The Demon Realm (3)
Team 2 leader of the Saetbyeol Guild Demon Realm Branch. Straight hair in a hime cut, glossy as obsidian. A telekinetic and body-enhancement hunter who wore a suit entirely too well.
"So this is how you mean to kill them?"
Yeo Baek looked up at Choi Jong-hyeok where he stood in the passage, her stare crooked with disdain.
"Figure if you beat them to death yourself, Su Seong-min will throw up his hands and report you straight to the chairman?"
She was a veteran who had once led Team 1 of the Demon Realm branch herself, experience and ability matched with sense and nerve. A-rank or not, she could say this much to Choi Jong-hyeok — a man shoved out of an executive promotion, gone from the headquarters hunting teams, and dropped onto a branch as a team leader.
"It is a test worthy of a team leader. They are rehabilitation hunters. Their character cannot be trusted, and so their ability, at the least, must be verified beyond doubt."
Choi Jong-hyeok answered, rigid as a roadside totem.
"I lived through the Ruin Era too! Raider scum, criminal scum — I grind my teeth at the lot of them. But this isn't right!"
Yeo Baek's shout came down like a waterfall.
"You're not going to take the Demon Realm? Not going to dig the magic stones? Do you have any idea how good the yield is here? Murim, Iron Blood, Angel — they all came swarming!"
It was a shout soaked through with hard practical sense.
"Snap out of it. Keep on like this and we get pushed out. We have to take in even one more rehabilitation hunter and seize even one more cavity!"
"……."
"That's how we dig magic stones, make the money, and bring in more of those expensive, powerful natural awakeners."
Only steady results would make the guild keep the company housing set aside for her family. What wouldn't she do, if it meant they could go on living in Sejong behind the anti-aerial beast barriers?
"Taking in the unqualified will only be a hindrance. Am I not already seeing to the occupation of the cavities?"
"A fancy A-rank hunter ought to manage at least that much! But you're Team 1's leader too, aren't you? Even if pure garbage walks in, you should know how to work them until they shine!"
So of course more than half of it was venting.
They're all dead in there by now. Only the ones shivering in some corner will be left. And what good is that? A hunter can be rough. They just can't be petty.
Hundreds of orcs packed that place, and with them demon overseers, demon elites, demon knights.
Jeong Jae-ha and Lee Hae-il are the ones Seong-min and Si-yu praised so highly. The rest may be rotten in character, but they can hunt beasts.
No matter how well they had graduated the tutorial, these were not enemies they could handle.
Throwing them away like this is a waste.
Yeo Baek folded every expectation she had and let the abuse pour.
Knock, knock.
"Huh?"
So when the tapping came from beyond the rock wall, she was a little startled.
"……?"
If she wasn't imagining it, Choi Jong-hyeok was startled too.
"I told them I would not open it until they had cleared the lot, did I not?"
He asked it as if he couldn't quite believe his ears. Frantic pounding and pleas to be spared, he would not even have questioned. This knock was far too calm.
"Yes. We've cleared them all."
The two who heard that answer were not calm at all.
"What did you say?"
"What?"
Before Choi Jong-hyeok could get another word out, Yeo Baek smashed the wall apart with her telekinesis.
Even a lie is fine. If they've got the nerve to bluff like that with a dozen demons and hundreds of orcs in there, that's enough for me!
She was prepared to let a bluff slide.
"Huh?"
It was not a bluff.
"That was quite enjoyable."
Jeong Jae-ha stood before the passage in a combat suit torn and scorched all over, a sword glowing red-hot in his grip. From his eyes spilled the pale light peculiar to the awakened, faint and overflowing.
"How did you finish this fast?"
Yeo Baek asked out of pure bewilderment. Ordered to take this cavity herself, she might not have done it so quickly.
"I……."
Jeong Jae-ha opened his mouth.
"What do we do now?"
"Let us out! Let us out, damn it!"
The rehabilitation awakeners screamed, lost to panic.
"Shit! This is fucked!"
"Get out here. Stay in there and you'll die with those bastards."
Jeong Ho-min stepped forward with his crew.
By then the demons of the cavity had noticed them. One with a whip of a tail jabbed a finger their way and stretched out a hand.
"Chwik, chwiik!"
"Hu-man! Meat!"
Volcanic orcs with mottled reddish hides turned their heads toward them, one after another.
"Hyung-nim. What do we do, sir?"
"This way."
I climbed a nearby rock pillar with Lee Hae-il. The floor of this Lava Cavity was anything but flat. A river of lava ran below, and pillars of stone, large and small, jutted up wherever they pleased. No battlefield for orcs built like main battle tanks.
"They're coming!"
"Shoot!"
The orcs didn't climb after us. They hit the panicking awakeners first, and Jeong Ho-min's crew with them.
There was a reason.
"Kiiiiik!"
"Chiiiiik!"
Monsters with a wingspan of two meters came flapping straight at us. An ordinary person would have lost flesh just for touching those blazing talons.
"These bastards! I'll mow 'em down, sir!"
"Wait!"
I stopped Lee Hae-il as she chambered the submachine gun.
"Why, sir? Agh—aaaaagh!"
All I did was stab the Flame Bats that came in close with the estoc.
Attaque
A hole through the torso would have killed them on the spot, but there were so many that the small wounds kept stacking up. Nothing that could punch through a body-enhancement hunter's muscle and turn fatal. A paper cut still hurts, though.
"Those bastards don't even have an Authority, do they, sir?"
Lee Hae-il broke off mid-swing of her cavalry sabre and shouted like she was losing her mind.
Tat-tat-tat-tat!
"Drop dead, all of you! You sons of bitches!"
Far off, another awakener seemed to have reached the same conclusion. He sprayed his submachine gun wild and knocked the Flame Bats closing on him out of the air.
Then one of the demons looked at him.
Detonation predicted.
The instant my status-window ring threw the warning across my vision—
BOOOOM!
There wasn't even time to shout. The awakener's submachine gun exploded.
"Aaaagh!"
Fingers gone, face studded with shrapnel, he was a hideous sight. Countless bats swarmed the body as it fell.
"Eck?!"
Lee Hae-il looked once at the submachine gun in her own hands and set it down.
"Uh. Sorry. And thank you, sir."
"It's not that we skip guns because they're weak. There are guilds like Iron Blood that build on an awakener's power and run heavy weapons as the main arm."
I answered while I kept holding the bats off.
"So if there are still beasts that haven't been wiped out anyway, you have to assume there's a reason."
Bit by bit, the lay of this place and the shape of the fight came clear.
"Keep digging!"
"Block the lower side!"
The demons had the orcs damming the lava river, and on the other side they were widening the mouth where the lava poured in. Fill this place with mana-laden lava, and make a den where their own kind could be born. A profoundly meaningful construction project. So I decided to help.
"Hae-il."
"Yes, hyung-nim."
"Drop down for a second and round up some grenades. Ask the ones panicking over there and they'll hand them over. If they don't, hit them and take them."
"What are you using them for, sir?"
"Not a peep when I tell you to hit them and take them, huh?"
"A-a joke? In this situation, sir?"
As she said, the situation was bad.
"Powerful thieves! Send more!"
"We go as well."
The orcs were already pouring in like bullets. Dropping those monsters with a 9mm submachine gun had never been easy to begin with — nearly a full magazine to kill one. Demons piling on top of that only made it worse.
"Fucking hell!"
Jeong Ho-min was being hemmed in by orcs, crew and all.
"No time. Go!"
I gave Lee Hae-il a light slap on the back.
"Hyung-nim! If I ever go back on Nutube, you've gotta come on, sir!"
Swearing the whole way, Lee Hae-il sprinted down. She dodged through the orcs and came back with grenades taken off the awakeners near the entrance we'd used.
"Borrowing these, sirs!"
Whether they'd cleared the tutorial on luck alone, they were still in a panic, hammering at the rock wall — so they didn't even notice her pulling the grenades straight off their belts.
"Here, sir. Where you using them?"
I took the grenades.
"I've hardly ever thrown anything round, but……."
"Yes?"
"……I did do knife throwing."
Far off, I watched the lava fall where the orcs were deep in their expansion work. Drop one more big rock, and that mouth would blow wide open.
Hopeless with machines or not, I can still pull a safety pin.
Whoosh!
The grenade drew a dizzying arc and flew a hundred-odd meters.
Bang!
It burst on top of the great rock the orcs were trying to split. The rock shifted a little toward the lava fall. Twice more, and the rock was caught in the fall and dropped away below.
Shaaaaa—!
The inlet widened, and the lava pouring through more than tripled.
"Chwiik!?"
Orcs who failed to yank their feet clear in time were swept off and died.
"Jeong Jae-ha!"
Jeong Ho-min leveled a submachine gun at me and shouted.
"You wanna die?! What the hell are you doing?! We're supposed to be stopping the lava from coming in!"
I shoved Lee Hae-il behind me, took up another grenade, and answered.
"Be stupid, or be vicious. Pick one. Life's going to be hard if you try for both."
"You little shit!"
"If you want to live, get up somewhere."
I wanted to throw a grenade that way too. I swallowed it, for the sake of later. That one had to be the string tying me to the Scorpion Crew. I couldn't sit around waiting on a word from Hong Si-yu. From what I'd heard, he'd been something like an action captain himself. His old colleagues had become big shots standing against the state, while he rolled here like a dog — every kind of thought would start crawling through his head. He'd make contact. He didn't have that much patience. A month or two, and it would come to a head.
Done thinking, I threw the grenade into the gap in the cliff where the lava river ran out. The orcs had already been splitting that cliff and shoving the rubble in, so it clogged in no time.
Shaaaaa—!
The lava rose all at once.
Lee Hae-il found herself staring hard at Jeong Jae-ha.
This man is seriously impossible.
The lava climbed fast, and the heat inside the cavity shot up with it.
Can't work a machine, can't work a computer — and then at times like this he turns into a genius.
But the sweat running down the small of her back was cold. Jeong Jae-ha looked down over the cavity, face flushed deep from the heat.
"Nice."
What had been a gorge a moment ago was sunk under lava.
"Chwiik! Chwik!"
"Kweeeee!"
Orcs that hadn't made the rock pillars drowned in it and died.
"Chwik, chwiik……!"
Of the hundreds, only dozens had climbed clear in time. The cavity was nothing now but narrow paths and small footholds.
"Perfect."
Jeong Jae-ha spun the estoc and smiled, purely delighted.
"Let's play!"
Estoc leading, he shot forward like a single arrow.
Thuk!
He ran an orc on the next rock island straight through the heart. At that speed and force the ribs caved, the spine folded, and the orc's body folded around him as if to embrace him. It went down without a scream.
Thuk! Thuk! Thuk!
He ran two more through behind the first, and kept running on the momentum of the charge, straight toward the lava.
"Hyung-nim!"
Lee Hae-il shouted, certain he hadn't seen it. She needn't have. Jeong Jae-ha tilted the estoc and drove his left palm hard into the orc's chest. The corpse dropped into the lava lake; he stepped on it and leapt. And he landed light on the next island, already rushing the orcs waiting there.
He was fast to begin with.
An orc bounded up with a great blade, meaning to cleave him in two. Jeong Jae-ha stabbed its thigh, slipped aside, and kicked it in the flank.
"Chwiik?"
Footing gone, the orc was shoved back despite its bulk and plunged into the lava lake.
And now the strength has caught up, too.
An orc, in the end, was only an E+ beast. Lee Hae-il herself was about that level now, and Jeong Jae-ha had stepped fully into D-rank.
"What a festival!"
He dropped one orc to the ground, reversed his grip on the estoc, and drove it down. Heart pierced, the orc flailed at the air, then went limp. Jeong Jae-ha drew the blade and stabbed in movements like a dance. Orcs fell with philtrum, eye, brow, and heart run through.
A few weeks ago he still had to set his angle just to face one.
Now there wasn't even cause to worry.
"Wh-what the hell is that guy?"
"Since when was he that strong?"
"So killing the Amber Wyrm and becoming a Dragon Slayer was actually true?"
Jeong Ho-min and his crew wore vacant faces.
Thuk!
Jeong Jae-ha pierced the last orc's neck and twisted the blade as he side-stepped. In the tutorial, that same attack had barely torn muscle.
Crack!
Now the neck tore clean off and flew.
"Hoo. Ha."
Jeong Jae-ha caught his breath once.
"Yeah. It's a festival."
He swept back sweat-soaked hair and smiled, keen and splendid as silvergrass under a sunset.
"New challengers just keep coming, don't they!"
And he charged straight at the demons.