One-Hit Faith
Thankfully, no compromise proved necessary.
There was the sensation screaming through me, convulsing with the urge to hurl myself at the monsters prowling the city center. How was I supposed to soothe it while making my way to the boarding house? The question had barely formed in my mind when an answer arrived — not good news, but the best news I could have asked for.
Because the densest concentration of monsters in the entire city was, as it happened, the boarding house.
Son of a bitch.
The landlady was going to faint. No — she'd probably already fainted. Whenever she laid eyes on a monster, her eyes rolled back, the trauma of losing her husband seeing to that.
And yet, even so, I had no choice but to call the situation fortunate. The fact that monsters were still clustered around the boarding house meant they hadn't achieved their objective. And if they hadn't achieved their objective, it meant Seoa's defense was holding.
'For now, at least.'
A time attack — who would have guessed. For someone like me, who preferred a leisurely and thorough approach, this was an uncomfortable arrangement.
I had, of course, considered crashing the party via Shukuchi. But that was truly a last resort. Shukuchi was, in the end, a matter of mana manipulation — a technique that rode on high-density mana to move. No matter how carefully I did it, it would leave traces. It wasn't as if the enemy had confirmed Hayeon's location, either. The address on file with the student services office was fake. And if they had pinpointed her, the monsters across the entire city would have already swarmed the boarding house.
Which meant —
'Aha.'
As I sprinted toward the boarding house, the events of that morning took sharp, unmistakable shape in my head. The gate had most likely opened in the tail end of dawn. Given Hayeon's daily rhythm, it would have been around six in the morning — the hour when, as always, she'd be getting ready to leave for school early, dodging the eyes of her classmates.
And then, abruptly, a gate had torn open beyond the sky. If I had been the student, what would I have done? The options came down to roughly three. One: return to the boarding house and join Seoa and the others. Two: take shelter in a bunker within New City. Three: link up with whichever teachers were holding down the school.
I couldn't say which Hayeon had picked, but my gut said the first. Our boarding house sat at a distance from the city center, so the second was out. She left for school at six in the morning — when I was around, I usually left first, but right now I was absent, and there was no reason for her to loiter at the boarding house waiting to depart. And of course, the only thing standing guard at the school at six a.m. was the old gatekeeper. Translated into our terms, that meant Nam Sangwon and the Honinhoe — and nothing more.
Besides, Hayeon was shyer around strangers than most people realized. Faced with a choice between people she had no connection to and Seoa's side, she'd have chosen the latter. Pure speculation, admittedly — but if she had acted that way, then I could breathe a little easier.
In any case, one member of the Honinhoe had once been on the monsters' side. There'd never been a whiff of treachery since, but flip it around: what if the monsters appeared right in front of them? The Honinhoe might well trade Hayeon away in exchange for their safety. Like it or not, they were a family — and for family's sake rather than their own, a human being is a creature capable of anything. Hand over Hayeon, and a betrayal could be redeemed a hundred times over.
And if that were so — if things had played out exactly as I'd predicted — then what was I supposed to be doing right now?
There was, of course, only one answer.
Kyaaaaaack!!
A blind spot in my field of vision. A scream belatedly erupting behind me — and claws came flying in. Idiots, shrieking at the top of their lungs right before an ambush, broadcasting their position to the world. If they hadn't, it would have been a real nuisance on my end.
I swung the greatsword in a wide, horizontal arc. The claws that had been soaring at me a heartbeat earlier were sheared clean in two against its blade.
But.
Instead of spilling blood, the afterimage simply melted into empty air. A phantom made of mana — that, in the truest sense of the words, was all it had been.
And then.
Right beside me, I pulverized the skull of a monster that had been hiding in the shadow.
Gyaaaaack!!
Only now did the little bastard die, letting out a genuine scream. Raw strength put it somewhere around C-rank — but insolently enough, it had a knack for scheming. Obviously, this kind of monster was nastier in temperament than plenty of far higher-ranked creatures. Come to think of it, civilian casualties aside, this side of them probably accounted for more hunter deaths.
I couldn't afford it to be any other way.
I examined the monster's remains. Something vaguely humanoid lay sprawled there — though no one on earth would mistake it for human. Matted fur grown to a filth that defied the word "unkempt." The hooves of a beast, the claws of a great predator. Venom was even seeping from their very tips.
'A ghoul, then.'
The corpse-eating demon — ? ? ? in the old texts. In modern pop culture, it sometimes gets lumped in with zombies, but its true nature was, above all else, a fallen jinn. It was no walking corpse, no jiangshi. The hallucination it had used on me just now was the same story — the ghoul's will-o'-the-wisp, the thing it supposedly used to lure in and devour the wanderers of the desert. Its raw strength was merely C-rank, but the sheer variety of abilities it inherited from its fallen-jinn origin was what made it a menace.
The poison in its claws was the same. Call them cousins of the vampire or the werewolf. By the International Hunter Association's standards: C+ rank. Its bag of tricks ran far deeper than its muscle — and then there was the defensive side, the thing that answered the werewolf's hide and vitality, or a vampire's regeneration.
Namely: the One-Hit Faith. A secret of monster-slaying handed down through the Middle East. The art of the single, killing blow, forged to slay dragons and ghouls. Because the dragons and ghouls of the Middle East possessed a nature that made them impossible to kill with anything but the first strike.
Fucking absurd.
Literally: if you didn't kill a Middle Eastern dragon or ghoul in one blow, you couldn't kill it at all. From the second strike onward, no matter how much power you packed into it, all you did was revitalize the thing — a power that converted every hit but the first into healing.
Which was exactly why I hadn't been throwing weapons around. To put it crudely — if the thing gritted through an arm, that arm's worth of attacks became dead weight on the spot. When I'd said I was grateful Seoa was holding the line, I had meant it. Information was what I needed most right now, and I'd already tested a few things.
According to the lore, the ghouls' defensive trait applied not per individual, but per weapon. In other words: even if you failed to kill one with your first weapon, all you had to do was draw a different blade. And that proved true. A thrown weapon I'd deliberately aimed at an arm had no effect on the same ghoul, while the greatsword did. I also confirmed that each of my greatsword's configurations counted as a separate weapon.
So that was where a master smith's handiwork really shone. I'd have to buy him a meal sometime.
In short — other hunters might be in deep trouble, but for me, it hardly mattered.
'Well, shit.'
The problem was that I couldn't currently use my Signature. More precisely, that I was holding it back. And in that state, I couldn't grind down a horde this size one kill at a time. The Signature had originally been made to sweep up large numbers as a bonus — which made it about as convenient as a screen door in this situation.
First priority was linking up with the boarding house. That was non-negotiable. Not for any other reason than that I needed to pass the ghoul intelligence to the Association's hunters through Tiamat. I could hope someone had already caught on, but realistically, I wasn't holding my breath. As I'd said before — a monster's ecology gets bound to the legends of where it appears. A gargoyle born in France can show up in South Korea. A kumiho born in South Korea can wander as far as Rome. But a giant out of Norse mythology doesn't just pop up in India.
Come to think of it now, maybe Tiamat had the right of it — traces of an age when the myths were real. Why, after all, does the three-legged crow never appear in European legend? Because in the days when myth was history, the three-legged crow never lived in Europe. And likewise, a monster out of Arthurian myth is most likely to surface in modern Wales or England — because that's where it lived, long ago.
Same principle. The monsters Korean hunters faced were, for the most part, the beasts of this country's own folklore. Ghouls might be a wildcard, but how many hunters out there knew the first thing about the Middle Eastern One-Hit Faith? If one did, I'd be genuinely shocked.
The real question was how I was going to punch through the encirclement around the boarding house.
Knngaaa!!
Kyaaaaaack!!
These bastards really don't give a man a second to think, do they?!
The boarding house had just come into hazy view in the distance — and the number of ghouls crossing my path climbed with every step. The thickening density was plain to see at a glance.
One ahead. Two behind. Each one trailing its own hallucination. Their illusions had no real effect on me, but they were simply annoying. And in the same breath, another six phantom clones to boot.
I brought the ghouls within range of the greatsword — and linked the strike.
One lunged straight in, arm outstretched. The other two went for my shoulder and my calf. The front one drew my eyes while the pair struck high and low at once, cutting off any retreat. Were they thinking that even if the extended arm got maimed, it didn't matter so long as they didn't die in one blow?
Rational. So.
I answered rationally.
I drew the greatsword far back, the way one sheathes a blade at the hip. Naturally, a weapon this size could never actually be sheathed — and so the greatsword rose absurdly, almost comically high. Higher than the head of the second ghoul already gunning for my shoulder.
Krruh?
A single syllable. That was the thing's last will and testament.
Then I pulled the sword forward again. What had come before was closer to a sheathing art; this was closer to a draw.
And then —
The deeply curved tip of the blade. What could only be called the hook at its edge bored straight down through the skull of the ghoul targeting my shoulder.
One.
Then, with one ghoul still hanging off the blade, I carried the draw through to its end. Riding the arc of the swing, the impaled corpse let out a whistling whoom —
And at the same moment —
Crunch!!
The corpse slung from my blade collided head-on with the skull of the ghoul lunging at my legs, and exploded.
Two.
At last — release. Rising cut.
Sheeeak!!
From groin to crown, I bisected the ghoul charging in from the front, arm and all.
Three.
Thud-thud-thud-thud. Only now did the corpses tumble across the pavement — hardly surprising, since everything I'd done amounted to a single swing. Blade tip. The ghoul's head caught on the hook. The greatsword's edge. One strike, three different weapons, one kill each.
Even by my own judgment, a flawless attack.
...Well, no — to be fair, Master Jung Ilhyun had said the same thing. Practice your forms against hordes of low-rank monsters. He wasn't wrong; viewed from that angle, this situation was a perfect training ground. But even so, I hadn't exactly wished for the opportunity to arrive quite like this!
A fight finished in one motion. Without so much as a breath to gather the spoils, I threw myself back into a sprint. At the same time, the calculator started turning.
The exchange I'd just made wasn't bad. But. To cleave three ghouls with a merely-decent strike had cost one full breath. So what then, if I was facing three hundred? A hundred swings, at minimum. Against ordinary ghouls, that would be no real problem. The problem was that ghouls had higher strains.
They didn't need to copy every vampire and werewolf trait, but still. Let's see. Standard ghouls: C+ rank. Named ghouls, the ones remembered in legend: B+ rank, say. And among those — the one called the King of Ghouls? Probably in the neighborhood of A+ rank.
'This is insane.'
That's madness — does that even make sense? No... facing them directly, I understood. A monster that cannot be slain without firepower capable of putting down an A+ rank in a single strike? Fuck's sake, are we really just letting ecosystem-destroyers like this roam around? And the higher strains even cast magic, the bastards.
No choice, then. This wasn't the moment to be sparing anything. Signature forbidden. Defense dictated by the One-Hit Faith. Enemies in droves. And with the gate already open on top of it all — this was no time to be rationing my tools.
The magic harvested from Dr. Pyeong So-woon's laboratory. It wasn't finished yet — but maybe it was time to unseal it.