This Awakened One Comes Free of Charge
Yeong-sik, who had been wound tight as a bowstring, let out a long, dry breath of relief.
"Haaah."
When the mid-boss known as the Blue Demon had ridden the support of an auxiliary-type Awakened and launched itself into the sky, he'd been half-convinced his heart would give out.
SLAM—
"GYAAAH!"
The crystal spear it hurled scored a direct hit on the hull.
It was the first time Hyperion—an entity that had never once been struck—had allowed an attack to land.
But before Hyperion's heavenly wrath, there was no mercy to be found. The Blue Demon, nearly roasted into a red demon by the Plasma Focusing Cutter, had hastily scrambled back out of the beam's path.
[How interesting.]
"!!"
Yeong-sik had never heard Hyperion take such an interested tone—not since the day it had explained the calamity called the Wave.
Somehow, he felt the tiniest flicker of jealousy.
It was like back in his past life, when the cat he'd fed every day would act aloof and indifferent to him, yet showed unmistakable favoritism toward his little brother, whom it only ever swatted at with a lazy paw and pestered out of spite.
Besides, wasn't that creature called the Blue Demon the very dregs of humanity?
He was the original architect of the word Slatter—a man who, in a world where mere survival from the zombies was struggle enough, committed every manner of atrocity imaginable. He didn't stop at his own crimes, either; he incited, organized, and industrialized them, building a cult of madmen addicted to pleasure and violence. And that was an Awakened.
And Hyperion was interested in that?
[It appears sufficiently useful. Heh.]
"...?"
There was something oddly off about the tone of that.
[I shall collect it without damage.]
At Hyperion's words, Yeong-sik's idle musings evaporated in an instant. Something about the word collect did not sit well with him at all.
Wait, what? What? That's terrifying.
From that point on, it was Hyperion's solo stage. Even with only its stage 1–12 upgrades, nothing could stand against it—and aside from the Blue Demon, which had managed a single near-effective blow, it was genuinely invincible.
Hyperion ceased its bombardment from a stationary hover and began high-speed flight.
Hard acceleration. Hard stops. Sharp turns. S-curves.
It unleashed every aerial maneuver in the book as it tore through the Slatters.
The raiders dragged hostages up as living shields to buy time, but they couldn't keep their wits about them under Hyperion's blistering speed. The moment an opening presented itself, Hyperion mercilessly drilled through a target's skull.
The Slatters believed their hostages concealed them completely—but there was no such thing as perfect cover. Wherever a gap appeared, Hyperion threaded an attack through it, and whenever their stance broke, it riddled them with its Vacuum Compression Bullet rotary cannons.
It dispatched them as easily as a cat toying with mice. A few of the deranged Slatters did slit the hostages' throats, but the rest remained untouched—for the simple reason that even they hadn't had the stomach to finish the job in the face of that overwhelming machine.
Before long, only one Slatter remained: the Blue Demon.
"I don't know who's piloting that thing, but I swear I'll shatter your skull for this!"
Uh... that wasn't actually me. You won't believe me, but it's Hyperion...
"I'll chew up your guts, and then I'll hunt down every single person you know and everyone who knows you—one by one—and show them what a life worse than death really means!!"
The creature was drowning in its own fury, spewing every curse it knew.
No, seriously, it wasn't me—
"!%@&@##%!%@^#!!"
The profanity that followed was so vicious that merely hearing it made Yeong-sik's hands and feet tremble.
"Um... Hype—"
[It seems some 'education' is in order.]
[Only I am permitted to curse my butler.]
And who exactly is it getting cursed on accou— ah, never mind. No, wait.
Strange as the phrasing was, Yeong-sik felt something oddly ticklish stirring from deep within his chest.
Ah...! Right! That's just like the pig-cat we used to keep—whenever it mooched food off my little brother, it always came back to me in the end.
[Commencing 'education'.]
What followed was an unrelenting reckoning.
The scorching beams focused on the creature alone. Hyperion deliberately dropped its altitude to provoke it, all while raining down light without pause. A hundred and twenty-eight beams converged on the creature, and its crystal-clad body began to glow burning red.
At least to Yeong-sik's eye, Hyperion appeared to be deliberately limiting itself to attacks that wouldn't kill.
"KRAAAAAAAGH!"
Eventually—whether from the limits of its ability—the creature would begin writhing in agony as its power started to fail, and at that point Hyperion would cease fire and wait patiently in the empty air.
Then, the moment it recovered, the beating resumed. Heal it up, hammer it down again. During recovery, it dialed the output down to just enough to keep the pain alive, and kept firing.
The creature's screams never stopped. Hyperion adjusted its flight path so escape was impossible, tormenting it endlessly until its mind began to fracture.
At last, having pushed its ability far beyond its limits, the creature collapsed into unconsciousness.
Even after it blacked out, Hyperion kept at it for a good long while before dispatching a small flight robot to collect the broken thing.
[A human that 'produces' metal merely by being alive. Remarkable.]
[The photon cannon BRX-2A is a low-grade, ultra-compact optical weapon, yet it withstood attacks for a time—excellent metal indeed. It will have many uses.]
And so the Blue Demon's fate was sealed: imprisoned within Hyperion, condemned to spend the rest of its life as a living mine, pumping out metal until the day it died.
Yeong-sik shook his head, asked Hyperion to hand the rescued captives over to a nearby shelter, and drifted away with serene detachment.
Yoon Seunga was dumbfounded.
"No, wait..."
When it had left, she could have sworn it was a flying craft about the size of a slightly oversized car...
"Haha. Surprised you, didn't I?"
It came back the size of a full-blown warship.
"..."
Yeong-sik was scratching his head sheepishly—though somehow, he also looked rather pleased with himself.
It had clearly grown in size, yet so much about it resembled its former self that it still felt like the same craft.
"Welcome aboard. To our very own space battleship."
Space... what? A space battleship?
And "our"? Who else is here? Then again, I suppose it would be strange for one person to operate a machine this size...
[A new maid candidate?]
Startled by the voice that came out of nowhere, Seunga flinched hard. But nothing more followed.
"A maid? Hype, come on, that's going too far..."
Yeong-sik was muttering something or other that made no sense to her.
"Anyway, come in. Since I moved up to stage 2 recently, daily-living conveniences come standard—you'll find it a perfectly comfortable place to stay."
Space... battleship, whatever it is—from the moment Yoon Seunga stepped aboard, her jaw refused to close.
The stability was absolute; nothing about it felt airborne. There wasn't a whisper of engine noise, either. And the place Yeong-sik led her to felt less like a warship compartment and more like a room in a first-class hotel.
The bathroom and shower, of course—but also a dining hall, laundry facilities, everything. It was all there.
Above all, what stunned her was that the facilities bearing the same names were nothing alike. Technology that made modern hotels look primitive was visible at every turn.
The shower worked like an automatic car wash—step in, step out bone-dry three seconds later. The laundry? Feed your clothes in, pull them out perfectly pressed and folded. The meals had been reduced to a single pill, admittedly, but the sheer technical mastery left her speechless.
Can this really be called technology? Isn't this just magic? It was only natural for that thought to cross her mind. That's how staggering it all was.
"Oh, this level? This is nothing. Think lower-middle class, even among commoners..."
Apparently, they'd been scraping by on a shoestring all this while. It had only been possible, he said, thanks to their run-in with some remarkably generous Experience Points.
She understood not a single word of his explanation.
She was beginning to suspect the man had taken a knock to the head after being expelled from the shelter.
And no wonder—he talked to himself, spouted complete gibberish, and every now and then would pause mid-walk to relieve himself against the ship's wall.
By every measure, he looked exactly like a lunatic.
"Anyway, get some rest. I'll take you back within a few days."
"Um... are you sure that's alright?"
"Mm..."
Her mother at the shelter weighed on her mind. And not without reason—the warning signs of the calamity called the Wave, the very disaster Yeong-sik had cautioned the shelter about, had been detected.
While she'd been waiting for him, she'd observed the zombies abandoning their random attacks on humans in favor of moving in organized packs—and, more chilling still, behaving as though they were receiving orders from something.
It had sent a shiver down her spine. Nothing about it felt right.
For humanity—already dying in droves to mindless zombies—zombies that moved and acted in concert like an army were nothing short of the apocalypse itself.
Awakened ones might fare somewhat better, but once you factored in the evolved variants, there was absolutely no room for complacency. Even now, evolved individuals that no A-rank Awakened could touch swarmed the land, and there were creatures even an S-rank dared not approach.
And if those evolved variants ever surged forward all at once...?
It would be a catastrophe beyond imagining. Her every instinct screamed at her to bolt back to the shelter that very moment—
"I'd love to grant your request, but I've got things I need to do over here before the Wave hits."
"..."
"Still, don't worry too much. A shelter isn't such a simple thing to break. It can hold out long enough—until we arrive."
After all, she had her pride. Yeong-sik had endured every contemptuous sneer and cold shoulder the shelter had to offer, hadn't he? He'd been outright expelled in the end. And now she was asking him to save it.
To be precise, she was asking him to save her mother—but to Yeong-sik, it would surely amount to the same thing either way.
Even as she spoke the words, guilt gnawed at her. But her mother kept flashing before her eyes, and she'd begged anyway.
She was anxious, yet she resolved to wait quietly.
Panic wouldn't fix anything.
Truthfully... she knew that returning to the shelter alone would accomplish nothing.
And exactly three hours later, she realized her choice had not been wrong.
Watching the slaughter of more than a million zombies in under three hours, no other thought was possible.
What on earth am I riding in?
Days later, she saw the shelter with her own eyes—on the very brink of falling.
While her heart burned with desperation, a very different sound reached Yeong-sik's ears.
[Initiating selective elimination.]
[Opening all weapons.]
From the evolved Dreadnought-class warship that was Hyperion—thirty-seven distinct optical weapons and two thousand forty-eight gun barrels—countless lances of light came raining down upon the earth.