Chapter 18
First Squad, assigned to the eastern side of the Mount Mui Goema hunt, was currently hiding in the trees with all traces of their presence erased, watching a live eating show below.
Crunch-! Crunch-!
Down below, some barbarian named Park Something-or-Other was being torn apart.
So there it is. The bastard finally showed himself.
The squad leader nodded as he watched the Goema at its meal. According to the scout who had observed the Qinghe Sect’s hunt, the Goema of Mount Mui was an almost supernatural existence.
Even though it was always wrapped in a conspicuous red mist, the Goema wasn’t easy to spot. It appeared out of nowhere and attacked out of nowhere. By the time you realized you’d been hit, it was already too late.
Or so the reports said: once it finished feeding, it vanished again the same way it had appeared.
Even with both eyes wide open, they couldn’t catch it. It was the very definition of a monster beyond reason.
The Qinghe Sect had been brought down by one of those ghostlike, impossible attacks.
So the sect master’s plan really did work.
The Qinghe Sect had stumbled around blindly and gotten wiped out, but Taeho Sect was different. They had built a plan from the information bought with Qinghe Sect blood.
And the key part of that plan was the barbarian currently being eaten alive over there.
The biggest obstacle in hunting the Mount Mui Goema was the bastard’s ridiculous stealth ability.
However weak the Qinghe Sect might have been compared to Taeho Sect, they were still a sect with some name recognition. The warriors of such a sect would surely have been able to use some level of qi sense.
That much was obvious, but they’d still been helpless before it.
Which meant the Goema’s stealth wasn’t something you could simply see through with qi sense alone.
Taeho Sect had the same limitations, so they would have followed the Qinghe Sect’s exact fate if they’d charged in blind. But they had intelligence now.
The Goema’s stealth has a weakness.
The Goema never revealed itself—except in exactly two situations. One was when it attacked. The other was when it drank the blood of a corpse it had killed.
In either case, the camouflage didn’t disappear.
If you weren’t an idiot, there was only one of those two moments you should be aiming for.
And the instant we baited it, it showed itself.
The bait had worked perfectly.
This was the real reason they’d recruited laborers with that whole “for the convenience of our disciples,” “creating jobs,” and other nonsense tacked on. The real purpose was simple.
They would become bait to lure out the Goema.
Someone had to do it, but there was no way Taeho Sect’s own disciples would be used for that.
Still, there was no problem.
Post an ad offering good conditions and idiots willing to be bait would gather on their own.
Not just any bait, either—strong, energetic idiots.
Shame it had to be that hard-working barbarian. Park Something-or-Other. Or was it Bang? Whatever.
That was the full extent of his feelings about Park Seongchul, who had struggled so hard just to make a name for himself.
“Squad leader, shouldn’t we move in now?”
At that moment, a squad member beside him asked through transmission of sound.
Snapping out of his thoughts, the leader studied the Goema again.
Park Seongchul’s corpse had withered so badly it was hard to believe he’d been twenty.
The rate at which it’s drinking blood feels slower than what we were told, though...
What mattered now was that the Goema’s meal was nearly over.
If they waited any longer, it would disappear again.
“On my signal, everyone attack at once.”
As the leader gave his orders through sound transmission and hand signals, the squad members nodded.
He also gripped his dao carefully.
When was a predator most careless?
When it was savoring the prey it had hunted down. And that was exactly now.
“We go on three. One...”
The squad leader folded one finger at a time.
“...Three! Now!”
Whoosh-!!
First Squad leaped down all at once.
A surprise attack struck the moment the enemy let down its guard.
This was why they had lain in ambush until now.
The blades and spears in their hands flashed with cold light.
“Die, Goema!!”
“Woooah!”
“Just stay still and turn into gold!”
Blue-white spear qi and sword energy poured over the red mist as their blades struck.
Slash-!! Thud-!! Crunch-!!
Through the hafts of their spears and swords, they felt flesh split, flesh pierced, bone shattered.
They had eaten nothing but steel for years; they knew the feeling well enough.
This was, without a doubt, the sensation of taking a life.
“Damn, that feels like a clean finish on my end.”
“Wasn’t that way too easy compared to the reports?”
“Means our ambush was perfect.”
They had succeeded in the hunt, but the squad’s reactions split between relief and unease.
“Quiet, all of you. The mist is clearing.”
The leader, belonging to the latter camp, flicked the blood from his dao and pointed at the Goema.
That discomfort would be cleared away once they saw the corpse for themselves.
The Goema, always shrouded in that blood-red mist and never showing its face.
Perhaps because of that mystery, even he had felt his heart thump for no good reason, like he was watching some legendary pocket monster.
Rustle—
“Ohhh, so this is what the bastard really looked like... huh?”
“What the hell...”
“......!”
Instead of admiration, confusion spilled from their mouths.
“Is that a jackal?”
“The Goema’s true form was a jackal?”
When the mutilated corpse of a jackal came into view, torn apart by their surprise attack, the squad members couldn’t hide their bewilderment.
Of course, there were Goema that transformed into beasts, but none of them had expected this.
“...Squad leader, what do we do now? Should we report back to the sect master first—”
!?
The squad leader’s eyes suddenly flew wide open.
From the tips of his fingers as he examined the jackal corpse, he felt a strange current.
The mist, which they had assumed would naturally disappear when the Goema died.
This mist wasn’t vanishing. It was flowing.
As if pretending to disperse while actually returning to someone else!
“Everyone, keep your surroun—”
“S-squad leader...?”
The leader suddenly felt his throat tighten.
He turned his neck with a stiff, creaking motion and looked behind him.
The blood-red mist that had scattered was now behind his back.
Crunch-!
Something sharp sank through his skin.
“Aah... aahhh....!”
The squad leader trembled as an alien energy seeped in through the place where he had been bitten.
“Squad leader!”
“Save the squad leader!”
For a brief moment, the squad members froze, stunned by the sudden turn of events. Then, just as they moved to act, the leader’s trembling stopped.
The blood mist peeled away from him.
“......”
Freed from it, he hung his head low.
“S-squad leader. Are you all right?”
One of the squad members asked cautiously.
Unlike those who had been bitten by the Goema before, the leader hadn’t been drained of blood, which was a relief—but something was clearly wrong.
Slash-!
“Aaagh!”
The dao the squad leader suddenly swung sent one of their arms flying.
“Squad leader!? What is this—!”
“Sto- stop him!”
Ignoring their pleas, the leader lunged at them.
They had thought they were the ones setting the bait, but the thing that had waited after the bait was thrown was that.
It had waited.
It had waited for a chance to sink new teeth into the strongest prey among them.
The strong prey would then make the rest easier to eat.
Eat the ones worth eating. Turn the rest into subordinates.
There were more prey in the mountain than just these fools.
It would not let them slip away this time.
......
Feeling its minions spread through the mountain in a sense too strange to describe, it issued an order.
Time to hunt.
* * *
“Tch, so we’re sleeping outdoors after all.”
One of the four members of the squad assigned to the southwest, the one that included Geom Mujin, kicked a pebble aside and grumbled.
In this age, everyone camped outdoors because they had no choice—nobody actually liked it.
The same was true of the beggars from the Beggars’ Sect.
They only do that because it’s their job too.
They mouthed off about righteousness and duty being all a person needed, but if you gave them money and a house, they’d come running like dogs.
Geom Mujin thought that as he stacked firewood for the campfire.
“Hey, barbarian.”
“......”
“......”
“......”
The grumbling squad member called out to the laborer, but no one answered.
That was because every laborer in the squad had black hair—they were all barbarians.
How was he supposed to know who the hell you were calling?
“You punk, are you ignoring me!?”
Thinking he’d been ignored, the squad member jabbed a finger at Geom Mujin and bounced in place, outraged.
Looks like he was talking to me.
“What is it?”
Geom Mujin answered flatly, and the other man’s brow twitched.
A barbarian... being this dismissive!?
The squad member had approached him, intending to put him in his place as a proud son of the Zhongyuan, but he suddenly flinched.
Seeing Geom Mujin’s eyes, he didn’t know why, but the urge evaporated cleanly.
“Ahem... uh, did you bring the marshmallows? I checked earlier and couldn’t find them.”
Instead, he cleared his throat and got to the point.
“Did you check the brown backpack over there?”
“Yeah.”
“Then if they’re not there, they’re not there.”
“If they’re not there, then go look for— ...Yeah. Right.”
He’d been about to snap back, because camping without marshmallows was unacceptable, but Geom Mujin’s eyes got him again and—poof.
Like an obedient cat, the squad member returned to his spot.
Damn. What kind of laborer has eyes that sharp?
“......”
“......”
The other squad members fell silent at the unfamiliar sight of the man who would normally have started a scuffle over that kind of behavior.
Annoying.
Meanwhile, Geom Mujin couldn’t shake the irritation he’d felt all day.
Even now, after climbing the mountain and setting up camp, the search had shown nothing unusual.
There was no Goema, no trace of a Goema, not even anything that resembled one. The only things they kept seeing were mountain beasts.
And once they threatened them a bit and drove them off, they all ran away.
To sum up the whole day so far:
Too smooth.
For a Goema hunt, everything was going far too smoothly.
You could say our squad just got lucky, but the other squads are quiet too.
If the Goema had been found by one of the other squads, they would have fired a flare signal, but Mount Mui’s sky remained still.
The sky...
Just as Geom Mujin looked up, the squad leader and the others exchanged glances.
“We’ll do a brief recon—”
Rustle.
Before the leader could finish, footsteps came from beyond the darkened forest.
Could it be the Goema?
Shit. Why us, of all people?
They swallowed hard and took up battle stances.
As the darkness and silence of night pushed their nerves to the limit, the owner of the footsteps finally appeared.
“H-Hek...! Hah...!?”
It wasn’t the Goema, and it wasn’t a mountain beast.
“Bongyu?”
“Wasn’t that guy assigned to Third Squad?”
Fourth Squad was thrown into confusion by the appearance of a disciple assigned to Third Squad.
He was a total wreck, dragging one leg behind him as he stumbled toward them.
“R-run...”
The disciple named Bongyu collapsed to the ground.
“Hey! What happened to you!?”
“Get a grip!”
The squad leader and the others slapped his cheeks.
“Behi... behin... cough...!!”
He tried to speak in broken fragments, then coughed up blood and went limp.
“He’s dead...”
Behind.
As Fourth Squad stared blankly at their dead comrade’s body, I chewed over the last thing he had said.
Sodam!
Kki-eek!
I called Sodam, who I’d stationed near Mount Mui.
Circle the whole mountain and take a look!
At the command of its master, Sodam immediately took flight.
Its feathers shone with the polish of a recent vacation, and its beak cleaved the air with smooth ease.
Shared vision.
I activated the miraculous power of the Baekdu Cheongak-eung.
My vision changed to Sodam’s.
It was already late, but Sodam’s eyes were not bound by darkness.
Faint lights could be seen around the mountain, and those lights belonged to the slaughter squads.
Focus on the lights.
Looking down from above, Mount Mui—or rather, Taeho Sect’s slaughter squads—was a shock.
They’re under attack?
Each squad was already engaged in battle.
Some had already been wiped out completely.
The identities of the enemies...
Thudthudthud-!
“S-something’s coming!”
“What the hell!? Weren’t those footsteps plural?”
A crowd of unidentified figures was rapidly approaching from the foot of the mountain.
“There wasn’t just one Goema!?”
“Nobody told us that!”
“No, this isn’t a Goema.”
“What?”
At my correction, Fourth Squad stared at me blankly.
“It’s an ambush! Get ready!”
The enemies approaching from this side burst through the darkness and struck.
Kiiiieeek!
Grrrrowl!
Hssssss!
The ones attacking us were the mountain beasts we had driven off on the way up here.
Their eyes glowed like drops of blood.