The Fox and the Crow
Kim Hui-seong, who had been listening in silence, finally couldn't hold back and cut into the story.
"So that's when you met Raven? He was the one killing the zombies?"
There was a faint edge of dissatisfaction on his face.
"Something like that, yeah. Anyway, just listen. Stop interrupting already!"
"Ah—yes, yes."
Red Fox, Lee Hee-su, wore a peculiar little smile.
"Hey, Hui-seong?"
"Yes?"
"Aren't you scared of me?"
"……I respect you."
Respect, was it?
Not a bad answer, as far as answers went. But there wasn't a shred of actual respect anywhere in Kim Hui-seong's heart. He didn't see her as his superior at all—only as a woman.
Her ability to read the hearts of others.
Ever since she had gained that power, she hadn't been able to face anyone with any real ease.
Desire and fear.
Those were the two things she always found looking back at her.
And those hearts had slowly, steadily, been breaking hers apart.
Kim Hui-seong, at least, was transparent enough that she kept him close.
It wasn't as though he had no desire of his own—but his was closer to the simple, honest attraction a man feels toward a woman.
The problem was that Hui-seong had plenty of experience with women, and his imagination ran extremely vivid.
She didn't simply read thoughts. She saw them, like scenes from a film.
"Hey! Hui-seong!"
"Yes?"
"……How—how old are you again?"
"Me? Twenty-four."
"……R-right."
Youth explained some of it, sure—but this guy was seriously out of hand.
Haa. This bastard… why the hell is he imagining me making him breakfast? Oh, for—this crazy son of a bitch?
In his fantasy, she was the picture of a demure newlywed wife.
Except she wasn't wearing a scrap of underwear—just an apron.
Thwack.
She cracked him over the head with a knuckle.
"Aaaagh! Wh-why did you—what was that for?!"
"…Do yourself a favor and get a girlfriend already, yeah?"
"……I don't have time. For the sake of the nation and humanity."
That wasn't the real reason, but it was true he didn't have a girlfriend. Women he slept with, sure. A girlfriend? Not one.
Hee-su found the whole thing so absurd she let out a hollow laugh.
"So what happened after that? Between the zombies and the demonic beasts."
"……I forgot because you interrupted me! Ugh, okay, so…"
Hee-su decided to finish telling Hui-seong about that day.
Red Fox Lee Hee-su walked slowly into the heart of the Rift Zone.
In a place like this, the conveniences of modern civilization were worthless.
Bring a vehicle in and the power of the Rift would simply tear it apart.
Hundreds of zombies and demonic beasts were fleeing in every direction.
At the center of it all stood a man, holding a half-shattered sword, perfectly still.
Around him, what had once been zombies lay scattered as shredded flesh, and what had once been demonic beasts had been reduced to spatters of blood.
She had considered herself hardened against most horrors—but in that moment, nausea surged up her throat. She forced the gag back down and took stock of the situation.
Looks like he killed them all in a single attack. A close-combat type? At this level, he's S-class at the absolute minimum—maybe higher.
Could she have done the same?
Against demonic beasts and zombies, maybe. But this was the very core of a Rift Zone.
Trash like these zombies and beasts could be put down with guns. Humanity needed Awakeners for an entirely different reason.
And that reason was exactly why she was called a savior of mankind.
Something that had not yet taken form was rippling with a crimson aura.
A thing from the Other Side.
Humanity still hadn't dared give it a proper name. They simply called it what it was—a thing from the Other Side—and left it at that.
These entities endlessly turned humans into zombies and beasts into demonic monsters. Ordinary physical attacks did nothing to them.
In the early days of the Rift Crisis, humanity had thrown every bomb it possessed at them. For better or worse, the bombs had worked.
The problem came after. Once the things from the Other Side realized humanity's weapons could affect them, they rendered every electronic device on the planet inoperable.
From that point on, humanity could no longer bring proper firepower to bear, and was slowly pushed back.
Only then did the New Humans begin appearing—Awakeners, Hunters, whatever people chose to call them. They were thrown onto the front lines, and only after losing seventy percent of the world's population did humanity manage to hold the current line.
Even now, no one knew what the things from the Other Side actually wanted. Humanity simply reclaimed Rift Zones and lost them again, over and over.
Strange. If he's a New Human, there should be a wavelength—but there's nothing. What's going on…
While Hee-su was still trying to make sense of the scene, the thing from the Other Side finished taking shape.
They assumed different forms depending on the situation. This time, it stood before the man as an enormous black crow.
I'll just watch for now.
She had no particular desire to force the issue. This wasn't a designated reclamation zone to begin with. The ground she was standing on had once held the nuclear power plant that supplied electricity to the entire region.
When every electronic device on Earth went dead, the plant's control systems had naturally gone with them. By all rights, humanity should have been wiped out when those reactors blew.
But the entities from the Other Side were just as vulnerable to radiation, so their first priority had been to convert every power plant on the planet into a Rift Zone.
In other words, this was a place where space-time itself had been frozen.
Thanks to that, the reactors never exploded.
Even so, if too many zombies and demonic beasts piled up, they would eventually spill over into the safe zones—so every so often, like pulling weeds, the excess had to be cleared out.
KRAAAAAAAAH!
The thing from the Other Side, now a colossal crow, began to scream.
An ordinary person would have gone mad from that roar alone. Hee-su hastily raised her power and formed a barrier. It couldn't stop physical attacks, but against mental assaults like this, it was effective enough.
She expected the man to cough up blood and collapse. He didn't so much as flinch.
In silence, he lifted the broken sword above his head.
The crow tilted its head at him, as if puzzled.
In that instant, the blade came down.
SHRRRRAAAAK—
Space itself was cleaved apart. The crow split cleanly in two.
KRAAAAAAAAHHH!
Its death shriek tore through the air.
Slowly, it began to scatter into crimson particles.
Tssssssss…
Hee-su staggered backward, stunned beyond words.
What had she just witnessed? There had been no wavelength. No surge of energy she could feel. Space had simply… been cut.
A single motion. That was all.
I-insane. He just erased a thing from the Other Side like it was nothing?
Things from the Other Side required at least three—no, four—S-class New Humans working together, plus massive supporting firepower, just to bring one down.
"……Ha? Is he out of his mind? Wait—hold on. If he did that, then this place—"
Tssssssss…
The crimson aura blanketing the area began to lift. He had reclaimed the Rift Zone. A place that was never supposed to be reclaimed.
Her head throbbed. Someone needed to get that nuclear plant back online, and fast. The Legion faction didn't exactly have technicians for this kind of work.
In the end, they'd have to request help from the government forces.
"I'm going to get an earful for this."
Even if she told them the man had done it, no one would believe her. Command would assume she'd handled the reclamation herself. They never understood the actual work on the ground anyway.
"Hey. You okay? Hey! Can you hear me??"
"………"
"Ha? Why aren't you saying anything? Look at me!!"
Wait.
The man's pupils were blown wide. He was unconscious. And yet the sword in his hand was slowly rising again.
Her instincts screamed.
Worse—the inside of the man's mind was so dark she could barely call it human. It was filled with nothing but the hunger for slaughter and destruction. Visions of him cutting down countless people like some blood-soaked demon flickered past her like scenes from a movie.
"I-insane. Is this thing even human?"
She poured everything she had into preparing a shockwave aimed straight at him.
An ordinary person would die or be crippled by a single hit. As an area attack, its raw lethality wasn't that high—but the target had no way to defend against it.
BABABABABAM—
The shockwave erupted, and at the same time she seized every heavy, solid object nearby with her telekinesis and hurled them all at once.
A thin smile touched her lips.
An attack like this usually killed or completely incapacitated its target.
Even if someone braced for the initial shockwave, the barrage of heavy, crushing debris that followed would tear a body apart.
KWOOOOOM—
A massive cloud of dust billowed up, swallowing the entire field of vision.
…………
No sound. No presence. No energy. No wavelength.
Hah… did I get him?
When the dust cleared, the man was still on his feet, unconscious, clutching a sword that was now nothing but a hilt. Everything she had thrown at him had been reduced to powder scattered across the ground.
What the hell is this bastard? Some kind of new Awakener? And what's with those clothes? Is he shooting a martial arts movie?
Hee-su decided to move him with her telekinesis.
Of all times for the car to be parked so damn far away.
Caw—caw—
Dozens of crows swept in behind them and began picking at the scattered scraps of flesh.
"Tch. Crows everywhere."
"Young lady, you have my thanks. It seems I owe you my life."
"……Does anything hurt?"
Hee-su was fairly certain this man had lost his mind. First the martial-arts getup, and now he was calling her young lady?
"I beg your pardon?"
"Looks like he's still not all there. Hey. You said he was fine, right?"
Hee-su snapped at the doctor with open irritation.
"W-well… physically, there's nothing wrong with him. B-but given the strange things he's saying…"
"So? What? Where does it hurt? Spit it out properly. Huh? You wanna die?"
Crackle—
Sparks leapt from her fingertips.
Any Awakener could produce a shockwave; condensed like this, it looked like a miniature bolt of lightning. It was Hee-su's preferred method of intimidation.
"Eeeek! I-I'm sorry! I-I'm not a p-psychiatrist, I—"
"Oh yeah? Then what are you?"
"M-me?"
The doctor couldn't get the words out. Murderous light flashed in Hee-su's eyes.
"I-it's just—! I-I'm a dentist!"
"……What? Then why the hell are you even here?"
"Th-there's only m-me… I'm the only doctor…"
"Haa? Are you kidding me? Get out!!!"
"I-I'm so sorry!"
After the collapse, doctors had become extraordinarily precious. A dentist was still a doctor, wasn't he? The only reason they even had someone like him on staff was because this was the Hound unit.
Hyeon-woo, watching the whole scene unfold with a blank stare, more or less pieced the situation together.
Unfamiliar—and yet welcome.
Modern civilization. Right there in front of him.
And the crazy woman standing over him—who exactly was she supposed to be? He'd been grateful, thinking she was the one who'd saved him. Turns out her temper was absolutely foul.
Looks like some kind of servicewoman, but her personality is garbage. Is this woman completely insane?
For a moment, he thought of his platoon leader from his days as a private second class. Her nickname had been exactly that—Crazy Bitch.
During a guerrilla march, when a collapsed soldier couldn't get back up, she'd stomped on him with her combat boots, grinding him into the dirt. The battalion commander had to get out of his vehicle to stop her.
Somehow she reminds me of that lunatic.
Crackle-crackle—
It had been a very long time since anyone had looked Hee-su dead in the face and thought crazy bitch this openly.
Witch of the Massacre. Crazy bitch. She had long since finished pulverizing anyone who dared say—or even think—things like that.
After that, no one had managed to think it at all. And now this arrogant bastard, after she'd gone and saved his life, had the nerve to think this?
The sparks gathered in her hand flickered right in front of Hyeon-woo's face. He didn't look particularly startled.
What? He's not scared? Most people would be losing their minds right about now.
"Ah? Young lady… no, miss—what is that? Fascinating. Could it be… the Thunder Spirit Divine Art? A supreme martial technique like that? Is this really the Republic of Korea?"
"…What kind of nonsense are you spouting? Thunder Spirit? Yes, this is Korea. But aren't you afraid of this?"
Hyeon-woo let out a quiet snort of laughter.
"Reaching even that level of attainment is no small feat, of course—but it seems overly focused on spectacle. And it doesn't appear to have much real power behind it."
"Is that so? Think you can stop it? Then go ahead and try!!"
CRACKLE-CRACKLE!
The spark left her hand and shot toward Hyeon-woo with vicious speed.
It wouldn't kill an ordinary person, but the combination of shockwave and electric current was more than enough to knock someone cold.
Pffk.
The spark died the instant it touched Hyeon-woo's palm.
"…Miss, which school… no—where did you learn this? Is it even martial arts, or some kind of sorcery? It's far too unrefined. You mustn't rely on parlor tricks like this. Learn it again properly."
"Ha? What are you? What the hell kind of bastard are you!!!"
Hyeon-woo rose smoothly to his feet.
Right there, he clasped his fist over his palm in a formal martial salute and bowed once more.
"Thank you for your assistance. This is the Republic of Korea, correct? Then I'll be taking my leave. Ah—by any chance, was there a sword near me? It was rather expensive…"
"……Hey. You don't know who I am?"
Hee-su gave her red hair a light touch, then angled her face so he could see the crimson of her lips against her pale skin.
Normally, that was more than enough. No one failed to recognize her.
"……Did you eat a rat or something? Huh? Ah—ahahaha. That was supposed to stay in my head. My apologies."
He'd said it on purpose.
And inside Hee-su's mind, Hyeon-woo's thoughts rang through with perfect clarity.
Ah? This crazy bitch talks so damn short. Suddenly attacking people out of nowhere? Haa. I'll let it slide—homecoming special. I finally make it back to Korea and the first thing I run into is this lunatic?
Homecoming?
What was that supposed to mean?
It was a word she couldn't yet begin to understand.