54. Kang Seok
"Hey, you still haven't found them?"
"Not a single body so far. I'm starting to think they've already slipped away."
"We've got every exit sealed off right now — how the hell would they get out? Search harder. We need to move out soon too."
The mercenary said this, irritation lacing his voice. The facility wasn't all that large, and no matter how thoroughly they combed it, the two targets were nowhere to be found.
They were certain the pair had entered the facility, and no one had been seen leaving — so logically, they had to be in here somewhere.
"Huh, hold on... was there supposed to be a corridor here?"
The mercenary stopped short. He'd swept the entire interior of the facility earlier, yet a passage that looked completely unfamiliar had appeared before him.
And this wasn't just his imagination.
The other members of his team nodded in agreement.
"We were definitely heading toward Storage No. 3... What is this place?"
"Did we take a wrong turn? Anyway, you two keep searching. I'll go check where this leads and come back."
The man turned and retraced his steps. But even walking the same route back, the déjà vu refused to fade.
It was clearly the path he'd come by, yet it somehow didn't feel like it at all. If he were normally bad with directions, maybe — but he'd never once experienced anything like this over all his years of operations, and it left him flustered.
However, the truly shocking part hadn't come yet.
"Wh... why are you coming out of there?"
"Huh?"
The man ran straight into the comrades he'd split from — heading in the opposite direction. He had walked far longer than the original route, yet instead of emerging into the facility lobby, he'd collided with the very group going deeper in.
Both sides were badly shaken. They began moving together, and soon enough, instinct told them something had gone terribly wrong.
"Wh-what the hell! We've been wandering the same route! Are we going in circles or something?"
"No... it's not the same route. It's changing, little by little."
Cold sweat trickled down the man's forehead.
Something had gone very, very wrong.
It felt like being caught in the pattern of a maze-type gate. But worse than that — while they wondered if they were circling the same corridor, the surroundings kept subtly shifting: the width, the height, even the faint patterns on the walls. As if the terrain itself were being rewritten beneath their feet.
Kugugugu!
And then, in that instant, every opening around them slammed shut.
The panicked hunters stumbled to a halt, and soon the ceiling began descending, the walls closing in as the space contracted around them.
"Th-the space is closing in!"
"Goddammit! Blast our way out!"
"It's — it's not breaking! It won't budge an inch!"
The hunters swung their fists, but the walls were unreasonably, impossibly hard — they didn't so much as tremble. Even swinging swords left not a scratch, let alone a dent.
The hunters spiraled into pure panic.
"Th-this is insane..."
Kuuuung!
Their world went black.
"Is that the end of it?"
Oh Hyeon-seong, who had been resting his palm against the ground, brushed himself off and rose to his feet.
Every mercenary inside the facility had been annihilated.
They'd never even laid eyes on the enemy — just buried alive underground and wiped out. Though he hadn't flattened them entirely or crushed them to bursting.
Why had they come here, and how had they found this place? He wanted to keep them alive for interrogation.
As he strolled unhurriedly down the restored corridor, the returned room revealed hunters collapsed all over the floor, felled by the crushing pressure and suffocation.
"G... good God."
Lee Gil-sang stared blankly at the scene.
Crackle-crackle!
Just then, the sound of radio static crackled from the corpses' chest pockets. Through the gritty, low-quality audio, some foreign language dribbled out in a stream. To Lee Gil-sang, of course, it was nothing but unintelligible noise.
But Oh Hyeon-seong understood every word coming through the radio.
"These guys weren't the whole force — there's a main body somewhere. No telling how many they brought, but we should get out of here for now. The mercenaries are on their way."
When contact with the team had gone dead, whoever was listening had realized they'd been wiped out — and now the main force was converging on the facility.
They must have switched radio channels, since no more words came through, leaving him unable to gather more detailed intel. But at the very least, squatting here any longer was a poor choice.
And so the two of them made for the facility's exit.
BOOOOM!
But the moment they stepped out, a massive explosion erupted overhead. Part of the hidden facility blew apart, and the blast collapsed the entrance halfway down.
As debris rained around them, Oh Hyeon-seong and Lee Gil-sang hurried back inside.
"Wh-what the hell! Wasn't that a tank just now?"
"Not a tank... though they are lunatics all the same."
Oh Hyeon-seong let out a hollow laugh and peeked outside.
The mercenaries had already ringed the entire area. There had to be at least several hundred of them, and armored vehicles had come along too. Not just IFVs — vehicles with their main cannons mounted.
Even for an uninhabited no-man's-land, hauling equipment like that overseas was beyond the reach of any ordinary criminal organization or mercenary outfit.
"Those Disanto bastards have completely lost their minds."
The name of the company mentioned in the mercenaries' radio chatter.
Disanto — a multinational agri-food corporation.
Based in South America, a mega-corporation wielding power greater than some entire nations.
Built on a global food empire, it held monopolies on telecommunications, logistics, defense contracting, and just about every other industry in South America.
When Oh Hyeon-seong's strawberries caused a national sensation back in Korea, the most frequent comparison had been to their Black Label premium strawberries.
And now a corporation of that scale had sent a mercenary force into North Korean territory.
Then again... I suppose the intel was never going to stay with Lee Gil-sang alone.
To Disanto, the Secret Seed Vault was an enormous prize — bait more than tempting enough to drive them mad.
Treasure of such staggering value that it could buy a country outright.
If it was the Disanto he knew, they'd sooner bring a small nation crashing down around them than let it slip away. After all, today's seeds carried far greater value and influence than oil — the "black gold" of the past era ever had.
"Still... their ambition has swollen absurdly. To think they'd plan to cause this much chaos here."
A sneer crossed Oh Hyeon-seong's face.
This wasn't some corner-of-the-map minor nation. This was Korea — the front line against the worst hellscape on earth, the China Front, a country that had repelled wave after wave of colossal monsters.
Kugugugu!
Oh Hyeon-seong summoned Merz. Not the materialized form, but the spirit's true self — a colossal golem, filling the entire space as it appeared.
Lee Gil-sang nearly fainted on the spot at the sight, but Oh Hyeon-seong calmed him down and gave the spirit his orders.
"They're going to rain artillery fire down on this spot. Can you hold it?"
Merz nodded and plunged both arms deep into the earth. The ground around them rippled and writhed, wrapping the two of them in a protective dome.
There was no need to shield the whole facility — only the space around the two of them, concentrating the defensive power to its limit.
And so, crouched together with Merz inside the buried facility—
"Er... sir, if we just keep sitting here, won't that get us nowhere? Wouldn't it be better to break out now, while the encirclement is thinnest?"
"No. Sit tight and watch. No need to go flexing our own strength when it's unnecessary."
Oh Hyeon-seong hadn't summoned Merz simply for defense.
Much like when the high spirits Alvern and Merz had first re-manifested, he had deliberately summoned him while letting out a powerful, unmistakable surge.
With their presence laid fully bare, the gate observation systems would register it as an energy spike on the level of an S-rank gate.
Ordinarily, the Bureau would have detected such a spike.
When Merz appeared last time, an S-rank-level surge had indeed burst out — but Han Su-yeon had issued separate orders, so unlike the Alvern incident, there'd been no uproar. The Bureau had quietly buried it.
But the jurisdiction of the Disaster Management Bureau covered only the territory of the Republic of Korea.
This land was not Korea.
Beyond the border, where monsters swarmed, the ones keeping constant watch over this region were the military's Special Operations Command.
"Now... he's coming."
The hunters surrounding the facility held their positions.
In truth, the facility entrance itself had long since been blasted wide open. The problem was the earthen barrier that stood beyond it, walling them off.
It seemed to have been raised by a hunter's ability — and even when they bombarded it, trying to punch through, it was no easy task.
BOOM!
"Oh, come on! The second we think we've breached it, it just regenerates!"
"Don't get impatient. Time's on our side anyway. He can't hold out forever."
Every ability required mana to sustain and restore itself. Keeping a wall of that size standing while it withstood continuous bombardment — a decent hunter would have bottomed out his mana several times over already.
Having held out this long was impressive, but there was clearly little left in the tank.
Once the mana ran dry, an exposed ability-type hunter was nothing more than easy prey.
But then, at that very moment—
Vuuuuung!
"Huh...?"
"Wh-what is that sound?"
A bone-chilling roar suddenly rolled in from somewhere. Every hunter on site turned their eyes skyward.
What had appeared without warning and was flying directly over their heads was — bombers.
"Y... you've got to be kidding me...!"
BOOOOM!
"AAAAGH!"
The bombardment came cascading down, screams ringing out one after another. The hunters tried desperately to respond, but against death raining from the sky, they were utterly helpless.
What the bombers were unleashing were mana bombs — anti-kaiju munitions designed to exterminate monster hordes.
Strategic weapons in a class apart from conventional explosives. So devastating, in fact, that domestically they were forbidden outright — never even allowed to be handled.
Unleashing something like that on monsters meant the cities where humans lived and built their lives wouldn't survive either.
But out here — a no-man's-land crawling with nothing but monsters, beyond the national border — there was no problem at all.
Kugugugung!
In the wake of the bombers' first pass came the dense, rolling thunder of artillery.
The hunters' screams gradually fell silent.
Crackle. Crackle.
The land smoldered, nothing rising from it but black smoke. The vault facility had been scorched to complete ruin. Even buried underground, it had been devastated past the point of leaving a single trace of its original shape.
And yet, from those ruins, two men crawled out.
Only long after the bombardment had ceased did they finally emerge.
"Phew... you certainly made a spectacle of it, roasting everything like that."
Oh Hyeon-seong shook his head and surveyed the surroundings.
The hunters who had encircled them had, of course, vanished without a trace somewhere, and the armored vehicles had been melted down to slag. The forest that once stood here was gone entirely — the terrain itself reshaped beyond recognition.
Vvvvvvt!
Just then, a column of vehicles came pushing through the flattened landscape. All of them painted in military colors — and armored vehicles bristling with fearsome equipment rolled up beside them and ground to a halt, while Lee Gil-sang, frozen solid, clutched his chest as if in the grip of cardiac arrest.
Squeeeal.
Military hunters poured out of the vehicles.
These were no ordinary soldiers. There were heavyweight hunters of the Special Operations Command here — so many, in fact, that Lee Gil-sang, an outsider, already knew plenty of their names and faces.
And such men weren't merely gathered in one place — they stood assembled in perfect formation.
Thud. Thud.
One man walked out from among their ranks.
The one face here that Oh Hyeon-seong recognized. That man approached and stopped before him.
"Sunbae."
Kang Seok of the Special Operations Command.
He faced his old sunbae of many years and looked at him.