Chapter 29
Chapter 29
4. The Savior Who Ended the Cold Wave -5
“Bleurgh.”
She threw up in the end.
Kim Sohye was drenched in sweat and gasping for breath. Tears, snot—it felt like her body was expelling every bit of moisture it could produce. It was a desperate struggle to cool down her overheated body.
Her stomach had turned inside out. Her whole body seemed to be begging, “Please, just stop moving.” She had never pushed her body this hard in her entire life.
Lee Hyejin, a B-rank hunter by Earth standards, patted Kim Sohye on the back and spoke with a hint of excitement.
“Hahaha! See, this is why it’s important for hunters to train their lower esophageal sphincter. When an emergency hits, you have to bolt out even in the middle of a meal, and if you throw up what you ate, you lose the food and you don’t get your nutrition either.”
“Th-that’s an involuntary muscle, how do you even train—urp—it.”
“You clamp it down by force with magic power! Anytime, anywhere—first priority is the stomach, second is everything else. And in that spirit, Sohye, since you dared to waste a meal’s worth of food, one more set.”
“Hah...”
The other hunters here ran around right after eating and were perfectly fine, so she’d wondered if humans in this world had evolved sturdier stomachs. No—they’d just been through so much in extreme conditions that they’d gotten used to it.
How to put it.
The baseline here was different from the start.
They weren’t training toward the broad, loose word called “survival,” but toward something tighter and higher than that. When Sojin invested about half her day into strength training, that had seemed truly impressive.
But watching people here chatter about how “if your arm gets cut off, you’ll need enough muscle strength to control your body with just one arm to preserve combat power”—it was like a firefly before the sun.
So that’s why. This was why Noah was so strong.
“I’ll rest for a bit. About ten minutes. It’s about time for me to do legs anyway.”
“Okaaay...”
Kim Sohye staggered over and leaned her back against a nearby wall, slumping down—
“Rest standing up!”
“⋯⋯⋯⋯”
She leaned her back against the wall and began a rest that wasn’t quite so sweet. With slightly unfocused eyes, she gazed at the distant mountain ridge. Verdant mountains stretched on endlessly. It was a beautiful landscape with a distinctly Korean feel.
But anyone who knew the menace of that blue-green color would probably feel their legs go numb.
Noah’s world had suffered far more violent and severe encroachment by monsters. Everywhere you looked—north, south, east, west—there was the green of plants, and in the distance there was even a colossal old tree that had grown to engulf an entire apartment building.
A plant apocalypse. That was how you could describe it.
In extreme environments, only the strong survive. That’s how evolution works. Just as people living in high-altitude regions have superior lung capacity, and microorganisms in Antarctica maintain metabolic activity even below freezing.
So...
This kind of training really was necessary for survival, and everyone who couldn’t keep up with it had died. And that was also the future that would someday come for Kim Sohye.
Monsters don’t stop.
There’s no way to close the Gates. No community in the System had found that answer. As time passed, the monster invasions grew stronger. Next year’s plants would definitely be stronger than this year’s.
For Kim Sohye and Camp Ace, too, a harsher winter would come, and like Noah’s world, the blue-green tide would deepen until the moment they could no longer endure—and then they would vanish as foam on the waves of history.
To delay that inevitable apocalypse even a little, she had to run and flee. But.
“...Can I really do it...?”
People aren’t iron.
They don’t get stronger the more you hammer them. Hammer them long enough, and at some point they shatter. Kim Sohye had the resolve to save her sister, her people, and her world, but if you asked whether she was confident she could keep up this training until the moment she died—she wasn’t sure.
She couldn’t be certain. She would get exhausted along the way.
“What is it?”
“...Huhk.”
“If it’s about the training, you can do a bit more, you know? Hunters are tougher than you’d think. Noah—I mean, Hunter Noah Won told me last time. Something about how superhumans have superhuman movements, or whatever.”
“Th-that’s not it... It’s just.”
Lee Hyejin poked Kim Sohye in the side with her elbow.
“Eyyy. Tell me. Hunter Noah Won told me to prioritize looking after you, Sohye. If you keep hiding it like that, I’m the one who gets scolded for not taking proper care of you, you know?”
“⋯⋯⋯⋯”
Kim Sohye hesitated, then honestly opened up about her worries. She was embarrassed even as she spoke. Whining to someone training hard right next to her that she didn’t think she could keep up.
What if Sohye or Noah thought she was pathetic. She’d worried about that, but unexpectedly, Lee Hyejin nodded as if she understood.
“Ahh, hmm. Well, I guess Sohye has never seen that, so⋯⋯”
“...That?”
“We all struggle too. We want to give up, want to quit. Everyone does. I’m a little different, but... The reason everyone keeps up with the training is because there’s a pacemaker up ahead.”
A pacemaker?
“People... when there’s someone working harder than them, especially someone working hard for their sake, they end up thinking, ‘Let me push a little harder too!’ You know. Naturally.”
“That’s... true. Yes.”
“Ahh, that’s the face of someone who gets it. Looks like Sohye has someone like that too. We have them too. Three of them, in fact, and if I had to pick the representative, it’s Hunter Noah Won. You’ve never seen him hugging a lightning rod, have you?”
“...He hugs a lightning rod?”
Lee Hyejin giggled, then said she had an old photo and brought out a film photograph. In it was Noah, on a stormy day, looking like a drowned rat and clutching a lightning rod in his arms.
“...Pfft.”
Honestly, it was funny.
He was normally a handsome guy like an idol, but with that white hair soaked and plastered down, you couldn’t even make out his features. And whether it was because he was cold or not, he was all hunched up, hugging the lightning rod.
It was like looking at a pitiful medium-sized dog caught in the rain.
“Funny, right? I look at it and laugh sometimes too⋯⋯ Noah is still out in the field, but he’s basically in a position like a president. Last time the National Assembly members were talking about delegating power to him or whatever, and he’s the one who directly communicates with other countries.”
“President... so like a general secretary?”
“Did you come from a communist bloc—oh, no. Anyway, he could easily act all high and mighty. But Noah has never once done that.”
So Noah was a high-ranking person.
Right. Noah had spoken with Colonel Oh on equal footing. Without being intimidated or pushed around, meeting each other at the same eye level.
After the apocalypse, society had shrunk drastically. But even in such a place, a person in power was still a person in power. And this Seoul... was smaller than Camp Ace, but too big to call a mere survivor group.
Even setting aside political power, considering the strength he possessed, he was already someone at the top of the pyramid.
But looking back, she had never once felt the aura of a high-ranking person from Noah—the kind you only saw on TV. He was a reliable leader who showed the way forward, but he was “close.”
“This lightning rod incident too—Noah was doing that to charge up electricity with his ability.”
“...So he had that kind of ability.”
“So⋯⋯ it’s true that we have grit, but we also draw strength from watching Noah. When there’s someone in front of you running all over the place to save Seoul and working hard to make things a little better, how could we slack off?”
People aren’t iron.
But precisely because of that, if someone beside you breathes strength into you, maybe you can endure even tougher than iron. Kim Sohye thought of her twin sister’s back, running ahead for her sake.
Right.
‘Sohye, hurry and run! Over here, over here!’
As long as the image of her sister Sojin’s back, running toward the sunset, remained burned into her retinas, she felt like she could squeeze out a little more strength.
“Looks like you’ve got your energy back, so shall we move on to the next training?”
“...Yes!”
Kim Sohye threw herself back into the extreme training.
I took a moment to stop by the training grounds. It was to check whether Sohye was doing well and whether Hyejin hadn’t gone overboard.
When I arrived, Sohye’s skin was glistening with salt. That’s what happens when you sweat, dry, and sweat again on repeat. Looks like she’d been working hard.
Since it’d be a bit much to drain her energy on the very first day, I casually asked if I should pull her out of Hyejin’s clutches soon.
“How is it? It’s really tough, right? It’s about mealtime now, so maybe we should...”
But the answer that came back was.
“I’ll work hard...!!”
“Ah, yes. Okay.”
She was more fired up than I expected. I could feel the motivation surging from Sohye’s entire body. The way she looked at me was also kind of sparkling.
Her family had come back alive, and that seemed to have become her motivation. The System had vouched for her talent, so as long as she put in the effort, her future would be smooth sailing.
She’d get stronger quickly. That meant gaining a reliable ally.
Things were running smoothly overall.
[-> Download Slot 2: 『Corpse-Plague Curse』 (Downloading... 93%)]
Except for this bastard.
The download speed, which had been slowing down, was now crawling along like a grub. When the hell was it going to finish?
Of course, these days I was busy with triangular trade, fishing with Colonel Oh, and playing tug-of-war of hidden intentions with the Saintess, so I wasn’t taking any losses since nothing required direct combat power.
The growth of 『Azure Wind Wanderer』 was also effectively capped until I promoted to C-rank, so there was no real reason to grind stages diligently.
There were about two weeks left until the next quarter’s tutorial, so time was probably sufficient. It just needed to finish by then. Surely it wouldn’t still be dragging its feet by that point.
The real need for power would come after that.
I would prepare for C-rank promotion as soon as I finished the tutorial stage.
If the 『Telescope』 was a respawning item and I could contact a higher being like last time to receive a skill, then I could immediately challenge the promotion exam.
If I trained the 『Quick Flash』 I received from Sergios and turned it into a skill, that would make three skills in total including 『Azure Wind Wanderer』. That would meet the minimum qualification for C-rank promotion that R-11 had mentioned.
If I failed to obtain a skill from the tutorial.
Then I could just obtain an artifact, like R-11’s fire-spewing gauntlet. I was in the position of not being able to use the Shop because my Credits were negative, but now I had confidence. Large-scale transactions were perfectly possible through barter.
Maybe I could even get a quote by making deeper contact with the Saintess. She was buying up weapons and preparing for something, so if I demanded an artifact as a condition for helping with whatever it was...
But.
“Surely not” and “what if” never miss, and things in this world are always most dangerous when they’re going well. Two days later, when I visited Camp Ace for the final transaction.
“Looks like a Gate is going to open.”
“⋯⋯⋯⋯”
I received bad news.
Actually, Colonel Oh was optimistic.
“The firepower of the plant monsters pouring out of a Gate is proportional to the Gate’s size, as you know. This Gate’s diameter is about 150 meters—nothing special. I’m only telling you because it opened. There was also something unusual.”
“...Something unusual, sir?”
“The zombies’ movements were strange. The Gate crack appeared in the sky above the point where we estimated the zombie command camp to be—the one we discussed last time. And as soon as the crack was observed, nearly the entire zombie horde started swarming toward it. As if they were gathering defensive forces.”
“⋯⋯⋯⋯”
“For now, I’m going to watch without intervening.”
Colonel Oh drew a line.
He spoke to me as my expression hardened by the second.
“I understand your regret. But that doesn’t mean we can execute a zombie rescue operation, now does it? If we launched such an operation, the camp would suffer heavy damage. This is unavoidable.”
He probably thought my grim face was because I expected countless civilian casualties—that it was about a moral dilemma.
But that wasn’t what I was worried about.
No matter how much the zombies were potential citizens who could be cured, there was nothing to be done in a situation with this kind of mass movement. Impossible things are impossible.
What bothered me was.
The fact that the holder of 『Corpse-Plague Curse』 had judged the Gate as a threat. The plants seemed to be trying to attack it, so it must have summoned the zombies for self-protection.
Let’s assume that judgment is correct. If the plants really do attack that thing, what happens?
One of the two would die. If it dies, it gets buried in the ground, rots, and becomes fertilizer. Then the plants absorb that fertilizer through their roots and grow.
The dark forest I explored with Sergios came to mind. The 『Monstera』 that was the boss of that forest had absorbed fragments of the world and wielded the powers of 『Glass』 and 『Shadow』.
If—
I don’t know if it’s possible, but if some plant were to absorb 『Corpse-Plague Curse』... A zombified plant unit commanding a zombie army—a combination so fucked up just imagining it made my skin crawl—wouldn’t be a dream.
It was only a hypothesis. I had no certainty.
But thinking about the possibility of such a thing happening, before the Gate opened I needed to either catch and deal with the source of the zombie curse, or deal with the plant bastards in the area. One of the two had to be dealt with and isolated so no chemical reaction could occur.
[-> Download Slot 2: 『Corpse-Plague Curse』 (Downloading... 95%)]
My condition hadn’t recovered yet. I needed to get better.
I was so anxious I briefly considered chugging about ten bottles of holy water. When I’d tested one bottle of holy water last time, it had no effect, but maybe the amount was just insufficient.
No, calm down. If it had worked, I would have felt it in my body. Don’t waste it for nothing.
Could I persuade Colonel Oh? Hmm. Even if I did, the damage would be severe. What conquering a forest required wasn’t a thousand soldiers but a single superhuman.
In that case.
In that case, what I had to do was—
[General | Silver-Traced Spear | Looking for someone]
: A white-haired bastard who looks like a gigolo. I’ll reward you if you tell me.
└ (Hunter 1): What’s this asshole on about now?
└└ (Hunter 2): Seriously, don’t mess with this guy. I’m warning you with my mana heart on the line.
└└ (Hunter 1): Who is he?
└└ (Hunter 3): lmaoooo don’t dig into his identity unless you want to die
└└ (Hunter 5): Always advertising that you’re a newbie lmaooo
└ (Hunter 4): Why are you looking for him?
└└ Silver-Traced Spear: To teach him some manners
Ding!
(New!)
└ (Hunter 8): How have you been?
└└ Silver-Traced Spear: Who are you
└└ (Hunter 8): Something came up where I need your help
└└ Silver-Traced Spear: You’ve got nerve
└└ Silver-Traced Spear: Do you want to die?
└└ Silver-Traced Spear: Write down your address