Investigation Request
"N-no! Don't, hyung!"
The instant I started toward the relics, Ha Yoo-jin lurched into my path, white as a sheet. After watching what had happened to those people, he was terrified I would end up the same way. That made sense. To him, I was the one person who actually saw him for what he was — and that made me someone he could not afford to lose.
I looked down at the boy clinging to me with eyes on the verge of tears.
"Relax. I'm not going to touch them. Not yet."
I probably will, though.
Honestly, walking away without laying a hand on them was never an option. I already had a fairly clear idea of how that fifth man had died.
Five relics shimmered with a faint, residual glow: a sword, a shield, a cleric's robe, a staff, and, last of all, the blade driven through the Gnoll Hero's chest.
Every piece except that last sword was an item that transmitted a cleric-class skill — exactly the kit I had wanted for an all-purpose vanguard.
From the Sword and Shield of the Forgotten Paladin, one could inherit the Legendary skills Goddess's Retribution and Iron Wall Guardian. The staff and the robe would yield Saintess's Blessing and Sanctuary Declaration — Legendary skills, both of them.
The sword buried in the Gnoll Hero's chest was no less formidable. It was the Proof of the Hero, and it granted a peculiar Legendary skill: a dual-helix mana circuit. For something shaped like a sword, the technique it taught was a mage's art, or so the stories went.
Anyone who obtained that unusual circuit could double-cast with almost no effort. More precisely, it did not let you fire two different spells at once so much as unleash the same spell twice — but even that was far from ordinary.
In my previous life, the man who held this skill had been talented, but never quite monstrous enough to prove the rumor. The whisper that circulated afterward was this: if a mage already capable of double-casting had claimed it, he would have become a nightmare who could fire each of two spells twice over.
I was convinced it would suit Na Seoyun perfectly. And — this was only a guess — it might even patch one of a Magic Swordsman's worst flaws: the near-impossibility of weaving magic mid-combat, and the way physical reinforcement collapsed the instant a spell was cast.
I would not know until we tried, of course.
The point was that every last one of these things was a treasure of staggering value. And that was only the story from my first life.
Because we had arrived years earlier this time, something new seemed to have unlocked. The fool who had touched a relic and exploded had all but confirmed it for me.
These weapons were currently holding the seal on the Gnoll Hero.
The funny part was that, as far as I could tell, the so-called Gnoll Hero was already dead.
A corpse — and one that had been dead for a very long time — coming back to life? Legends like that existed, sure. But I had never believed a creature of a mere gnoll's caliber could pull it off. The beings who carried those legends were always demons, dragons, Lord-class vampires of the sacred bloodline, or naturally occurring Generation-Zero Lycanthropes.
A gnoll — a creature that might have intelligence but could barely hold a conversation — recreating a legend like that? Impossible. Or so I thought.
Which meant the "resurrection of the Gnoll Hero" was probably not the revival of this particular corpse. It was the resurrection of the existence called the Gnoll Hero.
And the thing that would make it possible was the heart.
The reason was simple enough. The system message window had set that as the objective. The agent behind it was almost certainly the Golden Gnolls.
Either way, the power in these relics was what currently maintained the seal — and the moment a human hand touched them, that power diminished. More precisely, a sliver of it drained into the human body, then returned to the relic with only a negligible loss.
The reason people felt pain during the process was, I suspected, that they were not qualified. And though the transfer was forced, repeating it left traces in the body until, eventually, the person could not endure it anymore — and burst.
How many times someone could last probably depended on their current ability and their potential. Judging by what the dead man had said, the average was around five. The gnolls had figured that out and been using humans to peel the seal away, layer by layer.
I laid my hand against the space surrounding the relics.
Crack—
Just as I thought.
The area was sealed off by a barrier, precise and complete. Even that light touch met a considerable rebound. If I had pressed any harder, I would have taken real damage.
"Hyung! Hyung! Are you okay?"
Ha Yoo-jin stared at me, his face drawn tight with worry at the sudden backlash.
"Yoo-jin."
"...Yes."
His answer came a beat late. Maybe some ugly premonition had already taken root.
"I'm going to have to touch them too."
"Hyung!"
If the barrier would not let us through, then the seal would have to come down eventually. How else were we supposed to get inside and destroy the heart?
"Don't worry. I got a look at how the mana was moving. Touching them won't kill me."
Heading back to the others was an option, technically. But with relics like these sitting right in front of me, and some phenomenon I still did not fully understand unfolding around them, I had no intention of simply walking away. I wanted answers, at the very least.
"But—but... it's going to hurt like hell. You saw what happened!"
"Maybe. We'll see."
"Then—!"
"Keep an eye on the perimeter for me."
"...Hyung."
I said it firmly enough that the protest died in his throat. Ha Yoo-jin looked like he would rather chew glass, but when I repeated the order he had no choice. He stepped aside, miserable.
I studied the relics, then reached for the nearest one — the staff.
An unprecedented force drove into my body at once. It hurt, no question. But not nearly as much as I had expected. Light flared around me, swallowing me whole — a phenomenon nothing like what the previous victims had suffered. I felt Ha Yoo-jin jolt in shock behind me.
And then the world in front of my eyes changed completely.
For a moment, my mind went blank.
When I came back to myself, I was standing in a space wrapped in white light. I could not have said where the floor was, but I had the sensation of standing all the same. And directly in front of me stood a woman whose face would not come into focus.
...What is this?
"...How...?"
Her features were a blur. I was looking at her, and yet I could not hold an image of her face — as if I had been hit with a recognition-impairment spell. She seemed every bit as startled as I was.
"How did you come to enter this place?"
"I believe that's my line. Who are you?"
"I am the Seventh Saintess of the Goddess Church... or so I am called."
The name never reached my ears. I tilted my head.
"What was that name again?"
"...I see. So even my name can no longer be heard..."
The apparition looked stricken. I could not see her face, and yet I could read her expression. The absurdity of it almost made me laugh.
A Saintess, then.
The name hardly mattered. I did not know the lineage of the Goddess Church's Saintesses anyway. The next generation's Saintess would be a Summoner, true, but that was no reason for me to memorize their history. Not that I was completely ignorant of it, either...
Wait.
"The Seventh?"
"Yes. I am the Seventh Saintess — more precisely, I am the remnant of that existence."
"I was under the impression the most recent Saintess was around the thirteenth..."
"Has it already been that long?"
I had heard that a Saintess appeared maybe once a century, if that. Six generations, at a conservative estimate, meant six hundred years. Which meant this seal had been holding for six centuries.
Six hundred years. And it's still going?
Was that even possible?
Doubt flickered through me — then I thought of the relics' functions, of the staggering power still saturating this place, and it became a little easier to accept.
While I was still turning it over, the Saintess spoke again.
"Since even my name has been erased... please, simply call me Saintess. And you are?"
"A mercenary. Yoo Shin-hoo. I ended up here more or less by accident."
"Until mere moments ago, the gnolls were writhing to break this seal... and yet you seem entirely unharmed. Surely you were not brought here as their captive?"
"Of course not. Some strange things have been happening lately, so I infiltrated gnoll territory to investigate."
I offered her a handful of harmless details. She sounded genuinely astonished.
"For a single mercenary party to have come this far... that is truly remarkable."
"You're too kind. Though this does appear to be the place where the Gnoll Hero was sealed."
"...You even know of the Gnoll Hero?"
"I do. We've been looking into it, in our own way."
I kept the explanation suitably vague.
"...That, at least, is a mercy. To think the name still survives..."
She seemed to relax, if only a little.
"How fares the Goddess Church now? Has it grown stronger than in ages past?"
"Well, it is the state religion of the Empire. They are hardly wanting."
"Then I ask that you carry word to the Goddess Church. Inform them of what has happened here, and request that they dispatch their forces. The Gnoll Hero must not be allowed to rise again."
Not a chance. Report this and watch them walk off with every last scrap of loot? Was I insane?
"Wouldn't destroying the heart of that corpse be enough?"
"No. That alone will not suffice. It is true that doing so would halt the succession for now — but the Hero's soul would flee this place, and in time it would give birth to a new Gnoll Hero. The chaos that once engulfed the world must never be allowed to return."
Chaos in the world, my ass. If the Empire sent even a modest force, the gnolls would be swept aside. I had no idea what things had looked like six hundred years ago, but to the Empire of the present day, a Gnoll Hero was a mild inconvenience at best. Granted, if enough time passed and their numbers swelled past a certain point, they would not be quite so trivial...
And there were trainees still to come. This so-called Saintess had nothing to worry about. In my experience, gnolls were nothing compared to orcs.
Besides, if destroying the heart were not enough, there was no way the Main Quest would accept that as a clear condition.
Still, I asked, just to be sure.
"If the Gnoll Hero's soul escapes and starts making a new one... how long would that take?"
"Ten years. That would be time enough."
Oh, come on. In ten years, Rankers would be showing up. That was no threat at all. A single Ranker could wipe the lot of them off the map.
The reason I had been worried about the Gnoll Hero's resurrection in the first place was that, within a few years, it would have built a force so massive that this region's strength — and the strength of the Korean trainees — would not have been enough to handle it alone. That was what I had been guarding against.
A threat ten years from now did not concern me in the slightest. By then we would have punched through to the Middle Floor with room to spare. The Korean trainees alone would be able to deal with it. What I had actually been afraid of was a fast resurrection — one that would stunt the trainees' growth and force the Empire and foreign trainees to intervene, weakening our side's power in the process. If the problem was solvable, the Gnoll Hero was nothing but a generous source of experience. Of course, by that point everyone would have grown enough that the efficiency would be terrible, and the thing would get steamrolled anyway.
"And if the heart falls into gnoll hands?"
"In that case, if the gnoll that receives the heart is of the same kind as the current Gnoll Hero — that is, if a Golden Gnoll obtains it — a Gnoll Hero will be born at once."
There it was. That was the scenario I had to stop. Five tribes unified in a single stroke, and a force this region could not possibly stand against.
That could not be allowed to happen. As long as I could not start over in another country, the root of my power had to be here. I could not afford for that foundation to weaken.
And just like that, the worry vanished.
I could not keep the smile off my face.
Perfect. These relics are all mine.
An enormous windfall had just walked right up and placed itself in my hands.