Chapter 32
“Where in the world do you find a 170-centimeter sword hilt!”
I shouted at the blade that had punched straight through the ceiling.
Even as I yelled, I made sure not to move too much. The slightest shift sent cracks spidering through the plaster, and through those cracks I could hear the noise above us growing frantic.
Of course it was. This blue blade had gone right through the first floor and was probably reaching the second as well.
Yu Jae-i grinned and held up a V sign with her index and middle fingers.
What was so worth celebrating about that? A V sign, really?
I was honestly scared we were about to bring the hideout down on our own heads.
“No way, a technique for refining mana...! Just who are you...?”
“Yu Jae-i. The best blacksmith I know.”
I said it with complete confidence to Woo Yeon-hoo, who looked from her to Arca and back again, visibly stunned.
She really was the best blacksmith I knew.
Which was easy enough to say, since she was the only blacksmith I knew.
“You talk a good game. You don’t know the first thing about smithing.”
She shook her head and pressed the manacle around her wrist against Arca. The mana cuff met the blue blade and was sliced clean off, clattering to the floor.
After cutting away both the left and right cuffs, she waved Woo Yeon-hoo off.
“Don’t get the wrong idea. I didn’t refine the mana.”
“What? Then how are you maintaining the shape of the blade?”
“I’m not maintaining it. I’m just blasting mana out so recklessly that it looks that way.”
At her words, I could see mana scattering off the tip of the blade.
“That’s possible?”
“Only because the materials this guy brought were ridiculous enough to make it possible.”
“Just what kind of materials were they...?”
What kind of materials, she asked?
The previous World Tree’s branch. The previous World Tree’s sap. And the Watcher’s eyeball.
As Yu Jae-i had said, they were absurd materials, all right. If I put them up for auction, the price would probably soar into the heavens just so people could fight over them.
Even the Watcher’s eyeball, which looked like the least impressive of the bunch, was an A-grade material. It was the sort of thing used everywhere in modern society, the kind of resource people couldn’t do without.
It had even gone into the smartphone panel I’d been hammering on all this time.
“By the way, you won’t be able to keep that up for long.”
“Oh?”
“You’re burning through about fifty thousand mana a minute. For an average A-grade Hunter constantly feeding mana into it, I’d say it lasts three to five minutes at most.”
An A-grade Hunter’s mana pool was somewhere between one hundred thousand and one million.
If what she said was true, even an A-grade Hunter could only keep this up for two to ten minutes.
Wasn’t the mana consumption rate a little insane?
Come to think of it, that was probably why she’d described it as “blasting mana out recklessly” in the first place.
“You used something that ridiculous on me right now?”
“How much mana do you have?”
“One hundred fifty thousand.”
It had originally been one hundred thousand.
Holding Arca, infused with the previous World Tree’s sap, had increased it by fifty thousand.
At fifty thousand mana per minute, that gave me about three minutes of use.
Unless, of course, I counted my mana recovery speed.
She nodded, then looked at me.
“That’s plenty. I need you to do me a favor.”
“Fine, I’ll do it.”
“I haven’t even asked yet.”
In a situation where we needed to escape, she’d deliberately poured mana into Arca until it produced a massive blade so obvious the Crowd bastards would notice.
Why?
Because she wanted me to use Arca’s enormous blade to do something.
And if that was what Yu Jae-i wanted, it was easy enough to guess.
“This, right?”
I angled Arca and stabbed at the ceiling with everything I had.
I drove it in ruthlessly, as if taking revenge on the upstairs neighbor who kept making noise through the floor.
From above, I heard shrieks and startled cries from the white masks we couldn’t see.
Their screams were strangely satisfying, so I moved from place to place, jabbing Arca over and over again.
Watching me, Yu Jae-i burst out laughing.
So that really had been what she wanted.
When I finally stepped into the hallway because staying there any longer felt like it might bring the whole place down, a swarm of white masks came pouring down the stairs.
I lowered Arca, which had been punching through the ceiling, and pointed it straight at them.
“H-Huh? What is that?”
“A sword? That was a sword?”
The white masks who had come down the stairs froze in place, visibly shaken.
Even with their faces hidden, I could tell they were staring back and forth between my face and Arca.
Among them, a white mask marked with a pattern stepped forward.
It was the leader mask I’d seen once before at Jae-i's Blacksmith.
“I wondered why you were following along so quietly. So you had something to rely on, Yu Jae-i.”
“I told you already. I can’t trust any of you.”
“Hmph. Insolent bitch.”
[Saessak sensed an unpleasant gaze.]
[Saessak warns the Manager of danger!]
An unpleasant gaze?
That set my nerves on edge.
The only other time Saessak had reported feeling disgust was with Kim Jeong-cheol.
And Kim Jeong-cheol had been one of the Followers of the Demon Race.
Then this leader mask might be one too.
“Woo Yeon-hoo. I didn’t expect the Ildae Group’s young master to show up here.”
“...”
Woo Yeon-hoo said nothing. He only stood beside me and drove the tip of his spear into the floor with a rough scrape.
From the way he glared at the white masks, I could feel his resolve to fight alongside me.
That made me feel better.
The leader mask had already lost interest in him and turned back to me instead. It looked like he’d realized I was the one who had tricked him that day by claiming to be Seo Ji-hyeok.
“Baek Do-woon...!”
The leader mask snarled my name like an animal growling.
Of course he’d be sick of the sight of me. The guy who’d fooled him was standing right in front of him.
So how could I piss him off even more?
“What, you’re not completely stupid? I thought you’d still be mistaking me for Seo Ji-hyeok.”
“Pfft.”
“You, you damn bastards...!”
At my taunt, the leader mask’s fists trembled, but he still didn’t let the emotion fully spill out.
For a guy supposedly leading a whole crew, he was good at keeping it together.
That was irritating. Maybe I should push him a little further.
“What were the Followers of the Demon Race after when they kidnapped Yu Jae-i?”
“Huh? Demon race?”
“Followers?”
Yu Jae-i and Woo Yeon-hoo both looked at me like they wanted an explanation.
They weren’t the only ones. The other white masks looked just as confused.
They had no idea what I was talking about.
Watching them seem to ask each other, “Do you know what he’s talking about?”, I could tell the leader mask was hiding his identity from his own subordinates too.
Was Crowd an organization created by the Followers of the Demon Race?
Or had the Followers of the Demon Race simply infiltrated it?
The leader mask raised an arm and gave the order.
“...Capture Yu Jae-i and Baek Do-woon alive. Woo Yeon-hoo may be killed.”
Like that day, blades shot out from his arm.
If I dodged, they’d just hit Yu Jae-i behind me, so I took the blow myself.
Either way, the blades were useless against the bark.
Even if they somehow had a trick I didn’t know about that could pierce it, it would just regenerate naturally.
Clang! Rattle, rattle...
When the blades were deflected by the mana shield and clattered to the floor, the white masks rushed at us.
They’d stepped into the range of Arca, now swollen into a giant blade of blue mana.
“Idiots.”
I swung Arca once to the right and once to the left.
The hallway was too narrow for the white masks to avoid it, and they got smashed flat.
No, “smashed” wasn’t quite the right word.
They were wedged between wall and wall, like slices of ham stuffed inside a sandwich.
“Why am I the only one you want dead? That’s unfair.”
“Because Yu Jae-i is needed. And I know what that bastard really is.”
“What he really is... the Followers of the Demon Race, you mean? What the hell is a demon race anyway?”
Even Woo Yeon-hoo, an A-grade Hunter, didn’t know. There was no way I would.
I’d only ever read about demons in fantasy games and novels.
I’d never imagined they actually existed.
That was how little was known about them.
Even the scraps I did know came from Saessak teaching me.
“Humans who sold their souls to demons and became their servants. That’s all I know, too.”
“Sold their souls? Classic.”
“I see. Then we’ll need to get out and investigate.”
We kept talking as we brought the white masks down.
Arca swept left and right, crushing them into pulp, and the ones who slipped past it were finished off in a single thrust to the vital points by Woo Yeon-hoo’s spear.
Honestly, it would have been better if they’d just let Arca flatten them. They might have passed out, but they wouldn’t have died.
“Damn it...!”
The last white mask collapsed to the floor, sounding deeply aggrieved.
What was there to be aggrieved about?
They hadn’t even gotten close, and the whole group had been wiped out.
I looked at Woo Yeon-hoo and asked, “Something’s weird here, isn’t it?”
He seemed to agree, because he kept tilting his head.
The white masks were far too weak.
No matter how I looked at it, they didn’t seem like members of an A-grade terror organization.
Were they not Crowd, but people pretending to be Crowd?
It was weird enough to make me think that.
Another strange thing was that the leader mask didn’t seem at all interested in joining the fight.
Back at Jae-i's Blacksmith, when he’d mistaken me for Seo Ji-hyeok, he’d said we couldn’t handle them all at once.
So why wasn’t he fighting alongside his subordinates?
Why?
“...Ah.”
There was only one answer I could think of.
To hide his own identity, he’d abandoned the subordinates who’d heard him say he was one of the Followers of the Demon Race.
“Baek Do-woon, this is because of you! They’re dying because of you!”
Then the leader mask began firing blades into his unconscious subordinates.
When the blades pierced the throats of the white masks, their bodies shuddered and then went limp.
I hadn’t realized it when they hit us before, but it looked like the blades had been poisoned.
Woo Yeon-hoo leveled his spear at the leader mask.
“Bullshit! Don’t pin the crimes you committed on Do-woon!”
Exactly.
He was the one taking their lives, so why was he blaming me?
The leader mask’s voice stayed infuriatingly calm.
“Give up. You cannot escape this place.”
“The one who can’t escape is you. Do you think you can take me and Do-woon at the same time?”
“That’s what happens when you know nothing...”
The leader mask sneered at Woo Yeon-hoo.
Then he shifted his gaze off the frowning man and looked at me.
After that, he shouted proudly, “Baek Do-woon!”
“Yeah?”
“Then you’ll know, won’t you? How strong the Followers of the Demon Race are! That overwhelming power that crushes and tears an enemy apart!”
“Oh, that? Not much, really.”
“What?”
Maybe he hadn’t expected that answer.
The bastard went cold as if someone had splashed him with ice water.
I laughed at him and held up my right index finger.
“Really. I beat him senseless with just one finger.”
When I raised my right hand, Woo Yeon-hoo burst out laughing.
Come to think of it, he was the only one here who knew how strange my right hand really was.
He’d seen me fight skeletons with my index finger at Hongyureung Gate, and he’d seen me pull up Udamhwa and Seoljicho with absurd ease.
But Yu Jae-i and the leader mask, who didn’t know that, took it differently.
She shook her head, thinking I was bluffing, while he bristled, taking it as an insult.
“You damn bastard! You’re humiliating me? Fine, I’ll tear you apart with my own two hands!”
As the leader mask shouted in outrage, his body began to twist.
There was the sound of bones breaking inside that twisting frame.
He’d lost all his subordinates, so now he could start transforming without holding back.
Back when it happened with Kim Jeong-cheol, I’d been too stunned to do anything but watch, but this time I knew exactly what was going on.
And this wasn’t some transforming robot cartoon. I had no intention of sitting around and waiting politely.
Thud...!
I was about to swing Arca when something crashed down behind us.
Just from that sound alone, I knew what had happened.
I’d been stabbing through the ceiling with Arca.
The building had started to collapse.
“Do-woon, we need to get out now!”
For me and him, the building collapsing didn’t matter.
The problem was Yu Jae-i, the blacksmith.
She’d be crushed to death under the rubble.
“Leave it to me.”
As I answered, I used World Tree Swing to carve out an escape route.
Once, twice. Each time I gathered mana, it began to sheath the giant blade like a scabbard.
Maybe because of that, the mana at the tip of the blade didn’t scatter either and kept holding together.
In that way, the great blade only grew larger and larger.
Only after gathering all ten pulses of mana did the blade finally stop expanding.
Then I swung Arca, now swollen to monstrous size.
“......!”
The night sky appeared.
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