Chapter 27
Rei-shik and I went back through the passage together.
At the fork, Kim Jeong-cheol and his group were sitting there waiting.
The way they chatted among themselves, all cozy and casual, made them look like a band of close brothers.
They were probably discussing when and how they would kill Rei-shik and me.
Trash.
Kim Jeong-cheol spotted me and waved.
“Oh! You’re here. We’ve been waiting.”
Anyone looking in would have thought we were old friends who’d met after a long time.
Waiting, my ass.
They were clearly blocking the way in case we tried to slip out.
I should’ve realized it when Saessak said their gaze felt wrong.
“Ugh….”
As we drew closer to Kim Jeong-cheol’s crew, Rei-shik’s expression got worse and worse.
He was on edge because I’d told him they were hunter killers.
I’d only told him so he wouldn’t die without knowing a thing, but seeing how tense he was, I started to wonder if I’d made a mistake.
At this rate, it might be obvious that we knew who they were.
“You don’t look well. Are you all right?”
“Not especially. The end of that passage was a corpse storage room.”
“Ah… so that was it. I should have told you in advance….”
When we stopped in front of them, Kim Jeong-cheol asked with mock concern and reached out a hand.
Rei-shik saw the bastard’s hand stretching toward his forehead and flinched back.
It was only a tiny movement, but it was enough to make something feel off.
Why had he shrunk away as if he were afraid?
There was only one reason.
At that instant, Kim Jeong-cheol and I moved at the same time.
I shot out my left hand, seized the back of Rei-shik’s neck, and yanked him down just as the bastard swung the longsword at his waist.
Whoosh!
I heard the longsword slicing through the air.
“Hiiik!”
Rei-shik let out a strangled sound and clutched at his own throat.
No wonder.
If I hadn’t pulled him back just now, his throat would have been cut open.
Once Rei-shik confirmed that his neck was still intact, he let out a relieved breath.
Kim Jeong-cheol pointed the tip of the longsword he’d swung at me.
He asked in a lazy, unhurried voice.
“How did you know?”
“Lucky guess. I saw the corpse you stabbed in the back.”
“You mean you went into the corpse storage room and came back out?”
Kim Jeong-cheol’s group widened their eyes in disbelief.
Gwon O-seok and Han Gi-hae even frowned and shuddered.
Well, it was the kind of place so thick with stench and malice that nobody would want to get close.
It was only natural they’d react with disgust if I told them I’d gone in and come back out.
I wouldn’t have even considered going inside if Saessak hadn’t told me to.
All thanks to Saessak.
“If you’d known, you could have gone peacefully.”
They must have intended to kill us tonight, while we were asleep.
So that was what he meant by going peacefully.
It was absurd the way he spoke as if that had somehow been for our sake.
It was obvious he’d only been trying to make things easier for himself.
“This is nothing personal.”
“…….”
“D-Do-woon hyung….”
Rei-shik murmured my name, tense.
I understood.
Looking at the situation, Kim Jeong-cheol intended to handle me alone.
If that happened, Rei-shik would have to take on Gwon O-seok and Han Gi-hae by himself.
An E-class hunter against two C-class hunters two ranks above him?
Ridiculous.
I hadn’t expected that of him in the first place.
I was still an adult, after all. I knew shame when I saw it.
“Don’t worry. I never planned to leave it to you.”
As I said that, I used World Tree Swirl.
Once, twice...
The blue mana of the World Tree gathered into the longsword in my left hand.
The gathering blue mana began to wrap around the blade like a transparent scabbard.
Seeing that, Gwon O-seok and Han Gi-hae’s eyes widened in shock.
“S-sword qi…!”
“No way! How can a D-class hunter use sword qi?”
In truth, it was just mana gathering around the blade, so of course it wasn’t sword qi.
If anything, it was more like holding a torch you’d just lit.
It was nothing more than gathering blue mana onto the sword, like wrapping a strip of cloth around the end of a stick and setting it alight.
But the sight was so perfect that even Woo Yeon-hoo, an A-class hunter, had mistaken it for real sword qi.
There was no way C-class hunters like them could tell whether it was genuine or not.
“Gwon O-seok, Han Gi-hae. Focus on him.”
“Yes…!”
Kim Jeong-cheol gave the order in a far more serious tone than before.
Gwon O-seok and Han Gi-hae obeyed without the slightest hesitation.
It was an incomprehensible order, and an equally incomprehensible response.
Sword qi was something A-class hunters usually handled.
That was why Gwon O-seok and Han Gi-hae had been so shocked.
To them, I must have looked like an A-class hunter, or at least a B-class hunter close to that level.
Even so, Kim Jeong-cheol hadn’t chosen to run. He’d chosen to fight me.
And Gwon O-seok and Han Gi-hae hadn’t hesitated to follow either.
“……!”
The reason was clear from the sword Kim Jeong-cheol gripped tight in his hand.
A dark, muddy mana began to wrap around it.
It was smaller than the mana surrounding my longsword, but unlike mine, it was real sword qi, not a fake.
How could a C-rank hunter do that?
No, that was a foolish question.
The man standing in front of me was a hunter killer.
Of course he would have hidden his rank.
Even as Kim Jeong-cheol sweated from forcing out sword qi, he scoffed at me.
“Did you think only you could use sword qi?”
I frowned at that, and Gwon O-seok and Han Gi-hae rushed me at the same time.
They moved exactly like C-class hunters should.
They came at me in a fierce assault, but it wasn’t hard to block and evade them.
The problem was that every time I tried to counterattack, Kim Jeong-cheol’s eyes would flash and he’d move to strike.
Because he was waiting to catch me off guard with a single blow, I couldn’t make any large moves, and I had no choice but to keep my attacks restrained.
...At least, that was what Kim Jeong-cheol’s group must have thought.
“You little pain in the ass!”
Shouting like that, I swung the longsword in my left hand wide.
I made it look as if I’d lost my nerve and made a stupid mistake.
The longsword sliced through empty air without even touching Gwon O-seok or Han Gi-hae.
Then,
“Idiot!”
Kim Jeong-cheol charged in, just as I’d expected, trying to exploit the opening.
The longsword wrapped in muddy sword qi lunged toward my left flank.
“Die!”
As Kim Jeong-cheol’s longsword stabbed into my left side,
clang!
a harsh metallic sound rang out from my ribs.
It sounded like metal striking metal.
Thrown into an unexpected situation, he was visibly shaken.
“W-what?”
“So, who’s the idiot now?”
I grinned as I asked that.
He was too startled to even look at me, and only stared down at the source of the sound.
Kim Jeong-cheol’s longsword had been blocked by skin that had turned as hard as tree bark and failed to pierce my side.
Once he realized what was protecting me, he screamed.
“That’s impossible! How are you blocking sword qi with a shield?”
As he said, a normal shield can’t stop sword qi.
Sword qi is the force that can even cut through the carapace of a giant turtle beast or the scales of a dragon.
That was precisely why it was a hunter’s trademark among those who wielded cold steel.
But my skill wasn’t a normal shield.
World Tree Bark (A-class) - Due to the World Tree’s mana, the body currently changes into bark like the World Tree in its sprout state.
It was an ability that transformed my skin into something like the World Tree’s bark.
Sword qi was powerful, but it wasn’t absolute.
Were the sword qi of a B-class hunter and that of an A-class hunter really the same?
Of course not.
I didn’t know what rank Kim Jeong-cheol really was.
But was his sword qi really strong enough to cut through World Tree bark?
Not a chance.
According to Yu Jae-i, the branches of the former World Tree were weapons in their own right.
Even in sprout form, it was still the World Tree.
Of course Kim Jeong-cheol’s sword qi would have no effect.
Explaining all that would have been a pain, so I kept it simple.
“Because you’re weak.”
“You, you little bast—!”
Smack!
I repeatedly struck the bastard’s mouth with my index finger before he could spit out the rest of the insult.
His lips split on the first hit, his front teeth broke on the second, and his jaw came loose on the third.
Even with his jaw hanging open, Kim Jeong-cheol didn’t give up on trying to bring me down and kept swinging his longsword.
Now I batted aside the longsword, which had lost its sword qi, with World Tree bark and laid into his arms and legs with Warm Touch.
Crack, crack!
Kim Jeong-cheol’s arms and legs broke one after another, and he collapsed where he stood.
Even then, he kept spewing curses at me.
“...You’re pretty impressive, still having the strength to curse like that in your condition, you know.”
If you had a rotten personality, at least have some sense. This bastard didn’t even have that.
“I was going to go easy on you. This is what you get for running your mouth and getting hit for it.”
Saying that, I used Warm Touch to hammer every part of his body in a relentless, pounding rhythm.
At the same time, I looked over at Gwon O-seok and Han Gi-hae.
They’d gone still as stone, frozen in place, as they watched Kim Jeong-cheol, the man they’d been following, get beaten without being able to fight back.
“You two are next, so wait quietly—”
“Aaaah…!”
Suddenly, Kim Jeong-cheol, pinned beneath me, screamed.
I looked down, and the bastard still had some toxins in him.
Even while his body shook violently, he glared at me.
Has he lost his damn mind?
“What, are you begging me to hit you more because you haven’t been beaten enough?”
“Ugh, uaaaah!”
Maybe because his front teeth had been broken and his jaw had come undone.
I couldn’t make out a single thing he was trying to say.
No, that wasn’t what he was trying to do at all.
Kim Jeong-cheol was chewing on his own tongue.
Had humiliation finally driven him insane?
He knew full well that biting off your tongue wouldn’t kill you.
I had no idea what the hell he was doing.
“H-hiiik…!”
There was one more strange thing.
Every time Kim Jeong-cheol chewed on his tongue, Gwon O-seok and Han Gi-hae let out groans.
They hugged themselves and shook as if consumed by fear and terror.
What was wrong with these idiots? Had they all gone insane together?
Thinking that, I got to my feet, and then
crack, crack!
I heard bones breaking beneath my feet.
“Huh? What the hell?”
Looking down, I saw an utterly unheard-of phenomenon unfolding.
The sight was so horrifying that I instinctively put distance between us and backed away quickly.
The cracking sound was the sound of every bone in the bastard’s body coming loose.
It was the sound of them springing up and writhing around inside him.
His skin grew paler and paler, and black wings burst out from his back.
It looked almost like...
“A devil...?”
Rei-shik, who had been watching quietly, muttered under his breath.
Just as he said, Kim Jeong-cheol now had the appearance of a devil straight out of a fantasy game.
The cracking stopped, the transformation ended, and Kim Jeong-cheol slowly rose to his feet.
The body that had been broken by Warm Touch had fully recovered, and it had grown larger than before.
World Tree Sprout has identified the true nature of that filthy gaze!
Notification windows popped up, covering Kim Jeong-cheol’s figure.
True nature?
Did Saessak know what that thing was?
The sprout explains that the human male is a “Follower of the Demon Race.”
It then explains that a Follower of the Demon Race is a human who sold his soul to the Demon Race and became their subordinate.
“Follower of the Demon Race...?”
“Oh? You know what we are? As expected, you’re not just some ordinary D-class hunter.”
He’d only read what Saessak had told me, but he misread it on his own and muttered in impressed disbelief.
So he really was a Follower of the Demon Race?
“I didn’t expect to reveal my true nature here, but...”
In an instant, Kim Jeong-cheol vanished and reappeared.
When he appeared again, he was already standing in front of me.
It meant he had moved so fast that I couldn’t track him with my eyes.
“……!”
“With this power, I can beat you to death!”
Shouting that, he swung his fist.
BOOM!
The sound of a crushing impact rang in my ears.
It was so violent it sounded as if a bomb had gone off.
“Heh-heh-heh. I just need to break some little shield like that! Hahahahaha!”
Kim Jeong-cheol laughed so hard it sounded like the whole ant tunnel might collapse.
He was laughing like some third-rate villain from a movie, and then his eyes met mine.
“…….”
“…….”
“Y-you bastard! How, how are you still alive?”
“Well, because I didn’t get hit by your fist?”
“What? Then that sound just now was...!”
“What sound do you think? Your right arm exploding.”
“Kkkii, kkiyaaaak!”
...Was this guy an idiot?