The First Calamity
The First Calamity
The metallic taste of blood surged up my esophagus.
I spat a mouthful of blood roughly onto the mud, which was splattered with the entrails of beasts.
Every time I gasped for air, the sensation of muscles between my ribs screaming and tearing struck my entire body.
The forest outside the barrier.
The first night of scouring the forest, forcing Aura out of this underdeveloped body without a single healing method.
The result of that ignorant search was disastrous muscle tears and vascular damage.
'I'm going to collapse at this rate.'
I barely managed to support my body using my blood-stained sword as a cane.
The penalty for the crime I committed. The price was returning in full, in the form of torn flesh and screaming joints.
In the past, the information left by survivors about the Great Calamity was extremely fragmentary.
That it devoured magical beasts to grow its body, and that it had massive legs and eyes.
Relying on that crude information to blindly scatter Aura while searching the forest is madness.
The forest of the Western Front is vast enough to swallow tens of thousands of troops in an instant. Trying to brute-force this endless sea of trees without a single landmark was no different from a suicidal act of gnawing away at my own lifespan.
I had to painfully admit that the derailed plan had paralyzed my cold reason. Before I could even find the calamity, this underdeveloped body would collapse first.
I immediately stopped the tempo of the search and revised my tactics.
The teaching of the old mage, who told me to doubt and dissect everything.
The second night.
Instead of searching the forest blindly, I returned to the perspective of a hunter, setting up hypotheses and observing the ecosystem.
First, information about the bastard.
Information about it was extremely limited. Since it had never appeared after the Western Front was annihilated. People just speculated that it had perished along with the Vice-Captain.
The only thing I could rely on was the testimony of the survivors.
The survivors' testimonies were consistent. '8 red eyes, 12 legs. It devoured the surrounding magical beasts and rapidly grew its body.'
First hypothesis.
If it had 'started devouring' magical beasts.
Magical beasts are, by nature, animals with a desire to survive. If an overwhelming predator had appeared, the surrounding packs of magical beasts would have been terrified and fled in droves, or they would have been abnormally agitated and bared their fangs after losing their habitat.
I lay prone in the mud, observing the beasts' water sources and thoroughly analyzing the source of the scent of blood flowing on the wind. Large-scale migrations of magical beasts chased from their habitats by a predator, or traces of cannibalism caused by extreme stress. I waited all night for even a single abnormal tearing sound to be heard.
However, the result was a complete failure.
There were beasts peacefully quenching their thirst at the water source, and the wolf pack was quietly controlling the hunt only within their own territory according to established rules. Not a single external variable capable of threatening the apex of the food chain had intervened in this forest.
The forest on the outskirts of the Western Front was far too peaceful. The beasts were hunting low-level magical beasts in their territories as usual, maintaining a routine ecosystem.
"Haa."
I leaned against a tree trunk and exhaled a cold breath.
Immediately after confirming the failure of my hypothesis with my own eyes, my mind reached a perfect second conclusion without delay.
It hadn't started feeding yet.
In that case, the calamity must be in some unknown state of dormancy, not yet having begun its activities, and thus not even posing a threat to the magical beasts.
A static state, curled up without posing even a speck of threat to the surrounding ecosystem.
The third night.
If it's dormant, where would it be hiding?
A narrow cave that beasts can't access? The deep riverbed with strong currents?
Or a crevice in a sheer cliff?
I stopped the act of blindly wandering around looking for a hideout.
Instead, I climbed up a giant tree in the forest, closed my eyes, and pushed my sensitive senses to the limit.
'Every rough action and change must leave a large trail of Mana.'
I don't have the sense to control Mana in my Dantian yet, so I can't cast magic.
But if I focus and doubt, I could pinpoint the 'Mana fluctuations' left by magical beasts as they moved through the forest.
Mana is harder to read the more small, layered movements there are. However, the rough and large trails emitted when beasts tear apart prey or sprint at full speed remain clearly in the air.
The reason most magic is focused on explosions is also because it's easy to observe the reverberations.
I backtracked the Mana fluctuations penetrating the forest.
As I closed my eyes, the energy of the forest rose up with color beyond my pitch-black vision. The murky, sticky pools of Mana left by groups sleeping huddled together. The violent, sharp fragments of Mana scattered in all directions while tearing apart prey.
With even my breathing stifled, I moved along the branches of the giant trees, collecting those geometric trajectories in my mind.
The majority of magical beasts in this area are a pack with the shape of 4-legged wolves. They are 'Grizzle'.
They strictly form packs to patrol a certain territory, and only move roughly outside of it when hunting.
The collected information interlocked like a puzzle, and the rough Mana trajectories emitted by the beasts began to be perfectly drawn in my mind as one giant map.
This place is the wolves' main patrol route. That place is the swamp where they drink water. That ridge is the blind spot where they ambush for hunting.
"......."
I snapped my eyes open.
And I attempted the most ingenious reverse thinking.
In the map in my head, I excluded all places where the beasts' movement paths reached from the search targets.
The beasts' territory, hunting paths, hidden caves, and swamps. I boldly erased every place where even a little bit of Mana trajectory was entangled.
The scope of the search was extremely narrowed down.
Using the method of elimination, I led my tearing muscles and secretly dug into the few remaining blanks.
How long had I wandered the forest? My footsteps, which had been scouring the remaining areas in the darkness, came to a sudden halt.
"...Damn."
A dry, hollow laugh leaked out through my lips.
The traces of Mana created by the beasts.
A strange place that those countless and complex trajectories avoided in a circle, almost artificially.
I pushed through the dense bushes and stepped inside that space.
In the middle of the forest, a huge, wide-open clearing of about 100 meters.
It wasn't a hideout.
It wasn't a cave to breathe in, nor a cliff to hide my body.
A desolate and barren land where not a single piece of cover to hide my body, nor even a single blade of grass to stand on, grew.
A perfect blind spot.
Because there is no place to hide and no grass to graze on, herbivores do not approach this clearing.
Since herbivores don't come and there is no cover, there is absolutely no reason for carnivorous magical beasts that need to hunt to pass through here either.
It was the exact opposite of the hideouts like caves or cliffs that I had blindly searched on the first day.
It was a blind spot in my vision, left alone as if to prove the saying that it's darkest under the lamp.
"If I had thought of this sooner, I wouldn't have been rolling in the mud with torn muscles."
I muttered coldly, wiping my chin with the back of my blood-stained hand.
Tap.
I carefully moved my steps toward the center of the barren land.
However, when I had taken just a few steps.
Like a scene from a thriller movie, the air around me became bizarrely heavy and began to constrict my breath.
"...!"
The hairs on my entire body stood on end.
It wasn't the pressure emitted by a simple high-level magical beast or a knight's Aura.
My survival instinct, deep in my bones from having crossed countless hells and death lines in my past life, was sounding alarm bells like crazy.
The air turned sticky like mucus and clung to my skin.
An alien and overwhelming fear, as if even the oxygen entering my lungs was imbued with the smell of rotten blood.
I gritted my teeth, tore through that heavy air, and reached the center.
"...Found you."
It was there.
The center of the barren land. Something that hadn't been noticeable because it was perfectly assimilated with the surrounding earth color.
A blackish 'cocoon' was curled up, emitting a bizarre pulsation that defied human common sense.
Thump-. Thump-.
That unknown mass, pulsating ominously as if to devour all life and light in the vicinity.
In my past life, it broke down this barrier.
The terrible First Calamity that had crushed Vice-Captain Valian and 70% of the Western Front's troops into perfect meat paste.
Through my lips, that terrible nickname, which the Imperial military would later name with trembling and despair, flowed out coldly.
"Red Moon of the Twelve Tombstones that Devours All Things."
It hadn't even risen that red moon yet.
It hadn't even erected the twelve tombstones that would trample the world.
But a monster that makes you face instinctive fear just with the pressure it emits in its curled-up cocoon state.
"......."
In the midst of that crushing, overwhelming pressure, I instead bit the soft flesh of my lip to draw blood.
As the metallic scent of blood moistened the tip of my tongue, my reason sharpened coldly.
Fear is a luxury. Before that terrible calamity opens its eyes, I must tear that shell apart in one go with this underdeveloped body.
Shing-.
I drew the dagger from my waist and aimed the sharp blade at the center of the cocoon.
As if I didn't care about tomorrow, I pulled the Aura from the depths of my Dantian to its limit.
Looking down at the sprout of the calamity curled up in the perfect blind spot.
The hound's ominous and blood-shot eyes were flashing silently in the pitch-black darkness.