Hell's Hidden Treasure
This much information... from a place like hell?
There were any number of good ways to judge a person.
You could listen to what those around them said. You could meet them face to face. Or you could examine the achievements they had left behind—that, too, could prove useful.
In that regard, he...
Adjutant Choi Han could not hide his astonishment as he stared at the materials stacked before him.
The documents on the Abysses contained within...
Crude sketches accompanied by meticulous explanations, and inside them lay information that far surpassed anything he himself carried in his head.
Characteristics of lower-class Abysses, of course, but also mid-class and upper-class ones, along with predictions of the directions in which those creatures might evolve.
Even more astonishing were the detailed countermeasures for each type of Abyss, all grounded in that analysis. And most critically of all, the materials even suggested that if the current trend continued, the Abysses might, at some point, begin to develop intelligence.
He gathered and analyzed all of this alone... in this hellish guild? With just this, you could pull several practical research papers out of it. What kind of monster...
Thinking that, Adjutant Choi Han flipped through the documents at high speed. The sheer volume made a thorough reading impossible, yet he could still grasp, in broad strokes, what else was there.
Data on the Abysses... and what he was reading now concerned the combat styles of each hunter in the 28th Guild, along with the optimized methods for deploying them.
Naturally, that included the four S-class hunters, Lee Sena among them. Looking at those pages, Choi Han found a bitter smile forming on his lips of its own accord.
Lee Sena—this woman is someone you must never trust and never try to use... Haha. His eye for people is dead-on, too. If I'd seen this the moment I walked in, it really would have helped a lot.
It was content that no longer meant much now, yet it would have made excellent reference material for any commander trying to wring maximum efficiency out of his soldiers.
As he examined it all, two clear facts began to crystallize in Adjutant Choi Han's mind.
One: the man named Lee Jinhyun—whose name he had occasionally heard but never paid much attention to—was an extraordinary being whose abilities he himself could not even begin to approach.
And the other: the incompetence of that bitch Lee Sena, who had failed to recognize such a top-tier talent and cast him out, was far more severe than he had imagined.
That father of hers is the Vice Minister of National Defense, using family connections to effectively hold this country's military power in his grip—and yet his own daughter couldn't recognize a jewel like this and threw him away... We managed to keep our lives this time, but it won't last much longer.
With a large portion of his family occupying general-officer posts, and himself the de facto power holder meant to keep the military under control, Vice Minister Lee Jaemin was a man who could be said to have seized real command of the nation's armed forces.
Backed by both personal ability and the formidable prestige of his house, he had directed the war against the Abysses with relative success and firmly cemented his position.
This latest affair had begun to crack that prestige, yet the achievements he had piled up over the years were so numerous that his power remained formidable.
In that light, Lee Sena—unlike her father, nothing but raw strength wrapped around utter incompetence—was a fatal, irredeemable weak point for the powerful Vice Minister Lee Jaemin.
Given the massive disaster she had just caused, Choi Han began to look forward to watching that illustrious vice minister topple in the near future.
And for that... just as that person said, we'll absolutely need his help. Adjutant Lee Jinhyun's help.
Having thoroughly recognized the importance of a man he had until now regarded as nothing special, Choi Han carefully returned the materials he had been reading to their place, as if setting down a jar of treasure, and asked cautiously,
"Um... if I may ask, what do you plan to do with these materials going forward?"
"These? Well... I'll ask the owner. If he needs them, I'll send them over. If not, I'll throw them out. Why?"
"Th-then, if he says he doesn't need them, could you ask whether I might take them? It would be far too much of a waste for materials this extraordinary to be discarded."
"Well... if the original owner says it's fine..."
With that, Na Jiseon carefully lifted her phone and placed a call.
Watching her, Choi Han felt a mix of anticipation and a strange tension.
Then Na Jiseon's voice rose, slightly excited.
"Hm? Jinhyun oppa? It's me."
*
"The materials? If someone wants to use them, I don't mind... though honestly I'm not sure how much help they'll be. I haven't updated them in seven months. Still, if you really need them, go ahead and take them. Just do me a favor and dispose of the files on the 28th Guild hunters if you can. Handing those over, even now, doesn't feel like proper respect for the dead."
When I heard someone wanted the materials I had left behind at the guild, I gave permission without any issue.
There was nothing particularly problematic left in them, and more importantly, with most of the 28th Guild's members dead and the guild itself dissolved, I no longer felt any attachment.
If the crude notes I had scribbled could be of use to someone, that alone would give them meaning.
After authorizing the transfer of the materials and hearing about the dissolution of the 28th Guild, I cast off the last lingering emotion in my heart and turned my gaze back to the people before me.
Lee Are and Yu Gwon-sun stood on either side of me as if escorting me.
And directly in front of us sat roughly thirty B-class hunters, their expressions tense.
"Then... I will now begin the briefing on the commission. Glass, if you would."
"Understood, Aide."
At those words, Glass immediately operated the computer and brought up the display.
On the screen appeared a map of the defensive line around Hamhung, where fierce fighting was still raging even now.
And marked to the north of that line was a single red dot.
Looking at the screen that briefly summarized the current situation, I continued speaking.
"As you have all already heard, the Korean military has been pouring everything into the defense of the Hamhung area since the defeat in the last battle. Reinforcements rushed to the front have managed to hold the line so far, but the problem is this—the large-scale Abyss horde slowly descending from the north."
The clear red dot on the map.
It represented a swarm of Abysses numbering in the tens of thousands, currently advancing south at a crawl—no faster than a person walking at a leisurely pace.
Given the usual movement speed of Abysses, it was an absurdly sluggish advance.
Yet regardless of that slow pace, the movement of a force of such undeniable scale was plain to see, and the Korean military could easily predict the future that awaited them.
Even now, merely holding the defensive line was proving quite a strain. If that many additional troops arrived, what followed was obvious.
The line they had barely been maintaining would collapse, and the entire Hamhung region would fall into the Abysses' hands in an instant.
If Hamhung—responsible for the main supply routes—fell, not only Hamgyong Province but the occupied territories farther south would no longer be able to hold.
The results of this large-scale operation, which had mobilized tens of thousands of troops, would come to nothing, and in the worst case, even the South Korean mainland itself could be placed in danger.
"That is why the government has poured enormous funds into commissioning the Black Hunters currently in the country. Holding the Hamhung region and defending the line—that is the commission we have taken on this time."
A detailed briefing on the execution of the commission followed.
Yet as I explained it, I felt a tension thicker than usual.
It concerned information I had learned along with accepting this commission.
Something connected to a certain presence detected at the center of that red dot on the screen.
An Abyss in human form... This won't be easy at all...