Siege Warfare (1)
Jang Na-ik, who had been following alongside me, suddenly lurched on unsteady legs.
“Ugh!”
From the sea, countless tentacles were surging toward us. For someone as inexperienced as Jang Na-ik, it must have felt like walking straight toward the slaughterhouse. His nerves had tightened so hard that his knees nearly gave out.
Mun Dal-su barked at him in a sharp scolding voice.
“Na-ik, you brat! Get your head straight!”
“Y-yes, sir!!!”
If those tentacles slaughtered the hunters and poured onto land, the damage would become unmanageable. Their speed on land was slower than in the water, but that was more than enough to destroy buildings and kill people.
Which meant the white beach was both battlefield and fortress.
A siege, in other words.
Defend it, or let it be breached.
I stared out across the horizon. The Busan team holding Gwangalli Beach numbered twenty-nine, myself included. The Dirty Kraken's tentacles outnumbered us by dozens to one.
Maybe even hundreds to one.
Jang Na-ik apologized to me.
“H-Hunter Choi. I’m sorry. If I just listen carefully to everything you say, we’ll definitely win, right?”
He was really asking because he wanted to calm his fear and borrow some certainty from me.
“Well. There are a lot more of them than I expected. At this rate, we’re all going to die.”
“Y-yes?”
“What do you mean, ‘yes?’ There are way too damn many of them.”
“You’re joking, right? Please say you’re joking!”
Jang Na-ik clutched at my pant leg with a look of utter despair.
Of course, I was only teasing the youngest member of the team.
If we’d faced them with no preparation at all, we would have been defeated for sure.
But I’ve got a trump card.
“Team Leader Mun. Get the trap ready.”
At my call, Mun Dal-su nodded.
“Okay.”
The tentacles approached at speed, churning white foam in their wake. Forward. One hundred meters, eighty, sixty...
The closer the sea monsters drew, the more tightly the Busan team gripped their weapons, faces rigid with tension.
Mun Dal-su swallowed hard.
“Hunter Choi. Not yet?”
“Wait.”
Fifty meters, forty, thirty...
“How much longer?”
“Wait.”
From within the foam, bizarre shapes began to emerge. Even without binoculars, I could see them clearly now.
Their slick, mucus-coated bodies gleamed wetly in the seawater.
“Kieee!”
They had no eyes. But as the jaws at the ends of their tentacles gaped open, rows of sharp teeth flashed in the light.
Now the distance was barely ten meters.
“Hunter Choi...?”
The tentacles were close enough to grab.
“Now!”
Mun Dal-su slammed the button in his hand.
Sharp, jagged spikes burst up from the surface of the sea. Set at a forty-five-degree angle, they pointed straight toward the direction of the charge.
The tentacles rushing in at full speed slammed into the spikes.
Like slamming on the brakes on a highway.
“Kiiieeek!”
“Kekkk!!!”
Their bodies were caught on the spikes and ripped apart.
The Busan team clenched their fists in triumph.
“That’s right! Got you!”
“Now that’s what I call a haul!”
The equipment installed in the sea was called a spike strip.
It was usually a police device used to stop a criminal’s fleeing vehicle.
When a car ran over a spike strip, its tires would puncture and it would come to a halt on its own.
To stop the tentacles, we had modified the spike strip we’d laid beneath the sea.
The spikes themselves had been replaced with Magnium, a dwarf-forged alloy.
Magnium resisted corrosion from seawater and could retain a certain amount of mana.
And so the spike strip had been reborn under a new name.
In other words:
“Tentacle Stopper, you bastards!”
“How does it taste? Feels great, doesn’t it?”
Two days before the decisive battle, the Busan team and I had worked together to install the Tentacle Stopper in advance.
Like a car that gets caught in a police trap and comes to a dead stop.
Countless tentacles were snagged on the stoppers, flailing helplessly as they splashed against the water.
“Kekkekek!!”
When folded beneath the water, the Tentacle Stopper was almost impossible to see.
They could never have imagined a trap waiting for them right in front of them.
That, and the fact that the tentacles were less intelligent than the Dirty Kraken, helped a great deal.
On top of that...
“Nice one, Jang Na-ik.”
“Hehe. Thank you.”
Jang Na-ik scratched the back of his head, bashful.
Magnium alloy could be imbued with mana or inscribed with magical commands.
Jang Na-ik’s talent was Gravity.
A telekinetic-type attribute that used mana to manipulate gravity like a magnet.
Jang Na-ik had cast a spell onto the Tentacle Stopper’s spikes.
The command was simple.
“Pull in anything that touches the spikes!”
The effect was truly extraordinary.
“Kekeeek!!!”
“Kek!!!”
The more the tentacles thrashed, the deeper the spikes sank into them.
In less than a minute, red blood was rolling over the blue sea.
The tentacles lost all mobility and went limp. Their corpses floated up and bobbed on the surface.
“That’s it!”
The Busan team burst into cheers.
Thanks to the long line of stoppers stretched across the water, the number of tentacles had dropped dramatically.
And not a single person was injured.
Not a single casualty.
“As expected of Hunter Choi! That was the best strategy!”
“See? Team Leader Mun. I told you we only had to trust Hunter Choi.”
Mun Dal-su and the others praised me lavishly.
I drew the dagger at my thigh, White Revenge.
“I’m starting to get hungry. Let’s go.”
The tentacles had clearly been reduced, but they hadn’t been wiped out. There were so many of them that a few still managed to climb over the stoppers here and there.
About thirty in all.
Right now, that made the numbers almost one-to-one with the Busan team.
The tentacles were individually stronger in combat, but it didn’t matter.
“Kii... ek.”
Not a single tentacle that reached the beach was intact. The spikes had inflicted fatal wounds, leaving their bodies half-severed and their innards spilling out in streams. Most couldn’t even keep their balance; they crawled like worms before toppling sideways. A few died simply from being left alone.
Just as I expected.
Unlike the Dirty Kraken’s true body, which could regrow even after eight legs were cut off, these tentacles had no regenerative ability.
If we hit them first with the stoppers and then followed up while they were already badly wounded...
This is manageable.
I flipped White Revenge half a turn and gripped it in reverse.
“Let’s enjoy the appetizers.”
With me charging at the front, the Busan team surged after the tentacles.
It was the first day of the war when the Busan alliance truly showed its worth.
Deep beneath the black ocean, a massive coral reef swayed back and forth.
No, looking closer, it wasn’t a coral reef at all.
It was the creature most gifted at disguise among all life on Earth.
An octopus.
The master of transformation, the chameleon, changed color by secreting hormones. Even then, it took at least twenty seconds. An octopus, on the other hand, could alter its body in the blink of an eye. It could even freely change the texture and hardness of its skin.
On top of that, octopuses possessed remarkable memory and intelligence high enough to use tools.
If vertebrates stood at the summit in the world of land animals, then among invertebrates it was the octopus that reigned.
The giant octopus opened its eyes.
Its round head resembled a human face, and its eight legs transformed into tentacles the moment they were severed.
Humans called this monster the Dirty Kraken.
“...U, uh. Uuuh.”
The Dirty Kraken concentrated, making strange noises as it worked. Busily, frantically, it generated tentacles as if it were laying eggs.
“This. should. be. enough.”
Having learned human speech, the Dirty Kraken spoke Korean.
The tentacles were its avatars. Once it gave the order, they each moved like arms and legs of their own.
“Go. Go kill the humans!”
With a single command from the main body, countless tentacles headed for the surface.
The Dirty Kraken, which had burst out of the deep-sea gate, had set itself one simple goal.
Not to wipe out humanity.
Not to rule the Earth.
Just to plunge humans into pain.
To toy with them to its heart’s content. To humiliate them. To make them dance in the palm of its hand.
A sea monster that had gained intelligence.
As the top predator of the ocean, the Dirty Kraken found life in the endless deep far too boring.
If it wanted to, it could slice a blue whale into pieces in the blink of an eye.
But what would it gain from that?
Simple slaughter, just to fill its belly, was far too dull for the Dirty Kraken.
Then, by chance, it attacked a group of fishermen.
When it encountered humans for the first time, the Dirty Kraken felt an overwhelming rush of pleasure.
“P-please, spare me!”
“Please!!”
“Aaagh! Fuck!!!”
Unlike stupid fish, which had no idea how to express pain, screams, or emotion, humans wailed and begged. They screamed and cursed.
At that, the Dirty Kraken thought, What is “fuck”? What is that word? This is hilarious!
The giant octopus began to dream grand dreams.
Let’s torment them more. Let’s torment more humans, in more varied ways.
Like a crane game where you drop in a coin and turn the handle to win a stuffed toy, the more it bit, devoured, and drove them into despair, the more new reactions humans produced.
Humans were the Dirty Kraken’s only source of amusement.
Therefore, it could not let humanity go extinct.
It had to keep them alive, whittling them down bit by bit, and inflict suffering only intermittently.
Its hunting grounds were the east and south of the Korean Peninsula.
It had set Busan and the surrounding area as its target.
The first day’s invasion was only a taste.
It would send its tentacles ashore through the coastline and kill perhaps a thousand people at most.
Huh. Huh. Huh. I’m. looking forward to it.
Before long, the tentacles were drawing close to Gwangalli Beach.
Octopuses were unusual in that they sensed the world through their skin.
Even with their eyes closed, they could distinguish light from color and identify structures.
They also possessed a highly unusual nervous system.
An octopus’s body contained more than five hundred million neurons.
That was an astonishing figure, twenty-five thousand times greater than that of a snail, another mollusk.
Even more astonishing was this: only about one third of those five hundred million neurons were distributed in the brain.
The majority of the rest were stationed in the eight legs.
In other words, each tentacle shared the situation it encountered with the distant main body.
The Dirty Kraken closed its eyes.
It received the world seen by each tentacle as if it were watching multiple television screens.
We’re. almost. there.
But just as the tentacles reached land, the field of vision went black.
“...W-why is it like this?”
It was the beginning of disaster.
The tentacles were being torn apart by something and dying at a terrifying pace.
“N-no!!”
Octopuses are not assigned a sex at birth.
As they grow, they become either female or male. At present, the Dirty Kraken was female, and it possessed a mother’s affection for its tentacles.
Someone was butchering her precious children.
The pain the tentacles felt was transmitted in full to the Dirty Kraken.
“Y-you bastards!!”
The entire body of the Dirty Kraken flushed red.
In the end, only a few tentacles made it to shore.
And even those were all cut down by humans that sprang out to meet them.
Those bastards... how dare they!!!
Its fury made the temperature around its body rise. The seawater around the Dirty Kraken began to bubble and boil.
The Dirty Kraken tried to identify who those people were.
Those guys... are...?
Just like itself, they were people who could use mana.
It didn’t know the exact word for them—hunters—but it was obvious they were different from ordinary people.
One human in particular stood out.
A man with a snow-white dagger.
With narrowed eyes and a savage glare, the man swung his blade.
In a single motion, he brought down as many as three tentacles at once, rapidly reducing their numbers.
This... damn it!!!
In 2010, a scholar renowned as an authority on octopus research published a paper.
It argued that octopuses could recognize individual humans.
In other words, even if a person changed clothes, the octopus still knew who was who.
As the tentacles’ vision went black one after another in real time, the Dirty Kraken locked onto the man with the dagger.
Grinding its teeth so hard they seemed ready to shatter, it watched as screen after screen went dark.
Until only one remained.
That is, one remained apart from the man holding a tentacle in his hand.
The man stared straight at the tentacle.
Then he opened his mouth.
“Hey. You. You’re spying on us, aren’t you?”
As if he somehow knew the Dirty Kraken’s ability, the man spoke to it with complete composure.
“Go scrub your suckers clean and wait.”
The man raised the snow-white dagger.
“Your turn’s coming soon.”
The tentacle was severed, and the Dirty Kraken’s vision was cut off.
In the black depths of the ocean, the giant octopus screamed.