Giant Moles Usually Live in the Underground Waterways
"For a sturdy kingdom, the fierce moles must be purged at regular intervals! Go forth! My first retainer! Death to the puppets!!!"
Once his audience with Queen Medilla had ended, Gong Ryun followed her hand-drawn map into the underground waterways to carry out the commission.
Even the waterways came in many kinds of spaces. In some places filthy sewage ran; in others the water had all but dried away and the floor lay bare. Surprisingly, there were stretches of clean water as well—reclaimed water, the kind used for agriculture, flowing through the channels.
Where Gong Ryun walked, water was almost nonexistent. Thanks to that, the floor was dry, and the passage looked more like a dark tunnel than a sewer.
And the moment he stepped into a high-density zone, he met moles as if by some unholy instinct.
Keeeeeeeng—!
Even the cry was nothing like a docile mole's.
Black fur. Red eyes. Thick, heavy claws the docile ones never had.
Their frames were smaller and leaner than a docile mole's—about the size of a large wild dog. And they were active. Good heavens, they walked. Docile moles, out of water, either crawled on their bellies or rolled along like dumplings; these fierce little things trotted about on all fours. What they lost in bulk, they had gained in mobility. You could even see some muscle on them.
And there were about five of the things.
As he drew near, they stood straight up like meerkats and watched him, wary. On both forepaws he could see thick, sturdy claws.
Along the wall where the pack of fierce moles had clustered were gouges that looked as if they had been raked by nails. They had been trying to dig through.
Of course, advanced galactic civil engineering was not so soft as to let a wall be holed so easily. Digging at it must have felt like scooping at bedrock with a spoon.
But even spoon-digging at stone will yield results if you keep at it long enough.
And a damaged sewer was hardly the only problem.
Gyurarararara!
Gerrrrrrrrr!
Grarararararara!
Their violence was the real issue. They bunched up and went looking for fights. The funny part was that they never touched the docile moles—only people. Sewer maintenance workers, construction hands, ordinary citizens took the damage.
Left alone long enough for their numbers to swell, they would slip out of the drains and roam the filthy alleys.
You could think of them as a larger, more vicious version of a sewer rat.
Gyurat! Gyurat!
Kiek!! Kiek!!!!
Before he knew it the fierce moles were coming at Gong Ryun on all fours at a run—like a pack of fat wild dogs on a group hunt.
Familiar situation. He had killed plenty of moles in his time.
Gong Ryun readied his Joint-Locking Palm. Internal energy gathered in his right hand.
With that, he strode straight toward the approaching pack.
When the distance closed, the moles swarmed him.
The ones that had ringed him prepared their claw strikes.
The lead mole's heavy claw came scything in at Gong Ryun. And then—
Thud!
"…"
That proud claw smacked into his knee. Nothing happened.
Gong Ryun had properly raised his protective aura.
The others followed, hammering his shins and thighs with savage blows.
Thud!
Thud!
Thud!
"…"
It felt like being a holiday uncle cornered by a pack of rambunctious nephews who loved play-fighting.
Part of that was simply that moles were entry-level beasts for novice mercenaries—nothing special—and part of it was the quality of Gong Ryun's protective aura.
Slaves were restricted in the martial arts they could practice. All they got were the most basic body-strengthening techniques meant for hard labor—to keep rebellion from ever getting off the ground.
Having lived as a slave, Gong Ryun had used nothing but those foundational body-strengthening arts since childhood. Protective aura was among them.
While ordinary people, from a young age, studied lightfoot techniques, sword forms, mind methods, and all the rest, Gong Ryun had poured himself into a single art of body strengthening meant to endure brutal labor. His mastery of it was extraordinarily high.
He was sturdier than Un-rang, who came from the Orthodox path—that alone said enough. And Un-rang ranked near the top among the Unorthodox scrap-heap mercenaries working this city.
Thud!
Thud!
Thud!
So the fierce moles' attacks landed with no force at all.
Kyueeee…
Realizing nothing was getting through, one mole looked a little dejected—then—
Chomp!
It went for a bite attack.
It had clamped onto his thigh.
"Ow."
That one actually hurt a little. No wound to speak of, but the teeth pinched the flesh—like being nipped by a giant clothespin.
Seeing that, the other moles shoved their heads in as well.
Time to finish this.
"Joint-Locking Palm."
Gong Ryun's right hand crashed down on the mole in front.
His hand cut the air like a snake striking at prey. And just as a snake opens its jaws, his fingers flared wide—
Grab!
—and seized the mole's head with merciless force.
In an instant the hand swallowed the skull whole.
Crrrunch!
The mole's head shattered, skull and all.
Kyusit!?
The fierce mole beside it flinched in panic.
Too late.
Gong Ryun raised his right hand again and drove it at the next one.
Crrrack!!!
The second mole died as well.
Gyurararara!
Kieeeee!!!
And still they didn't run. Instead they bared their teeth and tried to tear into him.
"This is why moles are convenient."
If they had bolted in different directions at top speed, Gong Ryun would have had almost no way to catch them all.
He might, if he ran as hard as he could, overtake one—but then he would lose whatever went the other way.
Un-rang would probably have cleaned them all up easily even if they scattered. Speed was his strength.
Gong Ryun, though, was a trudger.
Walking up and using Joint-Locking Palm was basically his only strategy… so beasts that charged in without thinking were the easy kind to deal with.
Gyurat!
Crrrunch!!!
Third one.
Kieeeeeee!!!
Crrrack!!!
Gyurrrrrr!!!!
Crrrack!!!
Fourth. Fifth.
Done.
"Been a while since I've done this, too."
Once he had some experience under his belt, he had been taking higher-difficulty commissions instead of mole-culling. That had been Un-rang's advice as a senior mercenary—better for growing his martial skill and stacking more field hours.
"Still. Double the hourly rate? I can live with that."
I like money.
Gong Ryun said it out loud, without shame.
Then he walked a little farther in search of more moles.
And found another pack.
A swarm of them.
A full ten.
Gyurararara!
Kieee!!
Gyuririt!
Kiiiiii!
Kireut! Kirruk!
"Whoa. That's a lot."
The ones that had stood up as a group like meerkats to size him up dropped to all fours and came charging.
This stretch of channel was narrower than the last, so all ten were packed tight as they closed in.
Gong Ryun gathered internal energy into his right hand.
Bunched up this tightly, he would use a different method than before.
First he shot his hand, snake-swift, at the head of the nearest mole.
Splat!
The moment his grip landed, the mole's head burst like a watermelon under a hammer. But Gong Ryun's hand did not stop. It was still blazing with internal energy, still full of force.
Like a winding stream turning its course, his hand bent through a rough yet natural curve—and along that arc lay the next mole's head.
Splat!
That skull cracked. Then he rode the current again, toward the next head.
Like sewing. Gong Ryun's hand was the needle, and he was stitching straight through the moles' heads as he passed.
Splat!
Splat!
Splat!
He rode the flow. It felt like extending a single Joint-Locking Palm without ever letting it end.
Splat!
Splat!
Splat!
Splat!
The reason it made a wet splat instead of that earlier bone-cracking crunch was that the power was a little lower. Fired one by one, Joint-Locking Palm completely pulverized a skull; linked like this, it only smashed them halfway through.
Halfway was enough before moving on. Halfway was still death.
Splat!
Through the last one. Every skull crushed.
The moles' corpses lay piled where they had fallen.
He used this method for the sake of efficient energy expenditure.
Spending one long continuous strike to finish ten cost less than firing the technique ten separate times.
Gong Ryun had little internal energy to spare, so he always had to think about efficient consumption.
…
Plop!
A splash of water came from a little farther off.
Looking over, he saw a single docile mole half-submerged in the water at a distance, watching this place.
It was staring fixedly at the corpses of the fierce moles.
With eyes of absolute, unclouded innocence.
Not grieving. Nothing like that.
It was waiting for Gong Ryun to leave so it could eat the bodies.
Those corpses were high-nutrition organic matter.
Kyuuuung.
The docile mole's pure eyes sparkled.
Sparkle, sparkle.
It almost looked as if it were asking, with pure sincerity, When are you leaving?
That was the ecology of moles.
You might expect the fierce ones to play alley boss and bully the gentle ones—but the fierce moles never touched the docile moles at all.
Instead they attacked everything else without discrimination, as if that alone were the purpose of their lives. As if they had been born as tools for that one task.
And when the fierce moles finished that mission and fell, the docile moles ate the corpses with relish.
The flesh of fierce moles that had spent their whole lives protecting the docile ones became, even in death, a nutritious snack for them.
The docile moles simply ate with pleasure. Nowhere in the process was there guilt or question—only an act of the most complete naturalness.
"That's a little creepy."
Gong Ryun felt a touch unsettled.
The mysteries of nature were profound. At a galactic scale they were more so still. On the Slave Planet, the scary beasts had been things like crocodiles and snakes. As a child he had been terrified of crocodiles. Looking back, those things had been almost sensible—killed by a few shots of gunpowder weapons, no special powers like breath attacks.
But out in the galaxy you got everything from cosmic locusts like hydras, to ostriches that body-slammed people, to gorillas that threw diamond boulders… slug-things the size of buildings, giant trees that walked—strange creatures without end.
And even the weakest beasts, the kind that merely parasitized a city's underbelly like these moles, each seemed to carry at least one unnerving trait.
…
Still, thanks to creatures like these, mercenaries had work.
Beasts—wild animals, that is—were endless, and the labor market for dealing with them had no shortage of demand.
Even mining operations hired mercenaries for security, because packs of ostriches that charged at sonic speed whenever they saw a human would occasionally attack the laborers hauling ore on the surface.
"Nature's mysteries… kind of a lot, honestly…"
Gong Ryun muttered to himself.