novelraw Chapter 148 : Mission 10: The Hunters of Old (21)
Chapter 148 : Mission 10: The Hunters of Old (21)
THOOM!
The knight in full plate armor kicked off the ground and charged like a bull.
“Hey, Boy! Watch out!” Jail Mojik shouted urgently. “He doesn’t look it, but that bastard is… insanely fast!”
“…!”
The warning came too late. Chevalier was already on him.
He looked the part of a greatsword wielder—all heavy armor and brute force—but his attack speed was that of a master swordsman.
Launching off a Quake Step that tore up the ground, Chevalier brushed past Jae-hee in a single breath and swung his claymore with blinding speed.
The strike was lightning-fast.
CLANG!
Yet Jae-hee parried it effortlessly.
In fact, he didn’t just block it. He stepped into the attack, meeting the claymore before it could reach its apex and robbing the blow of its true power.
Inside his helmet, surprise glinted in Chevalier’s eyes.
“Hmm?”
“When it comes to speed…” Jae-hee grunted, shoving Chevalier’s sword away. “I’ve never lost a race in my life!”
THWANG!
Jae-hee’s face turned beet red as he pushed with every ounce of his strength, but Chevalier simply took a light step back.
After steadying his stance, Chevalier nodded. “You certainly have the upper hand in speed.”
“Hehe, right?”
“But you’re… lighter than I am.”
Chevalier charged again.
Not to be outdone, Jae-hee rushed to meet him.
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
But to his shock, he was driven back with every clash of his long sword against the greatsword.
Jae-hee gritted his teeth. It’s super heavy, and ridiculously fast…!
The weight of a greatsword, the speed of a master swordsman—Chevalier was a perfect warrior who possessed both.
Jae-hee’s speed alone had surpassed ‘fast’ and reached the realm of ‘extreme speed,’ but his other parameters were lacking.
Chevalier, on the other hand, would be a perfectly balanced, filled-in hexagon on a stat chart.
There was no meeting that kind of power head-on.
“Your blade is shallow.”
Chevalier closed in and unleashed a surprise three-hit combo. Not with his blade, but with his guard, his pommel, and finally a shoulder check—a brutal close-quarters assault.
Jae-hee’s sword was bound by the first two strikes, leaving him unable to dodge the shoulder check.
THWACK!
“Kegh?!”
“That’s not enough to stop me.”
Chevalier caught the staggering Jae-hee and, holding him like a human shield, charged forward.
Straight for Jail Mojik.
He’d struggled against her binding ability in their previous exchange and now intended to use Jae-hee to block her line of sight.
“You little…?!”
Just as he’d planned, Jail Mojik couldn’t activate her ability with Jae-hee constantly in her line of fire. Her power had a critical weakness: she had to designate her target precisely with her fingertips.
“You gave me a hard time earlier, too. I let you live, and you cause me trouble. Die.”
Reaching her in an instant, Chevalier tossed Jae-hee aside and thrust his greatsword at her.
Jail Mojik barely managed to weave threads in the air to bind Chevalier’s greatsword, but it wasn’t enough to completely halt the ferocious attack.
But before the blow could land, Razor rushed in.
“Leave my girlfriend alone!”
Razor threw every bottle of bone powder he had, then converted all the bone rings and necklaces he’d been wearing into a shield.
POP! KABOOM!
The bone-powder grenades didn’t do much damage, but they caked onto the threads binding the greatsword, slowing the attack.
So Chevalier simply relaxed his grip on the greatsword, took another step forward, and threw a straight punch with his left hand.
CRACK!
“Gyaagh!”
“Ugh!”
The lightning-fast jab from his gauntleted fist shattered the bone shield with ease, catching both Razor and Jail Mojik on the chin and knocking them out in a single blow.
As Chevalier prepared to follow up, he sensed something and dodged to the side.
RAT-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT!
A rifle spat bullets, its muzzle flashing violently.
Romeo and Juliet had opened fire. Romeo provided suppressing fire with his pistol while Juliet fired a pinpoint three-round burst from her rifle.
But Chevalier simply kicked off the ground, evading the line of fire with impossible speed. Sparks of electricity flew from the tips of his metal boots.
Deciding they had wasted enough ammunition, Chevalier held his greatsword before him like a shield and charged like a bulldozer.
“What the hell…”
Romeo clicked his tongue, quickly grabbing Juliet and rolling to the side.
Even as they moved, Juliet kept firing her rifle, but the bullets only created a shower of sparks against the armor, doing no damage whatsoever.
Chevalier’s charge narrowly missed them. At that exact moment, he swung his greatsword downward.
Lightning struck.
The golden-hot claymore, crackling with electricity, slammed into the ground, unleashing its stored lightning in all directions.
FLASH!
Caught in the shockwave that erupted with the lightning, Romeo and Juliet were sent tumbling across the ground without so much as a scream.
“Eeyaaaaah!”
Taking advantage of the opening, the Flying Tentacle God swooped in from above and shot out its powerful tentacles.
SNICK.
Chevalier sliced through several of the thick appendages with ease.
He had, after all, learned to kill monsters here at the Cheongnyangni Gate since he was a child. Cutting down monsters was far easier for him than cutting down humans.
“Kiyaaaaah! My legs!”
The Flying Tentacle God immediately lost its will to fight and collapsed in a heap in the corner.
Pushing himself up, Jae-hee looked around in a speechless daze.
Razor, Jail Mojik, Romeo, Juliet—knocked down.
The Flying Tentacle God—fighting spirit, gone.
Status Window and Soju Bottle were over in the corner, kneeling with their hands in the air… Why?
“Well, it looked like we were losing pretty badly… so I just surrendered first desu.”
“Just spare us, please. Hehe. Hic.”
“…”
The two non-combatants had apparently seen the way the battle was turning and immediately sensed defeat.
As for Rabid Dog, she hadn’t been able to pull herself together since catching the first whiff of the sewer’s rotten stench.
She was pressed flat against the ground, whimpering and trembling.
It was as if something terrifying was lurking nearby…
In any case, Chevalier had single-handedly wrecked the Black Parade’s Deck 1 Leftovers Team.
Approaching Jae-hee, the last combatant remaining, Chevalier slowly rolled his shoulders.
“Every day, I sparred with the Iron Knight. With the only active S-Rank Hunter.”
“…”
“I have spent my entire life training here. My fathers may have weakened with age, but my skills are now at their absolute peak.”
He was in his mid-thirties. His technique was perfected, his body matured.
In the life of the man called Chevalier, this very moment was his prime as a warrior.
“My combat skills are the best in the country. Before they use their Domain Breaks, I can subdue even those S-Ranks.”
“…”
“You seem to have quite a bit of talent, but nevertheless…”
Having gauged Jae-hee’s talent and level from their brief exchange, Chevalier declared, “At your current level, you can’t stop me.”
Jae-hee’s face was full of indignation as he yelled back, “I-I know your master is amazing and all, but my master is no pushover either, yeah?!”
“…?”
“My master is an S-Rank, too! A hero from the war thirty years ago! The one and only Granny Ghost!”
Chevalier tilted his head. “How long did you train under her?”
“Uh…” Jae-hee wiggled his fingers, trying to estimate. “A month? No, two? No, no. Let’s round up, be generous, maybe fudge it a little, and say three months…?”
“I’ve trained for thirty years.”
“Aiee…”
The sheer volume of time spent training was on a different level.
Even to Chevalier, Jae-hee’s talent and abilities were extraordinary, but between them lay an insurmountable gap that talent alone could never bridge.
“I’ve inherited the essence not only of Iron Knight, but of all one hundred Knights—their skills, their convictions.”
He was the finished product, forged by every member of the guild.
That was why he was granted the Hunter name Chevalier, which literally means “knight.”
“Demon Lord or Hero, any who oppose me, I will kill.”
“…”
“You—none of you—can ever defeat me.”
Chevalier wasn’t speaking to Jae-hee.
He was declaring war on the entire world he would have to face from now on.
“Hey, if you inherited all that stuff, you should be upholding those good and noble beliefs! Why are you so pissed off you’re about to turn into a villain?!” Jae-hee shrieked.
“Listen here, Sir Knight! Do you know what happens if you really decide to become a bottom-of-the-barrel villain like you said?”
“…?”
“You become our prison mate!”
Jae-hee gestured to the surrounding prisoners.
“You’ll be wearing the same cuffs, scraping together Credits one by one, and going through the welcoming party on Deck 1!”
Chevalier could only blink inside his helmet, not understanding a word.
Just then, Status Window slapped his knee.
“Wait a minute, he’s right. All these Hunters are going to get arrested in the end, aren’t they desu? Since they’re Awakened, they’ll be sent to our prison… Hold on, does that mean they’re all gonna be my lackeys desu?!”
Suddenly filled with bravado, Status Window dropped his surrender pose, shot to his feet, and pointed a finger at Chevalier.
“Oioi! Start polishing my shoes now before you get to our prison desu! I’ll be sure to take good care of you then desu!”
“…”
“I’ll even get you out of cleaning duty and some of the chores, huh?! I am the real power on Deck 1, where you’ll be staying! The roommate of the Deck Leader and the best friend of the former Deck Leader, I tell you desu!”
Beside him, Soju Bottle clapped her hands in admiration.
Chevalier narrowed his eyes inside his helmet.
“I don’t know what kind of prison that is. But if a hundred of us were to enter, I think we’d have more than enough power to take it over.”
“Uh?”
“And I think I could crush weaklings like you all by myself. By that logic, shouldn’t you be the ones trying to get on my good side right now?”
“…Uh?”
After a moment of stunned silence, Status Window screamed, “No desu, not my comfy prison life! The power I just barely got my hands on!”
“…”
“Boy-kun! I’m counting on you desu! Please, you have to beat that hunk of armor desu!”
Jae-hee gave a small shake of his head, corrected his stance, and tightened his grip on his sword.
“I was going to anyway.”
A sharp, blue light flashed in the boy’s round eyes.
“I promised my master I’d become the strongest. I can’t break just yet.”
“The strongest?” Chevalier scoffed, then shot forward like a thunderbolt. “That’s something only immature brats run around claiming they’ll be!”
“Good thing for me, then…”
Chevalier’s body crackled with electricity as he surged forward.
But then, everything slowed.
No, in Jae-hee’s eyes, the whole world had come to a crawl.
Through that frozen moment, a chaotic web of blue arrows unfolded: the Stormroad.
Lowering his stance, Jae-hee yelled, “Because I’m still an immature brat…!”
The next instant, he vanished.
What?
The speed was so immense that Chevalier, having lost sight of his opponent for a split second, whipped his head around in confusion.
Where—?!
But Jae-hee had already shot past him. The attack had already been delivered.
SHRAAANG!
Dozens of gale-like sword strikes raked across Chevalier’s entire body.
Having robbed his opponent of any chance to react with a sudden shift in gears, Jae-hee grinned.
“Let’s go, Round Two…!”
***
Meanwhile, on the surface.
“Domain Break.”
“Domain Break.”
The two S-Rank Awakened spoke in unison.
“Advent.”
“Ignition.”
The world split open behind the two old-era Awakened as their respective domains began to bleed into reality.
A stark blue ice field where blades rained down.
A sunset sea lined with castle walls.
As their worlds collided head-on, the two fallen heroes spat out the words with savage fury.
“Winter’s Edge.”
“Twilight Fortress.”
The final weapons of humanity, forged to fight monsters, were at last aimed at each other.