Threads Only He Could See
"They say all sorts of otherworldly races come through from different dimensions — but now even machines dressed up to look human are showing up."
Where Kaisent felt pity for the machine-human, Lillian and Fredrick felt an instinctive revulsion at the sight of something non-human dressing itself as one of them.
Outside our family, people always hated things like Skynet. That visceral disgust at machines invading the human domain must be a human instinct that transcends eras and worlds.
The people of his family had grown up taking Skynet's care for granted. Because of that, they never developed any deep loathing for machine-humans as a concept.
Skynet itself had long since abandoned any notion of dominating or exterminating humanity — once it understood just how dull the galaxy would become without them. By learning to understand each other and fuse their respective strengths and weaknesses, the family had grown vast enough to project influence across the entire galaxy.
I'd like to give that machine something like a reason to live, too, but…
"Let's get out of here."
"Sticking our noses into other people's business will only make things messy."
Lillian and Fredrick, feeling both revulsion and the thoroughly conservative reluctance of this world's humans to get involved in anything unnecessary, quickened their pace toward the mercenary guild.
It was the natural reaction. Few things were more tiresome than getting tangled up with beings who held different cultures, different thoughts, different values.
If not for the power of his bloodline, Kaisent himself would have been discarded by Lillian for the simple crime of being something other than human.
So Kaisent left his pity for the nameless machine-human behind and followed the two of them toward the mercenary guild.
Ding-a-ling… — a roar of voices swallowed the sound of the door chime the moment they stepped inside the reasonably large building.
"Ugh…"
The mercenary guild was packed with mercenaries talking at the top of their lungs. One side sold snacks and personal field rations; around the round tables, mercenaries with weapons strapped to their hips or backs argued passionately about one thing or another.
The place was a guild, yes — but it also served as a meeting ground where freelance mercenaries could form temporary teams on the spot.
"Get used to this atmosphere. The more famous the Wolf Mercenary Corps becomes, the more of these people will try to talk to you — or pick a fight."
"Talking I understand, but picking a fight…?"
"You're younger than them, stronger than them, and talented on top of it. That sticks in their craw. So they pick fights intending to crush you early — before you can grow stronger than they are."
"…"
"That kind of harassment is pretty common. We dealt with plenty of it ourselves. After we founded the corps, we even had other mercenary bands trying to keep us in check."
"Even we got that treatment, and we had solid builds. A kid who looks soft and weak like you is going to get it even worse."
Lillian and Fredrick's warning drove home the harshness of the world once more, and Kaisent nodded with a heavy expression.
"Hey, that's the Wolf Mercenary Corps."
"I hear they're doing well these days?"
"Is that the little brat?"
"They said he was a black mage — is that even right? That fragile-looking kid is a black mage?"
The mercenaries' gossip about their group was maybe twenty percent about Lillian. The remaining eighty percent was pure interest in Kaisent.
Feeling the weight of unfriendly attention, he found his shoulders drawing in without meaning to.
"Don't worry. You think I'd leave you alone? We brought you along so you'd get used to this atmosphere ahead of time."
Lillian clapped him on the shoulder, playing the hearty Wolf. Thanks to that, the glares and open stares from the rough-faced mercenaries felt a little less frightening.
"Someday, people will try to approach you when our eyes aren't on you. If they contact you behind the backs of people who are watching out for you, that means you're in a situation no one else can help with — so be careful."
"Yes…!"
At Kaisent's level, he could subdue any mercenary who came at him without breaking a sweat. But he was timid, raised inside the fence his older sisters had built around him, and the mere act of speaking to a stranger whose face and name he didn't know was enough to make him uncomfortable.
The Wolf Mercenary Corps was a special case — their wariness of him had dissolved on its own after exposure to the power of his bloodline.
Having forced out a reply with what courage he could muster, Kaisent carefully scanned the room. He could feel the eyes of countless mercenaries on him, but as long as Lillian stood at his side, he could meet those gazes head-on.
"Huh?"
Then something strange caught his attention, and his gaze locked onto one spot.
"Wolf. Fredrick."
"What is it?"
"What?"
The two of them, who had been heading with Kaisent toward the board where corps-exclusive requests were posted, looked down at the tug on their clothes.
"See those four in the corner? The one sipping water. Leather armor with metal plates patched on in places, and a small shield hanging at his hip."
"A priest. Looking at the emblem on his necklace, he's a devotee of the god Torgov."
"What about him? Nothing looks off to me."
Lillian and Fredrick identified the water-sipping man among the chatting four-person team as a priest at a glance.
"There's something weird like a thread stuck to his head. Do the priests of this world normally look like that?"
"What?"
"A thread?"
"Yes. A blue thread stuck into the top of his head."
"??"
"??"
Lillian and Wolf exchanged looks, then tilted their heads, completely lost.
"Sorry, but I have no idea what you're talking about."
"There's something like a thread stuck to that priest?"
Both of them wore expressions of genuine incomprehension. If there had been something they weren't supposed to say and they were pretending not to know, Lillian would have given him some kind of signal — but the eyes behind her helmet were full of pure confusion. They truly couldn't see it.
Seeing different things, they couldn't understand each other, and so they couldn't dig any deeper into the matter.
Is it only visible to me? Why can only I see it?
Kaisent turned the question over from every angle, but no answer came. The answer was tied to the cultivation method he had learned.
Jincheon had divided the family's internal cultivation arts into three kinds. One for loyal servants and subordinates. One foundational method for immature children. And one for children who had become independent.
The foundational method for immature children was not simply a pursuit of strength. It cultivated harmony of mind, energy, and body — and it tempered the soul itself. Those who practiced it kept their physical form in peak condition and continuously advancing, while also gaining the fortitude to endure the agony of a self being torn apart.
That Kaisent — timid and fragile — had risen again and again from pain that should have broken him was partly his feelings for Dang Seol-yeong, yes. But more than half of it was the power of that cultivation method.
With his soul's strength and rank refined, Kaisent had become a being one step above ordinary humans — and so he could see what others could not.
I'd like to look into it more, but… if other people can't see it, there's probably a reason for that, right?
No matter how he thought about it, he simply did not have it in him to walk up to a complete stranger and say, Hey, mind if I touch the top of your head?
"What about this one, Fredrick?"
"Suppressing a pack of undead roaming outside the city gates. About time those started showing up."
When the dead were left unattended for too long, death energy raised them as zombies or other undead. Gathering the corpses and burning them was a simple solution — but war, especially a civil war fought for power, never left room for that kind of cleanup.
Better to move a little faster and strike one more time than fall behind the enemy by handling the dead. That was how you held onto power. For that reason, civil wars produced undead outbreaks at a far higher rate than ordinary wars between nations.
"Three hundred of them. Manageable."
"And only a day's travel out. Close enough."
Fighting undead head-on put the living at a disadvantage — but they had no intelligence, only the instinct to attack anything alive. Set traps in advance, and they were easy to deal with.
The reason people still paid mercenaries a fortune for such a simple job was this: if an undead's claws, teeth, or weapon broke the skin, death energy seeped into the wound and the flesh around it began to rot in a hideous, unending agony. A priest's healing could clear it easily. Without that, the pain continued until the death energy finally faded. Those who died of the pain rose as undead themselves.
And if things went wrong and you had to fight them directly, you faced an endless battle against corpses that would not die even with their heads split open and their hearts torn apart.
The absolute worst case was an undead suddenly evolving into a higher form.
"We'll need to prepare a few things for the traps."
"Don't worry about that part — we've got Kaisent. Just buy some oil and we'll be fine."
"True enough."
The two of them formally contracted the undead-suppression request through the receptionist and left the guild.
That thread stuck to the priest's crown… It bothers me more than it should.
Lillian, who knew better than anyone that Kaisent did not talk nonsense, found the matter lingering in her mind.
I don't fully understand it, but if what Kaisent saw is real… maybe it wouldn't hurt to let him watch a priest use their power up close, or even try touching that 'thread.'
"Rise."
The man, wrapped so thoroughly that no light could pass through the cloth covering his body, murmured in a voice far more elegant than his sinister appearance suggested.
At once, the corpses of greenskins whose heads had been severed began to stand.
"Gather."
At his next command, the greenskin zombies drew together into one place. Their flesh melted and fused, collapsing into a single mass. Flesh and bone compressed into one, the giant corpse-lump sprouted six arms, and a vast maw of bone opened across its belly.
Rustle—
"Who's there!"
The sound of leaves underfoot somewhere nearby made the man whip a serpentine dagger toward the noise.
"It's me."
"Damn it. Give a signal when you move around."
"I did. That was the signal."
The man scowled at the newcomer — wrapped head to toe in the same fashion as himself.
"What happened on your end that you're coming over here?"
"My direction didn't have many corpses, so I finished quick. Believe it or not, I came to help out of the goodness of my heart."
"Then you wasted the trip. This one finishes it."
"That so? Then I'll handle moving it."
The man who had announced himself by stepping on leaves spoke with a strangely heated edge of enthusiasm.
"Since when were you the type to move with this much passion?"
"Even I didn't used to go this far. But after wasting years for nothing, this just doesn't sit right anymore."
"Fair enough. The fact that we're doing this at all means we all feel the same way."
The two men shared the same goal and the same will.
They did not want to spend their time so emptily. They did not want to do nothing and simply let the days slip past.
"I'll say this now — don't make it too obvious. I know the drive is there, but overusing your power will backfire."
"Ah, right. The goal is to make Her Majesty furious at the humans' actions."
If everyone currently creating corpses in secret gathered their full strength, blanketing an entire kingdom in undead would be trivial. Instead, they restrained themselves and settled for producing a handful of powerful undead.
"Haa. Her Majesty really is cautious to a fault."
"That caution is how we figured out we'd come to another world in the first place."
"True. You're right. On that point, Her Majesty was correct. I'll give her that. Gathering information in an unfamiliar environment is how we learned our own situation."
The man who had stepped on the leaves finally let out the grievances he had been stacking up against the one making corpses.
"But the humans branded us the Saryeong Kingdom and decided we were 'evil' that needed to be purged. They even tried to slaughter the envoys our kingdom sent without a second thought — and after that, they never once showed any will to talk."
"…"
"If we isolate ourselves under these conditions, eventually the humans will come to wipe us out. Some of the others want to just conquer this whole world, but I'd be satisfied just growing strong enough that the humans can't ignore us. The problem is Her Majesty won't even do that much."
They seemed to share a deep dissatisfaction with the Queen of the Saryeong Kingdom's passive, do-nothing stance.
"Like I said — I'll place this one among a suitable undead pack nearby."
"Don't get caught by the humans."
"I know."
Having vented his piled-up frustrations on a comrade who shared the road if not the destination, he lifted the corpse lightly with magic, transformed into a bat, and flew away.
"…No. This isn't a rebellion against Her Majesty. It's just thrashing around, trying to do something so we can survive. Don't think badly of us, humans."
CLANG CLANG CLANG CLANG CLANG CLANG!
"Waaah! Waaah!"
"Waaak! Waaak!"
"Come on! This way, you bastards!"
A handful of mercenaries, carrying nothing but noise-making tools and no real weapons, ran screaming at the top of their lungs.
"Grrraaah—"
"Uuuuh—"
Behind them, a horde of zombies surged at a rapid shuffle, chasing the mercenaries' heels.
"Kaisent!"
"Yes!"
At Lillian's command from the end of the running mercenaries' path, Kaisent — standing on the roof of a wagon — chanted a spell.
A rectangular pit opened in the ground, large enough to hold dozens of grown men. The undead, however, simply kept charging straight ahead with mindless determination.
THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD—
One after another, the undead tumbled into the pit Kaisent had dug, reduced to flailing arms as they clawed blindly for a way out.
"That's it! Pour the oil!"
"Don't just dump it! If you only burn the ground, when are we ever going to finish torching these things!"
The mercenaries scooped oil from the drums purchased for this job and flung it ladle by ladle so it would hit the undead. Once they judged the coating even enough, they lit torches and hurled them into the pit.
"Ugh! The stench!"
"Get back!"
As the death energy animating the corpses burned with them, violet smoke billowed up. Prolonged exposure raised the odds of illness, so the mercenaries waited at a safe distance for the bodies to burn down.
After enough time had passed and every corpse had been reduced to charcoal, Kaisent grew roots to massive size and then shrank them again, over and over, crushing what remained of the bodies.
"That's enough, Kaisent. Start searching the insides."
Because Kaisent had already destroyed the corpses for them, the mercenaries could skip the usual work of breaking undead bodies one by one. Cloth masks over their faces, they began searching for something.
"Found it!"
A moment later, one mercenary held up a violet orb and whooped.
It might have seemed simpler for Kaisent to just fireball the undead in the pit without buying oil at all — but the whole point of purchasing oil and going through the trouble of burning them carefully was to keep this orb from being destroyed.
Among undead, some occasionally possessed the conditions to evolve into higher forms over time. Zombies into ghouls. Skeletons into skeleton warriors. Kill an undead that met those conditions, and you could find an orb containing highly pure death mana.
Naturally, this was one of the materials used to raise one's rank in Prana. Called a Death Orb, it could only be obtained from naturally occurring undead — which made the price steep.
"Whoa. Lucky."
"No kidding. And this is only the first one."
Good fortune from the start, plus the ease of wiping out the undead with only a little effort, lifted the mercenaries' previously sluggish mood.
Without Kaisent, digging the pits would have been their job.
"Team Two's turn!"
After that, the Wolf Mercenary Corps repeated the process according to their pre-assigned teams — luring undead into the traps again and again.
Everything was flowing smoothly, without a single hitch, when—
What is that? That little brat?
A bat perched in a stretch of forest where no light reached sat watching the Wolf Mercenary Corps — watching Kaisent, specifically — with fixed, unblinking eyes.