Erosion Zone Practice (4) - Bang Bang!
Gunshots cracked through the colony in rapid succession. The air still shimmered with lingering waves of intense heat. Charred orc corpses lay scattered across the ground like discarded trash. A thick, acrid stench of burnt flesh rode the smoky wind. A few orcs had somehow survived the brutal bombardment, though they were barely clinging to life. Romeo Team moved casually among them, delivering clean finishing shots.
“Disgusting creatures,” Sergeant Major An Taejun muttered as he smoothly reloaded his weapon. “Leave them alone for even a little while and they multiply like this.”
“They’re certainly tough,” I replied with a nod. A normal human would have been completely incinerated, yet many of these orcs had kept most of their original shape.
“Yes. During the early days of the Gate Incident, even these things were a serious problem. Just a small group breaking out was enough to massacre ordinary civilians. These days we have proper erosion response protocols in place, so we can actually deal with them.”
Crunch. Sergeant Major An Taejun frowned as he stepped on a pile of burnt debris.
“Grrrr…!”
While we were walking, a low growl suddenly erupted and something swung at us without warning. I countered the heavy axe slashing in diagonally, driving a palm strike infused with the power of the Blood Hands Demonic Art. A massive three-meter-tall figure loomed before us. The half-burned orc’s face glowed with fierce red eyes.
Thud—
My palm shattered the orc’s axe at the same time Cheon Hayeon’s finger wind punched straight through its skull. The headless body collapsed heavily onto the ground.
“Thank you. This one must have been the leader,” Sergeant Major An Taejun said from behind me. He pulled out something resembling a short baton and drove it deep into the orc’s heart. When he withdrew the rod, a purple gem-like object sparkled at its tip. It was about the size of a finger joint.
“A manastone?”
“Yes. A creature of this caliber usually possesses one. Would you like to take it?”
He wiped the blood and flesh off the stone with a cloth and offered it to me.
“Just process it as a bounty payment.”
When I glanced sideways, Cheon Hayeon gave a silent nod as well.
“Understood. I’ll make sure it’s handled at a good price.”
Whether this had been the last one or not, we searched the orc colony several more times, but no other survivors turned up.
“Is the official mission over now?” I asked.
Sergeant Major An Taejun’s face hardened as he spoke. “Yes, that’s correct. The original plan was to escort the cadets back to the temporary base and then have our team search the sewers.”
“We’ll go with you.”
“…Are you sure that’s wise? We don’t know what might happen.”
“This friend of mine is pretty strong. She won’t get in the way,” I said, giving a thumbs-up toward Cheon Hayeon.
“Get in the way? I never thought that. It’s just…”
Sergeant Major An Taejun frowned deeply, clearly wrestling with the idea. It seemed the burden of taking cadets into a dangerous area weighed on him regardless of their actual strength.
“If you refuse, we’ll just go by ourselves?” I added half-jokingly.
He let out a heavy sigh. “Very well. But you must follow our instructions.”
“Where exactly is the sewer entrance?”
“It’s not far from here. They call it a sewer, but the North dug these things incredibly deep to serve as bomb shelters in emergencies. Thanks to that, people go missing down there all the time.”
Sergeant Major An Taejun handed me a tablet. The display showed the route to the sewer and an interior map. Though they called it a sewer, it clearly wasn’t just a simple drainage system. That was probably why the file had been updated for me.
We passed through half-destroyed gray buildings that looked like something out of a post-apocalyptic world and reached the outskirts of the city.
“This is the entrance.”
With a long creeeak, a heavily rusted iron door opened, revealing a staircase bathed in soft white lighting. A chilly wind blew up from below, carrying a musty odor mixed with a faint stench.
We followed the concrete corridor downward until a massive waterway appeared. Since it wasn’t currently in use, the channel was cleaner than I’d expected. I’d been wondering whether we’d need gas masks if fumes were present.
“We’ll start from this sector,” Sergeant Major An Taejun said, his voice tense as he took the lead.
In environments like this, ‘monsters’ tended to appear easily. It wasn’t for nothing that underground waterways were staple hunting grounds in so many games. The interior lights were on, but because creatures could be hiding beneath the water’s surface, we advanced carefully while sweeping our beams across every shadow.
Tap, tap, tap.
We walked through the enclosed sewer with tension thick in the air.
“Behind us.”
Cheon Hayeon suddenly stepped forward with a firm command. She swept her hand through the air and caught something. The overwhelming force made everyone freeze and stare at her.
“What is it?” I asked first.
Cheon Hayeon opened her palm. Crushed insect remains, reduced to powder, rested in her hand.
“It is a gu.”
“Wasn’t that thing flying just now?”
There were quite a few varieties of venomous insects classified as gu. Yet as far as I knew, none of the gu I was familiar with had wings.
“Indeed. This is no ordinary gu.”
“…We may have already been exposed,” Sergeant Major An Taejun said gravely, staring at the remains in Cheon Hayeon’s palm.
Whoosh—
Cheon Hayeon summoned flames and incinerated the corpse. It was the refined technique of Samadhi True Fire.
“It would be best if you all returned,” she said lightly dusting her hands as she addressed the soldiers. “This one and the student Kim Mugong will be fine. But it does not seem you will be.”
“What about the two of you?”
“We will continue the search,” I answered in Cheon Hayeon’s place.
“That is unacceptable. If something happens…”
“It’s fine. If it gets dangerous, we’ll pull out immediately. More importantly, as I said earlier, focus on protecting the informant first.”
Sergeant Major An Taejun frowned deeply and let out another heavy sigh.
“Understood. Please don’t overdo it. We’ll return shortly with reinforcements and proper equipment. This is an emergency radio.”
He handed me a rugged walkie-talkie.
“Thank you.”
“Good luck.”
Sergeant Major An Taejun placed his hand over his chest in lieu of a formal salute. I returned the gesture the same way.
Once the soldiers had quickly withdrawn, Cheon Hayeon’s lips moved.
“Now it is just the two of us.”
“Yeah. Why would gu be down here?”
“I do not know. This variety is new even to me.”
“If these things get inside you, do they cause hallucinations or auditory disturbances too?”
“Most gu have the property of burrowing toward the heart or brain. If they reach the brain, such symptoms would be highly likely.”
Given their tiny size, if they had slipped in through the respiratory tract, it made sense that Sergeant Major An Taejun hadn’t noticed anything unusual.
“They don’t show up on medical equipment either, huh.”
“The presence of wings suggests this is a modified strain. It must possess some means of evasion.”
“Will we be okay?”
“Your Extreme Yang energy will burn them the instant they enter your body, so there is no need to worry. And I… am fine.”
Cheon Hayeon puffed out her chest and spoke with lofty confidence. Honestly, I couldn’t even imagine her falling victim to mere insects.
“Something has been bothering my senses for a while. It is this way.”
She seemed to have already identified the source and strode forward confidently. Swarms of insects appeared along the way, but they all turned to powder and scattered the moment Cheon Hayeon released her energy wave.
…Once again, I was reminded that Cheon Hayeon was basically a cheat character.
After walking for quite some time, we reached a dead end.
“Here…?”
By now the alien sensation was strong enough that even my own senses could clearly detect it.
“Yes. There is something here.”
Boom—
Cheon Hayeon immediately punched the wall, shattering it completely. A horrific stench poured through the newly opened hole. The sour, concentrated rot stung my nose. Just breathing it in made every muscle in my body tense up.
“It reeks of corpse ghouls.”
Beyond the wall, unlike the waterway, only a faint blue glow drifted through the space. Corpse ghouls simply meant zombies or ghouls. Just like how zombies were the representative weak mobs in fantasy worlds, the same applied here. The only difference was that these were created through drugs and sinister arts rather than magic.
And just as modern fantasy zombies could be treated as elite mobs depending on the variant, this world was no different. Of course, even elite zombies would be nothing more than equally worthless trash before Cheon Hayeon.
Gwooooooh….
My senses, sharpened like blades, picked up the distant wail of a ghoul. It seemed they had noticed our intrusion.
The interior was surprisingly modern aside from the flickering lights. Despite being abandoned for years, it still maintained a degree of cleanliness.
“Let’s deal with the ghouls first.”
“Agreed.”
I didn’t know how many there were, but leaving those filthy things wandering around while we searched the facility felt far too disgusting.
Following the fishy odor, we entered a somewhat larger room.
“…Those insane bastards.”
The moment I glanced into the room beyond the glass wall, a curse slipped out naturally. Even the usually composed Cheon Hayeon widened her eyes at the sight.
Inside multiple square chambers, hundreds of transparent vinyl bags hung from the ceiling. Inside those bags were vacuum-sealed human corpses. They were suspended by both arms like slaughtered cattle. The sight of human bodies hanging like chunks of meat filled me with such revulsion I nearly vomited.
The corpses varied widely—children, elderly, men, women. To be precise, the proportion of children was overwhelmingly high. If we could see hundreds, the total number of people who had disappeared here without a trace must have reached the thousands.
Death. Death filled every corner of this place.
This kind of thing probably happened somewhere in my original world too. I had roughly understood just how much of a gutter the world of Murim Electric was. Still, there was a difference between vaguely thinking ‘it must exist somewhere’ and seeing the reality with my own eyes.
The filthy feeling creeping over me made me want to smash everything to pieces. I struggled to suppress that urge.
“So this is why you wanted to come here,” Cheon Hayeon said after stopping to stare silently into the chamber for a while.
Fortunately, she maintained relative calm even after witnessing the atrocity. Though she couldn’t completely hide the faint anger and bitterness that seeped into her voice.
“I didn’t expect it to be this bad. It must be the Blood Sect, right?”
At my question, Cheon Hayeon surprisingly shook her head slowly.
“It is too early to jump to conclusions. There are far too many pieces of trash in this world. It is possible this was the work of the North Korean government before its collapse.”
“…That is possible.”
Despite that possibility, the facility looked like it had been built after the Gate Incident.
We passed through the horrific rooms filled with corpses and finally arrived before a massive iron door. It must have still had minimal power, because it opened automatically as we approached.
Gwooooooooh!
The interior was as vast as a sports field. I never imagined a facility this large could be hidden underground. And guarding it was a horde of ghouls.
The dark blue corpses were rarely intact. Their limbs were twisted at grotesque angles, missing entirely, or had chunks of flesh melted and torn away. This was the true terror of the undead. The horrific rotting stench mixed with the chemical smell was bad enough, but simply ‘seeing’ them was enough to shake a person’s sanity.
“How unfortunate. It seems they have become hosts,” Cheon Hayeon said quietly as she gathered her energy.
I realized what was happening as well. The half-rotten corpses were swarming with the gu we had seen earlier. Some of them must have escaped through tiny ventilation shafts into the waterway.
Watching the zombie horde slowly preparing to charge toward us, I activated the Heavenly Demon Divine Art.
Thud—
Naturally, my energy resonated with Cheon Hayeon’s, sending explosive inner power racing through my meridians. For some reason, the Hyeop-in-ji-ro had been active since earlier as well.