Faith's Sword (2)
As the old saying goes — even a cow's horn comes out if you pull it in one unbroken motion — I didn't waste a second dawdling.
Fwheeeeeeng—
The hem of my sleeve whipped in the fierce wind above Incheon. In an instant I had arrived over the Incheon Football Stadium and looked down on it from the sky. This stadium, also known as Sungui Arena Park, greeted me with carnage that would put ruins to shame. Tents crammed the green pitch and the concourses of the stands, packed in without a handspan of empty space — and not one of them remained intact. Blood had soaked the crumpled, collapsed shelters red, enough to paint the day this evacuation site fell.
Gunfire and artillery ripped the air, and threaded between them human screams rose again and again. And dwarfing every one of those sounds…
'Kieeeeeeek!'
…came the howling of zombies. Garbage tumbled and danced wherever the wind carried it, a wind steeped in the stench of excrement and corpses. Collapsed structures and scorched scars lay scattered everywhere, alongside shell casings strewn at random and tanks blown apart.
"…Who needs a separate Hell when this place exists?"
Hell on earth was right here.
I came to a quiet halt above the pitch and studied the horde swaying below. If this many were outside, then going by these things' fondness for the dark, the interior of the stadium would hold something monstrous. The odds of Mutants mixed into that number were high as well. Above all, I was wary of meeting the one that had batted an army tank around like a toy. I'd crossed paths with it back when my Mimic Holy Body was nowhere near this level — and even so, it remained the only mutant I had ever failed to kill and been forced to flee.
My eyes swept rapidly across the ground, counting the zombies prowling it. Forty… fifty… Having tallied barely a quarter of the field, the total already pressing toward a hundred, I lowered my head.
Picking them off one by one with telekinesis would be hopelessly inefficient.
As I turned the problem over, the battle at Starlight Church brushed through my mind.
"…Right. That rat-bastard with the finger-guns."
Calling up his wretched final moments, I thrust out my right arm.
Drrrrrrr—
The stadium shuddered as though an earthquake had struck, and the zombies reacted at once. "Kieeeek—!" They abandoned their swaying mid-motion, heads whipping about as they tried to pin down the source of the tremor that had hit them.
Keeeeeeing— Mana howled savagely, and white light bloomed across my whole body. My glowing right hand gave a slight wave, for all the world like a conductor's baton.
Tududududuk— At that silent direction the turf cracked into pieces and rose slowly into the air. Shredded tents, garbage bags, chunks of concrete and clods of soil drifted weightless in the open air, floating up to a fixed height before stopping dead.
"……"
In skin-crawling silence, the football stadium became outer space in a heartbeat — and the only things still ruled by gravity in it were the brainless zombie hordes.
My right hand had begun to tremble by degrees; I clenched it tight. Keeeeeeing— Mana accelerated, and the debris under my telekinetic grip began to wheel in a circle. The slowly orbiting mass gathered speed, and with exquisitely fine adjustments of force the floating wreckage carved out channels for the wind. The breeze that had been gnawing at the ground climbed those channels and rose.
Grrrrrrk—
A whirlwind spun so fast its shape could no longer be read. The gaudy colors of the tents, the green of the pitch, and the asphalt all churned together into a single murky, ink-dark man-made tornado.
Krkakakakak— A vortex far vaster than the one that had killed the finger-gun Awakened rolled on and on, streaming my bangs back over my head. I couldn't even toss off my usual light banter, so absolute was my focus on controlling the telekinesis — but I couldn't have hidden my pride if I'd tried. Of course the top tier among psychic powers belonged to the forces of nature.
Zombies were sucked into that artificially braided knot of wind. Even as they thrashed, I could see the ones devoured by the storm being sliced apart, shred by shred, by the countless fragments whirling within it.
"Kieeeeeeek—!" At the horde's thunderous shrieking, the zombies lurking inside the stadium came boiling out like cockroaches.
Krkakakak— Drawn by the sound of the tornado gnawing the earth, they charged in blindly — and their plight was that of ants tumbling into an antlion's pit.
So this method was the right answer after all. Granted, spinning up the tornado had bled off a considerable amount of mana. But once the thing was up and running, all I had to do was keep feeding it a fixed maintenance cost…
"Kieeeek—!" …and what you got was a diligent blender, faithfully mincing zombies around the clock.
Watching their suicidal rush pour endlessly through the gates, I waited for the next course. Ordinary zombies were mere appetizers.
THOOM— THOOM— THOOM! A colossal boom shook the building.
"KRRAAAAAAAR—!" A smile spread across my lips at the howl of that familiar mutant bastard. The main dish I'd been waiting for had arrived.
Gate 1, where its roar had come from, rocked under the mutant's stomping. The entrance, drilled full of holes by some ferocious firefight, coughed up clouds of dust.
Grrrrrrk— With the sound of something being dragged behind it, the mutant shouldered through the dust and appeared. Sunlight traced the grotesque ripple of its muscles. It had been scowling, its face twisted with rage — until it spotted me floating in the air, and smiled a little.
Smiling?
"KRRAAAAAAR—!" With a huge bellow, the thing spun its whole body like a hammer-thrower. Its massive legs plowed inward, shattering the turf beneath them.
WHUMP— WHUMP— The green hunk of steel in the muscle-mutant's hand left it with a vicious shriek of torn air.
SHWAAAAAK— A green meteor split the wind and came screaming straight at me. I snapped my left arm up and poured telekinesis into the thrown object; my body, already washed white with light, flared even brighter and stopped the green meteor's charge dead.
Shit! The lunatic threw a tank at me!
When the object's motion had fully ceased, I confirmed it: a badly crumpled tank, hovering in midair. That deranged slab of muscle had hurled a tank at me.
"KRRAAAAAAR—!" Realizing its trump-card attack had fizzled, the mutant bawled at the top of its lungs. Before it could launch its next move, the fingers of my left hand began to dance softly. With telekinetic capacity still comfortably to spare, I lightly took apart the tank I'd caught midair.
Krrrrk— The tank peeled apart at its seams, and dozens of sharp spikes were born.
The spikes plunged as though gravity itself had seized them, answering my gesture with a bombardment of the ground. It had thrown me a single meteor; I would give it a rain of steel.
KWAA-KWA-KWAAANG!
"KRRAAAR—!" Beneath the merciless drumbeat of explosions, its roar lost its menace — no, that was a scream. All the thing could do was cross its arms, slabs of muscle upon slabs of muscle, and shield its face.
Hm. So even built like that, its head itself remained the weak point, apparently.
Perhaps thanks to that desperate guard, the spikes did tear at its hide, but no telling blow capable of toppling it was landing. Not that I had any intention of straining myself to pry apart that fortress of crossed arms and go for the head — a tactic far more to my taste had come to mind.
The moment the bombardment ended, the green spikes buried deep in the pitch answered my hand once more. Piled layer upon layer, they compacted into a colossal battering ram — and it slammed into the mutant's back while the thing was still reeling from the barrage.
WHUDD! A long, weighty crack of impact, and the muscle-mountain's body lurched. The ram didn't pause for breath; it rebounded even harder and flew at its back again.
WHUUUD! "KRRAAR—!" Panicked, the thing flung its arms behind itself — but like any ordinary muscle-brute, it was helpless against strikes from behind. Turn its body to face them, though, and it would lose the footing it needed to hold out against the tornado. Trapped between front and rear, the muscle-mountain took another ram strike. WHUUUD!
Its legs, driven deep into the turf, were wrenched out into the open. Robbed of its anchor, it let fly a howl of fury.
"K-KRRAAAAAAR—!"
The giant tornado ahead; behind it, the battering ram hauled far back for the finish. The optimal move the thing chose was to hunch its body down into a ball. Considering how it had swaggered in at the start, dragging a tank along and flashing that rotten grin, the sight was pitifully abject. Not that groveling so would earn it any mercy from me.
WHUUUD! The ram's final blow slammed into its rear. Shoved a step further forward, it slipped within the tornado's reach and began to be dragged away.
"K-KRRAAAAAAAR—!" It stabbed its fingers into the grass and held on for its life, but it was hopeless. Krkakakakak! The whirlwind swallowed it whole, and the grinding began. However ironclad its hide, no one escapes blades flying in from every quarter. Its armor held stubbornly — for a long while all I saw was the thing being shaved down, until at last black blood burst within the storm.
It died like meat in a blender.
You have slain a Mutant.
You have acquired 2,000 Faith Points.
You have acquired Knowledge of the Mutant!
— Mutant: "Steroid" —
"Steroid's explosive musculature grants it a monstrous measure of destructive power and defense. Never let it pin you down at close range. But don't stray too far, either — it can hurl objects with unnerving accuracy. Its one and only weakness is its very small head."
Reading through the knowledge of Steroid, one truth settled in: of course mutants had ranks among themselves too. The Faith I'd earned for putting down a Sound Stalker or a Jangsan zombie had been 500 apiece; this one, a single kill, had brought in 2,000. Speaking frankly, bagging four Sound Stalkers was better value for the effort than one of these.
"Hoo…"
With the death of Steroid, which had pestered me to the very end, not one zombie remained anywhere in the stadium. Letting out a light sigh, I withdrew both hands from their work. The tornado wound down by degrees, and shredded flesh and black-red blood fluttered down like flowers. I watched gobbets of flesh settle like snow between the savaged rows of turf, waiting on any zombie that had failed to make it out — I couldn't rule out a crawler with its legs or its waist shorn off dragging itself toward me.
"……"
I waited a long while for just such a contingency, but no lower-half-missing zombie ever crawled out. With a small nod, I set my floating body lightly down on the halfway line.
Thud— Savoring the soft give of the grass beneath my feet, I replayed the stadium as I'd mapped it from above. Barricades ringing the entire field; light machine guns emplaced at intervals. Tanks torn open, military vehicles abandoned on every side. All of it made my palms itch, of course — but the first thing to secure was ammunition. A gun without ammo was, quite literally, a toy good for nothing but existing. I had no intention of handing my believers rifles with bayonets fixed and ordering them to fight with bayonet drills powered by faith. I am not a World War II militarist.
"They must have built a new armory in here somewhere…"
If I were the commander charged with defending this shelter, where would I have put the armory? First, I'd have gathered the civilians onto the safest ground — the pitch — and stashed the weapons somewhere their hands could never reach. You have to plan for riots in an emergency, after all. Somewhere higher up in a football stadium, then…
From the halfway line where I'd landed, I slowly surveyed the stands. Above the green and blue seats, my eye caught a Sky Lounge hung with blackout curtains.
Blackout curtains, on a Sky Lounge?
The moment I saw it, my instincts stirred. If the field I stood on counted as the first floor, then the Sky Lounge was… the third. Now operating on pure autopilot, I swept my flashlight around overhead and crossed the pitch away from the players' entrance, cutting through the dark until I found the stairs up to the third floor.
Skreeeek— I forced open a door stained with blackish-red blood like a tattoo. Wherever the light passed, traces of a desperate battle lay thick: zombie meat rent apart by bullets, breathing its rot into the air, and small shell casings snagging my feet at every step. And last of all, the reek of blood soaked so deep into the building that no amount of decay could ever wash it out. I climbed the stairs slowly, a strange bitter tang thickening on my tongue.
The door barring the third floor was in far worse shape than the one below. Holes punched clean through it by gunfire gave me an indirect glimpse of how frantic that day had been.
"The third floor saw harder fighting than the first, which had been overflowing with civilians…"
Which was to say, something more precious than the civilians themselves lay sleeping on the third floor. Turning over evidence that kept confirming my judgment, I glided smoothly across the level. Past the black-red blood and the corpses I was by now sick of seeing, a door bristling with locks greeted me.
Krrrrrrk— I simply crushed the door itself out of shape and stepped into the Sky Lounge. My flashlight lanced through the darkness-drenched interior as I moved toward the blackout curtains — then, activating telekinesis on the spot, I flung them all wide open.
SHWAAAH—! Sunlight rushed in on a wind of dust and lit up the Sky Lounge.
Gazing over the lounge, now bright enough to see plainly without any flashlight, I let out an exclamation.
"…Oh!"
Where chairs and buffet spreads should have stood, the space was crammed full of weapons: ammunition boxes stacked in tidy rows, gun-black rifles, light machine guns, grenades, and more. I smiled — most of all at the crates of ammo piled up high, never even spent.
"Bingo!"