Final Weapon, You Dog Bastard!
The entrance to the Black Forest that the scouting party had seen was nothing more than a cruel joke.
The deeper they pushed, the denser the conifers grew, choking out the sky. The damp, centuries-old scent of moss mixed with the metallic tang of beasts and stabbed straight into their lungs.
The chill they had felt during the brief scouting run felt like child's play compared to the primal, crushing pressure radiating from the heart of this abyss.
The black trees, so thick that not even light could pass through them, gave the sensation of walking straight into the gullet of some colossal monster.
It had already been four years since his discharge.
At twenty-seven, Kang Jinhyuk had served from twenty-one to twenty-three, earned his degree, and spent the last four years as an ordinary unemployed man. The memories of his time in the GP search unit felt like canned food long past its expiration date.
A rusted, dented relic whose contents had grown too faint to recall.
Yet this hellish otherworldly forest had forcibly pried that relic open and poured its contents back into his brain.
It was just like back then.
The memory of spotting a glint of eyes in the pitch-black darkness during a night ambush, locking his sights on it while cold sweat ran down his back.
The hollow feeling when the supposed ferocious beast turned out to be nothing more than a stupid roe deer standing there.
Or the desperate, cowardly survival instinct that made him hold his breath and pray, "Please just go away, don't let it find us," at the thunderous sound of a massive wild boar charging across the entire mountain range.
Those brutal memories tore through four years of time and sharpened his senses to a razor's edge.
Jinhyuk instinctively located a zone where the territories of magical beasts overlapped in tense equilibrium—a kind of neutral ground where an eerie stillness hung in the air.
The same pathetic survival tactics he had used to avoid boar paths and read the eyes of roe deer now became the only compass guiding three hundred Cheonrangdae members like ghosts through the forest.
The path toward Ghost Cry Gorge was a nonstop parade of common sense being shattered.
Even while moving, Jinhyuk could only click his tongue at the bizarre ecosystem unfolding before his eyes.
"Captain, look over there."
Doksa pointed beneath a massive conifer. What looked like five fluffy white bundles huddled together.
They were strange creatures that resembled a mix of rabbit and cat—cute enough to charm any modern man, woman, or child—yet each bore a sharp horn sprouting from its forehead.
At that moment, a predator that had been lying in ambush in the branches—a Snow Leopard—silently cleaved through the air.
Just as they expected the strike of a beast standing at the apex of the food chain, an unimaginable scene unfolded.
The five Snow Cats leapt upward in perfect unison, as if they had planned it.
The white bundles shot upward like bullets and drove their forehead horns precisely into the leopard's belly and nape.
Kek!
The leopard fell to the ground without even managing a final scream.
What followed was even more gruesome.
The adorable Snow Cats opened their mouths wide, revealing razor-sharp fangs, and began tearing into the corpse of the much larger leopard while it was still warm.
What the hell? Are those max-level rabbits or something?
Jinhyuk could not close his mouth.
This was not merely carnivorous rabbits. It was an inversion that mocked the very order of the ecosystem.
In this forest, strength and weakness were not determined by size, but by how vile and lethal a hidden weapon one possessed.
Even those tiny creatures had evolved so desperately just to survive. Jinhyuk asked himself what a modern-day unemployed man like him had done, and steadied his mind.
The Cheonrangdae column moved through the bizarre ecosystem with eerie efficiency while the unnatural silence held.
The assassins of the First Company, former killers, clung to the branches and read the terrain and beast tracks through gaps in the leaves.
When they curled their fingers into hooks and flicked them downward, Doksa, leading the ground formation, read the signal and glided silently to Jinhyuk's side.
"Captain, the assassins' finger signals. Strong predator droppings and claw marks confirmed at two o'clock. We need to detour."
The moment Jinhyuk heard the report, he translated it in his head into the tactical language of a K-army search unit.
His brain spun exactly as it had when receiving a situation report of "suspicious movement toward the enemy GP" during operations.
The precious experience of a former squad leader who had once led five or six unmotivated soldiers through minefields now came roaring back to life.
"Beom Dal, signal a thirty-degree right course change. Keep the mercenaries from breaking formation."
Jinhyuk nodded and gave the quiet order to Beom Dal standing beside him. Beom Dal moved his thick fingers and traced a rough mercenary hand-signal only the Second Company's hired blades would recognize.
The command rippled outward, adjusting the spacing of the entire column.
At the same time, Jinhyuk called for So-sam at the rear.
So-sam had been watching the chaotic gestures of the wanderers and weaving them into a single coherent image in his mind.
The wanderers had lived as individuals with no unified system, yet So-sam shaped the strange trajectories of their movements into a kind of pictorial language and reported to Jinhyuk.
"Captain, when I diagrammed the wanderers' tracks, I found a 'bone pile'—a mass of beast carcasses—on the left valley side. Looks like a dining hall for creatures like those Snow Cats we saw earlier."
Jinhyuk received So-sam's "picture" report the same way he had once received "enemy expected movement routes" drawn on maps during his search-unit days.
The crude intelligence from various bottom-feeders was filtered through Jinhyuk's squad-leader experience and reconstructed into a precise infiltration route.
Using Doksa's scouting, Beom Dal's command relay, and So-sam's diagram interpretation, they slipped through gaps in the beasts' awareness like a blade and drove deeper into the forest's heart.
Yet the Ghost Cry Gorge waiting at the end of that gap was a hell of an entirely different dimension.
This place, where all the forest's blood vessels converged, was both a sanctuary corridor that monsters used after hunting and a kind of crossroads.
The early hours of the Five Classics. When the deepest darkness pressed down upon the earth, the gorge entrance was filled with an eerie stillness and suppressed groans that no human should ever hear.
Thud!
"Urgh…!"
Beom Dal viciously kicked the shin of a soldier who had made a digging sound at the bottom of the gorge with his thick leather boot.
A battlefield where even screams were forbidden.
Jinhyuk looked down from behind a boulder and swallowed the nausea rising in his chest.
At least military battles had the justification of annihilating the enemy. This operation was nothing but slaughter and hunting for profit.
"So-sam, check the map again."
Jinhyuk's voice leaked out through cracked lips. The map-maker So-sam unfolded the map with trembling hands.
"Captain… the atlas is wrong. This isn't blank space. It's their… gathering point."
Of all the damn luck… we picked the perfect choke point and it just happens to be their commute home.
Before Jinhyuk's thought could finish, a sharp howling tore through the forest from the far side.
Awooooooo—!
The trees of the forest began to freeze with cracking sounds.
Moisture in the air instantly crystallized and scattered like diamond dust.
They were coming. The true named boss monster leading the wolf-type magical beasts—the Blue Ice Wolf.
Hundreds of blue glowing eyes bloomed between the shadowed trees.
The killing intent of the apex predator, incomparable to the eyes of a roe deer or the presence of a wild boar, filled the gorge completely.
Jinhyuk swallowed dryly and raised his hand.
"Beom Dal! Fire!"
At Jinhyuk's command, the Third Company's Black Blades hurled their flame-oil jars in unison.
Clang!
Oil spilled with a shattering sound, and the mercenaries who had been lying in wait threw their torches all at once.
Whoosh!
In an instant, the gorge entrance was swallowed by a massive wall of fire.
The startled wolf monsters scattered sideways. The moment their paws touched the snow-covered ground, hell opened beneath them.
Crunch, crack!
What had looked like ordinary snow was actually a trap prepared by the Black Blades' cunning and the experience of several veteran hunters.
Deep pits lined with upward-pointing spearheads, camouflaged with rough conifer needles and a thin layer of snow.
Awooooo!
Unable to bear their weight, Snow Wolves, Blue Wolves, and White Wolves plunged into the pits and were impaled.
While they screamed and thrashed, Jinhyuk clenched his fist.
"Strike!"
Whoosh—!
The massive logs studded with spearheads that had been suspended from high branches were released by the assassins waiting above. They swung down in deadly arcs.
Below, pits and spearheads tore at legs. Above, hundreds of kilograms of falling logs crushed skulls. It was a three-dimensional slaughterhouse.
But the Blue Ice Wolf, a monster with a degree of intelligence, was different.
It stepped on the falling logs as if walking on air and soared upward.
Awooooooo~
With a single roar it froze and shattered the log-and-spear traps flying toward it, displaying the majesty of a predator while still airborne.
That was when it happened.
[Current Survival Rate: 8.71%]
[Mortality Rate Sharply Increased]
[Rapidly Approaching Critical Threshold]
The mechanical, rigid system messages slammed into his retina.
Jinhyuk's hand gripping the Heavenly Wolf Bow trembled. The faint pain that had lingered in his shoulder vanished, replaced by hot blood surging through his entire body.
The fourth-year reservist who once held his breath at the sound of wild boars now had to aim for a monster's throat if he wanted to live.
I want to go home. Seriously.
Even while thinking something so pointless, Jinhyuk smeared flame oil on an arrowhead, lit it, and drew the bow into position.
In the split second he met the Blue Ice Wolf's murderous gaze while it hung defenseless in midair, he seized the "perfect timing" he had experienced thousands of times during his gaming addict days.
"From now on, the ultimate weapon in this zone is my bow, you bastard!"
With Jinhyuk's desperate scream, a red flaming arrow that tore through the air—survival rate, death rate, whatever—shot straight toward the Blue Ice Wolf's forehead.
It was a single strike from a man who only wanted to live, without any system calculations or imprint assistance.
Blue chill and red flame intertwined as the arrow plunged into the Blue Ice Wolf's glowing eyes.