The Final Target and Greatest Danger
“KRAAAAAAAAH!!!!”
“KREEEEEEEK!!”
With cries that seemed to tear the sky itself apart, the Abysses before them tore into their own kind. Lower-class, mid-class, and Upper-class Abysses tangled together like a single writhing mass, pouring every ounce of their strength into ripping apart the creatures that looked exactly like themselves.
There was no judgment. No hesitation. In that moment, the force driving their every action was pure instinct — nothing more than the nature branded into their very being, and not a shred of resistance accompanied it. So they killed the “enemy” before their eyes, and died in turn.
Watching them, that being — the Abyss that wore a human shape — stood motionless for a time, silently observing the scene. At a glance it looked as though it had simply washed its hands of the whole affair, as if watching a fire burn on the far side of a river, taking no action whatsoever.
But though its outward behavior showed nothing, a storm of countless thoughts was raging through its mind. It was a human brain — the same brain that, throughout every battle until now, had always calculated the optimal path to victory. By borrowing its power, this creature had annihilated the vast human armies that had pushed all the way to the borders of its territory, and in the process of swelling its forces to this point, it had never once tasted defeat — only perfect victory after perfect victory.
Indeed, even the humans’ defensive line just moments ago would have been broken through given a little more time. And yet, right now, that human brain could produce no solution capable of answering the present situation. Even with its efficiency driven to the absolute maximum under mortal threat, it only poured out ever-deeper waves of confusion. Its forces were being rapidly whittled down by uncontrolled kin right in front of the enemy, and still it could find no proper countermeasure.
“KREUUUUGH!!”
“KUEEEEEEEK!!”
Then, from behind, the screams of its own kind began to rise, accompanied by the nauseating stench of death. The humans’ assault, which had briefly paused, had resumed — and the forces that had been locked in a one-sided slaughter with the kin flooding in from the front now found themselves attacked from both sides.
What that meant, the creature itself could not clearly grasp. But the human brain linked to it recognized the fact at once, flooding it with signals of extreme danger and plunging it into an even greater panic.
Terror. Fear. Despair. Negative sensations incomprehensible from an Abyss’s perspective began to pour in without end — and rather than offering any answer to the crisis, they rendered even the creature’s own ability to fight all but impossible.
As the situation dragged on, it finally made a decision. It would no longer rely on the human brain it had found so useful until now. It would move according to its own nature.
Abyss. A weapon born for destruction — that was its true nature. Until now it had suppressed that nature in order to pursue the new concept humans called “victory.” But in a situation drowning in chaos and the feeling of failure, such things no longer mattered in the slightest.
Self-restraint and cold clarity, now useless, were cast aside, and in their place the madness and rampage unique to Abysses began to fill the void. The sudden release of the Abyss instinct it had held down for so long hit it with a backlash beyond imagination.
And as a result…
KWA-GWA-GWA-GWA-GWANG!!!
TA-DA-DA-DA-DA!!!
The roar of machine guns and the thunder of artillery rolled across the field. Gripping their weapons and pouring fire into the Abysses far ahead, the hunters’ lips began to curl into smiles of pure exhilaration.
“Shoot! Just keep shooting!”
“Kill every last one of them!”
The life-or-death danger of moments ago had vanished without a trace; the hunters were now delivering nothing but one-sided punishment. And yet, even under that overwhelming firepower, the Abysses showed no sign of turning their attacks this way. Bombs fell on their heads and bullets punched through their skulls, but their attention remained fixed solely on the kin attacking them from the front. They paid not the slightest heed to the assault coming from behind, simply standing there and taking the hits until they died.
Watching the Abysses in that state, the hunters and the adjutants commanding them nodded once more.
Just as expected… the moment their attack direction flips, they can’t spare attention for anything else.
They may have learned to use their heads to some degree, but they still can’t handle complex situations. That part was true. The legendary adjutant really did figure all of this out in that short a time…
In this operation, Lee Jinhyun had identified two primary dangers. The first had been stopping the Abysses’ opening assault — and while the hunters and adjutants had briefly felt a genuine sense of crisis under the Abysses’ unnervingly cunning offensive, even that had been minimized thanks to the troop deployments Jinhyun had ordered in advance.
If they could just weather that early crisis and then successfully draw the Abysses in with the air force, Jinhyun had said, the fighting afterward would be relatively easy and safe. And the battlefield was unfolding exactly as he had predicted.
A merciless bloodbath among themselves, combined with the hunters’ gleeful bombardment from the rear, had reduced a combined Abyss host that had once numbered fifty thousand to fewer than a few thousand. Still a considerable number — but no longer a serious threat. And since the creatures still refused to stop tearing into one another even now, the first phase of the operation was, for all practical purposes, cleanly concluded.
Even so, it was still too early to fully relax. That had everything to do with the second danger Lee Jinhyun had warned them about.
“Gulp…”
“Mm…”
Once the majority of the Abysses had become corpses, one particular presence began to stand out sharply in their eyes. The hunters recognized what it was without difficulty.
“…So that’s the one.”
“The final target of this battle — and the greatest danger.”
The Abyss that wore a human shape had come into view. And right now, it was showing a form utterly different from the sluggish advance it had displayed on the way here.
“KRARARARARA!!!”
Amid a roar that made the air itself shudder, it was thrashing at a speed the eye could not follow. In that moment, it was using the two enormous dragon heads that formed its shape to thoroughly destroy everything around it. Its movements — swift as a coiling giant serpent, yet carrying raw, crushing destructive force — smashed and chewed through the bodies of the Abysses on every side, reducing them to unrecognizable lumps of meat.
No longer distinguishing friend from foe, it was locked in a merciless slaughter. The sheer overwhelming destructive power of that presence sent a heavy dread crawling up the spines of the hunters and adjutants who watched.
Even so, they did not open fire on it recklessly. The reason was nothing other than what Jinhyun had shown them the day before while laying out the precautions — footage of a fighter jet destroyed during the earlier eight-day intelligence-gathering operation.
As a test, a jet had attempted to fire its cannons at the human-shaped Abyss positioned at the center of the horde. Even after dropping altitude slightly for the attack run, it had still been two hundred meters up, under the skilled control of a hunter pilot, and it had gone straight in on the target.
And it had been destroyed. In a span of mere seconds. That enormous dragon head had surged up the full two hundred meters in a single bound and bitten the entire airframe clean out of the sky.
In other words, a half-hearted attack would not even scratch it — and would only redirect the monster’s attention from the Abysses around it onto them. So the hunters and adjutants had no choice but to wait, watching carefully until the lesser creatures nearby were cleared away.
Of course, that did not mean they could simply leave it alone. With the wall of soldiers collapsing and the “king” left alone inside the castle, Lee Jinhyun, the other adjutants, and the guild masters had no intention of letting this perfect opportunity slip away.
“All right, then… things are just about cleaned up. Shall we move?”
“Time to live up to the name ‘Guild Master’ for once!”
With those words, the strongest forces of each hunter guild began to advance. And among them, specially authorized to take part, were Dreamouth’s strongest assets as well — Are and Gwon-sun.