Uprooting (3)
Uprooting (3)
About a week had passed since I arrived in China.
During that week, I'd been running around like crazy, tracking down and dismantling branches of the Death God Cult.
Finding them wasn't hard.
The Death God Cult's branches were decently concealed.
They operated in gray zones where mana-wave interference was a complete mess, and the concealment level of the branch facilities themselves was quite high.
An ordinary detection-type superhuman would've had a hell of a time finding them.
That didn't mean they could evade the Observation Authority, of course.
Even without bringing out Observation directly, I could roughly pinpoint their locations by following mana traces.
I crisscrossed China, locating branches and launching surprise attacks.
I'd take out the bastards stationed there, then rescue anyone who'd been dragged in to be used as a sacrifice.
That was more or less how I'd spent the past seven days.
In that time, I'd dealt with over fifty branches.
Given that the Death God Cult had hundreds of branches in the original story, you could say I'd been chewing into their flesh quite effectively.
- Huu...
A fatigue-laden sigh slipped out.
My body was pretty worn down. I hadn't slept once that whole week. I'd barely taken any rest at all.
I'd been running everywhere, constantly maintaining wide-range observation.
Whenever I found a branch, I'd gauge its facilities and military strength, then charge in headfirst.
I'd taken multiple injuries in the process, but they were the kind of wounds that healed quickly through natural recovery—no potion needed.
The moment I finished cleaning up a branch and its aftermath, I'd sprint off to find the next one.
It was a schedule you could only call a forced march.
Both my body and mind felt the strain.
But it wasn't an impossible pace to maintain.
I was tired, but my combat strength hadn't dropped.
I could keep this up for at least another month, easy.
"Ugh..."
As I was letting out those heavy sighs, my body suddenly lurched up and down.
At the same time, a pained groan came from beneath me.
I tapped the thing I was sitting on a few times.
A hulking man, limbs bent at grotesque angles and his whole body covered in wounds.
One of the ones I'd beaten down earlier.
Plenty more were sprawled around nearby in similar condition.
The number was over twenty, roughly.
'This branch was on the larger side.'
The strength of each branch varied.
The weak ones—like that very first branch I'd raided—could be dealt with without much effort, but the larger ones required me to stack tension on top of tension when I attacked.
This place was one of the bigger ones.
I brushed myself off, stood up, and kicked the guy over onto his back.
Kyak! He let out a sound like some kind of frog as he flipped over, and I spotted a necklace around his throat.
An honorary necklace awarded to upper-grade heroes by the Association.
'A retired upper-grade hero, huh...'
Checking the date, the necklace had been awarded at least twenty years ago.
Upper-grade hero.
That's not a position you land by chance.
In his prime, he must've been a hero who could take pride in his abilities.
Now, of course, he was nothing but a thug with a decrepit body and rusty skills.
'Alright, then...'
My body, heated from combat, had cooled down somewhat.
First, I tidied up the surroundings and freed the people locked underground.
They'd been held in iron cages, same as before.
The basic doctrine was identical, so the facilities for performing sacrificial rituals were generally similar.
"Th-thank you...! Thank you so much...!"
It was one of the larger branches. As a result, there were many civilians captured to be used as sacrifices.
Most of them, once pulled from the iron cages, cried and sobbed with relief, thanking me for saving their lives.
Their appearances were truly wretched.
Their clothes barely qualified as rags, and they were so emaciated from starvation that their bones were clearly visible.
People living outside weren't well-off either, but those held here had suffered severe hardship.
'...'
Feeling complicated, I took some soup out of my subspace pocket, warmed it up, and handed it out.
I had plenty of emergency rations—bread, jerky, energy bars—but those weren't foods they could comfortably swallow right now.
The recently freed abductees audibly gulped even during the brief moment it took to heat the soup, and the instant they received it, they wolfed it down.
I'd deliberately heated it only to a moderate warmth, anticipating exactly that.
At first, I'd warmed it until it steamed, but I'd been horrified watching them scald the insides of their mouths and burn themselves gulping it down, so I adjusted the temperature.
After I'd filled their stomachs just enough so they wouldn't starve immediately.
I planned to send back those who had a home to return to, take appropriate measures for those who didn't, and then head out again to search for more Death God Cult branches.
'...It's nothing but self-satisfaction, but...'
My heart felt strangely heavy.
I shook my head, letting out a deep sigh.
While dealing with the Death God Cult, I'd been consistently rescuing people.
It was an issue that simply couldn't be separated.
The Death God Cult itself was sustaining its resources by using humans as sacrifices.
Naturally, subjugating the Death God Cult meant rescuing the humans about to be offered up.
'This will cause them considerable trouble.'
The Death God Cult was failing to secure sacrifices actively.
To be precise, they couldn't openly operate on the surface to kidnap people and offer them as sacrifices.
If they moved too brazenly, the Association wouldn't just sit back claiming it wasn't an issue warranting direct intervention—they'd lead a subjugation force straight in.
If that happened, their plans would completely collapse, so they were proceeding by hiding underground and gathering sacrifices bit by bit, just like this.
And in the middle of all that, an unknown troublemaker like me had barged in, somehow figured out their locations, and was smashing through their branches at lightning speed.
By now, their leader was probably livid enough for his head to spin several times over.
'The timing was good, too.'
Right about now is precisely the best time to jump in, raise a reasonable amount of hell, and slip out—just like in the original work.
The player is still far from being able to defeat the leader in a direct fight, but it's the perfect moment to throw a wrench into their plans.
If I stir up trouble now and smash their branches to a reasonable extent, the Death God Cult's plans will be set back by at least a year.
By then, I can officially come to China through Siyoram's external activities and kill the leader for good.
Of course, there were iterations where that didn't go according to plan.
There were cases where I messed up seizing the initiative, and the leader, driven mad with rage, personally came hunting for the player.
'Hmm...'
I pulled up my memories for a moment to gauge the leader's capabilities.
The leader's unique ability was necromancy-type.
And since he'd already secured a degree of his own army corps, he was a tricky opponent to deal with.
Even the army corps alone was quite overwhelming for the player at this point in time.
As for somehow breaking through the army corps and going for the leader directly, that was another matter—the leader himself was a fairly powerful figure.
The only one who'd ever taken down the Death God Cult's leader at this stage, at their leisure, was the 11th Iteration Diamond Warrior.
'Can the current me handle him?'
Right now, I'm hiding my strength to conceal my identity.
I'm mainly using my legs to hide the fact that I'm one-armed, and I've sealed away my spirit arts, which are easy to identify due to how few users there are.
I'm using magic only moderately, and I've deliberately changed the color of my aura to blood-red.
What if I came face to face with the leader?
It wouldn't necessarily be a disadvantageous fight.
If the leader came to find me personally, it means he'd be giving up the advantage he holds at his stronghold.
Of course, the story changes if he drags the Death God Cult's necromancers along with him...
'...I wouldn't be completely crushed.'
Still, I wouldn't die without putting up any resistance.
Since they haven't managed to revive the Undead Two-Headed Poison Dragon yet, there's no reason for me to get utterly demolished.
If I truly get cornered, I can fight using other methods, and if it really seems like I'm going to die, I can just use an emergency escape to flee.
Whether the leader comes looking for me or not—either way, it's irrelevant.
All I need to do is raise hell, warp their plans, and gain plenty of real combat experience on the side. It wasn't exactly pleasant, but I was also accumulating experience against necromancy.
Then I just need to get a mana infusion from the Lake of Mana, acquire the Proof of Protection, and return.
'Besides, the Taesan family is raising their own hell at the same time.'
They call it a gray zone, but ultimately it's a place where people live.
So information of a sort does circulate.
Among it, there was news that members of the Taesan family were roaming China, stirring up various forces, including pseudo-religious cults.
And that Lee Ji-yeon, the Taesan successor, had personally come to command the operation.
That was something that never happened in the original story.
I don't know the reason, but the forces the Taesan family was stirring up included the Death God Cult.
On one side, some unknown troublemaker was blowing up their branches, and on the other, a massive power called Taesan was ransacking their territory.
It had to be enough to drive the Death God Cult absolutely insane.
- Tug...
"?"
Just then.
A child strode right up and gave the hem of my robe a firm tug.
Green eyes and disheveled dark brown hair.
Even in rags, her well-defined features stood out.
She was around elementary school age—one of the children who'd been about to be used as a sacrifice moments ago.
I'd rescued her by a hair's breadth.
Had I been just a few minutes later, she would have departed from this world.
Wondering what she wanted, I turned as she pulled at my robe. The child held out an empty plate.
It was clearly the same bowl that had held soup, but now it was washed so clean there wasn't a single stain.
"...Can I have just a little more?"
Growl...
Her belly-clock rang the moment her words ended.
It seemed her hunger was still there, even after emptying the bowl in one go.
'That's only natural.'
She's at an age where you eat a lot, and on top of that, she'd probably been held captive in a place like that for who knows how many days.
- Nod
I nodded silently and ladled more soup into her bowl.
.
.
.
The next day.
A scene at one edge of my observation range looked rather peculiar.
A complexly twisted and tangled dungeon barrier at the mouth of a cave.
And a dreamlike mist that seemed to cling to the space itself, as if to hide that very barrier.
I had finally found the Lake of Mana.
* * *
"Team 1 here. Confirming good reception, no abnormalities. All teams, report."
Lee Ji-yeon tapped her smartwatch. Her voice was relayed to each team through the device.
[Team 2, confirming good reception, no abnormalities.]
[Team 3, confirming good reception, no abnormalities.]
"...Report confirmed. Notify me immediately if anything unusual occurs."
Clear replies came back without delay.
Lee Ji-yeon's expression darkened.
No casualties.
That was extremely fortunate, but there were no results either.
She'd tried it as a formality, for the sake of the report—just in case—but the reply she was hoping for didn't come.
"Haa..."
The mic disconnected as the report ended.
Lee Ji-yeon let out a sigh as if the ground itself might give way.
When she reflexively tilted her head back in frustration, the gloomy sky filled her vision.
Thick, billowing dark clouds blocked out the sunlight.
The area was already in poor condition.
And with weather like this on top of it, it truly evoked the image of a wasteland.
Even though people lived here, that was the reality.
She let out another deep sigh at the gazes directed at her—an outsider—gazes laden with wariness and fear.
'Where on earth are you...'
Roughly fourteen days ago, a child of the Taesan family had gone missing.
The child was from a branch family with considerable influence, and the last place their location was tracked was nearby.
Rescue personnel had been dispatched that same day.
Among those rescue personnel was the family's successor, Lee Ji-yeon.
She held the successor's status, in her own way.
So, having taken the role of leading Search Team 1, more than ten days had passed wandering through this wretched stretch of Chinese land.
She'd scoured every corner without a moment's rest in the process, but nothing that could even be called a trace had turned up.
'It's too vast...'
And so, the time spent stretched past ten days.
If the cause was a malicious abduction by someone or a specific group... this was the point where the odds of survival would become quite slim.
But even so, she couldn't invest a mere ten days and then halt the search.
Above all, if the child's life had already been cut short, she needed to drag out whoever was behind it and finish them.
'Right as vacation started, what the hell is this mess...'
"Break is over. Resuming the search."
After finishing her brief rest, Lee Ji-yeon announced the resumption of the search and snapped her fingers.
- Click!
A light sound resonated in all directions.
By the time the echo of the sound faded, Lee Ji-yeon's mana had rippled and swelled to its maximum size, then dozens of fragments broke away from its surface.
- WooOOOOoo...
A sound like mournful ghosts wailing emanated from the dozens of mana fragments.
Soon, like sponges that had soaked up water, the fragments expanded until they were as large as a human head.
Their shape was like will-o'-wisps molded from dark shadows.
It was the most basic type of undead manipulated through her unique ability, Taesan.
"Commencing search."
With her words, the dozens of undead spread out in all directions.