The Weight of the Blade
It's heavy.
From the Abyss of the Tutorial Floor all the way to this moment, Lee Sia had never felt a weight like this. The sword that had always moved as an extension of her own body—no mass, no resistance, not a trace of foreignness from the first time she took it in hand—was different now. It felt ready to drop to the ground under its own gravity, and the hand that gripped it was so mottled with pain that her vision swam.
It hurts.
Even half-dazed, she cut on instinct.
A clean, wet slice—and a zombie split apart and went down without any real force behind the blow.
Should I stop?
How many hours had she been at this? One? Two? Longer than that, she thought. How much time is even left? She didn't know. Not how long she'd been fighting, not how long remained. Only the tide rolling in from every side, and the endless work of cutting, cutting, and cutting again.
Ah—Ji-hoo?
The boy who had been covering her back came to mind. When had that solid wall of his presence vanished?
Don't tell me—
Her mind snapped sharp. She swept the field in a rush—and let out a breath of relief. Park Ji-hoo was still there, just farther off, pounding zombies one at a time. His gauntlets had lost their metallic sheen; they were stained a dark, dull red.
He's exhausted too.
It wasn't only her. The boy turning zombies into meat without pause looked spent to the bone, and the fact that he was still moving at all bordered on miraculous.
I should link up with him.
They were holding, somehow—but the limit was close. Maybe already past. The way they looked, collapsing on the spot wouldn't have been strange at all. Sia turned at once and started toward him.
It wasn't easy. The zombies between them numbered in the hundreds—far too many for someone this drained to punch through in a single rush.
My skill…
For an instant, Black Flash [D] flared through her mind. With that, she could close the gap in a heartbeat.
No.
She held it back. Using Black Flash [D] now would drop her into total collapse, and then there would be no point in reaching him at all. She wouldn't go to support Ji-hoo only to become dead weight.
So she advanced one step at a time.
Black Wing [C] carved the air. The strokes were half-unconscious, but the evolved Sword Heart [C] steadied her will to keep walking forward—cutting down every zombie that barred the path as if the blade itself were thinking and moving on its own.
A sticky spray of blood; scraps of flesh clung to her clothes. She didn't dodge. She didn't have the stamina to spare for that. Slowly—agonizingly slowly—she closed on Park Ji-hoo.
A vast roar rolled in from far away. Sia's body locked up before she could stop it.
What was that?
Nothing like an ordinary zombie's cry. The power in it was enough to raise the hair on her arms—immense, crushing.
A mutant zombie…
She had almost forgotten. The sheer press of the horde had been so overwhelming that the word mutant had slipped her mind entirely. She shouldn't have forgotten. One roar was enough to tell her how strong the thing was—something in a completely different league from the zombies still falling under Black Wing [C].
If that thing gets here…
It was over. She could never take it. The knowledge was pure instinct.
If I fight with Ji-hoo?
Park Ji-hoo was strong. Quiet, and never one to show off, so it was easy to miss—but his raw striking power sat clearly above hers. Give him a C-grade item or better and he would be operating on another level entirely.
Even so—
We can't win.
She shook her head. Not like this. Fresh, full on mana and stamina, unmarked by wounds—maybe then they could try. But what good were hypotheticals? They were nowhere near peak condition.
Do we run?
Judging by the volume of the roar, there was still distance. A sea of zombies stood between them and the source; it would take time for the mutant to arrive. If they fell back now, they could open that gap further.
"Ji-hoo!"
She forced her unwilling mouth open and shouted his name. Exhaustion had turned her once-clear voice into something like scraped metal.
And then—before he could even turn—something came hurtling across the space between them, from the direction of the roar.
No way—
Sia's eyes went wide. The approaching shape filled her vision.
The mutant zombie?
Smaller than the roar had suggested—but the speed was something else entirely, nothing ordinary undead could match. She wrung out what strength she had left and carved a path through the swarm around her. The recoil set her arms shaking; she felt her legs go soft in real time. She had no choice. She had to be ready the moment it arrived.
The second it gets here, I use Black Flash [D].
Her strongest skill. Exhaustion would follow at once—and if luck turned against her, she would simply drop and become feed for the horde. Even so, she had to stop it. At the very least, she would keep Ji-hoo alive.
That was the decision.
But then—
"…Huh?"
Her head tilted. She had been certain it was the mutant. The closer it came, though, the stranger it felt.
It isn't moving.
It was simply flying—no other motion at all, as if something already dead were free-falling under gravity. She cut down another rush of zombies, then poured mana into her sight. Space folded with a soft hitch, and the shape swelled into clarity.
It was the mutant. Unlike the common dead littering the ground, its face was closer to a monster's than a zombie's. The problem was that that was all there was. A severed head. No torso in sight—only the head, sailing through the air toward them.
Sia took an involuntary step back.
A heavy impact—and the head punched into the asphalt. It was so dense that even half-buried it showed not a single scratch. Only then did dead blood begin to sheet from the clean cross-section and darken the ground.
It's dead.
The mutant zombie was dead. A threat on the scale of the entire wave had arrived already slain. The situation was past surprising and into pure shock; even the mindless zombies hesitated, stopping short rather than approach.
"This is…"
The cut surface was impossibly smooth—as if it had been made that way from the start. Without the dark blood still welling out, she might never have believed it had been sliced at all.
Could I do that?
She measured the cut against her own blade on instinct. Impossible. Not with her current skill. Level 100 at minimum—no, higher than that—before she could even attempt a pale imitation.
Who in the world—
A face rose in her mind at once.
Ah.
Seong Yujin. The lunatic whose true nature she still couldn't pin down, for all the time they'd spent together. Around here, no one else could have shown that kind of power.
He really is ridiculous.
They had been drowning in the zombie tide, barely keeping their heads above it, ready to drop at any second. Meanwhile Seong Yujin had vaulted the mountain of undead and cut down the wave's greatest threat.
Those threads of his, probably.
How strong was that maniac, really? Their levels weren't that far apart—but the gap she felt was tenfold at the least.
I can't make sense of him.
How he had this kind of skill. How he knew so much about the Tower. Why, with power like that, he had still proposed offering sacrifices. From start to finish, nothing about him lined up. Respect she couldn't quite suppress, and the dissonance of clashing convictions—every feeling she held toward Seong Yujin was uncomfortable, unwelcome.
…This isn't the time to dwell on that.
She shook her head weakly and emptied her mind. Whatever kind of psychopath he was, her work was simple.
Cut zombies. Protect the survivors. Until this damned quest was over.
Time left…
Still unknown. She swung the sword anyway—until every last scrap of strength failed her. She never stopped.
"Guess I have to give them credit."
From a good distance off, still shredding zombies with the Heavenly Silk Thread [C], Yujin let out a small sigh and scratched his head.
"Twenty hours already."
Amazingly, Lee Sia and Park Ji-hoo were still holding the line. His help had been a major factor, of course—threads and blades thinning the numbers that reached them, and him taking the mutant, the second quest's strongest enemy, entirely on his own. Without that, the two of them would have been corpses long ago.
Even allowing for it—
"Not bad."
Both of them, Sia especially, had earned even his reluctant admiration. Her mana had bottomed out ages ago. Her stamina was past its limit. And still Black Wing [C] kept carving through the horde without rest—pure, almost impossible willpower.
I still think the whole approach is inefficient.
But watching how the two of them fought when driven this close to the edge wasn't a complete waste either.
"Four hours left, huh?"
Twenty hours down, four remaining. The zombies were still endless—the living outnumbered the dead several times over. Yujin kept pulverizing them through his threads while he watched Sia and Ji-hoo's condition.
"Go on. See if you can hold out all the way."
In his head, their evaluation had already climbed several ranks—from barely usable idiots to slaves who might actually be worth something. If they lasted the full remaining time, he might revise it again. One day, perhaps, they wouldn't be idiots or slaves at all. They might even be called companions.
"Either way, however this ends, I should still grab one more person."
Someone with healing, like he'd been thinking earlier.
A cascade of slicing sounds—dozens of zombies came apart at once, piling the mountain of corpses higher.
"This really is a miserable way to spend a day."
The tips of the fingers holding the Heavenly Silk Thread [C] were trembling in fine, constant shivers. Not as badly as Sia or Ji-hoo—but the long, grinding fight had worn him down too. If they had offered the sacrifices, the quest would have been finished and then some by now.
Yujin clicked his tongue inwardly and kept slaughtering.
And so another four hours passed.