I'll Authenticate With Your Corpses
"Wait. I'll authenticate it with your corpses."
Leos sprinted straight toward the Ulderik raider band. His target was, of course, the very center of their formation. Driving into an enemy's core in open combat was normally suicide—but in dense brush like this, the rule flipped.
Limited sight lines made friend-or-foe discrimination a nightmare for them. Leos had no allies nearby; he was alone. Once the fight tangled into a knot, the enemy would have to hesitate before every swing. For him, it was simple: anything that moved was a target. Kill them all.
Kyler, captain of the Ulderik, shouted with wide, startled eyes.
"That one's been trained! Don't let him tear into our lines!"
He had already noticed the tail, waited until the terrain favored him, even opened with a conversation to test for hostility—and then, despite being hopelessly outnumbered, cut one of them down first. That kind of nerve was more than enough to put fear into the Ulderik rank and file.
All of it stacked together. The men who should have stopped Leos only dithered, unable to force themselves forward.
"You stupid bastards! Move already!"
His subordinates only shuffled in place. Not one of them stepped up first.
S-scary as hell...
This was a man who could put a dagger through a head hidden in the brush. Even the thickest among them understood what charging someone like that meant.
Go first and you die. You absolutely die...
Throwing a dagger accurately at range was vastly harder than cutting with one up close. The idea that you could somehow handle at arm's length the man who hit every throw from a distance was almost unthinkable.
Their hesitation lasted only about three seconds. For Leos, that was more than enough.
Shhk!
He dropped the man in the center, kicked off a tree trunk to change trajectory, ripped the dagger from the corpse's hand, and flung it into the back of another who had already started to run.
Thunk.
A second body hit the ground. Only then did they grasp that flight would not save them, and the whole pack charged at once. The realization came far too late. Leos was already standing in the heart of their formation.
He dropped low, snapped out a concealed weapon—a long chain ending in a blade—and whipped it open in a single fluid motion. The chain uncoiled and shredded the legs of everyone within reach.
"Gyaaaaaaah!"
Hideous screams rose as more Ulderik members crashed to the dirt, one after another. Kyler could not even bring himself to rush in; he simply stared, blank.
"He's a... monster..."
Operating inside the Red Gate vortex, the Ulderik had seen countless monsters and mutants. But never anything as merciless, cunning, and efficiently lethal as the man in front of them.
Gulp.
Kyler swallowed dryly. Leos had stopped moving. As if he already knew exactly where the captain stood, he walked forward at an unhurried pace and spoke.
"Sending your men into the meat grinder so you can slip away alone. I despise trash like that."
"D-do you know us? About the Ulderik...?"
"Don't know and don't care about the Ulderik. But I know you've been prowling this area lately. Bodies left scattered in deliberate patterns. Anything worth money stripped clean—of course it looks unnatural. Irregular clusters of footprints always around the corpses. And every time you check the dead, there are monster tooth marks that appeared after they died."
"..."
"You advertise yourselves as raiders without even opening your mouths. How am I supposed to miss that?"
"I don't know who you are, but... I misjudged you. Are you the leader of a higher-tier raider band?"
"I don't associate with pathetic scum like that."
It made no sense. A man who had just butchered more than a dozen people without batting an eye claimed he had nothing to do with their world. Kyler was certain he was dealing with a top-class raider group, and he lowered his head.
"Please spare me. I didn't realize this was already claimed territory. We'll leave at once... just let me keep my life this once."
Leos walked toward him slowly and asked,
"Anyone else nearby?"
"As you can see... they're all dead by your hand. This was our entire force."
"Any other raider bands connected to you?"
"Renlox. We pay tribute to Renlox, a mid-tier raider group. Do you... know them?"
Leos nodded, then lifted his sword as if he had heard enough.
"Come at me. Killing someone who won't fight back isn't my hobby."
Kyler had been sure the stranger was tied to a raider band, but the behavior he was seeing now planted a seed of doubt. Raiders did not bother with honor, justification, or fair fights. The fact that this man was going through the motions suggested he might truly have no connection. Kyler spoke in a rush.
"...I-I don't know who you are, but if you're not with a raider group, you're going to regret this. We're all linked on the same network. The moment word spreads that I'm dead—"
Clang!
Leos closed the distance and swung. Kyler threw up his blade in a desperate block—only for a hidden weapon to flash from Leos's off hand the instant the swords rebounded.
Fssht!
The weapon grazed Kyler's face. At once his body locked rigid.
"P-poison... Y-you said you'd fight fair..."
"You got careless. That's on you, idiot."
Face purpling with outrage, Kyler swung at Leos in a sluggish arc. It was the last thing he ever did.
Thud.
When Kyler hit the ground as well, Leos methodically checked the bodies and pocketed anything useful, then roughly erased the signs of the fight around them.
He stacked the corpses neatly, then, without a flicker of emotion, started tossing them to the monsters. Feeding them was cleaner for covering tracks than burning them would have been.
Mid-throw, a thought crossed his mind: these human remains could serve as bait for a mutant. Wasting them like this felt almost wasteful.
— Hyung-nim, have you lost your mind? Live like a human being!
"Garf, why do you always talk like that? Using these might save Herisia and Bendict someday."
— You start compromising one little thing at a time and you end up no different from those raider bastards. Hyung-nim! You use those and I will never speak to you again.
"Fine. I'll throw them all away."
He was still pitching bodies toward the monsters when his Distance chimed with unwelcome news.
Leos opened the Interrunner site at once and scrolled the popular list.
A user calling himself KAR had openly uploaded photographs of human corpses to the Interrunner. At first people assumed it was a joke and piled on with mockery.
Not long after, the man's second verification post went up.
This time there was no text—only a photo. Carved into the body's flesh with a blade was the nickname KAR. Leos tried not to care. Whether the man was out murdering people or not had nothing to do with him.
Is he doing this for points?
Interrunner points were impossibly scarce under the current conditions. Even Leos was grinding for them, tempted by the shop's inventory. No further explanation was needed.
He's decent with violence, but he has no idea how to game the trending list, so he resorts to this.
Hostages in the form of other people's lives, forced onto the popular page. At first the crowd barely reacted—but as more corpse photos appeared, people began upvoting out of pure anxiety, terrified the killer might be near them. Before long, every post KAR made was blanketing the trending board.
Leos stared at the post with cold eyes. That was why Herisia had messaged him in such a hurry.
Whether KAR is one person or a group, they're definitely near our territory. Finding a Safety Zone means they're in this area.
He checked his own posts one by one. Everything else had been shoved off the trending list; the entire Top 10 was now wallpapered with KAR's uploads.
Once real people started dying, the terrified public stampeded into upvotes—a collective panic that rewarded every new post.
This is bad.
If operators like this started monopolizing points, Leos's own supply would take a serious hit. Cut off from the empire, the Interrunner was the only pipeline for logistics and artifacts. If people kept upvoting inflammatory bait and burying every other post, the whole board would collapse into chaos.
Leos thought it over for a moment, then photographed the corpses he had not yet thrown to the monsters and uploaded a post of his own.
Don't be scared of bugs like this. The second you actually face them, they're pathetic losers who die without doing a thing. Don't fall for the scare tactics. If you run into them, pick up a blade or a weapon and beat them to death.
The response was explosive. Praise for Leos flooded the comments one after another. And the instant his post hit number one on trending—
KAR left a reply.
Leos typed a single reply, then started walking at a measured pace.