Chapter 9. The Blue Lightning Slaughterer
Chapter 9. The Blue Lightning Slaughterer
Kwagwagwang!
The lightning erupting from my hand let out a roar like an explosion, wiping out the people I had saved just a few days ago without leaving a trace.
It was an instantaneous annihilation; they couldn't even scream.
Shockingly, my heart remained calm.
A bizarre tranquility, devoid of even a shred of guilt or a moment of hesitation.
It was just the sensation of neatly clearing away a bothersome obstacle that had been blocking my view. That was all.
Since that day, I stopped making pointless distinctions.
At first, I had my own strict moral standards standing firm within me.
I only targeted the bastards who hunted weak refugees like hounds, or the scum who resembled the group that had stabbed So-hee in the heart.
To desperately save those who were dying, to cut off the breath of those who intended to kill.
But in this new world, such outdated moral values couldn't exist.
The guy blocking my path. The guy glaring at me with hostile eyes. The guy holding a weapon.
And later... just any guy who caught my eye.
The reasons for the slaughter gradually dwindled, and eventually vanished. Reasons for killing were a luxury I could no longer afford.
They were merely a handful of fertilizer to raise the numbers on my system window, to reach a higher realm.
One day, I encountered a group that was looting while moving in packs through a ruined shopping street.
As soon as they spotted me, they bared their killing intent and raised their weapons, and that was the end for them.
Another day, a giant beast that had transformed was chasing people.
I burned the monster to death, and left the scene before the survivors could even say thank you.
Because if I stayed, I felt like I would end up tearing those pitiful humans to pieces with my own hands as they approached to express their gratitude.
Perhaps that instinctive repulsion that made me walk away from them was the last remnant of humanity fading away inside me.
My sense of time had long since disappeared.
I couldn't gauge how many days or weeks had passed, and I didn't particularly want to know.
I just walked when the sun rose, burned whatever got in my way, and collapsed anywhere to close my eyes when the sun set.
That was all.
Every time I poured out lightning, a terrible ecstasy struck my brain, making me dizzy.
That intense burst of dopamine that scorched every nerve in my body blue.
For that fleeting moment, all the hell in my head stopped.
That's why I liked it. It was thousands of times more comfortable to just go crazy.
But once that ecstatic pleasure faded, without exception, a deeper, stickier void swallowed me like a wave.
The center of my soul felt not just cold, but hollowed out.
I couldn't bear that emptiness, so I poured out lightning again.
And then I felt empty again, and poured it out again.
I knew it was a terrifyingly destructive vicious cycle.
I knew it, but I couldn't stop. No, I didn't want to stop.
Because the moment I stopped, everything I had struggled to suppress felt like it would come rushing back all at once.
I didn't bother opening my status window. But I knew.
My body had become light as a feather, and the electric shock coming from my fingertips had grown to a catastrophic level.
The blue current that at first barely filled an alleyway had now become a tidal wave swallowing the entire street.
Every time I killed something, whether it was a person or a monster, that icy blue thing inside me grew larger.
I, too, felt that this was an abnormal strength that far transcended common sense.
If this had been growth within a normal trajectory, I would have already been rotting as a corpse in this hellscape.
There were no tactical ambushes or intelligent hunts.
The very fact that I survived without a single scratch, despite just walking blankly with unfocused eyes and indiscriminately spraying lightning at everything that caught my view, was absolute proof of that.
We all arrived on the same day, greeted the same light, and started at level 1.
I didn't know why I alone was reaching the pinnacle of the world so uniquely fast.
I just liked that I seemed to obtain in a single day the power that those bastards would have barely scraped together over several days.
Now, I was single-handedly defeating groups of survivors that traveled in packs of dozens, sometimes hundreds.
One day, there was a group of Awakened who had tightened their encirclement, claiming they would hunt me.
They had quite a few numbers, and they seemed like guys who thought highly of themselves, calling themselves the rulers of this district.
But once we clashed, it wasn't a battle; it was just a one-sided cleanup.
The supernatural attacks the bastards fired were caught by the electromagnetic barrier crackling on my skin surface before they could even touch my body, shattering into pieces or having their trajectories forcibly bent.
I just walked as if taking a stroll, and with a few gestures, reduced that arrogant group to a handful of ash.
The expression on the last guy who was lucky enough to still be breathing was quite interesting.
It wasn't anger, nor was it desperate fear. It was absolute shock, the kind where one's human intellect simply cannot comprehend the cause and effect.
I didn't know Japanese, so I couldn't understand what he was muttering, but I guessed it meant something like, 'How can one person...'
But even such trivial questions soon faded.
I had simply adapted to this destructive state.
My soul had been completely tamed by the overwhelming strength that held the power of life and death over others.
People now ran away when they saw me. Even from a distance, if they saw a blue light, they would scream and scatter.
At some point, the words they spat out toward me began to pierce my eardrums.
Strangely, as if a translation system was operating, the bastards' words were accurately translated and embedded in my brain.
This must have been a type of linguistic evolution brought about by leveling up.
Once, a group hiding in the shadows of a ruined building spotted me and turned pale, shouting.
"B-Blue Lightning!"
"It's the Slaughterer! Run away!!"
Slaughterer.
The word stuck in my ear strangely.
...Yeah. It wasn't wrong.
What else would you call a monster that goes around burning people to death without even blinking an eye?
I didn't deny the name. I had neither the right nor the reason to deny it.
The fact that this was Japanese soil, not my homeland, suddenly crossed my mind.
I felt a fleeting sense of relief.
'...Let's think of it as revenge for the past.'
The blood-stained history of my distant ancestors, who might have had no connection to me, seemed to grant a very thin validity to the cruel slaughter I was committing now.
The streets I stayed in soon became ruins. Nothing remained—not people, not monsters, nothing that moved.
Only charred remains and a fishy silence.
I walked through the center of it like a ghost.
With nowhere to go, nowhere to stop. Just heading toward the next thing that bothered me.
Then one day.
I saw someone crouching between the collapsed buildings.
They were holding something that looked like a stick in their hand.
Clear murderous intent. Habitually, my right hand slipped up into the air.
But, the moment I was about to unleash the lightning, an alien silhouette caught my view.
It was a child. Hugging someone who looked like their parent with two small arms. As if to protect them with that tiny, tiny body.
And then, they were looking up at me with eyes full of fear, yet filled with courage.
Those eyes overlapped with the child who had looked back at me while fleeing a few days ago.
And beyond that, for some reason, So-hee's face came to mind.
'Why now, of all times....'
My hand stopped abruptly.
The blue lightning that had been crackling at my fingertips lost its place and fizzled out.
'...I... what was I... about to do just now....'
It was the first time.
That my right hand, which had been raining down thunderbolts, felt so chillingly unfamiliar and alien.
A sense of disgust washed over me, to the point where I wondered if this was really a hand attached to my body.
I slowly lowered my hand.
And without a word, I turned my back. Without touching the person with the weapon, or the child.
I could feel the child's gaze following me for a long time from behind.
That night, I holed up in a corner of a ruined building and retched violently for the first time.
As if trying to vomit out all the disgusting remnants of slaughter that filled my body, the essence of the monster I had become.
My stomach twisted, and only bitter water and gastric juices poured onto the floor from my empty insides.
I repeated the dry heaving for a long time.
I thought I was fine.
I firmly believed that my brain had already been numbed to emotion and had perfectly adapted to this mess.
But it seemed my mind wasn't.
Somewhere deep inside my heart, I was still, screaming.
I wiped my mouth and lifted my head, and my hands were trembling slightly.
The cruel hands that hadn't even flinched while burning countless humans to death without mercy were now trembling weakly like an aspen tree from just one bout of retching.
That cold thing that had firmly taken root inside me... it seemed it had shaken, just a little, that night.
It was only a little, but could that be proof that I hadn't completely broken yet?
I took out the doll I had shared with So-hee from my pocket. The doll, with bloodstains that had dried hard and turned blackish.
I stared at the doll for a long time, thinking of it as So-hee.
"...How do I... look right now? So-hee...."
My voice, raspy and cracked like scraping metal, drifted vainly through the air of the silent ruins where there were no longer any weaklings left to burn, before disappearing.
I knew, even without hearing an answer. What expression So-hee would have made if she saw me right now.
She would have looked at me with a sorrowful face, as if she were about to burst into tears at any moment. She would have asked in a trembling voice, 'What are you doing, Ji-han?'
No, she might have screamed as if tearing at her own heart.
Maybe she wouldn't have been angry. She might have just approached without a word and held my dirt-covered hand. Saying, 'It's okay. Let's stop now.' Because So-hee was that kind of person.
That was why my heart ached even more. That I could never hold those hands again.
...That pierced my lungs like an awl, and I couldn't bear it.
I sat with my back against the debris of the collapsed building, clutching the doll tightly. I buried my face between my knees.
What I was doing. How far I was going. Even I didn't know anymore.
Above my head, those colorful lights were still rippling beautifully.
As if the tragedy on the earth didn't matter, emitting a light as cruelly beautiful as that first night.