A Hole in the Sky
To cut straight to the conclusion: I succeeded in persuading Tiamat.
Honestly, I'd braced myself for it to be difficult. I still couldn't tell you how a talk that had started as a pure stab in the dark somehow bore fruit like this. She wasn't some runaway middle schooler, for crying out loud. Was this really a problem that could be settled with so little effort?
Naturally, I couldn't actually say any of that out loud. For one thing, the party in question was right there listening.
Hmm-hmm, hmm-hmm-hmm~
Tiamat was humming to herself, apparently delighted beyond words. Watching that guileless, radiant display, I couldn't help thinking of the Association people who'd begged me for this favor, and it stung a little. If it couldn't be helped, then it couldn't be helped. Best to look on the bright side. With that, I forcibly wrenched my thoughts in a new direction.
For starters, Tiamat's change of heart meant the goddess's power now remained in our hands. What we'd ultimately do about her status—whether she could even be sent to the front lines—was beyond me for the moment. But there were upsides. Because right now, Dr. Pyeong So-woon was on our side.
As a prisoner, granted. But what if we could borrow that brain of hers? It was possible that we, not them, would be the ones to lay hands on Tiamat's power.
In other words—
We could mass-produce monsters.
Not that we could control them, mind you. Even among the eleven monsters that had once served Tiamat directly, there had been traitors who defected to the gods' side.
But for me, that was actually better. No—I'd rather not control them at all. Fuck that. Fight alongside monster bastards? What kind of bullshit was that?
To put it plainly, I wanted exactly one thing: the combination of the Artificial Gate technology and her Authority. An infinite supply of monsters. And the source was the goddess Tiamat herself, so even fairly high-rank monsters should be no problem.
A few things nagged at me, though. One was the biological worry that she might come to regard such monsters as her children. The other was how we'd secure subjects to transform in the first place. There was no way we could use people, obviously.
Animals and plants could be transformed too, right?
Mm. I could feel the dream swelling. Well, either way, those were questions for the lady herself.
"Come to think of it, you did say you would protect me, didn't you?"
It felt like a great many steps had been glossed over somewhere in the middle there.
"Fufu, how endearingly bashful. Well then—do you know, pray tell, what the guardian of the goddess Tiamat is called in the myths?"
"No, I don't."
The party concerned, for her part, simply kept lobbing out these maddeningly half-clear remarks. She did at least seem to be in a fine mood. In fact, the reason we were making the return trip on foot right now was her request as well.
Frankly speaking, given the method she'd used to escape in the first place, there was no need whatsoever to be walking anywhere. She could have shifted her consciousness over to the avatar standing by at the Association's top floor, and I could have ambled home at my leisure. Should we have at least hailed a taxi? Slower than my own two legs, sure, but it would've bought enough time for a nap.
That was my thinking on the road back. But I suppose you'd call it a blessing in disguise? At the end of that pre-dawn walk home, I came to understand exactly what that old saying meant.
"What the fuck?!"
In the interest of my honor, let me state for the record: this time, those were not my words. They came spewing from the self-proclaimed goddess walking beside me. But just then, I had no leisure to seize on her slip of the tongue and pull.
Out by the harbor, I hadn't noticed—but the city was, by any measure, deeply wrong. A clamor frantic beyond reason. Smoke boiling up from every corner of the city. Screaming and wailing. Fire licking at the dark. It wasn't hard to guess what had happened.
Unfortunately.
Because—
Motherf—
Above the New City, high in the sky beyond, a colossal hole big enough to swallow the entire city had torn open.
For the first time since the Second Great Invasion had officially ended, a supermassive gate had appeared over the capital region of South Korea. Neither Tiamat nor I were fools enough to believe that an unprecedented crisis like this had simply happened by coincidence during the one window we were away.
Which meant—
"Comms?!"
"Nothing's getting through!!"
"Goddamn monster bastards. Nothing ever goes right."
"And what will you do, then?"
"What do you mean, what do I do? I stop them, that's what!"
"Then this one shall first ascertain the state of the Association!"
"If you've got anything to report, send it to the boarding house!"
The exchange of intentions was swift. The loose, giggly atmosphere of moments ago was gone without a trace. Tiamat and I took stock of the situation.
First: communications were down. Whether the monster bastards swarming the city had some ability to jam them, or the infrastructure itself had been hit, I couldn't say. But one thing was certain: this damn thing called a cell phone was good for nothing when it actually mattered.
No intel, then. In that case, who would be actively responding inside the city right now? The Hunter Association, without a doubt. And Tiamat, as of this moment, could return to the Association in under a second—all she had to do was dissolve the body standing here. Once she'd assessed the situation, any information worth sharing would go to the boarding house.
The moment I finished saying it, Tiamat's body vaporized and was gone. Convenient, if nothing else.
The problem was what came next.
The boarding house. That was the destination I'd settled on, and it couldn't be helped. The timing was far too contrived. To Tiamat and me, there was no way this, too, was anything but their doing.
The New World Order—Novus Ordo Seclorum. I'd hoped otherwise, but sure enough, they had secured Dr. Pyeong So-woon's artificial gate technology in advance as well. The problem was the sheer, absurd scale of the gate.
Minimum A-Rank, I'd say.
Gates are ranked by the highest-rank monster they can produce. And A-Rank meant a threat that would take nuclear weapons to guarantee a subjugation. In other words, it denoted national-level force.
That said, it didn't mean every A-Rank monster was the size of a nation. Nor were the gates that gestated such monsters. Which raised the question—what in the world was a gate literally large enough to wrap around an entire city trying to birth?
In that sense, the current situation could be called well and truly fucked.
...Slowly, I steadied my breathing.
Should I use my Signature? That was the first thought to cross my mind. Certainly, it would sweep away the monsters in the city center in a single stroke. But not now. The situation was bad.
I'd used my Signature only a handful of times this year. Clearing out a monster colony in a gate tied to Seoa's guild. The duel with Kim Minchul at the abandoned factory. And finally, blasting apart the demonic foxes' nest at the Namhae Branch.
What? The fight with Tae Siyoung? I'm afraid that one isn't on our house Signature menu—it failed, after all.
Anyway. In a word: situations where a mistake wouldn't matter. Right now was different.
Say I used my Signature this instant. The monsters could be wiped out in one go. But—a monster draped over the top of a building. A monster flying through the sky. If those things came crashing down, the damage might actually accelerate. More than that, at this range, fine control became difficult. I could widen the area to handle multiple targets, but naturally that meant synchronizing with the wavelengths of every single monster at once. It took time, and delicate adjustment went out the window.
Of course, killing monsters with a sloppy blast was easy enough. But what if a carelessly aimed Signature swept a person or a building into its target set? As I just said—if there was a centipede-type monster coiled around a building, that was by no means impossible. My mana-sensing dulled the moment the target wasn't a monster.
Besides, it was never a technique built for melee free-for-alls. Obviously. I was a solo hunter!! There was no way my kit was coded for group brawls!!
Not to mention I'd never once practiced it...
Fuck. Even if the day might come when I needed it, testing this technique mid-melee would be sheer insanity. What was I supposed to do if half-severed corpses started turning up?
So even I couldn't be certain on the spot. I had a feeling it would probably be fine. I even felt like I could manage that level of mana control now. But I couldn't stake the lives of every man, woman, and child in the New City on that gamble. If it were that easy, I'd never have floundered half-panicked through the stampede at the Gangwon Branch in the first place. Least of all now.
One thing, at least, was clear: this situation was unmistakably their doing. How had they built a gate of that scale? In a single day, no less—what the hell had happened? That, too, was easy to guess.
Goddammit.
Hadn't Moon Youngseok said as much from the start? The facilities he'd ratted out to us back then were only the ones within his own knowledge. There were bound to be plenty more that a small fry like Moon Youngseok could never know about. Of course, we'd known that too. That was why we'd kept patrolling the surrounding facilities ever since.
...So that was it? They'd brought their facilities online in a matter of days? I glanced up at the sky. Compared to the artificial gates Dr. Pyeong So-woon had produced back then, this thing was excessively, outrageously massive. Staring at it, I found myself wondering—maybe her actual research had been a little different from what we'd assumed. Not scattering gates piecemeal, but linking multiple research wings into a chain to produce one supermassive gate.
Come to think of it, that approach made far more sense. What use was mass-producing gates you couldn't even control?
And if so, their objective was easy to infer as well. Better to go all-in once than risk being found out by us—that had to be the logic. Dr. Pyeong So-woon's own facility proved the point. When we took the secret research wing, the number of labs synced with her building had been ten or more. If her research was about linking multiple wings to create a single gate, then that meant the network required at least ten facilities. Once discovered, it couldn't be easily repaired or reproduced. Maybe their plan was to throw the dice once and see what came up.
Of course, from the receiving end, it was no joke. And it was hard to believe they'd really set this off without a thought. They'd moved while Tiamat and I were away. Either way, they'd acted knowing full well there was a hole in our strength. How they'd caught on was a question for later.
Which left only one move for them to make here.
They mean to take Hayeon back.
I kneaded the back of my neck with a couple of dull cracks. Which was why the rendezvous point was the boarding house. Tiamat would have worked that much out on her own. The problem was—
When exactly did this begin?
I wanted desperately to believe it wasn't already over—that Hayeon hadn't already been snatched back with everything wrapped up neat and done. But the scene before my eyes was too vicious to allow that hope. Devastatingly, undeniably effective—I had no choice but to admit it.
That was the end of my deliberation. Having sorted my thoughts in an instant, I broke into a run toward the boarding house. Either way, the boarding house had to be checked first.