novelraw Chapter 37 : Cyber Psycho (6)
Chapter 37 : Cyber Psycho (6)
Chapter 37: Cyber Psycho (6)
The three executives of the Monterrey Gang.
Abigail Baron Marlow.
At the Stiletto Club he managed, a frenzy of stabbing was underway.
In just one hour, roughly twenty gang members had their heads severed beneath blades.
Dying en masse during a power struggle was a common occurrence in the criminal underworld. That was the physiology of lawlessness.
Still, to avoid repercussions, the unspoken rule was to kill only about five people for public display.
And yet.
Under the escort of the 8th Battalion, Baron Marlow’s forces were turning into a continuous line of headless corpses.
The gang members begged for their lives, but Lee Taebaek’s Para Blade showed no mercy.
Sgeong!
Lee Taebaek beheaded the gang members with mechanical movements.
“Taebaek, me too.”
“Stay back.”
He stopped Humito to the very end, even when he offered to help. Since he had started it, he said he would be the one to bear the blood.
“Tsk. I’m bored.”
“If you’re bored, go gag those kids over there who keep quacking.”
“Sure, why not. Ah! What about the bodies?”
“We’ll burn them together later. Pile them up.”
Rock watched that scene from the second-floor balcony, resting her chin on her hand.
“……”
It was a scene reminiscent of a slaughterhouse. Just watching made her stomach churn. Even she, who had been through quite a bit, thought, ‘Isn’t this a bit much?’
Chwaaak…!
By the time around ten gang members had lost their heads.
‘Phew.’
Rock turned her gaze away from the sea of blood and went back to Yoo Dahee to help with the hacking.
And as the hacking progressed, she realized belatedly that her earlier emotions had been shallow.
“…….”
Rock’s pretty brows gradually drew closer together. Her breathing, audible even through the mask, grew rough. It was the breath of someone whose emotions were flaring.
Yoo Dahee’s expression wasn’t any better. As if forcing herself to stay calm, she repeatedly took off and put on her glasses.
At last, the hacking ended. A suffocating silence spread everywhere. The silence broke several minutes after the hacking was over.
“…This bastard deserves to die a hundred times…….”
Yoo Dahee looked down at the baron, who had his face buried in the dining table, as if he were a bug. Then she brushed her hair back.
“Not just this bastard, but all the ones dying by Lee Taebaek’s hand right now too. I don’t want to curse crudely, but he’s seriously the worst piece of shit among pieces of shit. He’s done pretty much everything you can do to people.”
She turned her head. The neatly folded glasses slipped into the front pocket of her coat.
“I pride myself on having a strong stomach, you know? I’ve seen psychopaths who capture humans, extract their brains, and pickle them in polymorph… I’ve seen lunatics who make furniture out of human bones……. But what this Abigail-or-what’s-his-name bastard has done goes way, way beyond the line.”
“…….”
It was something she couldn’t even bring herself to say aloud. Nor was there any need to. The atrocities the baron had committed so far were being projected into the air as holographic footage.
P-please, spare me……!
Hey, catch that one running away!
This idiot doesn’t know the fun. Leave him. Don’t you know the real fun is catching the ones who try to run and beating them down?!
A demon.
No other word came to mind.
Baron Marlow and his gang played with humans by literally dismantling them. Like children playing with insects.
With a slashing gesture, Yoo Dahee turned off the footage. She stared at the empty air where the video had lingered and fell into brief silence. Rock also kept her mouth shut and thought.
‘The saying that the dead tell no tales is outdated.’
In Lake City, hacking human brains like this was possible. The organization leading the field was MegaCorp.
They sought to place not just Lake City but the entire world beneath their feet. Monopolizing information was the first cornerstone of that grand plan.
MegaCorp regarded each human as little more than a walking memory chip. Their respect for life was faint to the point of being nonexistent.
MegaCorp’s recent actions followed the same line. From some time ago, they had strongly encouraged residents to undergo full-brain chip implantation. Through broadcasts, terminals, radios—every medium available.
As a result, in the Upper District, drilling a brain socket hole behind the ear became a trend. More than half of the Upper District residents had undergone the procedure, without realizing it was a mark of slavery.
That was why the Resistance strained to interfere with everything MegaCorp did.
The value the Resistance placed above all else was freedom. They were inherently incompatible with MegaCorp, which yearned for an absolute surveillance system. Rock agreed with that cause and was active alongside them.
‘Yoo Dahee seems to have another reason, though.’
It was classified information known only to Kang Hyunseong and the Supreme Commander within the Resistance.
Yoo Dahee was a woman with many secrets. Many male members were captivated by that mysterious charm, only to realize she was a thorny rose and flee without exception.
“No matter how much human dignity has become an ancient joke.”
Yoo Dahee spoke as she took out a gun. Click-clack, she pulled the slide back with nimble hands.
“…There still has to be a line you don’t cross.”
The barrel, catching the light, glowed red. It was an agitated look unlike her usual indifferent demeanor. She turned her head and asked,
“Don’t you think so, Rock?”
“…….”
Rock didn’t entirely agree with what Yoo Dahee was saying. She herself laughed as she fired guns; talking about moral standards and lines was a self-contradiction devoid of persuasion. Even so.
Nod, nod.
Rock nodded her head.
Because unlike the baron, Yoo Dahee didn’t kill people for personal gain. It was solely for a greater cause. She stained her hands with blood in the name of freedom.
“Thanks, Rock.”
Yoo Dahee smiled as she raised the muzzle.
“I know you don’t fully open your heart to me, but still, you empathize with me as the only other female member on the team.”
She couldn’t be placed on the same scale as the baron, who killed and toyed with people for amusement. Therefore, drawing a gun to punish such trash was a waste of mental energy and a waste of bullets.
That was the conclusion Rock reached. She pressed down the muzzle aimed at Baron Marlow with her fingertip, lowering the aim. Yoo Dahee demanded an explanation with her eyes.
Inside the mask, Rock hooked her index finger like a ring, then pulled the mask down to reveal her mouth. A startled Yoo Dahee’s lips parted.
“No way… Rock, you?”
Rock only smiled bitterly. She walked straight up to Baron Marlow and whispered something into his ear. A short death rattle, too brief to be called a spell.
“■■■.”
The table trembled in small jerks. It was because Baron Marlow, whose cheek was pressed against the table, convulsed.
Clang—!
The baron, who had been hovering at the edge of the afterlife, not only opened his eyes but went into a seizure. He thrashed so violently that liquor bottles rolled and shattered with a crash.
Rock’s Gifted.
Cursed Words.
It was only the second time Yoo Dahee had seen it as well. Rock was extremely reluctant to use Cursed Words.
“Rock, you…….”
“…….”
Rock pulled her mask back up. Dark fatigue had already settled beneath her eyes. Yoo Dahee holstered her gun and looked away.
“Guaaah… uugh……!”
The screams bounced around the soundproof walls.
The baron’s pupils swelled as if devouring the whites of his eyes, then shrank into dots. Veins bulged grotesquely over his pale skin, and all his hair fell out in an instant, leaving him bald. He truly looked like an undead.
“Ki… kill… me……!!”
Abigail Marlow squeezed out his voice with all his remaining strength. His buckteeth were smeared with bloody tears and nosebleed. The blood was purple.
“P-please… please, kill me!”
The baron begged—not to be spared, but to be killed.
The two women coldly turned their backs on him and left the room. The door closed behind them.
Despite the soundproofing, the screams pierced through the walls. Abigail Marlow would writhe in pain worse than death and slowly wither away.
Hoping that sight would bring solace to the victims, they headed for the first floor. All the way down the stairs, Yoo Dahee cast worried glances. Rock just walked in silence.
Cursed Words didn’t inflict a curse only on the target. The caster also had to bear the weight of the curse together. Gifted was supposed to mean a blessing from God, but to Rock, it was a curse itself—one she could never be freed from.
It was an ability that perfectly fit the meaning of the word curse.
The game company compiled statistics for each quest. And based on those numbers, they created graphs.
The purpose of the statistics was to study which types of quests induced active participation from users.
And according to various statistics, most users liked simple hunting quests the most.
In short, click-click. Hunting and leveling up could be done together, and users tired from daily life didn’t want to use their brains in games.
Empty your head, feel the pure sensation of control, and still have the satisfaction of following a quest line!
In short, a simple hunting quest could be said to be a quest that caught two rabbits at once.
‘Of course, the developers weren’t happy about it…….’
That was nothing more than the developers’ artistic disease.
“I made an insanely awesome story, so you should experience it even if I have to force you.”
Because of that selfishness, countless users fell away in droves.
What users wanted wasn’t substance, but practicality. No matter how the story was, they didn’t give a damn.
I won’t deny that, back then, I felt secretly disappointed. I thought that the fun of quests wasn’t just simple entertainment. I thought so, and I wanted to show it.
Show and prove.
But then.
To state the conclusion first, that wasn’t the case. As of this moment, Lee Taebaek had changed his thinking completely.
The essence of games? Entertainment.
Quests? Simple hunting!
“Hoo.”
I exhaled hot breath and wiped away greasy sweat. My collar was stained with a viscous mixture of my own sweat and other people’s blood. Seeing the value of labor and sweat visually doubled my sense of satisfaction.
Above all else, it was fun. Even I thought my clean, decisive swordplay was refreshing, and my stress melted away.
Besides, since every bastard I was beheading was trash, I felt no guilt. On the contrary, as I kept telling myself it was hunting, my blade moved on its own.
I slid the blade up into my armpit gap and pulled it out in one long motion. My side grew damp.
Even if it was annoying, you had to wipe the blood off immediately like this. That way, the blade suffered less damage.
If dried blood caked on like scorched rice, it was a headache, and if you tried to scrape it off with sandpaper, the blade thickness would thin out and it could break.
‘…But why do I know this so well?’
I’d never learned it anywhere. I tilted my head with a puzzled expression, then my gaze was drawn to the corner of my vision. A notification window was flashing.
Ah, right. An alert had popped up during the hunt. I’d set it aside because it was distracting, and I’d already forgotten. I’d been so focused on hunting gang members.
‘At a glance, the speed at which my level was going up was insane.’
Now I understood why users so strongly preferred ‘simple hunting quests.’ It felt like the developers’ perspective that had been fogging users’ vision was clearing. As expected, statistics didn’t lie.
That aside.
‘It’s all over.’
The hall was a pandemonium. Bones, chunks of flesh, and corpses. Faithful to the three elements of a hellscape, it felt as though hell itself had descended into reality.
Otherwise, why would even Kang Hyunseong look sick of it and be drinking liquor at the bar table? Still, thanks to Humito diligently handling the cleanup, the number of rolling heads had noticeably decreased.
‘I’ll need to call in the 8th Battalion.’
The 8th Battalion also handled corpse cleanup duties. Because of that, they were also called scavengers in the streets.
‘Kang Hyunseong will take care of contacting them.’
I had caused all of this on my own. Trying to contact the 8th Battalion myself at this point would be insubordination and breach of trust.
Achievements were distributed evenly, and responsibility for the situation was also shared. That was what a team was.
“First, me.”
I was just about to check my personal gains when Yoo Dahee and Rock walked over.
“Did something happen? You don’t look good.”
Kang Hyunseong said it. He had been downing straight liquor at the bar table by the stairs.
“…No, it’s nothing.”
“What is it, then.”
Kang Hyunseong asked in a slightly coercive tone.
“Let’s clear the glasses first. You might throw up when you hear it.”
“At my level, throwing up, my ass. Go on.”
When Kang Hyunseong snorted, Yoo Dahee let out a sigh. She laid out the evils Baron Marlow had committed so far.
She didn’t leave out a single detail. She thought that was a courtesy to the victims. The descriptions were so vivid they played clearly before my eyes.
Even Humito, who had been moving corpses, stopped what he was doing and listened closely. I maintained a blank expression.
“That’s what happened.”
With those words, silence fell. Perhaps because of the brutal background, the negative emotions thickened even more.
“…….”
“…….”
Kang Hyunseong, who had been tipsy, now looked as though all the alcohol had drained from him. The hand holding the glass trembled.
Clang—!
Just when it looked like it would break, the glass finally shattered, unable to withstand his grip.
Creak.
Kang Hyunseong sprang up and grabbed a bottle. He hadn’t even shaken off the glass shards embedded in his palm, so the bottle was soon drenched in blood.
Striding forward, Kang Hyunseong stopped in front of Humito. Humito willingly stepped aside. One look was enough for mutual understanding.
…Pop!
Kang Hyunseong roughly popped the cap with his molars. Then he poured the liquor over the corpses. A pungent gasoline-like smell began to spread.
“Hyunseong.”
At that moment, someone blocked him.
“Venting your anger by burning this place down along with the corpses won’t help.”
“…….”
It was none other than Lee Taebaek. At some point, I had come up beside him and stood shoulder to shoulder.
“…What are you saying…….”
“I understand you’re angry. That’s why I cut these bastards down without question. But if you burn the club down with the corpses here? You’ll be kicking away, with your own feet, even the chance to sit at the negotiation table with the Gang Alliance. If you do something like that unilaterally, without consulting the Supreme Commander. Even if the Supreme Commander is favorable toward you, do you think the other battalion commanders will stay quiet? They might take this opportunity to conspire to dismantle the 9th Battalion.”
“I’ll take responsibility—.”
“Responsibility isn’t something you can take on alone just because you want to. The one who assigns responsibility—namely, the Supreme Commander—has to say you alone are responsible for it to work. But if the other battalion commanders roast you like beans, what can the Supreme Commander do? The Supreme Commander is a decision-maker, not a dictator. If he’d been that kind of person, he wouldn’t have been able to serve as the head of the Resistance, which upholds ‘freedom’ in the first place.”
The principle behind actions couldn’t be emotion.
In the first place, I hadn’t recklessly raided the Stiletto Club.
On the way here, I had solidified the plan after intense calculation and design, then moved based on that. If I’d charged in fueled by blind vengeance…… one of those headless corpses over there would have been me.
“Then… Taebaek, you’re saying we hand all these corpses over to the 8th Battalion bastards? Those corpse-cleaning assholes? You don’t seem to know what kind of people they are. They’re Resistance in name only—their ideology is no different from MegaCorp. They’ll just rummage through the bodies and greedily suck out whatever information they can!”
“Hand the corpses over. Anything those small fry know won’t be that nutritious anyway. The important information will have already been taken by those two. And they’ll have destroyed it so other battalions can’t get their hands on it.”
Rock nodded reluctantly. She felt like Sun Wukong trapped in the Buddha’s palm. Don’t tell me—even this was…….
“Let’s dump this soft flesh on the 8th Battalion. Then we can demand a larger, more legitimate compensation.”
“A larger compensation, meaning?”
“Here.”
Thud, thud. I stomped my foot twice.
“We make this place an independent base camp, separate from the 9th Battalion’s headquarters.”
“Uh… Taebaek.”
Humito scratched his cheek and spoke.
“The reason the Resistance doesn’t build external strongholds isn’t because there’s no space… it’s because of security… The idea itself is really good, but… using the 9th Battalion’s name to set this up as a base camp still leaves practical problems.”
“What are you talking about. When did I ever say I’d take over the Stiletto Club under the 9th Battalion’s name?”
“…Huh?”
“We handle the actual operations, but we borrow someone else’s name for the facility and ownership.”
I took out a Hero’s Coin and flicked it with my fingernail. As always, the coin sprang high into the air and gently landed on the back of its owner’s hand.
“The owner of the Stiletto Club will be Buntaju District 31’s Jin Sobang.”
I twirled the club and continued.
“The facility’s purpose will be a relief center for vagrants in the Bottommost District. If it’s for charitable purposes, it’ll be tax-exempt and we can avoid City Government audits, right?”
“D-don’t tell me, Taebaek, you planned all the way to this point……?!”
“Well, let’s say that’s the case.”
Everyone’s mouths fell open. Yoo Dahee, the least shocked, stammered out a question.
“Th-then. The facility. The facility name is?”
I smiled and said,
“Baekbaek Order Branch 1.”
[＃1 Small-Scale] 1.9 Patch Notes
◈Main Patch
• As of today, the base of Abigail Baron Marlow, 「Stiletto Club」, has been changed to a 「Save Point」.
At a Save Point, patch notes will proceed automatically even while awake.
When buffing the faith of believers, the effect is amplified up to 10 times.
〉〉 Auto Save…….
〉〉 Applying patch.