Walking Into Ruin
She had felt the signs that something like this would happen.
Sometimes, even knowing a situation is collapsing around you, you have no choice but to walk straight into it.
That was precisely the predicament A-class hunter Park Seonyoung found herself in now — and it was unfolding exactly as she had feared, helplessly and without the slightest deviation from her worst expectations.
"All units, establish defensive formation! There's a ruined building nearby — use it as your center and move as fast as you can!"
The new adjutant's command came through in a rush of urgency. But under the circumstances, his orders were utterly useless.
The so-called ruined building was nothing more than the crumbling remains of a single-story house, its walls barely high enough to matter. Forming a defensive line there against Abysses that could smash concrete walls like paper would do nothing but block their own field of vision. Any real defensive benefit was out of the question.
And more critically still, they were positioned on low ground — lower than the surrounding terrain. Being forced to face a massive enemy force from a position like this already meant accepting catastrophic losses as inevitable.
Haa… I knew it would come to this. But still… I never thought it would actually turn out this bad.
About a hundred meters ahead, S-class hunter Lee Sena was busily slaughtering Abysses. And beyond her — pouring down the hillside in a black, seething tide — came more of them still.
Seonyoung took in the sight, a weary, humorless smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth as she raised her weapon.
I figured a supposedly recognized adjutant might be worth at least a fingernail's worth of hope. Turns out he was no different from the ones in every other unit. If our commander had been him… we never would have been driven into a situation like this in the first place.
Having reached that conclusion, and with the plain, unremarkable face of Adjutant Lee Jinhyun rising unbidden in her mind — a face she found herself missing more desperately than usual today — Seonyoung raised her voice.
"All units, deploy defensive formation!"
"Deploy!"
The moment her voice rang out, the hunters moved with drilled precision, spreading into a circular defensive formation. At the front, B-class hunters tasked with defense raised their electronic shields into a circular barrier. Behind them, A-class hunters took up firing positions with their rifles.
And through it all, utterly indifferent to their movements, Sena continued as she always did — swinging her weapon without restraint amid the Abysses, cutting them down one after another.
"We're way too close to the Guild Master right now… What do we do about this?"
The A-class hunter beside her spoke carefully. But there was an edge to the words — less genuine concern for Sena than something sharper underneath.
Recognizing exactly what that edge meant, Seonyoung gave a slight shake of her head.
"It'll be messy and miserable, but try to shoot around her as best you can. If something happens to her side, we won't even last until the other squads arrive. At the very least, we need to keep those green C-class kids in the back alive long enough to send them home."
"…Haa. Honestly, I never thought we'd go out this pointlessly."
"Hey, don't overdo it. This is still a B-class mission, you know? Die here and you might as well throw your A-class hunter credentials in the trash."
"Well, yeah, but…"
That was as far as the conversation went. The A-class hunters turned their eyes forward again. They didn't need to finish the thought. They already knew what came next.
The bus had already left — driven off by that idiot woman standing right in front of them. All that remained was grinding themselves into the dirt in a hell with no end in sight.
"They're coming!"
The moment Seonyoung's words ended, the hunters prepared to pull their triggers. In their hands were 15mm-caliber rifles — called rifles, but typically fired on full automatic, each round packing enough force to punch clean through armor plating. Weapons only A-class hunters like them could even handle. In terms of raw firepower, they were more than reliable.
And crucially, unlike a certain someone in another squad, their packs were stuffed full of ammunition.
Watching the Abysses surge toward them in a literal black mass, they prepared to pour out firepower without restraint — just as they always had.
And then—
"Fire!"
The instant Seonyoung gave the order, rounds began to fly. Each shot punched through the hide of the Abysses charging toward them, tearing their insides into ruin.
"Kyaaaaagh!!"
"Kerrruuugh!!!"
Dozens of wolf-type Abysses at the front of the charge collapsed with grotesque cries. But the spaces they left behind filled almost instantly — like scooping a single bucket of water from the ocean — as countless more Abysses poured in to take their place.
Worse still, their formation was already in the worst possible position. The corpses tumbled downhill, and killing a mere handful of them barely slowed the advance at all.
In the end, even after grinding hundreds of Abysses into pulp in a matter of moments, the hunters found the enemy's charge pressing right up to their faces.
And then—
KWAANG!
"Kh!"
An enormous impact slammed into the B-class hunters holding the front line behind their electronic shields. Had they been ordinary humans rather than the superhumans called hunters, the blow would have sent them flying long ago. Even so, they locked their shields in place and held the line to the last.
And then—
"Discharge!"
At the command, the B-class hunters cranked their electronic shields to full output. Ultra-high-voltage current surged into every Abyss in contact with the barriers, and the creatures surrounding the formation were reduced in an instant to thoroughly charred corpses.
With it came a horrific stench. These were people long accustomed even to the reek of gunpowder — yet the smell that hit their nostrils every time they used this tactic was something they could never quite get used to.
But right now, they had no luxury of caring about such things. Beyond the mountain of corpses, more Abysses were already charging toward them once again.
"Damn it… If the formation had been better, we could have been dumping high-yield bombs on them."
"That's not even the real problem! This so-called commander has been sitting back watching the whole fight. At the bare minimum, shouldn't he be telling us the Abysses' characteristics?"
In their current position, a poorly placed bomb detonation could just as easily spill their own blood on this low ground. The badly chosen terrain was already working against them in every possible way.
But what they truly needed in this moment wasn't the terrain advantage they had already given up on — it was deeper, more precise direction from their commander.
On the surface, the battle looked like nothing more than a one-sided cycle of assault and defense. But within it, countless fine distinctions existed: which enemies were coming at which moment, where to strike in response, what combat patterns the enemy employed.
Until now, the A-class hunters of the 28th Guild had received exactly that kind of information from Lee Jinhyun in every battle, at every critical moment. From this new adjutant's mouth, however, not a single word of that sort had come.
The only order he had given was that clumsy early command to form a defensive line around a ruined house that offered no help whatsoever — while they were already stuck in a disadvantageous position.
Granted, the fact that they were fighting under such terrible terrain conditions could partly be blamed on Lee Sena herself — still thrashing about in a solitary bloodbath, ignoring the adjutant's orders entirely and continuing to draw Abysses toward them in ever greater numbers.
But more than that, the adjutant's complete failure to offer anything useful in this crisis — contenting himself with nothing more than urging the unit led by Yujin on the opposite side to hurry up and move — was proving a profound disappointment.
Strictly speaking, though, while they were entitled to feel disappointed, blaming the new adjutant for it was somewhat unfair. This was simply the limit of what ordinary adjutants were capable of.
Drafting overall strategy, monitoring the situation, issuing rough directives, and sounding a warning when danger approached during a mission — that was the standard. Someone like Lee Jinhyun, who could distinguish individual Abysses from a black, indistinguishable mass and relay the precise countermeasures for each… honestly, even among adjutants, almost no one could do that.
And there was one more thing.
There was a decisive difference between ordinary adjutants and Lee Jinhyun. But that particular difference was something they had never truly expected from anyone else — so on that front, at least, they felt little disappointment.
And so, under every kind of disadvantage, the hunters poured everything they had into survival — firing their rifles, blocking attacks with their shields. But as time dragged on, their limits began to close in.
And at last—
"Khuh!"
One of the B-class hunters, finally overwhelmed, went down under the Abysses' assault.
Through the gap that opened in the formation, the Abysses' attacks began to pour in.
And then—