Just Not Enough Firepower
Ko Yu-Yeon, one of the Twelve Vassals, had originally led the family's legal team as well as Lumen's. He now headed the independent Aurora Law Firm.
He had never truly fought a case through to a full trial, yet he was famous for always presenting settlement terms the other side could not refuse. Because of that reputation, he was utterly convinced that if he ever did go to war in a courtroom, he would be invincible.
But the battlefield he considered himself invincible on was the courtroom and litigation. Not actual combat.
Among the Twelve Vassals he ranked in the middle tier as an SS-class, yet that was only a matter of grade. When real combat sense and overall fighting power were factored in, he sat firmly at the bottom.
"I'm the kind of person who belongs behind a desk, you know."
"You say you're at the bottom, but that's only within the Twelve Vassals, isn't it? Have some confidence."
"I don't want to hear that from Steward Woo Do-Il, who's in the exact same last place."
The three demons the Twelve Vassals had been assigned to handle. Among them, Ko Yu-Yeon was luring the fish-headed demon with the trident—the one they had dubbed Sha Wujing—and grumbling the whole way. Woo Do-Il merely shrugged.
They did not get along, but he was not so lacking in judgment that he would pick a fight with Ko Yu-Yeon in an emergency like this.
"I still don't understand why everyone always treats you and me like a set menu."
That, however, was purely Woo Do-Il's private feeling. Ko Yu-Yeon felt no such restraint.
He was openly displaying his displeasure.
"…That's exactly what I want to say."
They were the two who got along worst among the Twelve Vassals, and the two who ran neck-and-neck for last place in combat power.
Yet because their abilities happened to have excellent synergy, they were always deployed together whenever something like this happened.
Normally, repeatedly crossing the line between life and death together would foster a certain camaraderie without anyone noticing. Their relationship, however, only continued to deteriorate.
"I prefer to set private feelings aside in situations like this. Do you absolutely have to drag yours out into the open?"
"…Is that something Steward Woo Do-Il, who just called me the bottom, should be saying?"
He had only been grumbling because he hated being thrown into combat. The moment Woo Do-Il went out of his way to mention combat rankings, Ko Yu-Yeon's mood soured and he snapped back. Woo Do-Il simply shook his head.
"I truly cannot grasp the standard of your jokes."
"Then don't cross the line."
Woo Do-Il claimed he had only been joking about Ko Yu-Yeon's grumbling, yet the instant he sensed Sha Wujing beginning to gather something, he activated his ability without hesitation.
The massive mana that had been coalescing in the sky scattered at once.
By applying his ability-nullification power, he could cancel not only superpowers but, as now, magic and martial arts as well.
Layered on top of that, Ko Yu-Yeon's illusions made luring Sha Wujing almost trivially easy.
They displayed that kind of seamless coordination—and yet the two of them could never grow close.
It was not because of some past incident. Their personalities were simply too different.
Responding to the sudden appearance of the demons was not the family's responsibility alone.
Guilds and military units had also sortied to deal with them.
The problem was that every force outside the family—guilds, the army, and the rest—had no idea that these demons were transcendent combatants capable of wielding mana.
They simply thought of them as unusually strong monsters of a type never seen before.
Bang! Bang! Ratatatat!!!
The combined force of guild hunters and soldiers poured fire onto the ox-headed demon, the Bull Demon King.
"Shoot! Empty everything you've got!"
Countless artillery pieces belched flame without pause while hunters and soldiers armed with personal firearms raked the target with rifle fire.
"Mooooo!!!"
The Bull Demon King ignored it all and charged.
Kuuuwaaa!!!
The instant its hooves struck the earth, the ground cracked and the whole area shook.
"C-Cease fire!!!"
The earthquake the Bull Demon King had triggered made the emplaced guns rock; hunters and soldiers mid-burst toppled over. The commander immediately ordered a cease-fire.
If anyone kept shooting while falling, friendly fire was inevitable. It was the only choice.
"Muuuuu!!!"
The moment the pressure of continuous fire vanished, the Bull Demon King burst into a great laugh and slammed into the hunters at the very front.
"Gyaaaa!!!"
They tried to stop its charge with superpowers, but the S-class strength tore those abilities apart as if they were paper.
Not only the powers—the hunters themselves were shredded by that overwhelming charge.
Those who at least managed to scream as they were flung away were the lucky ones who still had their lives. Hunters who died without even a sound kept appearing one after another.
"E-Everyone, withdra—"
"Everyone else, fall back. Leave me."
The officer in command was about to order a full retreat when a single hunter stepped forward and spoke with perfect clarity.
Her voice was soft, yet it carried an unshaken confidence that reached every ear. They all nodded.
The youngest SS-class hunter, a rising star watched not only in Korea but across the world.
Han Si-Eun accelerated in and seized the Bull Demon King's horns.
"Huu… this is a bit much. I really shouldn't have had that drink."
Catching the horns stopped the charge, but the moment they locked into a pure contest of mana-fueled strength, Si-Eun felt the strain.
The opponent was clearly weaker than she was, yet its recovery was bizarrely fast.
"…What are you all doing?! I said run already!"
She knew she would need to go all-out, yet she had bought them time so they could escape. Seeing the guild and military units reforming their encirclement instead made her shout in frustration.
"B-But leaving Hunter Han Si-Eun alone—"
"Does headcount matter in an S-class fight? Ordinary weapons won't work unless you've got nuclear ordnance!"
At her cry, fear suddenly spread like a contagion and everyone edged backward.
They had thought it was merely a strong monster; the words "S-class" filled them with terror.
"Huu, good thing they finally got it."
As the hunters and soldiers withdrew, Si-Eun—already feeling her strength ebbing—shook her head.
Then she forcibly twisted the Bull Demon King's head and released the horns she had been gripping.
"Mooooo!"
The demon, which had been trying to force its way forward, collapsed under the sudden counterforce.
In that opening Si-Eun swiftly assembled the rods at her waist into a long pole and fitted the dagger Jeong-Hoon had given her during the Nova hotel terrorist attack.
Grasping the completed spear in both hands, she lunged and stabbed the Bull Demon King in a blur of speed.
Until she learned martial arts and magic from the family, Si-Eun had also fought with firearms.
Close combat using acceleration had been possible, but only as a last resort.
After learning to control mana, however, she preferred melee weapons she could hold in her hands when facing strong monsters rather than guns or ranged arms.
Coating a weapon with mana and fighting with it was simply more comfortable when the weapon was held directly.
"Muuuuu!!!"
"…Tch!"
She had clearly pierced the heart, yet regeneration began from the wound itself.
Si-Eun yanked the spear free and put distance between them.
"What the hell is this monster? Would Chairman Lee know?"
Even as an SS-class hunter she had only ever seen a monster regenerate after a pierced heart once before—the celestial golem in Hwanung's sky garden.
That was why Jeong-Hoon had come to mind unbidden. The moment mana began to roil around the Bull Demon King, she used acceleration to get outside its range.
For an instant the spear in her hands had reacted to the demon's mana.
"Moooore!!!"
Her instinct had been correct. Matching the Bull Demon King's roar, mana that had reacted to the scattered firearms and other metal around them disassembled the metal and coalesced.
When the demon stretched out its hand toward that mass of mana, it became a gigantic club.
Wielding a club roughly twice Si-Eun's height, the Bull Demon King swung it at her.
Kuuu-guu-guu!!!
The air itself vibrated; a massive shockwave rolled toward her. Si-Eun poured mana into her spear and swung, canceling the wave.
"This weird pressure is starting to piss me off."
They had clashed mana against mana, yet she—whose rank was higher—felt as if she had taken the loss. Si-Eun's brows drew slightly together.
The more the Bull Demon King poured out mana, the more her own control slipped, just a little at a time.
Then the demon slipped through those gaps and launched a ferocious assault, forcing Si-Eun onto pure defense.
The thought that she would lose if this continued made her explode her mana. A colossal blade of aura surged up the spear.
The aura climbed the dagger, forming a giant sword several meters long that carved horizontally through the Bull Demon King in a single stroke.
"Huu…"
Watching the demon fall in two pieces, Si-Eun let out a deep breath, reset her grip on the spear, and drove it toward the falling head.
Given the regeneration she had seen so far, there was no way it would simply die.
"Huh?"
Just as expected, the upper half of the collapsing Bull Demon King moved of its own accord and opened its jaws wide.
Kwachik!
It bit down on the mana-wreathed tip of her spear.
Kiiik-kiiik!
Mana crashed against mana, scattering sparks.
While they were locked like that, the severed lower half was dragged across the ground and reattached itself to the torso.
"Grrrrr!!!"
Eyes meeting those of the Bull Demon King as it panted with the rough sound of grinding steel, Si-Eun tried to pull up more mana.
Yet even direct contact alone kept fouling her control.
Realizing the genuine danger, she forced the mana upward, only to feel it crushed under an oppressive weight that made her scowl in frustration.
The only option was to release the spear and open distance.
But letting go of the spear now would create a whole new set of problems.
"You haven't yet learned how to resist sealing mana, young lady."
Si-Eun had been about to drop the spear and leap back when an old man's cackling voice suddenly sounded from behind the Bull Demon King. Her eyes flew wide.
Seogeok!
A single streak of light flashed past, and the Bull Demon King's head soared into the air.
The strike was so clean and so fast that even SS-class Si-Eun failed to register it for a heartbeat.
An old man in a suit, wearing a plain white mask and holding a one-handed sword, had appeared. Si-Eun swallowed hard, eyes still wide.
"Decent skill, but you've still got a lot to learn. Well, at least you got those deadweights out of the way. Good work."
"…Are you perhaps someone from the family?"
When Si-Eun carefully asked the masked old man whose tone carried that cackling laugh, he paused for an instant.
She had not assumed he belonged to the family merely because he had cut down the Bull Demon King.
She had assumed it because he was trying to protect people.
"Hm? What, you're family too? I can never remember the young vassals' faces. Sorry about that."
"No, that's not it. I'm a friend of Chairman Lee Jeong-Hoon."
"…! Ah, so you're that hunter—the Family Head's friend! My apologies."
Nodding in understanding, the old man flicked his sword and disrupted the Bull Demon King's regeneration.
The trajectory of each swing was visible, yet the speed and cleanliness were such that no one could tell when the blade had actually moved.
"Leave this place to an old man like me and withdraw."
"…Will you be all right?"
"Of course!"
The old man was toying with the Bull Demon King as if it were a child, yet no matter how she looked he did not appear to be S-class, so Si-Eun was about to shake her head.
Then an enormous surge of mana erupted from his body, and she nodded instead.
Han Si-Eun was not so ignorant that she failed to recognize the sign of S-class mana saturating an elder's body. She accelerated away at once.
Confirming she was clear, the old man—an elder of the family—unleashed his mana to the fullest and completed the S-class awakening he had been suppressing all this time.
Once Yeo Tae-Hyeon, Han Su-Ho, Park Jin-Yang, and Dong Sa-Seong confirmed that the demons they had named Sun Wukong, Zhu Bajie, and Sha Wujing had been lured by Jeon Mun-Jae, Baek Si-Hwan, Ko Yu-Yeon, and Woo Do-Il to the designated point, they squeezed the triggers of the anti-materiel sniper rifles they had been holding ready.
Thoom!
The massive rounds left the monster-grade anti-materiel rifles with such force that even the four S-class-and-above Awakened rocked in place.
The three demons struck by those bullets were lifted clean off the ground and hung in midair.
"Hey, at least radio us before you shoot?!"
"They closed in too fast. Couldn't help it."
Jeon Mun-Jae protested after feeling a bullet graze past his head. Dong Sa-Seong merely shrugged a half-hearted apology and fired again at a demon trying to rise.
Thung!
Matching Dong Sa-Seong's shots, the four vassals kept hammering the demons, pinning them in place so they could not move.
In that interval the four who had been luring them slipped away from the area at high speed.
The place they had drawn the demons to was a stretch of coastal no-man's-land left empty after monsters had once rampaged through it.
From a sniping position 1.5 kilometers away, the four confirmed the lure team had cleared the zone and then radioed in.
Tudududu!!!
Attack helicopters that had been standing by immediately lifted and opened up with their autocannons on the demons.
Five gunships poured streams of shells while the rockets mounted under their wings streaked out.
Kuuuwaaa!!!
The rockets detonated and the ground itself seemed to catch fire.
Even from a distance the burning demons were clearly visible.
Puh-buh-bung!
The moment those flames were confirmed, self-propelled howitzers hidden nearby began their barrage.
Bombers launched from the aircraft carrier waiting at sea swept in and dropped their payloads.
There was a strange prejudice that only nuclear weapons among modern arms were effective against monsters confirmed S-class or higher, because anything less simply would not work.
Han Si-Eun had shared that prejudice and had shouted as much to the soldiers and hunters, yet modern weapons did, in fact, work.
There were any number of recorded cases of S-class-or-higher monsters being subjugated with conventional modern firepower.
The reason people still believed otherwise was simple.
Against an S-class monster, the firepower was simply insufficient.
As if to prove the point, the three demons reeled under the successive firepower show and burned brightly.