Graveyard of Knights (4)
CLANG!
"Kgh!"
The blade had ridden up his chest and was carving a line across his torso—only to grind to a halt near the pit of his stomach.
Grempel had wrenched the arc of his greatsword off course, wedging the steel into the spear's path just before it could drive home.
Unfortunately, the Spear of Radiant Light wasn't quite broken enough to chop a boss monster's weapon into kindling. It might have been different with a Weapon Break effect, but as things stood, there would be no cutting Grempel down along with his greatsword.
'Then again—'
If he couldn't be killed, then the next best thing was to strip away every scrap of his fighting strength.
"Hngh!"
I twisted the spear, rolling the blade from a diagonal to a vertical edge, then dragged it upward and carved away Grempel's left shoulder.
Shrrk!
— KRAAAAAAAGH!!
The severed arm bounced and rolled across the ground. Not a drop of blood followed. Well. Undead.
— MERE OUTSIDER!!
Dark crimson flame swallowed the greatsword whole. Losing an arm had cut deeper than I'd guessed; the torrent of his fury was swelling by the second, and the Berserk inscribed in the ring was venting its power harder and harder.
'Fallen King, Grempel' has entered the 'Frenzy' state!
Watching the message unfurl before me, I let a knowing smile creep across my face.
Frenzy—a status condition that ignited once Berserk stacks piled past thirty. Attack power inflated like a balloon, while defense and recovery were slashed to a tenth. The hallucinatory madness came free of charge.
— I WILL KILL YOU AAAALL!!!
The blood-red greatsword pulped everything around it. It hardly seemed aimed at me anymore; more like he was simply swinging at whatever dared to exist.
I'd been mildly afraid he might simply endure the side effects of Berserk. Thankfully, the mental derangement of Frenzy looked to be beyond even him.
'There it is. My chance.'
My attacks had been landing well even before Frenzy took hold. With his defense gutted like this, one clean hit might shatter the body outright. The only problem was threading a spear through that howling storm of steel to deliver it.
'A thrown spear?'
The idea flickered past and I dismissed it almost at once. Unlike against the necromancer, the odds of it being batted aside mid-flight were enormous—and a miss here meant I'd be well and truly out of answers.
"What in the world is that greatsword?"
Equipment carried by the undead almost always stewed with a sinister aura of its own. It was the reason the phantom knights' armor had buckled so easily under holy power. The greatsword Grempel swung, though, hadn't been touched by holy power at all. Fine—maybe the weapon was simply a class above. But it had felt less like resistance and more like the blade actively shoving the holy power away. High-tier undead occasionally sported gear with a holy-resistance property, sure, but it was almost always something small—a necklace, a ring. A greatsword built that way? I'd never laid eyes on one, not even before my regression.
'I'll pick that apart later.'
Leveling my breathing, I reversed my grip until the spearhead pointed at the earth. Then I kicked off the ground and charged—
— WHERE ARE YOU! WHERE ARE YOU!!
Grempel was still deep in his frenzy, wrecking everything within reach. The closer I crept, the harder the dull booms of displaced air hammered at my ears, the colder the sword-wind needled at my skin. Whether even Intercept could turn aside every blade he was flailing in that state, I honestly couldn't say.
'Slip up once, and I'm a stain on the floor.'
My entry point was the left flank. With the shoulder I'd carved off him, that side fed him far fewer swings than the right.
WHUUM! HM! KWAKWAKWA-BOOM!
Grempel brought the greatsword crashing down, drunk on his own madness. The moment I crossed into that attack radius, strategy and planning evaporated. There was nothing left but sensation—the endless search for the one correct answer.
My eyes never stopped moving, raking the field for the timing. The single most perfect seam. I waited for a gap to yawn open in that storm of steel.
"…!"
There.
I exploded off my knees and collapsed the distance in a blink. Speed and precision—that was all that mattered now, and every nerve I owned funneled into those two things. Like an arrow off the string, I hurled myself at the target. No need for raw power. Just one technique. Extend the spear, skewer the man. Land it—
"Pierce!"
—and walk away with a perfect score.
CRUNCH!
The spear rammed straight through the center of Grempel's abdomen. His defense was clearly gone, because his lower half promptly shattered and sloughed away beneath him.
— Krrgh…!
All the strength bled out of his breath at once.
"Haah…."
Sweat ran off me in ropes. The instant that razor edge of tension let go, my body sank like a sandbag. In raw physical terms, Grempel had been the better monster. If not for everything I'd carried back from before my regression, the one lying there in pieces would have been me. Thinking about it sent a proper chill up my spine, but I kept it off my face and looked down at the fallen king.
— Kheheh… so this is how it ends.
The frenzy seemed to drain away the moment he lost the ability to fight; Grempel's voice came out remarkably level. Sweeping the sweat- and blood-matted hair out of my eyes, I watched the boss dying.
— In the end… I too shall sleep with this land.
"…Welp. Sorry about that."
Who knew I'd live long enough to feel sorry for a boss monster at the bottom of a gate? Still, watching someone you could actually talk to breathe his last wasn't exactly my idea of a good time.
— Kghahat… there is no need for apology, outsider.
Grempel spoke like a man setting down a burden carried far too long.
— In return… I would ask one last thing of you.
"Name it."
— Take my name into your keeping. I have no wish to die as I am and blacken my forebears' name.
…Do I really have to, though?
Just as that was fighting its way up my throat—
[Route updating.]
[Hidden Route — The One Who Never Became a Monarch]
▷ Choice
① Take his name.
② Do not take his name.
The route had refreshed itself once more. This time, though, with a twist.
'It's giving me options.'
Every hidden route until now had simply hinted at a method and left me to decide whether to walk it. This one had planted a fork directly in my path.
"…"
And my choice was: do not take his name.
"No."
— …And why is that?
"What do you mean, why? 'Take your name or don't'—what am I even supposed to do with it?"
I was, quite literally, an outsider from another dimension and nothing more. What right did the likes of me have to carry a man's name off to another world?
"My job starts and ends with passing your name along and putting down a rampaging enemy. I've got neither the reason nor the obligation to haul your name around with me."
— …
"And what's with staking your life on a name anyway? 'Blackening my ancestors' name,' honestly… You'd seriously die nameless over that? Are you an idiot?"
I had walked the length of the annihilated Korean Peninsula once. Gathering up the corpses that remained, I built graveyards—hundreds of them, then thousands. And every headstone I drove into that earth was blank. There was nothing I could carve into them. Because I had never known a single one of the dead by name.
"Honor, money—none of it's worth a damn once you're gone. So doesn't that make it your job, while you're still breathing, to leave a name behind?"
— …
"You're Grempel. Today, you died by my hand. That's the whole of it."
— …You truly are an amusing creature.
His voice had loosened into something strangely light. Grempel hauled his collapsing frame upright by sheer will.
— Then, I shall keep that name.
His lower half was already nothing at all, and most of his torso had crumbled and scattered on the wind.
— I am Grempel.
His neck dissolved.
— Simply… Grempel. One who lived out his days and passed on by that name.
And then his skull began to come apart.
— Outsider.
Grempel left me words like a final testament.
— Do not… trust the Monarchs.
Monarchs.
My eyes snapped wide open at the word.
"…What? Hold on—what did you just say?"
[You have slain the boss, 'Grempel'!]
[You have acquired Bloodstained Ring of Madness (S).]
[You have acquired 25 Exp.]
[You have acquired a Fragment of the World.]
[Body stat increased by 1!]
[Body stat increased by 1!]
…
Seongnae-dong, Daegu. Outside the gate.
As the promised five hours wound down, a strange electricity began to thread through the crowd.
"Don't tell me he's actually going to clear it?"
"I'd settle for him not dying."
A truckful of reporters had already drafted failure headlines for every scenario imaginable. A few had gone further still and flat-out predicted Lee Tae-hyun's death. That had seemed like overkill at first, but the Hunter Bureau staff were lending the theory credibility just by existing—faces drained white, bustling in circles—until Bureau hunters were posted around the gate on standby.
'Something has happened inside that gate!'
The salacious version spread with real legs. On social media, the verdict was already in: Lee Tae-hyun was dead, or would wish he were.
Hunter Bureau hunters lined up out front whoa whoa whoa whoa
Did something happen in there??
Suspicions and gossip in every flavor. And at the center of that white-hot scene sat Seong Ju-ah, swallowing drily.
She had done all the preparation that could be done from outside. Once an assault had begun, a gate never reopened unless the people inside either walked out or died.
An unprecedented disaster. A gate whose difficulty had spiked without warning. And of all the gates in the country, the problem had to erupt in the one Lee Tae-hyun had entered.
"Does that man drag calamity around with him or something…?"
Muttering to herself, she checked her wristwatch. Roughly ten minutes remained of the five-hour clear time Tae-hyun had promised. She wasn't naive enough to expect him out on the dot.
If Tae-hyun managed to escape alive, she would immediately feed in the hunters on standby, investigate the gate, and get to the bottom of the difficulty shift. Seong Ju-ah was running through her plan one more time when—
Wuuuuuung…!
The gate shimmered, and a human silhouette took shape within it. Clothes caked in blood, a body hanging in tatters. A man walking out, leaning on a silver spear planted into the ground like a walking stick.
"Lee Tae-hyun confirmed alive!"
The waiting medical team rushed to swallow him up. Camera flashes whited out the entire area. For a moment, Tae-hyun's eyes went round; then his face snapped back into its native sharpness.
"Haah… looks like I made it out in one piece."
The tension that had been wringing Seong Ju-ah's body came unraveled all at once. If he had died in there, the fallout would have been a nightmare in a dozen different ways.
"Team A, in."
At her signal, five Hunter Bureau hunters moved as one. The man at their head stretched a hand toward the gate—
"Something's wrong. Something's wrong."
He could only stand there, dumbfounded.
"Captain? What are you doing? Go in!"
"Uh… um… that is…"
Before he could scrape together an answer to his teammate's question—
Pop!
The gate vanished.
It closed slowly from its edges inward, dimming until it had burnt out entirely. And that meant exactly one thing.
'Clear.'
Not a failure—certainly not a break. A complete, total clear of the gate.
Every jaw on the scene hit the floor.
"Wh… what…?"
Seong Ju-ah was no different from the rest. Every last pair of eyes swung toward one man—a figure limping away from the scene despite the medical team's protests. The F-rank hunter who had cleared this gate alone, in five hours flat.
The trash-tier hunter, Lee Tae-hyun.
That day, the internet burned to the ground over him.