. Take everything worth taking...
He reached into the beast’s spilled entrails.
Before long, he had recovered the hormone sac and even extracted its brain.
After eating Muaz’s brain twice—Muaz was also level 6—he had learned something: eating the same species over and over didn’t help him discover new applications.
But different individuals might be different. I’ll just eat a hundred grams and see for myself.
The only problem was how to pack up the rest and swallow it later, but if that could bring in hundreds of thousands of points, it was worth the trouble.
At last, Yoo Sung-jun’s eyes fell on the devices holding the Death Spoil’s blue blood.
Evolve. There had to be a reason those bastards were collecting the creature’s blood.
Infectors are trying to lure users in and turn them into their own kind. If they can do that even to ordinary people once Dark Cover hits, they’ll become a much bigger pain in the ass.
Whatever the reason, he couldn’t leave anything behind that might benefit them.
Bang! Crunch!
He smashed the devices apart with his greatsword.
From beneath the mangled wreckage—so destroyed it was almost impossible to recognize—blue blood began seeping out in steady streams.
Satisfied, Yoo Sung-jun gave a small nod and turned his gaze to the wall.
Taking the passage back the way he’d come would just waste time.
There was a shorter route through the wall.
Should hold.
He loosened the nano-particles, binding his wrists and hands together.
Still gripping the greatsword in reverse, he kicked the wall with all his strength.
The wall collapsed, and debris thundered down below.
Looking down, he could already see the Defoil horde surging upward like a black tide.
I wonder if they got out safely.
He crossed through the breach, calmly worrying about the lives of the two people below.
Ka-ga-ga-gang!
As he fell, he drove the greatsword into the wall.
Whenever his speed had been reduced enough, he’d pull the sword free, then ram it in again.
His wrists ached, but it was bearable.
He had landed in a spot with fewer Defoils than the others, so he still had room to maneuver.
At this rate, they won’t be able to chase me.
He funneled the remaining power into speed and ran.
Before long, Yoo Sung-jun was far from the earthen tower, heading for the rendezvous point his younger brother had mentioned.
No sooner had he arrived than he heard a shout that made him feel, almost against his will, relieved.
“Hyung!”
“Sung-jun!”
At the sound of their voices—and at the sight of their intact bodies—he smiled.
As he approached, his brother pushed himself to his feet.
In his hand was a blackened aluminum rod, charred nearly to cinders.
Holding it up, his brother gave an awkward laugh.
“I had to crank the output all the way up to punch through the wreckage. The cartridge got burned through to the limit too, and this ended up like this.”
“You’ll at least get a few pennies if you sell it. Good work.”
“Aren’t you curious about what happened down there?”
Still seated and catching his breath, Choi Hyun-seok spoke.
At his question, Yoo Sung-jun sat down on a broad rock.
“Let’s compare notes. What I learned up top, what you learned below.”
After the Defoils, the Queen had also occupied the earthen tower.
With pheromones clogging their senses, there was no way they had noticed the three of them, who were several kilometers away.
So they figured they might as well talk while taking in the spectacle.
“I dealt with the one on top, and the ones below will probably be taken care of by those things, right?”
“Haha, yeah.”
They exchanged everything they’d experienced.
The glass cylinders below, filled with blue liquid.
The six hundred or so humans who had mutated into Infectors inside them.
They had blown apart the pheromone organ, setting those people loose against the Defoil horde.
The blue liquid. Was it made using Death Spoil’s blood?
It was hard to call it a coincidence when the color was exactly the same.
Since they were Infectors, D-Virus had to be flowing through their blood.
He still didn’t know why they’d chosen Death Spoil as the subject, but the mission had made one thing clear: in this world, the only things they had to watch out for were humans and Infectors.
Evolve. Those half-breed freaks who aren’t quite human and aren’t quite Infector either.
After hearing Yoo Sung-jun out, Choi Hyun-seok folded his arms with a grave expression.
“You’re thinking the same thing I am, Sung-jun. One thing’s certain: this wasn’t something users could have done on their own.”
“Right. Those Infectors had already established themselves in this ruined world. And they were doing it with users who weren’t even Infectors themselves.”
“They’re probably not individuals strong enough to be compared to the Five Calamities. So they formed a collective.”
Weak things clustered together.
They built organizations to resist absurd strength, then searched for ways to keep those organizations alive.
“That bastard found a way to bulk up through a religion called Evolve.”
“Sweet words like immortality, freedom, and absolute safety—that would be enough to lure in users whose minds were already weakened by anxiety.”
“It wouldn’t be possible with ordinary charisma, so he must’ve used some kind of ability.”
“Hypnosis. Or maybe Enchantment. He probably subdued them before the user could ‘witness’ anything, then infected them.”
Choi Hyun-seok muttered grimly.
Yoo Sung-jun nodded, as if in full agreement.
“It’s a high-level mental ability. Unless your Body Enhancement is level 5, you probably can’t even resist it.”
“And then he’d use the users he’d subdued and infected to capture more users.”
“They’ve clearly been preparing for a long time. They probably developed a mutated virus strong enough to get past the D-Virus antibodies formed by Body Enhancement. That’s likely how they spread it.”
“So in this case, they prepared a mass infection by taking down a clan-level group... but how exactly?”
“If they infected only the clan leader, the rest could have been lured here by trusting the leader’s act. They’d have come here without realizing they were being marched to a slaughterhouse. And we were the ones who brought that slaughterhouse down.”
Yoo Sung-jun asked Loki a question.
Had any other Earth from a parallel world been introduced into this one besides theirs?
[No, Yoo Sung-jun. Your world is the only one.]
Then they hadn’t been preparing for users in the first place.
They must have been planning to use their own abilities and refined virus to draw other Infectors to their side.
Why did they infect humans instead of Infectors? Right—because of reason.
Humans could think, feel, and make decisions on their own, which meant they could spread their own numbers without orders from above.
What they had to provide was... yes, overwhelming loyalty. That alone would be enough.
“This incident is worth digging into more thoroughly.”
Now that they’d identified a real force behind it, all they had to do was ask the right questions.
The location of this cult called Evolve, the scale of its power, where its leader was hiding—things like that.
“Quantum said that among the lower-ranked users in a clan, if someone had raised their user grade, they’d pull their questions from the list.”
“We’ve been doing that too, but raising user grade isn’t easy.”
“Why not?”
Choi Hyun-seok let out a faint sigh and scratched his cheek.
“You can funnel points and get achievements more favorably, sure, but you can’t repeat the same achievement on the same difficulty.”
Which meant they had to keep chasing higher difficulty and a wider variety of achievements.
Yoo Sung-jun stroked his chin and nodded.
So the standard is this: users with low skill can’t even raise their user grade properly.
User grade was, in the end, a privilege reserved for the strong.
“Then we’ll have to use the question rights as efficiently as possible.”
“Exactly.”
[Mission cleared. Transporting to Enter Room.]
Wait a second.
It looked like the Defoils had finished wiping out all the humans who’d been turned into Infectors.
Yoo Sung-jun delayed his return for a moment and took out a plastic bag.
He packed the Death Spoil’s brain and hormone sac separately, then sealed the bag airtight.
After that, when he held out his hand, the two of them both wore puzzled expressions.
He shook the plastic bag at them.
“Rock, paper, scissors. We need to decide who’s going to eat it. The volume’s smaller than I thought, so you might be able to swallow it all at once.”
Both of their faces drained of color.
***
A dark auditorium.
Only moonlight seeped in through the shattered opening in the ceiling.
Inside the abandoned building, spiderwebs stretched in tangled layers.
Red fire flickered to life on a cross mounted to one wall.
Looking closer, it wasn’t a cross at all.
The shape—its horizontal line bent and lifted diagonally—resembled a bird’s foot.
One back toe. Three front toes spread wide. Maybe that was the shape it took.
The symbol cast a surprisingly bright light over the area.
Under the bloody glow, black shadows stirred on the floor.
The people crouched there raised both hands, palms up.
At the same time, they lifted their heads, and the sight was grotesque beyond measure.
Their red eyes turned toward the crimson symbol.
Every face held the same expression.
Rapture.
“Let it be done! Let it be done!”
One and all, they began chanting the same words like parrots.
The noise swelled. Madness churned.
The red light pouring from the emblem washed over the ruins—and over them.
Those who had been crying out went silent all at once.
“Aaaah!”
With both hands gathered to their chests, they wept in streams.
What exactly did they think they were going to do?
“Evolve.”
When had he arrived?
By the time the man standing on the dais spoke, everyone erupted again.
“Let it be done! Let it be dooone!”
Now it wasn’t even a word anymore, just disordered cheers hurled at him.
The man had a smiling face that brought to mind a Hahoetal mask, with white hair neatly swept back.
His black preacher’s robe bore the same emblem painted in red across the back as the one hanging behind him.
He stood with his hands clasped behind him and extended his right hand.
When he spread out three fingers, excluding his thumb and little finger, silence fell instantly, as if they had all rehearsed it.
“Today, I have called you here to bring you good news.”
“Let it be done!”
“Our gracious incarnation of evolution! The living god’s manifestation! Evolve himself! After careful consideration, has bestowed holy blood upon us so that additional believers may enter the fold!”
“Let it be done!”
He raised his left hand, which had still been held behind him.
In it was a crude stainless-steel cup, half of its gold plating already flaked away.
They saw the liquid sloshing inside.
And they shouted at the blue liquid in unison.
“Let it be done! Let it be done!”
“Yes. The people we will be receiving now will also be granted immortality and liberation, and they’ll be guaranteed safety for life in this free paradise!”
“Waaah!”
They rejoiced as if it were happening to them personally.
Watching the fanatics, the man tilted his chin.
As if he had been waiting for it, a burly man tugged on a rope.
Men and women were dragged forward, their wrists and ankles lined with long, blood-crusted welts, as though the tendons in their limbs had been torn.
A total of eight people.
With their arms and legs bound behind them, writhing like insects, all of them had their eyes shut.
The man looked down at the ones dragged near him, wearing a sorrowful expression.
“These people were taken in by the sweet lies of that wicked band of Satanists and dragged around like puppets. Just like you! Just like me. Those cursed eyes that shared sight with Satan have long since been gouged out.”
“Let it be done!”
“But now that they have been chosen by Evolve! Now that they’ve been granted this glorious opportunity, their wounded, cursed flesh will be reborn through holy blood today.”
“Woooo!”
The madness reached its peak.
Smiling with satisfaction, the man stepped in front of them.
“Accept this blessing with humility.”
“Shut up, you bastard! You think we’re gonna get infected? We already finished Body Enhancement. We’ve got antibodies!”
“Kheh-heh-heh. You gouged out your own eyes so the supporter wouldn’t notice through them and mark you for the mission zone. You sons of bitches. Worse than dogs.”
Unlike the two who kept cursing and struggling, the other six looked utterly resigned, not even twitching.
Watching them, the man took out a syringe.
He filled it with blood from the cup, then jabbed it into the screaming woman’s neck.
“Don’t worry. This blood is blessed by Evolve’s evolution, even for your antibodies.”
At those words, the woman’s face went ashen with despair.
Then she began to convulse.
The others, injected one by one afterward, reacted the same way.
Their wounded flesh peeled away as if shedding a husk.
Fresh tissue sprang up in an instant, and regenerated eyes opened.
Looking at them as they stared blankly ahead with red eyes, the man jerked his chin.
“Take the newly born ones to Evolve. After their complete blessing, they’ll become new believers who will stand with us.”
“Let it be done! Wooo!”
Everyone once again went wild at the sight of the newly converted faithful.
Watching that scene, the man spread both arms wide.
The mood had ripened perfectly.
It was time to end on the greatest news they had ever had.
“Our Assistant Bishop Carancul has finally done it! He has mixed Evolve’s holy blood with Death Spoil’s blood and created an inferior version of the holy blood! He used it to bless the clan members under his command all at once, and I’m about to show you the footage now! With this, we can increase the number of believers even more and bring great joy to Evolve!”
“Let it be doneaaa!”
Listening to the screams of fervor that had reached their limit, the man signaled.
A screen then dropped down from behind him.
Now the video should have appeared.
Normally, the camera installed in the earthen tower would have linked up for a video call with Assistant Bishop Carancul on the top floor.
Why?
And yet nothing came through.
Not from the basement, not from the middle floors, not from the top—none of it, not a single place.
No, one connection did exist.
So the man hurriedly changed channels, desperately clinging to hope...
“Huh?”
A single, baffled sound escaped him.
The camera installed where the tower’s exterior could be seen.
What it showed was not the tower at all.
Instead of the tower, there was some hill or knoll.
And around it were the Queen Defoil and its Defoil army, having occupied the place.
After seeing everything, only one thought flowed through the man’s mind.
...We’re screwed.
Strength drained from his hand, and the empty cup fell to the floor.
Clang. Clang... The pitiful sound echoed through the entire auditorium.