Chapter 355
Translator: Ryuma
Chapter: 355
Chapter Title: 145. Faith (3)
Snow had fallen on the surface overnight, and sharp winds whipped up the piled snow, creating a fog of ice crystals.
In contrast, the underground here was pitch black.
The surroundings were eerily silent, with a chilling ghostly aura hanging in the air.
Leading the way was Defender.
He said he'd been operating in this area with his team for quite some time.
Surprisingly, Defender had a team.
One behind him, and two more bringing up the rear—they were his teammates.
They were bound together not so much by Defender's character, but by their skills and a shared hatred for the cultists. Most were from academies rather than schools, or volunteers.
Volunteers were those who hadn't even attended academies and had stepped up to become hunters after the war began.
Considering Defender's main enemies were humans rather than monsters, it wasn't a bad lineup by any means.
In fact, they showed their proficiency as killers in spots all over.
"Here."
A sour stench of rotting corpses filled the train car stopped between stations.
It was the smell from bodies recently killed.
And sure enough, corpses with white cloths draped over their faces, bound to subway handrails, hung like meat in a butcher shop.
There were at least fifty of them, conservatively speaking.
The work of cultists.
Like any cult, they started off treating you like family, pulling out all the stops, but once they thought you were fully under their thumb, they demanded ruthless labor and servitude.
Anyone who didn't follow the rules or tried to run got executed like this, left as a lesson for the rest.
But these recent ones were the doing of the "Most Wanted" Defender and his hunter team.
They'd ambushed the cultists at an execution site and given them the same fate.
One of the team was a defector from the cult, which made the surprise attack and wipeout easy.
"Ugh... This is fucking disgusting..."
The young woman following behind, armed with just a single pistol, dry-heaved.
As could be seen from her eyes glowing in the darkness, she was one of the regular Awakeners who'd come with us.
Her name was Iharu. According to her, it poetically meant "tears of summer."
During prior discussions with Defender, we'd agreed to treat this Awakener as non-existent firepower from the start.
Defender had planned to kill her if things went south, but I didn't agree to that.
Once you set up a procedure like that, people tend to follow it without thinking, even if we weren't looking.
Regardless of the trouble regular Awakeners were causing right now, they were a precious resource in Korea, with so few left.
We had to find a way to make use of them somehow.
"Hold. Stand by."
We took a short break in another car lined with hanging corpses while the Defender team checked surveillance gear they'd set up beforehand.
And then.
"Urgh..."
One of Defender's teammates pulled a haggard man with a gag in his mouth from a tightly sealed box.
Up close, a foul stench hit us—shit, piss, and vomit all mixed together.
He'd clearly been locked in there for a long time.
He couldn't even stand properly. Checking the box size confirmed it was tiny.
They'd crammed a whole person in there indefinitely.
A brutal slice of wartime inhumanity, without even a shred of humanity.
The teammate's mask, gas mask, and sunglasses didn't seem just for style or practicality.
"This guy's a cult emissary."
Just like the Return to the Ghostly Path Cult took its name from a wuxia novel, their faith was full of wuxia-style terms.
Like cult leader or protectors.
But unlike a unified system like Roman Catholicism, each cult had its own naming conventions.
Some didn't even have administrative roles, others only high-level protectors, and the one we were facing ran like a dynasty under a single cult leader.
Emissary was a low-level admin role across cults, based on what I understood—a high evaluation in faith rather than personal ability.
"Hey, wake up."
A rough-spoken guy slapped the emissary's cheek.
Another shoved a canteen into his mouth, forcing water down.
"What are you doing?"
Iharu recoiled at the sight, but I silently watched Defender's teammate handle the emissary roughly.
"A true believer."
Defender muttered.
Probably meaning his faith was strong.
Strong enough to hold their doctrine—which sounded like mad ramblings to us—above his own life.
"Why keep him alive?"
I couldn't understand sparing someone beyond redemption.
Defender, usually expressionless, curled his lips in a cold sneer and murmured in a voice as icy as his smile.
"I want to see his faith break."
"...I see."
I thought it pointless.
If it were me, I'd have ended that false faith with a bullet between the eyes already.
But then.
"Heh heh heh..."
Something happened that made me understand Defender's feelings.
Despite the harsh, brutal treatment, the cultist drooled and pointed at us, muttering.
"You know nothing. The reason rifts appeared in this world. Pretending to know when you don't, dying in ignorance...!"
Thwack!
Defender's teammate clubbed him with a rifle butt.
Even clutching his gut and vomiting stomach acid, the cultist kept muttering.
"It won't break my will. It's as obvious as the sun rising in the east that we're right..."
Thwack! Thwack!
Defender spoke up.
"Don't kill him."
He looked at me.
"That's why. With guys like this."
The teammate gagged the cultist again.
Looked like they were taking him along.
Iharu voiced what I was thinking.
"You're not planning to drag this guy around, are you?"
She stared at Defender.
"...Just want to show him. See if he spouts the same crap after watching his precious cult get smashed."
Defender glanced at his teammates and added.
"We'll handle him. These guys are experienced pros. And... they've all suffered at the hands of believers."
Defender turned to the tall guy in the gas mask.
As his gaze landed, the gas mask spoke in a young voice.
"The cult bastards raped and killed my mom and sister right in front of me. And I..."
He removed the gas mask.
Where his nose should be, there was nothing.
And that wasn't the only horrific sign of abuse etched into his still-youthful face.
"..."
I turned my gaze back to Defender.
"Do what you want."
Not my style, but I wasn't about to interfere in their chain of vengeance.
They had enough people for that.
If they could manage him well, it was all the same to me.
"Over here."
Iharu beckoned me over in the silence.
She wanted to whisper.
No reason to refuse, so I leaned down.
Her warm breath tickled my ear as she whispered.
"Sorry to bother you, but do you sense something ahead?"
I nodded.
She pulled away from my ear, surprise flashing across her face before she motioned to whisper again.
I leaned in once more.
"It's not just one."
Regular Awakeners weren't total hotheads, it seemed.
She knew the info Defender had.
"Dancer types. Your old-school hunters' worst nightmare."
"...Yeah?"
"That's not all. There's a mid-sized one housed there too."
"Housed?"
"Like a hangar. You old-timers have been away from the field too long—you might not know, but small infiltrator types build fortified bases with a high chance of housing combat mid-sizers. Like stationing fighters at an island airstrip."
Glancing around nervously, she added in an even quieter voice.
"These guys here... aren't they bottom-tier even among old-school? You think a team with volunteers—even by old-school standards—can handle a mission that's tough for a fully formed squad?"
I stepped back and looked down at her.
"You know a lot."
"Of course. We're the elites here. I have more achievements than Ahn Seunghwan."
She buttoned her open jacket collar and pointed to the badge on her left chest.
A horned deer emblem I didn't recognize.
"Just so you know, we—I—don't want you dying. Professor."
"...Yeah?"
"If the Professor dies, morale tanks. I get why Director Oh is keeping us in check, but we don't want to see this city fall either. We know we can't go back to Jeju anymore."
"..."
Finally, the nagging doubt in my chest cleared up.
Why these young folks were slacking off with absurd, impossible excuses.
Simply put, they wanted command.
Like before, let regular Awakeners take full control and boss everyone else around.
Like the latter half of the China deployment.
I didn't know much about that system.
I'd returned to Korea before Awakeners took over as bosses, and even here, my past merits let me keep leading teams.
But I knew the reality of the battlefields left behind.
Our already high hunter mortality rates spiked even more under Awakener command.
Not blaming Awakener greed or incompetence.
With Awakeners as the core, our hunter teams' doctrine shifted to one-track protecting them.
The old proactive doctrines emphasizing fluid movement and creativity vanished, leaving only passive ones for Awakeners, by Awakeners.
Might work fine against monsters, but our enemies included humans too.
Cultists and rebels exploited that weakness relentlessly.
Oh Munhee understood it wasn't right.
Regular Awakeners were rare, but now old-school hunters were precious too.
School-trained hunters were already scarce, now nearly extinct, and academy fillers weren't immune to the attrition either.
In monster wars—where the skill gap between veterans and rookies was widest—a single hunter's value had changed.
In this era where everything was scarce, Oh Munhee had called me to find a new balance.
Regardless of efficiency or achievement counts, my team's low losses were a fact even my harshest critics admitted.
"...How many monsters have you killed?"
I asked the kid at least ten years younger than me as we started moving.
"Who knows. Too many to count? Small, mids, no discrimination. Never taken down a large though."
"So you think we can't handle whatever's over there?"
"Yes."
Her glowing eyes met mine as she nodded.
"Physically impossible."
"Yeah?"
"Yes. Even for you, the legendary hunter, the Professor."
She smiled.
"Kuh huh huh huh..."
From behind, the bound cultist's muffled laughter leaked through the gag.
Soon the gag came off, and his mutter echoed in the darkness.
"That girl's spot on. Truly chosen by God. She knows reality. You can't win. How could mere humans beat God's emissary...!"
Thwack!
I waved Defender over past the beating hunter.
Time to fight.
As Defender's team rebound the cultist and secured the tunnel perimeter, we unpacked gear.
Hunter equipment.
Weapons of odd shapes and purposes that had vanished into history's back alleys alongside us old-school hunters.
I won't deny these guys are outdated.
But they're forged from our blood.
Blood from lost comrades, sometimes our own body parts, poured into figuring out how to kill humanity's enemies more efficiently.
Click—
Not quite like my trusty pair of axes, but I pulled out well-worn gear.
Mark Seven Harpooner.
Our hunters' spear, capable of felling nearly any monster type if used right.
I prepped two.
And then.
Screeeech—
Loaded the crossbow.
Not some crude homemade like Judge Killer—this was a French hunting crossbow.
If anyone asked why a medieval weapon, the bolt's payload would answer.
No sharp tip at the end—instead, a mini camera.
Unlike drones constantly emitting signals, this glided silently on momentum after launch, snapping pics in danger zones before retrieval via attached carbon fiber rope.
This let us snag some intel without provoking monsters like a drone might.
It was a form of evolution.
Just as monsters evolved against human tactics, we old-school hunters evolved right back.
Awakener arrival paused that for a bit, but our evolution hadn't been culled.
After all, our ways were the "latest" since we left the frontlines—no further development.
"...New model."
After firing camera bolts multiple times to methodically scout the hazard zone, something unknown lurked beyond.
A massive amorphous slime blob, mid-sized by volume.
Iharu glanced at the fuzzy tablet feed and blurted.
"Macrophage type."
She knew about new models.
She shook her head.
"Can't help with that one."
"Were you planning to?"
"Yeah. Seunghwan asked me personally. But."
She shrugged.
Her already glowing eyes flashed brighter as she added.
"That's an Awakener sniper type."
The bound cultist behind let out a chilling laugh through the gag.
Thwack!
Hunter gazes, including Defender's, fixed on me amid the merciless blows.
"..."
I thought for a moment.
Three faiths clashed here.
Humanity can't beat monsters.
Old-school hunters can't beat monsters.
And our way isn't wrong.
"Let's go."
Which was right? We'd see.