Kettle
"That went in nicely," Pacific said.
"Yeah. Perfect timing."
With that, Won-goo approached Montage.
"Hyung-nim. Your timing was spot on."
"Went in nice and clean, didn't it?"
"Yes. Couldn't have been better."
"Then I reckon we can head in too?"
"Hold on. The laborers go in first. That's what we're paying them for."
At Won-goo's hand signal, his crew sprang into motion, and the laborers waiting in the distance began to move as well.
They weren't the main force leading this operation—just extra hands who'd joined for the pay. Their defining trait was simple: they worked exactly as hard as they'd been paid to.
They were what people called freelance day laborers.
Since they fought for a daily wage, you'd think they'd slack off, but that wasn't the case. From the moment they took the money, they too put their lives on the line.
It meant they'd follow any order—so long as it wasn't a outright suicide mission.
In this apocalyptic world, even the simplest-looking jobs demanded you stake your life on them.
Even stepping outside the Shelter for a short errand was a gamble with death.
That was precisely why survivors couldn't help but cling to whatever sweetness they could find.
Perhaps thanks to Joce's whistling, Dulla was rampaging across the field, carving through enemies left and right. The terrifying thing about Dulla as a mounted knight was that the steed beneath him wasn't alive either.
Neither Dulla nor the horse ever stopped.
Dulla in particular ignored incoming attacks entirely and kept swinging, which meant he was performing far beyond expectations.
"Director. Dulla's durability seems to have improved dramatically."
"Yeah. Looks like the Seal is doing its job properly."
The boost in strength carried real weight. As his body grew, his power grew with it, and with greater strength came the ability to wear heavier armor.
On top of that, his toughness had improved too. If the common mobs were honeybees, Dulla was now a hornet—a hornet among hornets, the oversized, exceptionally vicious kind.
"Ogres!"
Far off in the distance, ogres came barreling toward them, thundering against the ground in a hurry.
When ogres appeared, a whole retinue of lesser monsters typically followed in their wake. But this time was unusual.
Behind the first ogre came more ogres.
Two more, in fact.
The lead ogre was a full-grown adult exceeding five meters, while the ones trailing behind were sub-adults, only刚刚 around the four-meter mark.
"Not again. An ogre dragging other ogres around as underlings."
"That's rare, isn't it?"
"Ogres are proud. And they sit at the very top of the food chain, so they strike out on their own before they're fully grown—otherwise they'd never survive. A mother ogre trailing very young pups is one thing, but this? In human terms, they'd be in the prime of their rebellious years. You think they'd listen to anyone?"
"Not a chance."
Word of the ogres spread, and the Fishers began converging near the Trailer. Until recently their numbers had been modest, but now there were a good twenty of them.
Money draws a crowd—that was the eternal law of the world.
These weren't amateurs working as bait like the rookie Fishers; these were the real thing, and even twenty of them made for a formidable force.
"Three ogres. Can you handle them?"
"The surrounding mobs—"
"You want us to clear the mobs first?"
"That's right."
"Support's approved, but you'll need to take them down fast. We can't stall here."
The Fisher speaking for the group was a middle-aged man who went by the handle Kettle.
He had a slight build and stood short, but he was a genuine veteran Fisher.
He'd overcome a poor natural physical constitution through his Gift and Coin enhancements.
And among Fishers, he had quite the name for himself.
Fishers died at even higher rates than ordinary survivors, and of all those who perished, the ones who died most often were the baits.
At the Fishing Grounds, anyone with promise was pulled from bait duty and trained up into a proper Fisher, which meant for a former bait to survive and become a veteran, both luck and skill had to be on his side.
Kettle had both.
"No answer?"
Won-goo asked again. Kettle turned briefly to exchange a few words with the Fishers behind him, then spoke up.
"Do we need to take them alive?"
"Oh, for crying out loud... Look at the situation. Does it look like we've got time to be gently capturing anything?"
"Then we'll take them down quick."
"Good. Let's move. Hyun-sung—tell Sapiens and our Master to send Fisher support."
The Fishers hefted their weighty gear and started walking. Their pace wasn't fast.
At a glance it almost looked frustratingly slow, but there was a reason for it.
The equipment Fishers used for hunting was uniformly heavy, rigid, and anything but portable. Among it all were weapons one man couldn't even wield alone.
"Can that many men really handle three ogres?"
"They're veterans. They'll manage. And that Kettle is something of a Named in the fishing trade, so it should be doable. Right, Pacific?"
"Yeah, that guy's famous. And skilled, too."
"What's he like personality-wise?"
"Like most Fishers—terrible with people. They're not the type to nurture dreams and futures, you know. That man is a hardcore addict."
"Is that why they call him Kettle?"
Mu Beob-sa asked.
"Nope. There was that famous case, remember?"
"What case?"
"The one where a father beat a school bully—and the teacher trying to cover it up—to death with a kettle."
"The guy who turned himself in carrying a bloodstained kettle? That was HIM?"
Won-goo remembered it too. It had once been the scandal of the nation.
"So they say. He served time, then got out."
When you heard the name Kettle, a stainless-steel kettle was probably what came to mind—but the kettle 'Kettle' had wielded as a weapon was a cast-iron enamel one.
More than sufficient as a deadly weapon.
"That man's got a real edge to him."
KUUUUNG!
By then, the adult ogre was squared off against Dulla. When it brought its massive wooden club crashing down, the whole area shuddered with the impact.
Everyone assumed this was the end of Dulla's role—that he'd done more than enough of his job already. But then something unexpected happened.
Dulla dodged the ogre's attack. Barely.
"It... dodged?"
However big Dulla had grown, there was no way he should have been able to withstand an ogre's blow.
People occasionally compared a survivor's strength to an ogre's, and there were indeed survivors capable of output on par with one.
But even if they possessed the same strength, they couldn't produce the same destructive force.
The ogre's power was immense, and so was its mass—a weight no human could hope to bear. A full-grown adult ogre carried a weight comparable to an African elephant.
When that kind of strength, backed by that kind of mass, swung a giant club, no amount of raw power should have been enough to endure it.
Which was why everyone assumed Dulla's part was done.
Then something interesting happened.
The steed Dulla rode leapt backward, scraping past the swing by a hair.
"Chul-soo! What's going on? Did Dulla dodge that?"
"I don't think so, sir. Seems like it's a function of the phantom steed itself."
"If it can do that, its utility just skyrocketed, hasn't it?"
Won-goo nodded silently.
"Chul-soo. Recall him now."
"Yes, sir!"
The beauty of Capsule Monsters was that as long as Chul-soo could see Dulla within his field of vision, he could issue commands. Spoken orders were the fastest and most immediate, but a command could also be sent from a distance through thought alone.
The drawback was the delay.
Geum Chul-soo kept the recall command at the front of his mind as he watched Dulla.
Perhaps thirty seconds passed?
Then Dulla, who had shown no reaction until now, suddenly wheeled around and came galloping back toward the Trailer.
The ogre gave chase, but it couldn't match the phantom steed's speed—it was fast enough to outpace even its burst acceleration.
And as it ran, the phantom horse leapt and wove its way clear of every monster in its path.
It looked less like Dulla steering it and more like the horse itself answering Geum Chul-soo's command.
Meanwhile, the other crew members and monsters collided in earnest.
The ogres, robbed of their target, floundered for a moment before spotting the intruding survivors and flying into a frenzy.
Through it all, the Fishers quietly went about their work.
Some rushed in to draw the ogres' attention; others seized the opening to land powerful strikes. Not blows on the scale of an ogre's attack, but heavy enough to deal real damage.
Punching through an ogre's thick hide as an ordinary survivor was harder than it sounded.
And one Fisher was doing both at once—drawing aggro and dealing damage in the same breath.
Kettle.
Unusually, he fought with a bow. It didn't look particularly powerful, but there was something fascinating about it: Kettle was firing arrows from directly in front of the ogre's nose.
Which naturally made him the ogre's target every single time. The moment he became the focus of its attacks, he'd open the distance to buy himself time, then loose another arrow.
His movements weren't especially agile, and the arrows didn't look especially dangerous. To the ogre, it must have felt like being pricked with needles.
Except those arrows were coated in poison.
And a potent one at that—the ogres struck by his arrows reacted with a distinctly pained agony.
Won-goo watched Kettle's fighting style with great interest.
"Pacific."
"What?"
"How many Coins is that Kettle guy worth?"
"Not that many, I'd guess. Forty? Somewhere around there. Why, something wrong?"
"Just asking. His eyes are exceptional, that's all."
Mu Beob-sa cut in.
"True. Great eyes. His physical abilities are middling, but those eyes let him read and evade in advance. Then again—is that really just good eyesight, or does he simply know an ogre's patterns by heart?"
"Probably a bit of both."
"He's good. At that level, he could run his own Fishing Ground."
"Not that guy."
Pacific was firm.
"Oh?"
"Being a representative takes serious will and passion. A Fishing Ground means caring for hundreds of people—do you really think he could shoulder that? The Kettle I know isn't the type."
"So that's why someone that skilled just drifts around?"
With that, Won-goo checked his watch—gauging how long the Fishers would need to bring down the ogres.
Just as he was thinking that with this level of firepower the fight would drag on longer than expected, something interesting happened.
Behind the line, a small cluster of Fishers raised something upright.
"What is that?"
A colossal structure rose rapidly into place. It looked like magic—the siege engine had been assembled as though time itself had been accelerated.
It was a medieval siege engine as large as the ogres themselves.
The thing known as a Combat Trebuchet.
Given its intricately complicated structure, assembling one should have taken an enormous amount of time.
Yet the Fishers had built it not instantaneously, but in a shockingly short span all the same.
Even with several men swarming over it, it was nothing short of astonishing.
And there, strapped to the trebuchet's launch cradle, sat a massive spherical orb—so enormous and smooth it was closer to a counterweight than a ball, looming there like a threat.
"Is that what they're going to launch?"
Jeon Hye-ji asked. She was still aiming her rifle across the battlefield, set in sniping mode.
"That alone would be a letdown. They'll have used their Gifts, so there must be something more to it."
His prediction proved exactly right.
A trebuchet was, by design, a siege engine built to hurl projectiles at distant enemies.
But the trebuchet the Fishers had labored to build here was not serving that purpose at all.
It merely looked like a trebuchet—it was operating on an entirely different principle.
"Whoa—it's moving!"
Pacific shouted in surprise.
Just as he said, the trebuchet was advancing forward.