Reality Check (4)
...
"Almost there."
"...Yes."
I woke before Ha Yujeong even spoke, the warped pressure of the dimension prickling against my skin. We were on the outskirts of the city, and once you got this close to the capital, even leaving town was a hassle. A gate in a place where people lived this tightly packed, where the sidewalks were laid with so much concrete it might as well have been a maze—it was ridiculous. I could understand why they’d rushed to send in a dismantling team just to get it over with.
As the car approached the gate, I saw the temporary barricades spread across the road, with soldiers and low-rank hunters standing by to hold the line. They were there to respond fast if anything burst out of the gate.
But, honestly, it was only buying time.
The low-rank hunters might be able to do something, but the soldiers—ordinary people who hadn’t awakened—were another matter.
It wasn’t that I was underestimating the power of personal firearms. Against the beings of this world, meaning Earth’s native life and not the creatures of the outer realms, guns were usually far deadlier than the swords most hunters swung around. What was a person supposed to do against a volley of bullets? How could anyone dodge rounds that flew faster than sound, let alone endure them?
The problem was that awakened beings and monsters that followed the laws of the outer realms were immune to attacks without mana. You could shove them back with brute force, you could restrain their movement, but you couldn’t actually hurt them.
Take an airplane, for example. If you crashed from the sky to the ground, no living thing would survive. But even a weak D-rank awakened person wouldn’t die from a fall on Earth. There was no mana in Earth’s environment.
What could kill a hunter living on Earth were attacks from other hunters or monsters that carried mana of their own, and the limits inherent to life itself—genetic disease born from within rather than infection by outside bacteria or viruses, the inability to sleep, starving when you couldn’t eat, suffocating when you drowned. Things like that.
And for exactly that reason, weapons that weren’t meant to be held in the hand and swung directly were useless against the outer realms. Maintaining mana in something that had left your body was a magician’s domain, not something ordinary awakened people could do simply because they had awakened mana.
Which meant that, unless you were one of the rare exceptions, a plain personal firearm could never, ever kill them.
In other words, everyone stationed here was basically just meat shield duty.
So why weren’t they calling in a high-rank hunter? Because I was the high-rank hunter.
I had to finish this as quickly as possible myself, before any monsters slipped out beyond the gate.
"Halt. You can’t pass from here on."
"Hunter Association. We’ve brought another hunter to be deployed to the gate."
"...My apologies."
Once Ha Yujeong showed her Hunter Association ID, the soldier blocking the road immediately lowered the barricade.
The car rolled a little farther in and stopped. I got out and looked toward the gate.
A wind was howling around it.
Mana flowed on that wind, carrying a smell that didn’t belong on Earth.
A hole torn through the air. Nothing could be seen beyond it.
Only strange, faintly shining specks drifted there, like stars in a night sky.
That was why gates were hard to assess before entering. You couldn’t see inside. All you had was the residue of mana riding the wind, enough to read the degree of dimensional contamination the gate was holding.
"How long has it been there?"
"About forty-six hours since the gate’s appearance was detected."
"And the dismantling team?"
"They were sent in four hours after the gate was detected. Their signal was lost forty-two hours after the gate appeared."
Forty-two hours inside, and the signal had been gone for four hours already.
They’re probably done for.
No—wait.
If they’d been chosen as a dismantling team, they had to be hunters with at least some experience.
Even if the signal was lost, they should have been able to find cover and wait for additional support.
...And if they were too useless to even do that, there was nothing I could do about it.
"Uh... Hunter-nim."
"What is it?"
"The mission is only to dismantle the gate. Don’t do anything reckless."
"I know. I said I know."
Taking Ha Yujeong’s warning, I accepted the signal beacon.
The beacon was a lifeline. It was both proof to the outside that a team member was still alive and, if we decided the gate couldn’t be dismantled, the guide back to reality. Follow the signal from the beacon, and you could return to the gate’s entrance.
The only way out of a gate was either to dismantle it or to leave through the entrance you came in by.
The dismantling team had already gone in and lost contact; if I lost mine too, it would become a real mess outside.
That wouldn’t happen, of course, but Ha Yujeong couldn’t know that. No wonder she looked so uneasy.
I gave her shoulder a light pat, then tucked the beacon into my hip pocket and zipped it shut.
"I’ll handle it, so go find Shin Jaecheol and look for Choi Eunho. You’ll say you can’t find him anyway."
Ugh. This fucking smell. I’d rather smoke.
Once I stepped through the gate, past the shimmer of light and into the other-dimensional interior, I was greeted by a broken brick road and old-fashioned buildings with sharp, pointed roofs. It was the kind of European scene that didn’t belong anywhere in Korea. The air itself carried the stench of wild beasts.
"Gothic type."
A gate was the forerunner of an outer-realm invasion, a kind of first symptom of reality contamination. And because there was more than one kind of outer realm trying to poison Earth, the inner dimensions of gates changed according to the source they came from.
European-style ruins, a shattered city, the smell of wild animals.
Classic Gothic fantasy. A place crawling with blood-crazed beasts.
The good news was that, in a Gothic-type gate, most monsters weren’t especially large or powerful compared with other outer realms. Even low-rank hunters could probably take them down without much trouble.
The problem was the contagion.
This was the outer realm.
A space saturated with mana governed by outer laws.
On Earth, we were immune to disease. Not here.
If you were exposed to this air too long, you’d eventually turn into one of the beasts living here. Your own mana resistance could buy you time, but in the end it only delayed the inevitable.
I could endure for centuries because of Blessing, so it wasn’t a meaningful threat to me. But for the dismantling team that had entered ahead of me, it absolutely was.
"Grrrrrr...."
"Aack—! Aaaack—!!"
If luck was really against me, one of those things might be a member of the team that went in before I did.
As soon as I came out of the gate and started walking toward the tallest castle, I could feel a pack slowly closing in around me.
When they’d gathered enough of a number, they bared their hostility and started howling.
Beasts.
Werewolves.
Muscles bulging under tattered clothes.
Bodies buried in coarse fur.
There were no giant types. Mostly ordinary specimens.
Number of them... around thirty to forty.
That was a bit much.
"First, let’s clean up."
I drew the single-edged sword I’d taken from Ha Yujeong’s car.
Blood began to pound through me. Adrenaline. A separate, different hunger from the lust I’d been feeling back home. It was the primal urge to put these things down.
Yes. This was it.
This was what a hunter was.
What lust, what ass-kissing, what being someone’s little girl, what being a man, what being a master?
Watch and learn. This was how you really lived!!
CRACK.
I charged them head-on and smashed the head clean off the one standing in front.
The instant after, five or six more came barreling in to bite me.
They clawed and kicked.
They sank their teeth into my legs, my waist. One bit my shoulder, another slammed a hand across my face.
Good. Hit me.
Go on and bite.
Scratch me.
My skin wouldn’t even take a wound.
No matter how hard they bit, their teeth couldn’t leave a mark on my flesh.
No matter how they clawed, their claws only struck my bones and shattered against them.
The one who hit my face had his wrist bent backward under the strength of my skull.
Then I swung the single-edged sword.
I didn’t know swordsmanship. I was swinging it literally as a club with a blade, and it didn’t matter that it wasn’t properly sharpened. Wherever I swung, their bodies split open.
Two at a time. Three.
Then I reached out and tore them apart with my bare hands. Blood sprayed.
I drove a fist into one’s skull and caved it in. Blood sprayed.
I grabbed a leg and slammed it down, then swept sideways. Blood sprayed.
As I kept swinging, corpses couldn’t hold together; legs ripped free and flew off. Blood sprayed.
Yes.
One more good thing.
These wild beasts didn’t know how to run.
So I didn’t have to chase a single one.
Blood sprayed.
This wasn’t combat, and it wasn’t even a hunt.
It had to be called a slaughter.
Kill one, and the sound draws a new beast from the city.
No—calling them beasts was being too generous.
They were sacrifices.
Rotten vermin that had come here only to die.
I killed the beasts, again and again and again.
I killed the beasts, again and again and again.
When you tore one apart, a new beast came.
When you killed one, a new beast came.
Death to every werewolf.
Death to every being that had lost its reason.
Thud.CRACK.
Drip, drip.
When I finally beat the last beast to death with my fist, there wasn’t a single werewolf left alive in this dead city.
And I had only been inside the gate for an hour.
Since it had taken me about thirty minutes just to walk from the gate to this Gothic city, the actual tearing-up probably hadn’t even taken thirty minutes.
...Already done?
Suppressing a faint sense of disappointment, I tossed the last werewolf’s corpse onto the ground.
My entire body was stained red with blood, but there was nothing to be done about that. I wasn’t the kind of fighter who could keep his clothes clean like a magician.
Ah.
Come to think of it, the signal beacon.
It hadn’t been broken in the middle of the fight, had it?
Slightly uneasy, I patted through my pocket.
Getting back out wouldn’t be hard, but if the beacon signal had cut off and the people outside started doing something stupid, that would be a problem.
"Phew."
The beacon was fine.
I’d worried a little when they lunged for my waist.
Everything was going smoothly. The entire lower district of the city had been cleared, and the beacon was intact.
If I wanted to reach the core of the gate, I’d probably have to head up to the upper district and enter that distant castle I could see ahead. The biggest beast would be guarding the core, so all I had to do was kill it and destroy the core.
That wouldn’t be difficult, but the distance was pretty far.
If I destroyed the core, the gate would dismantle and any survivors inside could return home... but there was no telling how long that would take. Could a survivor hold out until then?
On the other hand, if I found the survivors first and sent them out, there’d be no problem dismantling the gate afterward at my own pace.
So there was no need to change the order.
Judging by the number of beasts here, the dismantling team probably hadn’t made it up to the upper district. If they were still alive, they were likely hiding somewhere in the lower city.
Just as I’d thought at the start.
Let’s find the survivors first.
Fuck you, Ha Yujeong.