Never Let Your Guard Down
“Hyaaah!”
Crack!
The humanoid torso of the creature lost an arm to the swinging axe, the limb shearing away as if it had never been attached. Crimson blood sprayed from the stump—and still, Yuna, Guild Master of the Sixth Guild, found her brow furrowing of its own accord.
“Kh…”
A monomolecular cutter sheathed in flame, designed to cleave a target clean through and make regeneration impossible. And yet the humanoid flesh of this thing, even with an arm severed by such a weapon, regenerated the lost limb with effortless ease.
What the hell is this thing? Durability aside, I’ve never seen regeneration like this.
Even after its cells had been seared and destroyed by fire, the monster restored its arm to perfect condition in a matter of seconds. The black portions of its body could at least be damaged with sustained assault, and their recovery could be interrupted. The white parts, though, took no injury at all—like some immortal hydra that simply refused to break.
An Abyss like this exists in the world… Just how strong can these things become?
A chill of dread settled over her. Abandoning any hope of harming the white sections, Yuna focused her attacks on the black ones instead—never noticing the faint smile that had begun to form at the corners of the creature’s unfocused white eyes.
There are any number of ways for a large force of the weak to face a small number of the strong. But if the goal is to minimize losses and secure a certain victory, I can name one condition that is absolutely essential.
Aggro management.
Deny the enemy efficient attacks while pouring every ounce of offensive pressure you can muster onto them. In games, that job usually falls to the so-called sturdy tanks. Unfortunately, no such concept as a defense-specialized hunter exists among us.
Hunters are tougher than ordinary people, certainly—but take a bad hit from an Abyss and you still end up with broken bones, ruptured organs, and death. Everyone is more or less the same in that regard. Electronic barrier shields can block their attacks quite effectively, but the limits of those devices are painfully clear.
In the end, the only realistic tools available were the ones I could see playing out right now: evasion and flight. I was grateful we even had that much.
If this Abyss’s attack speed had been even a fraction higher, things would have gotten very complicated. Still, those two are dodging better than I expected. Small mercies.
Two people had become the Abyss’s designated targets and were running for their lives, the humanoid creature glued to their heels. While they fled, the remaining hunters hammered it from the flanks and rear.
But that offensive could never be indiscriminate. It required careful restraint. The creature’s attention was locked on the prey in front of it for the moment, yet I could read its shifting gaze well enough to know the truth: if one side poured on a one-sided assault, it would abandon the fleeing targets and swing its attacks toward the flanks and rear instead.
The aggro is holding better than I thought. Honestly, I was worried—this thing has intelligence.
From the moment it slaughtered its own allies with its bare hands, I had known it had half abandoned reason and slipped into a berserk state. That did not mean it couldn’t snap back to clarity and start moving with cunning again. Complacency was absolutely forbidden.
I kept a close watch on every motion, coordinating the hunters’ pressure so the aggro wouldn’t snap to another direction, steadily stacking damage. And yet—
Even as the black dragon portions cracked, peeled away, and began to melt down with no major surprises, an ominous feeling I could not shake made my brow tighten on its own.
It looks like it’s just thrashing around simply… and that simplicity is exactly what makes it suspicious. Berserk or not, this is the same creature that was directing other Abysses with such cunning before. There’s no way it just sits still and takes this.
It might have been nothing more than baseless worry. But I had learned from experience that a battlefield instinct can sometimes hand you a clue about the unknown.
There’s something. The problem is figuring out what.
From where I stood, I had no way of knowing what it was after. Even so, that did not mean I was without options. If the enemy was preparing a trump card, we simply prepared one of our own.
And for me, that trump card was the two buttons I still had not powered on—more than mere reinforcements. If luck was on our side, they might even lock down this rampaging Abyss’s movements for a single critical moment.
“Kraaaagh!!!”
The Abyss’s dragon head burst apart, spraying a liquid the color of blood. The white humanoid torso’s regeneration was absurdly powerful; the black side looked a little tougher in terms of raw defense, but damage clearly registered there, so the hunters naturally concentrated their fire on it.
The result: while the humanoid half remained relatively intact, the dragon-head portion was so shredded it was barely recognizable. It still gasped and wheezed, proving it clung to life—but the injuries were unmistakably severe.
“Grrrr…”
The creature that had been charging forward at terrifying speed suddenly stopped dead in place. It raised its two tattered heads high and held its ground like a snake on guard.
“Looks like its life’s hanging by a thread.”
“What do we do, Adjutant? Finish it like this?”
Even at the end, Guild Master Yuna chose caution and put the question to her adjutant. Lee Jinhyun seemed to weigh it for a moment, then gave the order.
“Honestly, my gut says there’s something more… but for now, attacking is the only option we have. Just in case, please stick to ranged fire for the time being.”
“Got it.”
She couldn’t see a better approach either. Yuna and the other melee hunters eased back a step, and the gunners opened fire once more.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Crack! Crack!
Pistols and anti-materiel sniper rifles hammered the creature. It swung its heads this way and that, trying to lock onto the hunters—but its movements had slowed so dramatically that it could no longer land any meaningful attack.
Watching it thrash uselessly as its life seemed to drain away, the guild masters began, carefully, to let the word victory take shape in their minds.
And then—
“Kyaaaaaaaah!!!!!”
Crunch!
“!”
“Wh-what?”
The next instant brought something none of them had expected. Shock flooded every hunter’s face—and Lee Jinhyun’s as well.
With one mouth already reduced to ragged scraps of flesh, the creature bit down on its own body. More precisely, it tore free the opposite head, the one that had been hanging on by little more than a thread.
And in that same moment, as if a switch that had been off had finally been thrown, a change so clear it was visible to the naked eye began to overtake its form.
The remaining black torso bleached rapidly to white, the color draining out of it as if washed away. Sensing something deeply wrong in the transformation, the hunters seized the reins of tension once more and prepared for battle.