#39 Uprooting (2)
#39 Uprooting (2)
After a long wait, I finally sensed movement from the unfinished product being carried away. I caught its fading scent, roused my stiff body, and stretched like a cat.
'They took longer than I expected.'
The moment it climbed into a car, the moment I confirmed it with Insight, my gaze sharpened. A status equivalent to a B-class—surely one of the tails.
'I don't know how far they're going, but—'
If I follow, I'll be led straight to their base of operations. It wasn't long before the car slipped onto the highway.
'The Hunter-Only Lane.'
A lane with no speed limit, reserved exclusively for hunters. Sure enough, the driver punched the accelerator close to 200 km/h. Perry dropped down onto my shoulder, and the instant she landed I wrapped her in shadows and tentacles so she wouldn't fall off, then ran. The tail crossed the bridge connecting Gimpo to Ganghwado Island.
'There are people here?'
Sparse, but I caught traces of human presence now and then. Maybe they hadn't abandoned the island because it's so close to the mainland. I trailed the tail across the bridge, and before long, it parked.
'How much further?'
The tail walked for a good while, then gradually made its way into increasingly isolated terrain.
'...'
Seeing the signs of human activity thin out, I nodded to myself. Nine out of ten, this would be one of their hideouts. I sensed a cluster of presences gathered at a moderate distance. Clairvoyance—the evolved form of Dark Vision—let me pierce through the buildings some distance away and make out their figures.
'Insight can't reach that far, though.'
Maybe it was thanks to everything I'd been through. Instinctively, I could feel that they were the Prodigal Sons.
'In that case.'
There was no need to keep the tail alive any longer. I launched spikes. The tail jolted in alarm and tried to react, but it should have moved a fraction of a second sooner.
"——!"
Both wrists and both ankles were pierced, nailing it to the ground. Before it could scream, I gagged its mouth.
"..."
I gave it a brief moment for the pain to ebb. Only when I saw its face drained of color, deathly pale, did I release the gag.
"...!"
Maybe it was the effect of Intimidation—the tail was trembling. I figured it would answer me meekly now, and stepped closer.
"Answ—?"
From beneath my foot, I heard something quietly tearing. A sound so faint that without my Hearing skill, I would never have caught it. As if confirming it wasn't my imagination, mana slowly began gathering. The tail's deathly pale face regained its original color. And what that meant was—
'A trap?!'
I clawed frantically at the ground. A torn scroll lay there. A scroll buried and designed to tear when weight was applied to it. The moment I shredded the now-grinning tail with my shadows, a halo of light started coalescing.
'...!'
I pulled up every ounce of mana I could. I resisted the scroll's magic, but the light kept gathering. This was no ordinary scroll.
'This is...?!'
At the very least, this wasn't something the Squares had crafted. I could feel a coercive force—a powerful magic pressing down on me, trying to enforce its effect without the slightest consideration for the user's condition.
'Silent Mouth...!'
It had to be his doing. I'd thought things were going too smoothly. If I let myself be carried along, I'd fall right into the trap they'd dug for me...!
"——!"
I gritted my teeth and resisted the magic Silent Mouth had embedded in the scroll with everything I had. But it's difficult to fully resist magic left behind by Silent Mouth. Even if he hadn't recovered his original power, he was still a mage so exceptional that only a handful could match him.
'Dammit...!'
***
The halo of light flickered, and the waiting tails fired the spells they'd prepared one after another. Three-verse, even four-verse incantations. Magic of every kind flooded the area. The impact was so powerful that the protective wards laid across the walls shattered. No matter who it was, no one could survive that carpet bombardment of magic. Convinced of the kill, the tail's lips twisted into a distorted smirk. But when the dust cleared moments later, it was forced to frown.
The situation made no sense. Yet no matter how it thought about it, only one possibility came to mind.
"...It failed?"
The tail muttered, disbelief dripping from its voice. How? Had it actually withstood the immense magic contained in a scroll made by Silent Mouth himself?
"It was this strong."
The tails standing by murmured darkly. In the middle of contacting somewhere—they began to feel an intense heat.
***
My body was quivering. The moment I lost focus, I would be dragged somewhere instantly. In the end, my mana ran dry, and my Great Magic Power pulled up mana from the depths. After clenching my jaw and straining with everything I had—the light finally scattered by the narrowest of margins.
"...!"
I gulped down rough breaths several times. My head felt slightly foggy—maybe the early signs of mental exhaustion. The amount of mana embedded in that single scroll was absurdly vast.
'I never expected them to pull something like this.'
I hadn't even considered that I was being baited, but I'd managed to resist by a hair's breadth. The trap had failed—but I realized I'd gotten arrogant.
'Things have been going too well lately.'
Gu Sang-seop, Gu Ma-jun, Lee Baek-seom, the Blind Spot, the island off the west coast.
The reason I'd been able to keep the upper hand against them wasn't because I was exceptional—it was because they didn't know I existed. And that advantage was slowly vanishing. I'd shown myself several times now; it wouldn't be strange if they'd started to sense something off. No—maybe they'd been aware of my existence all along. I couldn't guarantee this was their first trap. That would mean the unfinished product in Seongdong-gu had been bait from the very start. I'd been neatly played.
'The one saving grace is—'
I'd been fooled, but I hadn't been caught. I'd just barely managed to resist the scroll's magic and break free. If things had gone even a little bit wrong...
'...I might have died.'
I didn't know how much they knew. Had they identified that I was the one hunting them? Or had they sensed something vague and dug a trap to test the waters? Either way, the important thing was:
'The trap failed.'
I steadied my breathing as I registered the presences clustered a fair distance away. There was no presence that felt like Silent Mouth. Then there was no problem at all. By the time I confirmed that, my breathing had settled.
[Mana Regeneration (D) Lv.4 proficiency at maximum. Mana Regeneration (D) Lv.4 → Mana Regeneration (D) Lv.5]
My mana was recovering. I set Perry down apart from me for a moment and sank slowly into the shadows.
'—I'm going to hunt them down.'
My shadows extended across my unfolded spiritual field. It took barely over a second to infiltrate the building's interior.
There were only six of them in the basement level. And all of them were tails. Even so, they posed no threat. Gradually, black flames kindled and began to spread, swallowing the building's interior. There was no smoke, but the heat was scorching the floor. Soon enough, through Clairvoyance, I could see them stirring restlessly.
'They'll be prepared down there, so...'
Fighting by going down into the basement would put me at a disadvantage—I needed to smoke them out. Before long, unable to endure the heat, they emerged onto the upper floor. Just like the Bam in Daejeon, just like the Blind Spot hideout. The second floor of this derelict building—they seemed to have carved a passage leading from the basement to the upper floor. The tails descending the stairs saw the black flames, recoiled, and retreated. They must have figured jumping from the second floor was safer than coming down to the first.
'Clever, but—'
They opened the windows and dropped down one by one. I skewered one with shadows mid-air, killing it. The next one, already falling, barely caught the windowsill, and the other tails hauled it back up. They changed direction and started running toward the highest part of the building. It didn't matter.
'If I keep just two of them alive—'
That should be plenty to extract information. All six of them appeared to be tails. In the end, deciding that jumping out the windows was impossible, the tails climbed all the way to the rooftop. In the meantime, the flames were slowly crawling up to the upper floors.
'I'm not letting you escape.'
Maybe they decided there was no way out. From the rooftop—a height of five stories—they leaped in different directions. Under normal circumstances, that would be suicide, or at best you'd break something even with luck. But every one of them was a hunter equivalent to B-class. A fall from a five-story building wouldn't seriously injure them. While they were in mid-air—I slaughtered the two closest to me, but the remaining three were already sprinting away at full speed.
"..."
I'd waited below, worried they'd climb down through the windows if I went up. That turned out not to be the best approach. I sighed, watching them flee in all different directions.
'Do they really want this badly enough to stake their lives on it?'
As B-classes, they'd be valuable assets anywhere. No—they probably only reached B-class thanks to the Prodigal Sons' support in the first place. Still, I doubted whether it was worth risking their lives over.
'Lunatics.'
The heretical Prodigal Sons—just thinking about them made my teeth grind. They'd been seduced, told to create their own world, told that once the Elixir was complete, everything would be over. Never knowing that the Elixir itself was a fantasy that could never be made. Mixing the blood of God-created beings was never going to produce the blood of a god.
'...Whether they were deceived or not.'
What they'd done so far could never be forgiven. Tail or underling, I had no intention of leaving a single one alive. I caught up to one, and it whipped up a storm of magic in retaliation. I raised my own mana against it. What seemed like an even fight was soon corrected by Great Magic Power, and my mana crushed and suppressed it.
"...!"
As if unable to believe it had been suppressed, it thrashed to resist again. I severed its neck with shadows and cut it down. Two left ahead.
'The rest are—'
Running without even looking back. Worried they'd slip beyond my detection range if I took my time, I sprinted at full speed and fired spikes. I sliced through the tendons in the wrists and ankles of the one pinned to the ground, then crushed it under the slab of flesh I'd stored in my mouth with Stowage, pinning it down. For good measure, I tore off its pouch.
'That's one.'
One secured. The last one was teetering right at the edge of my detection range, about to break free.
'Thank god it's an island.'
Ganghwado Island was close to the mainland and still connected by a bridge, so it wasn't a completely abandoned island—but human activity was still sparse.
'At this rate.'
I could finish this before a commotion broke out. No matter how fast it ran, it couldn't match my speed. My stats might be slightly behind, but the gap in skills was extreme. I caught up before long and was just pinning it down when a halo of light began to shimmer. That damned scroll again. I snuffed out its life immediately, and its body alone vanished to somewhere.
'...In the end, I only caught one.'
A little disappointing, but killing one was better than letting it slip away. I turned my steps back toward the tail I had captured.
***
"Ha... look at this."
As if she couldn't believe her eyes, Hong Yuri's brow furrowed as she sipped coffee through a straw. The lingering traces of mana—and more than anything, her own eyes. Others might have been fooled, but traces remained. And as long as traces remained, you could never fool the Tracking Magic Eye.
"Strolled around as brazen as you please, is that it?"
At the fact that a monster had openly roamed the heart of Seoul, the corners of Hong Yuri's mouth twitched. She interlaced her fingers, cracked her knuckles, and twisted her neck. Her crimson eyes deepened to a dark, rich red.
"This time—I'm not letting you get away."