The Agricultural-Industrial Complex (3)
A tearing shriek echoed through the air.
Thud! Thud! Thud!
The lanky mutant and the common mutant were running in lockstep, matching each other's blistering speed.
Debris—broken chairs, shattered signs, and splinters of wood—littered the street, but the creatures simply plowed through, sending everything flying as they closed the distance.
Swollen muscles, flared nostrils, and bloodshot eyes.
It was a grotesque, unnatural sight.
These were monsters so starved they would hunt down and devour rats just to survive.
With a bloody, appetizing wild boar leg sitting right in the middle of the street, it was no wonder they had completely lost their minds.
No matter how much their intelligence had evolved, they could not overcome their primal instincts.
Jeron and Kang Yu-jung swallowed hard.
What if this went wrong?
They might have to flee back to the Karen Continent immediately. But if they did, they would only have to face these beasts again the moment they returned.
They had to kill them here if at all possible.
Whoosh!
Jeron began casting.
He regulated the flow of mana exactly as prescribed in the grimoire, channeling wind-attribute magic through his mana hall.
Two magic missiles materialized in the empty air.
These magic missiles were fundamentally different from the ones he had cast on the Karen Continent.
As his internal mana resonated with the ambient mana of Earth, the spell's destructive power amplified tenfold.
Meanwhile, the two ravenous beasts lunged for the boar leg.
At that exact moment, the ankle trap snapped shut.
Crack!
“Screeeech!”
“Skreeee!”
The trap had worked perfectly.
The ankle trap was held under a full ton of tension by a steel wire.
The moment it triggered, it snapped shut instantly, biting deep into the mutants' ankles.
The beasts thrashed in agony.
Simultaneously, the overhead net dropped.
It wasn't steel, but a heavy-duty nylon fishing net. Lead weights attached to the edges dragged it down, trapping both thrashing monsters beneath its mesh.
The mutants' ankles were half-severed, dangling precariously.
A ton of tension was enough to tear steel apart, yet it had failed to completely sever the mutants' bones.
The two creatures flailed wildly in their confinement.
They would never get a better opening than this.
Jeron unleashed his magic missiles at the struggling targets.
He pushed the spells forward with a surge of raw mana.
The projectiles streaked through the air.
Concentrated to over ten times the density of his spells in Karen, the magic missiles struck the mutants dead-on.
Boom! Boom!
“...!”
The explosion was deafening.
It carried the force of detonating TNT, wrapping the monsters in a violent vortex of wind-attribute mana.
Flesh ruptured and skin peeled away, exposing raw muscle beneath. Black blood sprayed from their torn bodies.
“Tough bastards!” Jeron muttered.
To be honest, he had been confident in his magic. He believed that a spell ten times stronger than what he could cast in Karen would easily obliterate the mutants.
Yet the magic missiles had failed to crush their vitals.
Instead, the blast had torn a portion of the nylon net.
Still, they were in a good position. Caught completely off guard and hobbled by their half-severed ankles, the mutants couldn't easily flee.
Without panicking, Jeron and Kang Yu-jung raised their crossbows.
Jeron felt the heavy, solid weight of the mechanical weapon.
While it didn't use steel wire, the high-strength fitness cables engineered with modern technology could easily withstand a ton of tension.
The mechanical crossbow was designed with an 800-kilogram draw weight, yet the pulley system allowed even an older child to draw the string.
They aimed for the mutants' heads and pulled the triggers.
Twang!
Thwack!
“Gah!”
“Scree!”
With twin death rattles, the two creatures collapsed and lay still.
“Wow! We did it!” Yu-jung cried.
“Yes!”
Their first hunt was a success.
The moment the mutants died, a blue energy drifted from their corpses. The Golden Key on Jeron's palm eagerly absorbed it.
Having charged to its limit, the Golden Key evolved to the next stage.
Its golden hue grew noticeably deeper.
Perhaps because they had slain evolved mutants, Jeron could feel that its capacity had nearly doubled compared to before.
But it was too early to celebrate.
The two mutants that had been lingering to the south suddenly accelerated, charging toward them like madmen.
Thud! Thud! Thud!
The muscle-bound mutant was much slower than the lanky one, but that was only by mutant standards; it still moved as fast as a human sprinting at full speed.
They crossed the distance in less than a minute.
“Screeeech!”
A deafening, ear-splitting shriek tore through the air.
Reaching the front of the building, the monsters leaped, grabbed the second-floor railing, and vaulted upward, closing the distance in the blink of an eye.
There was no time to cast.
Jeron had to make a split-second decision.
Should he try to cast a spell, fire the crossbow, or run?
His mastery of magic wasn't high enough to hit targets moving that fast. He could barely hit stationary targets; hitting a leaping mutant was out of the question.
The crossbows needed to be reloaded, and even if he fired, a single bolt likely wouldn't kill them.
If that muscle-bound freak caught them, they would be crushed to dust.
For Jeron, who prioritized safety above all else, a direct confrontation was out of the question.
Jeron immediately opened a portal, grabbed Kang Yu-jung's hand, and stepped through the rift.
Two seconds later.
Wobble!
The two mutants flailed at the boundary of the portal, unable to cross over.
They thrashed their arms as if drowning in water, their heads protruding slightly through the dimensional barrier.
Jeron raised his sword and thrust it hard into the eye of the muscle-bound mutant.
Squelch!
“...”
Though no sound traveled through the portal, he could see the beast screaming in agony.
However, the blade stopped halfway.
It felt as if it had struck a solid wall inside the skull. He hadn't pierced the brain.
Writhing in pain, the muscle-bound mutant grabbed its companion and retreated from the portal.
“Phew... Haa...”
Jeron and Kang Yu-jung panted heavily.
Crossing from Earth to the Karen Continent always left them breathless due to the sudden temperature spike to over forty degrees Celsius, and the sheer adrenaline of the encounter made it take even longer to calm their racing hearts.
Sweat poured down their faces.
“Yu-jung, are you alright?”
“Yes... What about you, mister?”
“I think I'm fine.”
Neither of them was hurt.
Though shaken, the thrill of successfully landing a magical blow on a mutant kept their spirits high.
Jeron felt an exhilarating rush.
The magic of the Karen Continent, which felt so weak and limited back home, possessed enough destructive power to shatter an evolved mutant when brought to Earth.
Of course, he had only hit a trapped target, but this opened up entirely new possibilities.
Jeron peered through the dimensional rift.
The desolate rooftop on the other side was completely still.
He checked the surrounding area.
There were no mutants in sight.
Jeron and Kang Yu-jung reloaded their crossbows and stepped back onto Earth.
The sudden drop in temperature made their blood vessels constrict, but they quickly scanned their surroundings.
The mutants were gone, but there were fresh trails of blood on the ground.
Even in their retreat, the beasts had dragged away the corpses of their fallen pack mates.
Thanks to that, their path was easy to track.
Sensing danger, the mutants had fled the agricultural-industrial complex. The trail led straight north, passing the main entrance.
They had abandoned their territory entirely.
Earth's apex predators had sensed a threat and run away.
Jeron stared at the tracks stretching along the asphalt.
“I hope they head into the studio apartment district and pick a fight with the ones over there.”
“Now that would be a show worth watching,” Yu-jung agreed with a smirk.
It would be a clash of titans between the muscle-bound mutants.
The one in the studio district had half its skull crushed, and the one from here was missing an eye. It would be a bloody, evenly matched fight.
“It'd be even better if all of them ended up dead.”
“If they do, farming this place will be a breeze.”
Jeron and Kang Yu-jung thought of the stationery store and the discount shop nearby.
This small town was a veritable treasure trove. If the mutants were gone, they could focus on salvaging resources without a care in the world.
They climbed to a nearby rooftop to see where the mutants were heading.
Thud! Thud! Thud!
The creatures had already moved quite a distance to the north.
Covering nearly a kilometer in such a short time meant they had been truly terrified.
They carried their dead comrades over their shoulders, retreating further and further north.
This meant the agricultural-industrial complex would be safe for the time being.
While other mutants might wander in eventually, this area had been ruled by a pack of four. It would be safe for at least a day.
Once they confirmed the beasts were gone, Jeron and Kang Yu-jung climbed down to the street.
They walked through the road lined with half-destroyed buildings.
After such a commotion, any humans hiding in the complex would surely be watching them in secret.
“Yu-jung, I think it's time to call out.”
“Will it be safe?”
“Yes. The mutants are at least a few kilometers away now. As long as you don't scream at the top of your lungs, we'll be fine.”
“Okay. Here goes.”
Kang Yu-jung took a deep breath.
She still looked tense.
Mutants had incredibly sharp hearing.
She had spent her entire life holding her breath and staying silent; shouting out in the open was something she had never dared to do.
But Jeron could guarantee her safety.
If anything went wrong, he could open a portal and escape instantly. Even now, he could protect her with a shield.
He channeled his wind mana to cast a barrier around her.
As long as his mana didn't run out or take a massive external impact, the shield would hold.
Kang Yu-jung did not hide the raw emotion swelling in her chest.
“Dad...!”
Her voice echoed softly through the ruins, trembling with hope and fear.
How long had she suppressed these feelings?
Jeron knew her trauma was likely far deeper than his own.
He was her only surviving family.
She had risked her life daily just to find him.
“Dad! It's Yu-jung! Please... if you're here, please come out!”
Tears finally spilled over her eyelashes and ran down her cheeks.
Jeron understood her pain completely.
She had suffered so much to survive.
This cruel world had never offered her a warm hand—only monsters seeking to tear her apart.
Just then.
About three hundred meters away, someone began running toward them frantically.
A man with shaggy hair, a thick beard, and a tattered jacket.
He was painfully thin.
As the figure closed within fifty meters, Jeron recognized him instantly.
Though years had passed, frosting his hair with white and carving deep wrinkles into his face, it was undoubtedly the man Jeron remembered—Kang Su-chul.