The Taste of Earth
Authority
Plop.
Unlike the reactions of the dwarf elves, the result Raphael produced wasn't all that impressive.
It was a little gruesome, granted — countless insects and undergrowth tangled together into a single mass. It looked like ground meat made of bugs, rolled up into a ball: a sphere roughly the size of a basketball. And it dropped to the ground.
Everyone wore dumbfounded expressions. After all that buildup, as if something tremendous were about to emerge, it seemed pathetically small.
Then the ball began to roll.
Growing, just a tiny bit at a time.
"Director Gong. That thing... is it the part where it's worth using that powerful contract on?"
Mu Beob-sa was the first to react. A wielder of magic — he couldn't help but be sensitive to anything resembling his own power.
"Let's wait and see. I'm confused myself. But Hye-ji's judgment has never been off the mark, has it? If she says it's dangerous, it's dangerous."
"Didn't she say it could be dangerous even without an ability? That's the part I recall."
"That's exactly what I'm hoping isn't true. There's something there. Only a rare few dwarf elves ever receive a blessing, and you said those blessings are tremendous."
"And yet, looking at that thing..."
Mu Beob-sa stopped mid-sentence. The reason was that one of the dwarf elves fleeing at full speed had caught its ankle on the ball called Protico and gone down.
Then the horrible thing happened.
The sphere crushed the fallen dwarf elf on the spot, grinding it straight into more minced meat.
The dwarf elf shrieked, squealing, until it became one flesh with Protico.
And Protico grew.
To a size incomparable to before.
Then it surged forward again. Its speed was the same as before, but rolling at that new bulk, it chased down the dwarf elves faster than ever.
They had fled quite a distance, but against a Protico that had begun to grow, there was no answer. And once it swelled past a certain size, its speed didn't drop at all anymore.
It simply glided past, and anything it passed became one with Protico.
Everyone grimaced at the sheer horror of it, saying nothing as they watched the scene unfold.
"Now I get why they call you the Raphael of Slaughter."
In the blink of an eye, Protico had swelled to the size of a house, now angling its course this way and that as it merged with the dwarf elves.
Before long, the grass and bugs were barely visible in it anymore. What it was mostly made of, now, was elves.
Protico rolled a long way off before returning, absurdly enormous.
Raphael brought it in close and spoke.
"There is a larger village farther up. We should go there."
Gong Won-goo shook his head.
"We're not prepared to handle every dwarf elf there is."
"My blessing will suffice. I can kill them all today. Now is the right time."
Won-goo looked down at her with cold eyes.
"Raphael. We made a contract. And that contract includes a clause about never lying. So I'll ask again. Can we handle it? There isn't just one blessed one among them, is there? I didn't sign on to die for your revenge. Tell me clearly. There are more, aren't there?"
"There are."
"Be honest with yourself. Can you handle all of them alone?"
"......"
Reading her silence, Won-goo issued his order at once.
"We're going back."
"I can kill more of them before they all gather."
"And the risk grows with every single one. Raphael, I don't know exactly what they did to you. But one thing came through loud and clear: your hatred for them runs bone-deep."
"It does."
"I have no intention of stopping your revenge. But revenge doesn't have to be the end of everything. You gained a new life today, and revenge is simply one part of living it. Understood?"
"......"
The crew didn't linger. They pushed out of the forest without delay.
Raphael raised the subject no further either.
"What? You don't eat meat? A vegetarian?"
Won-goo had kept talking with Raphael, while the rest of the crew watched from inside the trailer. Raphael's language was still the unintelligible dwarf elf tongue, so Won-goo was the only one who could converse with her.
"That is so."
"Don't dwarf elves eat meat? You only don't eat humans... I thought you enjoyed meat otherwise?"
"That is the price of my blessing. I cannot eat meat."
"You don't eat it, or you can't?"
"If I eat it, I am immediately wracked with pain."
"Then you can't, plain and simple. And this is a world where even greens are hard to come by..."
"I do not eat much."
"Even so, you should eat a little. You're... too gaunt right now."
"I endured one hundred and eight nights and days."
"Don't tell me you didn't eat anything that whole time?"
"I ate nothing. Not a single drop of water."
A strange thought crossed Won-goo's mind then. Even among elves, the dwarf elves were a poorly documented people — but surviving one hundred and eight days without consuming anything at all was beyond comprehension.
However upside-down the world's common sense had become, there were still things it couldn't explain.
"No one dies easily in the Prison of Latus. You die slowly, experiencing every torment — hunger, regret, boredom — all of it, savored slowly on the way to the end."
"So that's what that birdcage was for?"
"Yes. That is why I could not die."
Won-goo could vaguely understand Raphael's rage toward her own kind. Her family had been slaughtered through treachery, and she'd been locked away in a horrifying prison before crawling back out.
It was more than enough to turn an angel into a devil.
"Ttugi. Do we have any greens in our food stores?"
"I'll look, Hyeong-nim."
"Hold on. Flour's technically a plant too, when you think about it. Raphael. Can you eat food made from flour?"
"I can. Only raw meat and cooked meat are impossible."
"What about meat that's been simmered in a stew and taken back out?"
"I can eat that as well."
"So it's just meat itself you can't have."
"Correct."
"Then this just got easier. Ttugi. Get some ramen going."
"Yes, Hyeong-nim!"
The trailer was heading back to the Shelter at speed. With autopilot now available, Won-goo could ride in absolute comfort.
"And 'the right time' — that wasn't a lie."
"What right time?"
"The time to destroy the forest."
"But you said it was a lie?"
"I never said it was a lie. It was neither a lie nor the truth."
Won-goo snorted a laugh.
"So you didn't know the outcome either. Why make it so complicated? Am I right?"
"You are right."
"So what made it the right time, then?"
"There was a great festival. After a festival ends, they become much weaker."
"A festival... so that's why their response was weaker than expected?"
"You guessed it at once. If it hadn't been right after the festival, far more of them would have shown up."
Killing intent bled back into Raphael's eyes.
"Relax for now. Eat."
The smell of ramen boiled by Lee Hyun-sung filled the trailer. With good sense, Hyun-sung had made chajang ramen — the black-bean-sauce kind. No one knew whether a dwarf elf could handle spicy food.
Raphael eyed the sight of a dish she'd never seen in her life with wary suspicion, but once she watched the crew eating, she followed suit.
Raphael tasted a single bite of the noodles.
The killing aura that had looked ready to annihilate her entire race vanished in an instant.
Raphael sat frozen, wearing the expression of a man who'd just taken a sledgehammer to the head. Her mouth hung open as she looked back and forth between the faces of the crew.
Watching her, the crew snickered like a pack of pranksters who'd pulled off a dirty trick and gotten away with it.
"Wh... what is this thing?"
"The taste of Earth."
"The taste of Earth?"
"Raphael. Listen carefully. On Earth there's a people dead serious about food. When they greet each other, this is what they ask: 'Have you eaten yet?'"
"......"
"Eat up, quick. These guys are eating machines — I had to pause my chopsticks just to match your pace."
Everyone held chopsticks. Raphael alone held a fork. And a place mat, too.
Bear-like as Lee Hyun-sung looked, his delicacy was the finest among the crew.
They rewrote the contract at the Shelter. A few more service-contract forms purchased from Sanghae sat in the office. The whole crew had filled them out together, and since Sanghae had drafted them, their binding power went without saying.
All the while, Won-goo kept the conversation flowing with Raphael. She told him about the dwarf elf race, and he walked her through everything to watch out for.
Her manner of speech was stiff, but Raphael was sharp. She grasped her situation in no time.
"Then. I must learn the language quickly."
"Take it slow. Learning a language isn't easy. And you've got it a bit easy — with that skin of yours, you can just pass as a foreigner."
Judged by human ethnicity, Raphael's skin leaned close to a white person's — though not the paper-white of Baek Seol, but a tone laced with a faint copper sheen.
"Master Mage."
"What is the part you need?"
"If any books written in elvish come into the bookstore, tell them not to sell them — set them aside for us."
"Understood."
"And... Hyun-sung. Paper and pens."
"Yes, Hyeong-nim!"
Hyun-sung produced paper and pen with remarkable speed — because Geum Chul-soo had just handed him the notebook and pen he'd had tucked in his jacket.
"Make it A4."
"Yes, Hyeong-nim!"
Won-goo wrote down how the Coin Exchange machines worked on the A4 sheet.
"Um... can dwarf elves get coin enhancement too?"
"Yep."
"Well, that is..."
"She's registered under our service contract, isn't she? So she can. Jo Mu-sa."
"Wasn't that power of hers made from coins?"
This time it was Jeon Hye-ji who asked. She'd grown intensely curious after the shocking spectacle Raphael had shown them all.
"No. That's the racial power the dwarf elves are born with."
"If that's not a Gift, then..."
"A Gift is a present granted to an individual. Most people live out their whole lives without ever knowing they have one. It's the start of the apocalypse that awakens them."
"Then the dwarf elves as well..."
"Their world never had an apocalypse open up, so no forced awakening. But there's a way. Get enhanced with coins once. The system diagnoses what your Gift is on the spot."
"Their physical abilities were incredible — and to think that wasn't even enhancement... that's a shock."
"Hye-ji. Listen up. The common misconception is that humans are the hexagonal race — a species with physical ability and mentality balanced just right. That's what everybody thinks, no?"
"Isn't it?"
"Humans are such a fragile species that we rank among the very lowest in the entire universe."
"Er... that badly?"
"Yeah. The only things we're somewhat strong in are adaptability and immunity, I'd say. Everything else ranks near the absolute bottom. Humans are a species that dumped everything into the brain, more than you'd think. This head — the brain alone sits near the very top of the pyramid."
Won-goo tapped his temple, thump, thump. But everyone tilted their heads, wearing expressions that said they didn't quite follow.
"The beastmen seemed pretty smart too, though? They seemed about the same..."
Won-goo smirked.
"Jo Mu-sa. Can you measure intelligence?"
"Excuse me?"
"The brain. Can you measure how exceptional your brain is, how much potential it holds?"
"That's what testing is for..."
"Don't tell me you actually believe you can determine intelligence by checking off a few pre-made questions and tallying a score?"
"......"
"That can't precisely measure the brain's capacity. Fluent conversation? That's only one function among the many the brain carries. It's hard enough just to gauge high from low. The brain handles a great deal more than that. Creativity and imagination are part of the package too. Want an example? The universe holds countless nonhuman species, but almost none transform their civilization at this speed. Most live and die in the exact form they were given at the dawn of their existence. Humans don't. We developed astonishingly fast."
And then Won-goo swallowed the words that came next.
The words: and that was why the apocalypse had begun.