Chapter 112. The Mercenary Corps.
Chapter 112. The Mercenary Corps.
I was absolutely livid. It just didn't show on the surface. Over the years, plenty of bastards had crossed me, but this was the first time anyone had laid a hand on the people around me — on my woman, no less.
'And he actually put his hands on her body...'
I kicked the bastard square in the jaw while he stood there trembling and babbling nonsense, knocking him out cold.
"Finally, some peace and quiet..."
I grabbed him by the hair and dragged him along. Just as things were settling down, Terion came flying over in a panic from a distance.
"I-I'm sorry... To think something like this would happen while I was so absorbed in my research..."
"It's fine. It was an unavoidable accident."
Truthfully, subduing him wouldn't have been easy even if Terion had been there. This piece of trash had ascended to divine status in his own way, so if the two of them had fought, the surroundings would've been wrecked and casualties would've piled up.
"I boasted that you could count on me, and yet things turned out like this... truly..."
"It's fine. At the end of the day, thanks to the artifact you made, I arrived before anything major happened. Thank you."
Terion nodded. Relief that things had passed without disaster mingled with an expression that still looked vaguely uneasy.
"Everyone, get back to your duties. I have a great deal to discuss with this one."
Just as I said that and was about to move, the president and his group whispered among themselves, and then the president stepped forward as their representative.
"Could we not accompany you...?"
"It's going to get very rough... Everything up to now will feel like child's play by comparison."
I wasn't saying I'd torture him in a blind rage. If he answered what I asked, that would be ideal, but if not, I'd have to resort to it — and a man who'd attained divine status wasn't going to open his mouth from ordinary pain.
"We're prepared for that. But isn't this the first person from Titan we've seen besides you, Representative?"
"..."
"We need to see for ourselves if we're going to be better prepared for threats like this."
"Hmm..."
"Truthfully, that's just an excuse. Aren't we all family now? We simply want to stand by and observe."
We took the bastard into an unused livestock warehouse. I'd used it once before, so I radioed ahead that I'd be using the livestock warehouse, and the special operations troops had apparently understood — they'd cleaned the place up spotlessly.
I had a chair placed in front of the bastard and sat down facing him. A nod to the operative standing by, and a bucket of water was dumped over his face.
"Gahk...! Kehk..."
Still completely disoriented, he looked around wildly, trying to take in his surroundings.
"I ask, you answer. Simple, isn't it?"
"Wh-where is this...!"
— Tap.
I tapped the pressure point at the center of his dantian and mana circle with my foot, and his face turned crimson as the blood vessels bulged, about to burst.
"Ghuuuaaagh!!! Gkheup...!!"
The moment the pain subsided, he was gasping desperately for air.
"I ask, you answer. Is that really such a difficult request?"
Apparently having no desire to experience that again, he nodded his head up and down violently.
"Good. Then how did you cross dimensions?"
"Th-the Pantheon sent me...!"
"Why did they send you, and how? In detail."
Once I'd heard the whole story, I felt a bit deflated. They'd happened to find someone from the same dimension as me, and the condition they'd set for sending him was that he stick close to the 'Calamity' and assist him... As much as I'd helped them, I'd never expected them to go this far...
In truth, they had offered me dimensional transfer back then, but by that point I'd already collected every divine artifact, so I'd refused their help.
"But I truly didn't know the Commander was here. I swear...!"
"Then why did you come here?"
The reason was utterly low and trashy. He'd figured the government forces would have plenty of people, so he'd come looking for women. And as a bonus, he admitted he'd thought the Pantheon wouldn't be able to find him after the dimensional transfer, so he'd just ignored their request entirely.
"Shut your mouth and I'll keep asking. Who taught you that martial art?"
"The Advisor taught me...!"
"The old man taught a piece of trash like you? Why?"
His meeting with the old man was pure coincidence, he said. Back when he was weak and scraping by day to day, the old man had noticed him and started him off with menial chores for the Yong Corps.
"Was the old man ever the sentimental type...?"
"He said I reminded him of the Commander...!"
That was genuinely interesting. After I'd left, he'd seen someone from the same dimension as me, and simply because his hair color was the same, he'd taken him in and trained him.
'Good grief... Has the old man gone soft in his old age?'
"Then what about the other corps members?"
As I thought of them, my expression gradually relaxed. Seeing hope in my face, the bastard's tension slowly eased, and he started chattering on about every little detail. Amid all the rambling, the gist was that everyone was doing well.
"Then why did you leave the Yong Corps?"
He started hesitating and hemming and hawing. I let out a sigh and rose from my chair, and suddenly very eager, he began to speak.
"I ran away...!"
Once he'd gotten strong in his own right, he couldn't stand having someone above him giving orders anymore, so he'd run. And around that time, the Pantheon had approached him with their conditional deal.
"In that case, this is my last question."
I stared at him coldly and spoke in a sharp voice. His relaxed expression stiffened again with tension, and I heard him swallow hard.
"Did they resent me?"
If he'd tried to spout half-assed lip service or stir up trouble with pointless provocations, I'd intended to rip his tongue out. But without a trace of that, he began speaking honestly.
"Not a single one of them resented you... They said that just as we yearn for 'freedom,' the Commander yearned for his 'homeland.' That those who need to go must go, and we've already received so much from the Commander — resenting him would be no different from being a beast...!"
"Heh... That sounds like them."
"Then... will you spare me now...?"
In front of the bastard clutching at hope, I recited the rules of the Yong Corps one by one.
"Do not betray the Yong Corps. Do not covet the property or family of a fellow corpsman."
"What's that suddenly supposed to...?"
"You tried to covet my family."
Only then did he grasp how things were turning out, and despair settled over his face. Having realized that escape was all but impossible anyway, he simply wore a hollow expression.
"Heh-heh... Heuh-heuh..."
"Finding it hard to hold onto your sanity now that you're accepting the situation?"
Maybe he'd snapped. He stared at me with vacant pupils, then looked over at my companions and started babbling.
"To them, you're nothing but a freak, just like me. They revere you now, but once you're no longer useful? You'll be cast out like a leper. Right now safety matters above all else, so they're sucking up to you and flattering you, but the moment they decide otherwise, they'll toss you aside."
Normally that would've made me angry, but hearing it, I just felt sorry for him.
"The delusion that because you lived that way, others will too. The arrogance of declaring your own few experiences to be the universal truth."
"..."
"How pitiful your short life has been, without a single person truly on your side. No, that's not quite right. You did have people on your side — you just walked out on them with your own two feet..."
Originally, I'd wanted to cut off both the hands that had touched them, flay the skin off layer by layer. But I couldn't stand the sight of such wretched behavior anymore. So I killed him in a single stroke. Terion, who'd been staring at the corpse, spoke up.
"Say, would you mind if I took this?"
"To make into an undead soldier?"
"No, not that. Do you remember what I said before about creating a body?"
"Ah... Then you mean...?"
"That's right. It's a body that has ascended to divine status in its own way, and with your origin essence still in it, it should withstand my aura well enough."
"Hmm... But it's still the face that sexually harassed Chaeyeon and Jia, so it feels a bit..."
"Worry not. Using this body as a base, I'll reconstruct the outward appearance into my own image from the past."
"If that's the case, then sure..."
Terion took the corpse, and with nothing else particularly worth cleaning up, I did a rough tidying and stepped out of the warehouse.
'So this kind of thing is going to happen more and more from now on...'
Honestly, divine-status beings aren't exactly common, but they aren't vanishingly rare either. Titan is a dimension with an overwhelmingly large population, and countless races live there.
I came back home with the girls, and the president and a few others came looking for us.
"What brings you all the way to our home?"
"We just... had something to discuss with you in private, Representative."
I let them in, and we sat down in the living room and started talking.
"A single man rendered the village's perimeter utterly useless... Fortunately, this time the group members weren't even aware of it, and only we know — that's a blessing. But if someone had approached with malice from the start..."
If that had happened, we would've had to absorb considerable damage. If I hadn't been here, we'd have taken a blow close to annihilation. Honestly, there's no way to make the group members stronger in a short time. The only option is to gather my corps members who are crossing over to Earth as quickly as possible.
'Until then, I'll just have to stay in the village as much as possible... Or make artifacts like this last one.'
Still, there was one artifact left that Terion had given the girls. And as for reassembling the Yong Corps — if the old man is as sharp as I know he is, he'll have already realized that what's happening on Titan is no ordinary matter. There's a chance he's already gathering the corps members, who'd scattered to various regions for missions, into one place to live together.
More than anything, the Yong Corps' assets, which I'd checked before coming here, were substantial enough for the members to live on for years without taking a single contract.
Truthfully, Earth is vast — just as I don't know every corner of Titan. And there isn't even a dedicated intelligence organization here. There's already a possibility that something from Titan has crossed over.
The existing superpowers do contact us periodically. But when it comes to countries like China and North Korea, all we've managed to confirm is that their command structures are still alive — we have no idea what they're actually doing.
Maybe, in this period where information truly is cut off, people are surviving in the gaps between them. Or conversely, maybe those countries have already been devoured.
But to go and see for myself, I'd have to gamble on an uncertainty: 'What if they're there?' If I went all that way and found nothing, that would just be a waste of time.
A few days after the commotion ended, a Great Cataclysm shook the entire world — something on the scale of the zombie crisis that would leave the globe aghast.