The Red-Haired Elf
The skeleton was certainly interesting. He had partially covered his ears to make them look human and even changed his odd eyes to a light brown, but my senses caught everything clearly. Long, sharply pointed ears and mysterious green-and-amber pupils.
“Yun Han-gyeol, you and elves are the worst possible match. If you ever meet one, don’t even look back—just run.”
The warning Jo Giman had given me in my previous life suddenly came to mind. Come to think of it, that bastard had always been oddly meddlesome, constantly telling me to watch out for this or that.
‘You were going to kill me anyway, you crazy psychopath.’
The fleeting thought was scattered by the irritated flick of red hair.
Bang—!!
‘Tsk… As expected.’
The red-haired man had dispelled the Contaminated Breath I’d activated the moment I saw the massive orc army with a single wave of his hand.
“What a truly disgusting stench. Paralysis? Poison? How crude. This skill… Skeleton soldier, is it yours? Wait… that’s not a skeleton soldier, is it? A variant?”
“Clack!!”
“Oh? You understand speech? And now that I look, this sticky wave is also your ability? Just what exactly are you?”
He had even detected the wavelength of my senses.
“·······”
“Keeping your mouth shut, are you? Then shall I ask the child connected to you instead? A few fingernails? No, it would be better to peel off a thin layer of that soft facial skin. Then she’ll cry and scream and tell me everything I didn’t even ask.”
···········
‘If that son of a bitch so much as touches Yeonhee, I’ll really kill him.’
I summoned a bomb made from the ‘Tooth’ monster into my hand and prepared to charge at him right then and there. Of course, I knew full well that even this bomb couldn’t leave a single scratch on him.
“Hoo— What’s that? A bomb made of bone? That’s a power I’ve never seen in my long life. Khehehehe— Well now, I’ve found something far more entertaining than I expected. What is your name? Ah, you can’t speak? Hmm… How curious. The weather’s turned bad. What a shame, what a shame.”
‘Ha… This guy talks too much too…’
The chatterbox elf stared at me with a gaze full of curiosity, seemingly seriously contemplating what to do. Jo Giman had once told me that elves were born with extremely delicate sensory abilities. The problem was that those senses were sharp enough to detect even my sensory waves and Stealth.
It seemed Jo Giman hadn’t warned me for nothing. Of course, they could only sense my abilities—they couldn’t nullify them outright. I had learned that fact shortly before Jo Giman killed me, when I’d accidentally encountered some kind-hearted(?) elves in a high-rank dungeon.
That meant my style of gathering information first and using it for surprise attacks would never work against an elf.
‘More importantly, why is that bastard just standing there? If he wanted to, he could wipe out every hunter here in seconds.’
Crackle— Crackle—
I finally understood why after seeing the lightning bolts striking around him at irregular intervals.
‘It’s not that he won’t—it’s that he can’t. Well, of course. An upper-tier A-grade elf inside an E-grade dungeon? That should be impossible from the start.’
But thinking about it the other way, it meant he was somehow accomplishing the impossible. In other words, a monster among monsters.
KWOOOOO—!!
‘There are well over a hundred orc warriors now. Damn it!’
For over a minute, we remained in a complete stalemate.
“Huuu… This should be enough.”
The middle-aged man who had been sitting behind the elf and muttering something fervently stood up, brushing off his clothes.
“You work disgustingly fast!! Still, thanks to you I got to see something interesting. I’d like to leave a mark on him, but I’ve truly reached my limit. Put your hands on me.”
When the middle-aged man and another man beside him placed their hands on the elf’s shoulders, the elf closed his eyes for a moment, chanted a spell, and summoned a small door just wide enough for three people to pass through side by side.
The elf opened the summoned door and stepped through, then suddenly turned his head back and shouted toward me.
Shhhhhk—
With a boisterous laugh unbefitting of an elf, the mysterious red-haired elf and the two men who appeared to be Blue Eye executives vanished beyond the door.
His words and actions had been light, but the weight they left on me was heavy.
‘I already know that, you bastard! Argh…’
“Th-they disappeared…”
“Are they really gone?”
Helen and Jin-gyeong stood with wide rabbit-like eyes, staring blankly at the spot where the intruders had vanished. The others frozen in place were doing the same.
·········
A brief silence.
Tap— Tatat— Tatatatak—
The silence didn’t last long. The moment the overwhelmingly powerful being disappeared, the hunters gathered in the area began turning one by one and sprinting away.
‘Haa— What a shockingly eventful day in the short life of this skeleton soldier.’
Meeting an elf in a place like this was surprising enough, but the real shock was learning that the orc legion commander and the Blue Eye cult were working together.
‘Uwaaaaah, what the hell is all this bullshit!!’
[Calm] [Calm]
But thanks to the great passive trait, my mental chaos quickly subsided, and the storm that had been raging inside me began transforming into a different emotion.
‘So the offering… was to summon the orcs… Ha… Hahaha…’
··········
‘So that’s how it was…’
So it was you bastards who killed Yeonhee in my previous life…
Huuu———
I let out a long breath. Of course, no actual air flowed from within my body, but it was a sigh carrying diluted remnants of anger, guilt, despair, and regret.
‘I’ll kill every last one of you.’
There was nothing to hesitate about. I wanted to do it. This was my chance to repay even a little of the life debt I owed her—the woman who had become the biggest turning point in my previous life.
But the elf was gone, and I needed to think carefully about what to do right now. Because the current situation was quite dangerous.
Imagine facing hundreds of D-grade hunters. It would be strange not to run away immediately. And their numbers were still growing. They had already surpassed two hundred.
Right now, rather than my own rage, I needed to focus on how to keep Yeonhee alive. The easiest option in my mind was to grab Yeonhee and sprint straight for the exit. At least then she could survive.
But Helen and Jin-gyeong weighed on my conscience. This is why Koreans can never do things simply. That damned sense of duty…
‘And Yeonhee would never want that anyway…’
As far as I knew, the only way to close a gate that had begun releasing monsters was to kill every single monster that came through until it naturally disappeared. There might be someone in this world with a skill to close gates, but I had no memory of any hunter possessing such an ability.
Judging by the speed at which monsters were pouring out of the gate, I could roughly estimate the total number. After observing carefully during this short time, the final count of orc warriors that would emerge from that gate was at least over a thousand.
Fight against a thousand damn D-grades? Maybe suicide really was the answer.
‘Guerrilla warfare to whittle them down won’t work—the numbers are too high. They’ll reach the exit long before that.’
If those things reached the exit, could they get outside? If so, that would be extremely dangerous. The Lizardman Swamp dungeon was somewhat removed from the city center, but because it was popular, the surrounding commercial district was well developed. Nearly ten thousand people lived there permanently, and the actual active population at this hour would be dozens of times that.
A sudden dungeon break would be more than enough to turn the entire area into a wasteland. The number of casualties would easily be several times higher than the number of orcs.
‘Tsk… Worrying about other people even at a time like this. What a blessed life I lead.’
BUWOOOOOOOOO——!!
The orcs that had come out began activating Warrior’s Howl. It felt like they were telling me to worry about myself, so I nodded and checked my current status.
◈ Mana is sufficient.
◈ 41 bombs available. Must use with maximum efficiency due to enemy numbers.
◈ Production still in progress.
“Why aren’t you running away?!”
What pulled me out of my brief reverie was Jin-gyeong’s ear-splitting shout. She was waving her palms frantically at me and Yeonhee, gesturing for us to hurry over.
She wasn’t the only one running. The thirty-or-so hunters who had been searching for the hidden Blue Eye cultists with us, along with another forty who had arrived later, were all retreating at once. It was an extremely natural reaction.
They were higher rank than us, far more numerous, and the Blue Eye cultists weren’t even all dead. The survivors were looking at us with mocking sneers. Every single one of those bastards looked like they needed a good beating.
‘Hmm, but it’s not the worst situation?’
Fortunately, the fleeing hunters still had some brains. None of them made the mistake of all rushing along the shortest route to the exit. A few even immediately fired signal flares to warn the other hunters scattered throughout the dungeon.
Watching the dozens of streams of people splitting off and flowing toward the exit like an ebbing tide, Yeonhee and I briefly met eyes.
‘The lizard unit besides Number One and Number Two will get torn apart the moment they come out. The numbers and individual stats are just too different.’
I tried to convey that with my eyes, but she had already entered a state similar to competitive excitement. Of course, she also carried the duty of stopping them.
The desire to deploy her full power and clash head-on. Her choice, which differed from her usual pattern, probably wasn’t unrelated to the stimulus called No Hayun.
From my perspective, that was a welcome development.
‘No Hayun does have her uses. Even if she’s annoying.’
It was an absurdly reckless and childish decision, but if that was what she wanted, I’d play along just this once.
‘Even if the ending is obvious, she needs to feel the difference in power and gain the experience of growth.’