King of Dobong-gu (1)
The long, long midnight battle at Bukhansan Fortress was over.
"Still, I got plenty out of it."
The haul from this fight: twenty-two awakened zombies. One corpse of that ridiculously strong chuuni leather-jacket awaken-er. Roughly eighty spears.
"Looking at it like this… not half bad, is it?"
And above all else, there was one prize that mattered most.
"Your name was Lee Se-a, right?"
"Eek! Y-yes! That's right!"
"Why are you shaking so hard?"
On the way home, the healer barely said a word. At first I thought she was just exhausted, but that didn't seem to be it either.
"Were things rough while they had you locked up?"
"W-w-w-well, about that…"
Seriously? She was worse at talking face-to-face than when we were scribbling notes through a crow. Extreme introvert type?
I barely managed any conversation before we reached the house—and only then did the truth come out.
"Uh… oh… it's just a regular house…"
"Well, yeah. People live in houses."
"I thought you'd live in a mansion. Your clothes look so… aristocratic."
Ah. Right. I'd completely forgotten I was still in a dress.
"So that's why you were scared?"
"Well… actually… because you're a necromancer…"
"Ah."
Lee Se-a hemmed and hawed, watching my face, before finally spitting out the honest truth. She'd thought I was a summoner at first—then found out after the rescue that I was a necromancer, and that had terrified her.
Another necromancer-hater!
I'm a genuinely decent necromancer, thank you very much.
"I don't do bad things, so stop worrying."
Still, she was a precious healer. Time to treat her properly.
I sat her down on a chair I'd stolen from a convenience store and started the interrogation.
"Name: Lee Se-a. Age?"
"T-twenty."
Yikes. That's young. So when the apocalypse hit two years ago… no, by calendar year it would be three years ago. She was a first-year in high school when the world ended?
She must have had it rough.
"How'd you get caught?"
"They found our hideout. They realized I was an awakener and dragged me off… and, well, I'm a woman."
"What?!"
These absolute scumbags!
I slammed the plastic table I'd also brought from the convenience store, seething.
"I should've just killed every last one of them! They didn't… do anything to you, did they?"
"No. Once they knew I was a healer, the guy in the leather jacket told them not to touch me."
"Well, that's a relief, at least."
Even in a ruined world, healers being valuable seemed to be a universal consensus.
Those Bukhansan bastards, though—if I'd known they were this much garbage, I would've killed a few more. A hundred zombies would have been so nice. From now on, if I see them, I kill them. I'm a good necromancer, after all.
"Were you part of any group before?"
"No. Just a survivor group."
So they weren't all clustered down in Gangnam. Small survivor groups seemed to be scattered everywhere. Which meant she probably didn't have much useful intel…
"Your class? It can't just say 'Healer' on it."
"It's Restorer. My main skill is turning things back to their original form."
"You said living things are hard, right?"
"Yes. Biological tissue is complicated, so it drains a lot of stamina."
"Let's test it. Ttacttac-i!"
Ttacttac-i, who'd been wandering nearby, came running at my call and snapped to attention. I peeled off the layers of tape stuck all over him and turned to Se-a.
"Heal this."
"I've… never treated an undead before… but I'll try."
Se-a aimed her palms at Ttacttac-i, closed her eyes, and focused. And then, astonishingly, his rattling ribs knit back together, and the cracks spiderwebbing across his bones began to vanish. In less than a minute, Ttacttac-i had been restored to a skeleton gleaming pure white!
Clack-clack-clack!
"That's incredible."
"It barely took any effort. Undead aren't living tissue—they're basically minerals, I guess."
She added that bones, as part of an undead, didn't function as living matter so much as they simply existed as objects. Which meant zombies and mummies would get the same inanimate treatment.
"Great. Then go heal the undead who got wrecked saving you."
"Okay. How many?"
"Three hundred seventy-two."
"Excuse me?"
"A lot of them took damage climbing the walls. About a hundred got completely pulverized in the last fight, so those might be rough."
"…What?!"
As I said it, I had the undead form up in a single-file line. The intact ones scuttled around gathering their comrades' scattered, rattling parts off the ground and joined the queue with them.
"Heh. Looking good."
From now on, as long as I collected the broken undead after a fight, I could recycle them forever. Do this right, and I basically had infinite power.
"Well then… that just leaves this guy."
The corpse in the leather jacket. Leader of the criminal gang, no doubt. I stepped outside and tried converting him into an undead.
· Zombie King
· Skeleton Mage
· Ghoul
· Dullahan
"Ohh…!"
As expected—this guy had been a high-grade awakener. Just looking at the undead options on the list put me in a good mood.
Zombie King would be a higher-tier undead of the zombie line. Skeleton Mage… felt like the type that would sling debuffs. Ghoul seemed like a different branch of zombie evolution.
"But… yeah. There's only one real choice."
Dullahan!
Even among ordinary undead, a Dullahan was solidly mid-to-upper tier. A warrior type might not quite match the leather-jacket aesthetic, but the sheer resonance of the name was overwhelming.
"Dullahan. No question!"
The moment I chose Dullahan, the familiar blue smoke rose up. But this time, unlike the others, the smoke condensed and forged itself into armor. His flesh hardened like metal, and over it formed dark blue-black plate. In his hand, a whip of vertebrae had already taken shape.
And the instant everything but the head was complete—
"—I pledge myself to my master."
"Eh?"
The Dullahan rose, dropped to one knee, and spoke to me!
"You can talk!"
"Yes. I am capable of speech."
"You're so polite!"
"I stand before my master. Naturally, I must be respectful."
Yikes. Goosebumps prickled up my arms. This guy was a complete one-eighty from the arrogant bastard from earlier!
"Hmm. Do you still have your memories from when you were alive? Do you remember the conversation before you died?"
"Regrettably, even my exceptional memory fails me on that point. I recall dying to a spear that fell from the sky—but everything immediately before and after has been unnaturally erased."
I thought back to what the Dullahan had been saying before he died. A being above the heavens… The thought struck me that this "being" might be connected to the System—the one that opened the gates and handed out classes and skills.
"Alright. Got it. What's your original name?"
"Han Seong-jin. 'Seong' for star, 'Jin' for to shake the world. A name befitting one who appeared upon this earth like a great star and made his power known."
"Uh… I'm just gonna call you Lahan."
"To be bestowed a name by my master—there could be no greater honor."
What is wrong with this guy!
Still arrogant, still insufferable, still full of chuuni energy—but slap polite speech on top of it and the whole package got genuinely weird.
"First, show me your abilities. What's your class?"
"I am an Architect. A Heroic-rank class capable of creating matter."
"Ohh. Anything?"
"Mineral-based materials are quite simple, though metal alone is difficult. I can also produce plant-based materials within certain limits."
So that was how he'd mass-produced the spears. The stone spearheads made sense now too. Architect—building-oriented, then. That would explain the limitations.
"Most of the walls of Bukhansan Fortress as they stand today were repaired and expanded by my own hand. A feat only I, Lahan, could accomplish."
Whoa. Hearing it put that way, the ability was even more impressive than I'd thought.
No—why had he been using this power to fight people in the first place? He could've just built houses and shelters, gathered decent people around him. Then again, if he'd had that kind of intelligence, he wouldn't have been playing gang boss in a den of criminals.
"However… perhaps because I have become undead, my abilities seem somewhat diminished."
"Can't be helped."
Immortal Legacy was a Heroic-rank skill, after all. Getting a Heroic-rank class undead for free off a single Heroic skill did feel a little like cheating.
"How much weaker?"
"The basic skills I obtained upon first changing class remain intact, but most of the skills I earned through achievements have either vanished or dropped in rank."
"That's a real shame."
"On the other hand, becoming undead has made my body considerably more durable."
Still—letting an undead with this kind of power just sit around felt wasteful. He gave me the creeps, sure, but he'd led a whole group before. Maybe I could put him in charge of some of the undead.
"I'm putting the new zombies under you. Think of them as your subordinates and manage them."
"As you command. I shall forge these dull, incompetent zombies into an elite force and offer them up to my master."
This bastard. I'd noticed it in the fight too—he talks way too much.
"Hmm… what now?"
At this point, I'd finally realized something. In a body that never aged, a life free from the fear of death—what was the most terrifying thing of all?
Boredom.
I went exploring because I was bored. I made undead because I was bored. I searched for people nearby because I was bored. Look at each reason separately and they all seemed different, but the root cause of every single one was the same: I was bored out of my mind.
"Yeah. I need more people."
And by "people," I didn't mean actual living humans—I meant proper intelligent beings, like Lahan who'd just joined us.
Society's systems had all collapsed? Fine. Then I'd build my own and live in it—I was Time Bill Gates, after all.
It sounded a little grandiose, but there was no other choice.
"I'm going to turn this whole northern district into my own personal world."
Growing a faction might draw the Special Security Bureau's attention, but you couldn't refuse to make kimchi just because you were afraid of maggots. And it wasn't like I'd done anything wrong. I'd simply eliminated exactly twenty-three evils of society. They wouldn't just show up out of nowhere and put a blade to my throat… right?
With my goal set, I began to move in earnest.
First objective… become the King of Dobong-gu!