Enemy (1)
From Jung Jinho’s perspective, it must have been the kind of shock that kicked the front door off its hinges and ran off screaming into the night.
“W-what the hell are you talking about… Mr. Seokwoo?”
“I did it! I stabbed this bastard! Brother!”
“You insane son of a bitch!”
The room erupted into noise for a brief moment.
Jung Jinho immediately drew his sword.
Obviously, I didn’t think he was drawing it to attack us.
He’s going to kill him.
He was probably trying to kill Yoo Seokwoo and put a lid on this whole mess. Kill him first, shut him up, then sort everything out afterward—that was probably the only option Jung Jinho had left. There was no way he wanted to start wrestling with our team in a place like this.
If the one who’d been stabbed had been Kim Hyunsung or Park Deokgu, maybe there’d have been a chance. Unfortunately, the one who got stabbed was me, the weakest link, Lee Kiyoung.
I can’t let him kill me.
When I reflexively looked at Kim Hyunsung, I saw that he was already moving to take his position.
Kim Jaejun, Jung Jinho’s lackey—who looked painfully short on even basic situational awareness—apparently took Jung Jinho’s charge as the signal to fight, because he came sprinting toward me with a dagger in hand.
“You filthy piece of trash! You killed him! You killed Ki-cheol!”
Of course I had killed Lee Ki-cheol.
That said, I never imagined he’d leave Park Deokgu alone and come charging straight at me.
I seemed to have become the official celebrity of this party while we were clearing the route.
The one who was supposed to be safely protected in the back had suddenly become the main tank.
What I hadn’t expected was that Park Deokgu’s reaction speed would be a little slow.
I’d at least thought he’d block the second attack, but he failed to stop Kim Jaejun as he raised the dagger and lunged in my direction.
Dammit.
I curled up reflexively at the sensation that it was aiming straight for my throat, and the dagger drove in from behind.
That hurts!
“Aaaagh!”
It hurt.
Park Deokgu only snapped back to his senses after the second strike landed.
He shoved the bastard back with his huge shield, his face going pale and stiff as he stepped in front of me.
Yoo Seokwoo, behind him, looked dazed by the sudden turn of events.
He was even trembling as he held onto the sword that had stabbed me.
He wasn’t used to stabbing people either.
More important than the small fry, of course, were Jung Jinho and Kim Hyunsung.
Before the words “It’s a misundersta—” could even leave someone’s mouth, their swords crashed together.
Good.
The instant the impact rang out, Jung Jinho was sent flying backward, clear across my field of vision.
The fight had already begun.
The script had been completed, and the two of them were now onstage.
All that was left was to clean up this mess.
I wanted to tell someone to heal me right away, but the problem was that I couldn’t get the words out.
The agony was so intense—pain unlike anything I’d ever felt in my life—that no sound would come except a scream.
Instead of the healing magic I’d expected to come pouring down, what I heard was Jung Hayan’s shriek.
“Nooooooooo!”
It hurts…
“You bastards!! Brother!”
“Nooooooooo! Noooooooo!!”
I wished she’d stop screaming and just heal me already.
The situation was spinning forward so violently that I couldn’t even keep my head straight.
Monsters were charging from the front, while Jung Jinho and Kim Hyunsung were locked in swordplay.
Park Deokgu seemed torn between blocking the front and guarding the rear where Yoo Seokwoo stood, but for now he was doing his best to shield me as I lay there.
“Brother! Brother!!”
“I’m not dead yet…”
“N-nunim! The ring! Ring! Hurry up and say ring! Ring!”
“Aaaaaaah! Oppa! Oppa! Oppa!”
“Calm down and say ring! Ring!”
“Ah!”
I’d expected Jung Hayan to panic, but the situation looked even worse than I’d imagined.
Only after Park Deokgu grabbed her hand tightly did she seem to remember what she had available to her.
“H-heal! Heal!”
Light spilled over me.
My body didn’t recover all at once, but the pleasantly warm glow was definitely mending my wounds.
The pain was still there.
Still, the sensation of blood gushing from the wound was gone.
I almost died.
If they’d been even a little later, I really might have died.
“Oppa. Oppa. Oppa.”
“Bro, brother!”
“I’m fi—ah.”
With my body a little lighter, I looked around once more.
Kim Hyunsung and Jung Jinho were still slamming blades together without a word.
Anyone could see that Kim Hyunsung was several steps above him.
There was obviously no way I’d listen to that bastard’s excuses.
In the end, our main villain abandoned Yoo Seokwoo and Kim Jaejun and started retreating.
Kim Hyunsung, who had glanced in our direction for a moment, gave a nod and spoke in a rush.
“Mr. Deokgu! Please take care of Ms. Hayan and Mr. Kiyoung. I’ll handle Jung Jinho….”
“A-alright!”
He’d judged that we were capable of taking care of the situation.
With the two of them having such high agility, they vanished from sight in an instant.
Kim Jaejun seemed to realize the situation had gone to hell too, because he immediately tried to pull away—but even then, he didn’t take Yoo Seokwoo with him.
At this point, the one who had to hold the monsters back was Park Deokgu.
“You dirty bastards!”
Once again, Yoo Seokwoo swung his sword at us.
Of course, this time he didn’t land a hit.
Park Deokgu had smashed him aside with his shield.
Thwack!
Yoo Seokwoo’s body flew up into the air and slammed into the wall, but at the same time the monsters were already rushing in here.
“Mana Shield!”
The second line of insurance Kim Hyunsung had prepared blocked their path.
At the same time, the chant was completed in a flash.
Kim Jaejun and Jung Jinho had already disappeared from view, but Kim Hyunsung should be able to track both of them down.
No.
“Bro, the nunnim is gone….”
Kim Jaejun would be taken care of by Jung Hayan.
“Don’t worry, Deokgu. I’m going to deal with the monsters in front of us first and then follow right away. I know where they went.”
“Well, that’s a relief, but….”
I hadn’t seen when or how they vanished either.
He must have cast his spell and gone after Kim Jaejun in the blink of an eye.
I didn’t know whether he’d be able to keep up with someone that agile, but the fact that he’d rushed off so anxiously suggested he’d come back once he’d dealt with his business.
Maybe because he’d been hit by a situation he hadn’t predicted, Park Deokgu’s face was a mess of tears too.
My collapsing and bleeding all over the place must have been a pretty shocking sight, because I looked at him and opened my mouth.
“Don’t cry, you pig bastard.”
“W-who says I’m crying?”
Thanks to him standing there like an idiot, a dagger did end up stuck in me one more time, but for some reason I didn’t feel bad about it.
* * *
Dammit.
The situation was impossible to understand.
Yoo Seokwoo, you idiot. You worthless bastard.
He shouldn’t have taken him in.
No, Yoo Seokwoo wasn’t the only idiot here.
He himself was no better, for taking Jung Jinho’s sword being drawn as a signal to attack and driving a dagger in immediately.
He should have stayed calmer.
Lee Ki-cheol, his old companion from the long road behind them.
The thought that Lee Kiyoung, that son of a bitch who should be beaten to death, had killed his friend had robbed him of his composure.
I knew the plan had been canceled….
The problem was that bastard’s smile, or the way he bared his teeth while saying he was sorry.
He’d known he needed to hold back, but he couldn’t.
That face. That face was the problem.
That smirking expression.
That blatantly provocative look.
The way the bastard’s eyes and smile seemed to look down on him from inside— that was the problem.
He was already furious enough to burst a vein, and then he found that bastard with a sword stabbed into his stomach.
Even then, when he saw that same face watching the whole thing with a strangely amused expression, he couldn’t keep his reason intact.
And Jung Jinho was a bastard too.
He’d never thought there was any real brotherhood between them to begin with, but he hadn’t expected to be discarded so casually, like a ragged used cloth.
Doesn’t matter.
But that didn’t matter anymore.
He and Jung Jinho had only ever met out of necessity anyway. The bastard had used him, and in return he could use the bastard too. It was as simple as that.
First.
First, he had to get out of here.
Jung Jinho had decided there was no chance of winning that situation just now.
He was good at reading the road, so he could definitely track the path Jung Jinho had taken as he fled.
Even now, the trail the bastard had left behind was still plainly visible. After following Jung Jinho and dealing with Kim Hyunsung, he could strike from behind more decisively this time.
He wouldn’t be able to rest until he tore Lee Kiyoung, that bastard, apart and left him in pieces.
He grabbed his bow and arrows and tried to move as quickly as possible—right then.
What?
The road ahead was different.
This was definitely not the path he knew.
After becoming an archer, this was the first time something like this had happened.
He wondered if there was some problem with the dungeon itself, but it definitely wasn’t that.
The traces left by Jung Jinho and Kim Hyunsung had also been cut off at one wall.
“What the….”
As he looked around, a strange wind suddenly brushed past him.
“Huh….”
He only realized one of his legs had been severed a moment later.
“Aaaaagh!!”
What the hell… what is this… what is this!
He couldn’t make sense of it.
A wind had suddenly blown in from somewhere, and then one of his legs had been torn away.
No one would stay calm in a situation where they couldn’t even tell what was attacking them.
“Aaaaaaaagh!”
When the wind blew again, his wrist was cut off.
“What! What the helllll!”
Only one thing came to mind: magic.
When he desperately looked around again, he caught sight of a woman emerging faintly from the darkness.
At first he thought she was a woman he’d never seen before, but that wasn’t true at all.
Jung Hayan?
Her face was flushed red.
Her eyes….
Something was wrong with them. Her hair was a wild, tangled mess, and the clothes she had been wearing were in ruin. He could see her roughly wiping away the tears running down her face.
“I-I’m not a-apologizing to you.”
“Wha—”
“I’ll never forgive you. You… idiot! We have to kill them all. Anyone who hurts Oppa has to die.”
“What the hell are you talk—aaagh!”
“Shut up! Shut that mouth, I said! You… y-you idiot! How much must it have hurt? Our Oppa… hic… how much must it have hurt? Even when he was hit at first… it must have hurt for sure.”
She was quick to understand the situation.
The woman in front of him was not normal.
Fuck… fuck… fuck….
Realizing he’d hooked himself onto the wrong woman came in an instant.
He’d vaguely known she was obsessively fixated on Lee Kiyoung, that bastard, but he’d never imagined she’d be this fucking crazy.
He could hear the sound of her whispering a spell.
It was only natural that his body sensed the bad omen before his mind did.
He wanted to crawl away somehow and get out of this situation, but there was no way he could escape.
There was too much open space to crawl away like a cripple and run.
He felt the powerless girl’s arm grab his hair and yank his face up.
“I-I’m a little sad because I have to finish this quickly… It would’ve been so nice to pay back what happened to our Oppa a hundred times over, but I can’t do that… hic….”
“Save me… I… I only did what I was told….”
“I don’t believe a liar’s words…. Air Bomb.”
The thing in her right hand was a spell he’d seen before.
The spell that had turned monsters into bleeding pulp.
Unlike the one he’d seen before, which had been about the size of a human head, the one in her hand now was tiny.
Just as he was trying to understand what she intended to do, the madwoman’s voice came again.
“Open your mouth.”
“W-what…?”
“I said open it. You… you have to feel it too. You need to feel how much our Oppa hurt.”
Without thinking, he clamped his mouth shut.
There was no way to imagine what would happen if that thing went into his mouth.
But the madwoman pried his jaw open by force and shoved the tiny bomb inside.
The sensation of an unwanted foreign object entering his mouth made it impossible to gather his thoughts.
Sweat kept pouring down his body, and his limbs trembled for no reason at all.
Before he could even imagine what would happen next, a deafening explosion shook his brain.
BOOM!
“Gwoaeeek!”
Fragments of his teeth burst out inside his mouth, tearing through his tongue and throat, his palate and cheeks.
He couldn’t understand what had happened.
What he did understand was that the pain felt like it was melting his brain.
“It hurts, right? It hurts for you too. Then why… did you do that?”
Crazy bitch… crazy bitch… crazy bitch….
“You made it bleed, idiot.”
“S-sa… save me… waeheueuek save….”
The way she calmly tidied her appearance made the whole thing even more grotesque.
She calmly smoothed down her tangled hair and wiped the blood splattered on her face with her sleeve.
“I need to finish this quickly… so this is the last one. Don’t ever do that again.”
He begged in his head for her to stop.
He begged her to please, please let him live.
He couldn’t get the words out properly because of the terror, but his consciousness was fading fast.
When he clung desperately to the thought that he wanted to live somehow, a final voice echoed over him.
“Ah… he died.”