The Weight of a Hero (11)
The Dirty Kraken was on the brink of death.
Debris jutting from its body had turned the seawater cloudy and opaque, and a few fish were already floating in the water, gnawing at the monster’s exposed entrails.
Serves it right.
It was a shift in perspective.
Just as I hadn’t relied on magic alone when I fought the Cult Leader of Heavenly Sun and Earthly Mastery, there was no law saying I had to use nothing but Poseidon’s power just because I was dealing with a sea monster.
Besides, even though Mirror Turn was absurdly overpowered, it barely drained any mana at all.
It was a kind of cheat.
I was decent with a sword, sure.
But magic? I’m hopeless at that.
Setting aside the fact that I just didn’t have the talent for it, I’d never been the type to throw myself into the mage’s domain with any real enthusiasm to begin with.
So the strategy I chose was cheating.
In the comic’s original setup, Mirror Turn was only supposed to be used when Mr. Eden reflected an opponent’s attack back at them tenfold.
I’d tricked the Hero System.
With no blood, no sweat, and no years of grinding, I’d gotten my hands on an absurdly powerful skill with almost no effort.
Like a needle thief growing into a cattle rustler.
Like a bungling shaman getting someone killed.
I’d taken a needle and turned it into a coin.
I’d taken a sham shaman and, using the team’s youngest member, transformed that flimsy telekinesis-type Graffiti...
...into potent dark magic.
Jang Na-ik probably didn’t even know what he’d done.
To think I could crush the Dirty Kraken just by spinning a few coins.
What incredible value.
At that moment, my ace in the hole, Jang Na-ik, became the trump card that turned the whole fight.
Yeah. I’m glad I brought him.
Then suddenly a vein bulged in my neck.
“Ghk!”
My vision blurred and my stomach tightened.
I feel like I’m about to pass out.
Awakener's Balance: ₩511,583,103
Awakener's Balance: ₩510,490,452
Awakener's Balance: ₩509,733,346
...
All through the battle, I’d been using Blessing of Water. It had barely kept me breathing underwater, but even that was starting to fail me.
No wonder.
I’d split the sea with Control of Water, then fought while moving hard and fast the entire time. The water was so cold my teeth were rattling. If this had been an ordinary person, they’d already have gone into hypothermic shock and suffered catastrophic brain damage.
My body had long since hit its limit.
I need to finish this now.
The Dirty Kraken wasn’t dead yet. If I left it alone, it would recover little by little, like a weed that keeps growing no matter how many times you stomp on it.
I drew Heoksikdo.
I closed in on the Dirty Kraken and swung.
One of its legs came off.
“Gaaah!”
To wipe out the Dirty Kraken completely, I had to destroy its core.
The problem was...
Where the hell is it?
The Dirty Kraken couldn’t hide its core outside its body the way a Cancel Golem could.
It’s definitely carrying it somewhere inside.
That sly bastard wasn’t about to reveal a weakness out in the open.
Keep cutting, and sooner or later it would show itself.
This was going to be a slugfest.
Heoksikdo flashed black and split the surging water in two.
Then every remaining leg was severed.
“Sto. p! Hah. Hah. It. hu. rts!”
The Dirty Kraken screamed and regenerated its tentacles.
But the speed was off.
Maybe the crushing impact had left the damage deep inside, because the limbs were growing back at a distinctly sluggish pace.
“It. hur. ts! It. hu. rts so ba. d!!!!!”
The Dirty Kraken couldn’t fight back.
It was being butchered mercilessly, like a punching bag.
“Y-yo-you!!! You f-fu-uck!!!”
It lashed about and spat curses as it struggled.
Its body turned bright red.
“I’ll. kill. you. I’ll. kill. you. and. ev. ery. one. of. those hu. mans too......!”
“Shut up.”
I drove the tip of my blade into one of its eyes and gouged it out.
“Kek!”
The Dirty Kraken’s body convulsed.
The red that had spread across its body, like the last flare of life before death, drained away.
Almost there.
If there was no core in any of the eight legs, then it had to be somewhere in the main body.
I raised Heoksikdo to strike the finishing blow.
That was when it happened.
A razor-sharp killing intent burst out behind me.
It felt as if someone was about to punch straight through the back of my head...
Instinctively, I swung my sword.
The tentacle that struck Heoksikdo was cut clean in half.
“...”
That was strange.
The Dirty Kraken shouldn’t have been able to make any more tentacles.
Unless there was another octopus.
Or another side to it.
Which made no sense.
As the muddy water cleared, I felt it.
Goosebumps broke across my skin.
Damn it.
Beneath the reef, between the coral, behind the seaweed piled in thick black mats—something glittered in the dark water.
Countless tentacles were glaring at me.
It was a trap.
The Dirty Kraken had hidden as many of its limbs as it could, just in case.
Those tentacles moved independently from the body.
Even with the monster itself hanging by a thread, the tentacles came at me without hesitation.
No problem.
I drew White Revenge.
The pure white blade shredded the tentacles to pieces.
Nothing’s changed. I still have the advantage.
The momentum was still on my side.
But...
“Ke. gh! Gggh!!!”
While the tentacles bought it time, the Dirty Kraken used every last ounce of strength to recover.
The severed legs regenerated.
The body that had been flattened and caved in began to swell again.
So that’s what you were aiming for.
Like the moon waxing and waning, my sword had to weaken if I focused too much on defense.
I had to choose.
Give up flesh to take bone.
Or step back and plan for the future.
The answer was already decided.
I sheathed White Revenge at my thigh.
Let’s see who breaks first.
I used Heoksikdo to gouge out the Dirty Kraken’s remaining two eyes.
“Krrr!!! Gah!!!!”
The Dirty Kraken coughed up blood foam.
I couldn’t just ignore the tentacle attack whipping in from behind me.
Instead, I adjusted the ratio.
If defense was three, then offense would be seven.
As I lowered my guard, a gap opened even in the Absolute Shield.
Tentacles scraped across my body.
“Kkek!”
“Kkhk!!!”
“Kek!!!!”
The tentacles’ gaping maws tore into my arm and thigh.
Part of my W1 suit ripped away.
When seawater seeped into the wounds, they burned like someone had thrown salt into fresh cuts.
It hurts.
It was more than pain. My senses were starting to go numb.
As my momentum weakened, the Dirty Kraken noticed immediately.
“Ju. st. wai. t. You. on. ly. need. to. heal!”
From here on out, it was a battle of will.
Whoever endured to the end would win.
Defense down to two.
Then lower, to one.
And in the end, to zero...
I gave up defense entirely and focused only on offense.
“Hup!!!”
I clenched my teeth so hard it felt like they might shatter.
I didn’t even breathe.
My heart felt like it was about to burst.
My brain was overheating so badly it felt like my hair was burning.
I kept pressing the attack without pause.
Heoksikdo butchered the Dirty Kraken’s body.
And my own body, in turn, was being savaged by its tentacles.
I need healing.
Regeneration has been activated.
The wound-healing ability of Speeder is now restoring your body.
Buying two skills at once made the money drain fast.
Awakener's Balance: ₩506,602,551
Awakener's Balance: ₩505,711,627
Awakener's Balance: ₩504,271,269
...
After I’d swung hundreds, maybe thousands of times, the Dirty Kraken finally stopped regenerating.
As for me...
Bones were showing through my body in places, and my shredded muscles were plainly visible. By the time the octopus’s main body had become a rag, something began to glimmer in its center.
The Dirty Kraken had eyes and a mouth on its face.
That was only mimicry of a human shape, not its real eyes and mouth. A true octopus’s mouth was somewhere inside the body.
A black hole ringed with sharp teeth.
Found it.
Like a dragon gripping its pearl, the Dirty Kraken was clutching its core deep inside its mouth.
I brought Heoksikdo down on it.
A tentacle tore into my neck.
“Gghk!!!”
In the middle of that hideous pain, I lost my grip on Heoksikdo for a moment, then snatched it back with everything I had.
Crack.
The core split, but it didn’t break apart completely.
It was still too weak.
One more time!
Sensing its own death, the Dirty Kraken twisted wildly and wrapped its body around the core.
A long tentacle coiled around my body.
“Urk!”
The tentacle strangled my neck and pinned my hands and feet in place.
It was a desperate attempt to stop me.
The tentacles wound around my body like a mummy’s bandages, slick and slimy.
The Dirty Kraken linked the tentacles wrapped around me to its own body.
“Go. to. hell!!!”
Its scream pierced my eardrums, and then it dragged me somewhere.
Down to a valley carved into the seafloor.
Deeper than the deep sea.
A trench.
My breath...
Air bubbles leaked from my mouth.
The strain on my body grew violently worse.
The deeper you go in the ocean, the greater the pressure becomes, multiplying by the second.
...It’s heavy!
It felt like a giant god had planted a foot on top of me and started pressing down.
The pressure crushing my body felt no different from having a herd of elephants standing on top of me.
At this rate...
...I can’t hold out.
The Dirty Kraken went lower and lower.
How far have we gone?
...Three hundred meters? Five hundred? A thousand?
By then, I couldn’t even feel the light anymore.
It was all darkness, nothing but darkness.
Only then did the Dirty Kraken stop.
“Thi. s. is. yo. ur. gra. ve.”
I couldn’t call up the system window.
I couldn’t use any hero abilities.
If I so much as twitched a finger the wrong way, an elephant would crush me flat.
“You. won’t. get. out. of. he. re!”
The Dirty Kraken held me tightly and kept me pinned in the depths.
...
It felt as though the world itself had stopped turning.
So quiet.
My heartbeat slowed, little by little.
For an instant, my life flashed before my eyes.
My childhood, the memories of my previous life, the days after my rebirth...
Strangely enough, useless thoughts were the first to intrude.
Who am I?
What am I doing here?
Who the hell am I fighting?
Maybe it was because death was right in front of me.
Maybe I’d simply drifted into meditation while wandering near death in a place with no light at all.
Either way, the fundamental question of existence kept multiplying inside me.
Who is Choi Yongki?
Depending on how you looked at it, the answer changed completely.
A righteous hero who had set out to find meaning in a new life.
Or...
A paranoid man obsessed with money until he was finally swallowed by defeat.
Who is the Purple Devil?
The 19th-century German philosopher Nietzsche once said, “He who fights with monsters must be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”
Because of me, hundreds of navy personnel had died.
While fighting the Dirty Kraken, had I somehow become a monster myself?
The blue leather adhered to both of my hands fluttered in the current.
To think I’d made a suit out of a sea dragon’s hide.
...Heh. Guess I’m not exactly sane either.
I was still wrestling with it.
What justice really was.
What kind of hero I wanted to become.
Whether the path I had chosen was truly the right one.
Like adjusting a rear sight before firing a gun, I had to keep questioning myself even after I put on the purple mask.
I never thought it would be this hard to forge a conviction, let alone defend it.
Maybe...
my enemy wasn’t the Dirty Kraken at all.
Maybe the real enemy was...
not Seo Gwang-pal, not Go Pil-hun of the Dio Guild, not the Cult Leader of Heavenly Sun and Earthly Mastery, not even monsters.
It was...
myself.
So the one I had to defeat...
the one I had to rely on, and lean on...
the one who had to change...
was me and me alone.
I clenched my teeth and squeezed out every last shred of strength I had left.
The final card I pulled out was neither the legendary dark magician nor the hero of the sea.
Judgment of the Superhuman has been activated.
The primal, simple force of the first hero, Super Kid, surged through me.
Like a mother gently cradling a baby, I wrapped my arms around the Dirty Kraken’s body.
“This isn’t hell. This is heaven—and our...
I drew the Dirty Kraken lower.
“...sanctuary.”
The reason it had stopped here was obvious.
Even the Dirty Kraken couldn’t endure a trench that went any deeper.
It panicked.
“W-w-wait! H-hold on—!”
Three thousand meters. Four thousand. Five thousand...
I knew it.
If this kept going, I’d die too.
That’s fine.
In this tragic, mutual-destruction kind of ending, a translucent jellyfish glowing faintly violet drifted past me, slow and serene.
It was fine. Really, it was fine.
This life has... been pretty fun.
Unlike me, who felt strangely calm, the Dirty Kraken thrashed wildly while trapped in my grip.
“St-st-stop!!!”
The pressure had grown so intense it could crush even coins flat.
The grasp of a giant was seizing me and grinding me down.
I didn’t stop.
I kept diving with the intent of drilling straight through to the end of the world.
“No. s-stop!!!”
At last.
The core the Dirty Kraken had been guarding split in half.
“Aaaagh!!!”
As the core crumbled into powder, the Dirty Kraken exploded into fragments.
I sank into the darkness and lost consciousness.