novelraw Chapter 60
Chapter 60
Chapter 60
“After you unpack at the resort, you can take the vehicle we provide and hunt the released Creatures.”
Artin’s explanation was concise, and also kind.
“Ah, are you worried it might be dangerous? That’s perfectly understandable. However, on our Carpe Diem side, together with master’s and doctoral-level researchers, we’ve downgraded their aggressiveness to about the level of ordinary stray dogs, and we’ve also had them learn separate commands, so you really don’t need to worry too much…….”
After personally carrying their luggage to the lodging, he handed them a list of simply arranged precautions and waivers and added,
“It’s unlikely, but if a dangerous situation does arise, please don’t hesitate to contact us right away. Then our emergency rescue team will depart within five minutes. Everything is covered by the insurance included in the package, so if there’s any problem at all, we recommend pressing it immediately, and also…….”
What followed was mostly related to safety, and after nearly thirty minutes of explanations, various waivers, and signing documents, they had no choice but to return straight to their lodgings while looking at the outside, which had already become night.
“Huaaam, see you tomorrow.”
“Yeah, we booked it for a whole week anyway, so we should rest today.”
On the surface, all they had done was ride a ship, arrive at the Free Planet Alliance, shop, and ride in a car, but wasn’t there such a thing as psychological fatigue?
Perhaps because of that.
The room the women went into soon filled with nothing but low breathing sounds and the occasional rustle of turning bodies.
In contrast, the atmosphere in the men’s lodging, where Baek Hwi-young and Beatus entered together, was quite different.
“Hwi-young.”
“Yeah.”
At least those two felt a sense of incongruity about the very existence of this resort.
Beatus furrowed his brow as if thinking about something, then quickly came to his senses and spoke.
“Doesn’t something feel strange?”
“Yeah, it does.”
Creatures were not beasts.
That meant they weren’t something you could tame just because you tried.
Yet they were releasing such things over a vast area and operating it like a leisure sport?
If one conceded a hundred times, a businessman with an uncanny nose for the smell of money might pull it off.
‘Rather, being suspicious might be oversensitive.’
Thinking of it as a rich man’s hobby after catching the scent of money made sense, and simply thinking of them as one of the beast-type alien species discovered so far also made sense.
At this time, Creatures were always underestimated.
But what lingered between the two was a bizarre sense of discomfort that couldn’t be explained by that reasoning.
‘……It’s not that nothing like this has ever happened. But why? Why does it feel so unsettling?’
Leaving Beatus behind, Baek Hwi-young bit his lip hard and gazed at the distant plains and forests stretching far and wide.
How could there not have been those who thought of using Creatures in one way or another, or factions to do so?
Instructor Jin Crow and Professor Lillian themselves had stripped Creature corpses and filled them with artificial skeletons to make training dummies.
But making training mannequins from their corpses and directly controlling them were entirely different matters, weren’t they?
‘They follow only the commands of higher individuals and their instincts.’
That was the very first step to understanding Creatures.
After the war began in earnest, why had Imperial knights and Composite State special officers ground through soldiers just to somehow kill the higher species?
‘Because if you kill the commanding individual, it becomes easier to eliminate the monsters that are left with nothing but instinct.’
And that surely hadn’t changed even now.
That was why there was no way they could believe the nonsense those people spouted while talking about master’s and doctoral researchers.
“……Haa, whenever it feels this chilly, something always ends up happening.”
Beatus didn’t know the detailed inner workings either, but perhaps it was intuition born from having been through his fair share of hardships; he smiled bitterly and pulled a cigarette case from his chest.
Then he immediately took one cigarette between his lips and casually held it out to Baek Hwi-young.
“Do you smoke?”
“…….”
Baek Hwi-young stared at his fingertips for a moment, then at the tip of the white cigarette that had always been offered to him first, so familiar to him, and slowly accepted it and took it between his lips.
Chiiik, sss-.
Soon, in their unlit lodging, nothing filled the space but the heavy diffusion of cigarette smoke.
There was a strange sign of something being off.
But since they didn’t know what it was, the core of the conversation they shared throughout the night was to at least not let their guard down…….
-Kiiiiiiik!
However, what they faced the next day was a scene so peaceful it made their prior tension seem pointless.
No, should that really be called peaceful?
“Go!”
“Yes!”
Dokgo Ran surged forward rapidly, and Hino Kanae, who had drawn her long Japanese sword, followed behind, her long black hair tied with a red ribbon fluttering.
-Kyaaaah!
Soon, the pack of Creatures that looked like a mix of wolves and monkeys, having discovered the two, bared their distinctive sharp teeth and charged, but the outcome had already been decided.
“Kyahahahat!”
Dokgo Ran broke through the long distance in an instant, her bronze skin rippling as she drove her shoulder into the chest of the one running at the front, then, using the right foot she stepped out with as a pivot, twisted her waist swiftly and blew apart the neck of the one following behind in a single motion.
Paaang!
A sound like a balloon popping rang out, and Dokgo Ran shouted brightly with a grin wide enough to show her distinctive protruding canines.
“It pops nicely!”
“Move!”
Dokgo Ran’s bronze thigh twitched for an instant, and soon she leapt back a full turn, avoiding the Creature’s claws slashing precisely at the nape of her neck.
And in that fleeting moment, filling the crossed vision of the Creatures was none other than—
“Hup!”
—the sharp blade of Hino Kanae, and what followed was an indiscriminate slaughter carried out by the two cadets.
-Kki, kkiiii.
The mass-produced Creatures, so-called and not even given a unified naming, could only bare their teeth at the approaching death and despair at their foretold fate.
The Creature standing at the very edge, torn between fear etched into its instincts and its appetite, must have realized that day.
Along with the terror of approaching death, the powerlessness of a life that existed to be hunted…….
“What are you thinking about?”
“Huh? Um. No, it’s nothing.”
Famille realized belatedly that she had been spacing out and rubbed her eyes.
It seemed likely that trying to keep pace with Dokgo Ran and handling all sorts of urgent matters had left her unable to sleep on the ship and even until dawn.
“Famille, are you tired?”
“Huh? Yeah, a little.”
Except for the two rampaging over there, everyone else was resting after spreading out near the black pickup truck rented from Carpe Diem.
When Famille nodded at Miel’s words, Miel rummaged through her bag for a moment and pulled out a pink blanket and handed it over.
As Famille accepted it without thinking, Miel smiled bashfully and said,
“Go inside for a bit and get some sleep. I’ll watch the kids.”
“……Okay. Mm.”
What on earth she thought she was watching, looking exactly like a squirrel.
Famille nodded, feeling grateful for that consideration even as she thought so.
Once she went inside, Beatus, who had been cleaning his firearm with a noticeably more relaxed expression, spoke to Baek Hwi-young, who was sitting beside him drinking a beverage.
“Looks like we overreacted. It’s not much, compared to what we thought.”
“…….”
Baek Hwi-young didn’t answer, but inwardly, he couldn’t help but agree with those words.
On the plains reminiscent of a golf course, Creatures moved about in packs, but all of them were nothing more than individuals soon to be labeled as lowest-grade mass-produced types.
Even that aside, the claim that they were being managed didn’t seem false—every claw and tooth had been blunted.
‘Was I being oversensitive?’
To begin with, anyone possessing Dual Gear–level combat power could deal with that much without suffering serious injuries.
Not only superhumans.
Even if one were to deploy a mere platoon fully equipped with powered exoskeletons, they would be able to clean that up with ease.
However, even if there seemed to be no problem on the surface, the paranoid sense of unease lodged in his mind did not easily fade away.
Some people called him cautious.
Others cursed him as a coward with frayed nerves.
Why was it that he, who survived to the very end and led humanity, was called an ugjang(愚將), a foolish and dull general?
It was a derogatory epithet meant to belittle him, and at the same time, a name those who praised him used with a sense of warning.
‘Was it when I cried out warnings about Creatures after being commissioned? Or when the war with the Empire was approaching and I protested that we needed to look at Creatures first, only to be demoted for not moving the army?’
He couldn’t even remember when he had received that name.
But he always viewed everything pessimistically, and people cursed that as a coward’s delusion or exaggeration.
Yet he knew.
That this intensely paranoid anxiety, and the pressure flowing along his spine even at this very moment, were the final driving force that kept him going.
“Don’t let your guard down, Beatus.”
“Yeah, just in case.”
Beatus nodded at his words, but he didn’t look particularly reassuring.
He was certainly wise, but he was, in the end, someone who moved according to common sense and objective facts.
And the world Baek Hwi-young had lived through betrayed things as easily as the word “common sense” implied.
“Kh, this is it. That really relieves some stress.”
“Right? At this rate, we might even get full marks on the next practical exam.”
While he was thinking that, Dokgo Ran and Hino Kanae, who had already finished their hunt, approached, their bodies streaked with the green-and-purple-mixed blood distinctive to Creatures.
“Here, towels.”
“Oh! As expected, there’s no one but Miel.”
The sight of the two wiping their bodies with the towels Miel handed them resembled something he had once seen on a battlefield, but at least now, their expressions were nothing but bright.
Just as Baek Hwi-young was trying to forcibly scatter that subtle afterimage.
-끄아아아아악!
From far away, deep within a dense forest that seemed to lie beyond at least one hill, a scream echoed out, and the peaceful atmosphere instantly froze. Without anyone prompting it, they looked at each other and spoke.
“This.”
“That sounded like a person screaming.”
A human scream ringing out in a field meant for hunting Creatures.
They weren’t foolish enough to be unable to imagine what that meant.
“Huhk, hngh.”
A fishy sweetness flowed from the corner of his mouth, and the breath filling up to his chin felt like it might burst his heart at any moment.
If it hadn’t been for the implant embedded in place of his severed leg, his legs would have tangled and sent him crashing to the ground already.
‘What is this? What the hell is going on!’
Ten years of being ground down as a special service noncommissioned officer in the wretched Composite State. After retirement, with no money to treat his severed leg, he had no choice but to drift into the Free Planet Alliance.
There, by some twist of fate, he met a Ripperdoc who was an illegal doctor and bio-engineer and got his leg reattached, but because he used a cheap body part, he couldn’t afford the maintenance costs and had been living as a mercenary for several years.
At first, because of his pride as a soldier and the prejudice against other species instilled by his Composite State training, he had trouble even earning his keep, but now he was making a name for himself as the team leader of a mercenary group of respectable size.
-Team Leader, lately there’s been a lot of work related to Creatures coming in. So I was thinking, while we’re at it, should we go check this place out as a vacation too?
The trigger had been the strong suggestion and subtle pressure from Cecil, his lover and someone who served as a kind of operator within the team.
His deliberation hadn’t been long, and just as she said, they were having a fairly smooth vacation-cum-training session.
‘Cecil, did Cecil betray us? But why?’
Everything had been a trap.
Cecil had vanished at some point, and when they were exhausted from hunting Creatures, a series of enemies took advantage of that moment, surrounded the team, and injected sedatives into their necks.
He didn’t know how things had come to this.
But one thing was certain: if he was caught by them, he would never experience anything good.
‘If I can just reach the resort—no, at least somewhere this emergency signal can reach…….’
For some reason, no matter how much he pressed the emergency signal the company had handed out, it didn’t go through.
There must have been signal interference.
Just as he was sprinting through the forest with that faint hope in his heart.
“Just like Cecil said, I guess you really are a former soldier. Your situational awareness is quick. Even if you’re a bit slow at running.”
A chilling voice came from behind, and he gritted his teeth, spinning the single gear within him to its limit as he immediately rolled his dagger into a reverse grip.
Kaang!
But his attack was blocked far too easily, and the man with his face hidden by a black military cap and mask stared at him with eerie eyes and spoke.
“As expected of a former hunting dog of the Composite State. Let’s take a beating first.”
“H-Hey, wai—. Kuaaaah!”
With a fist planted in his abdomen, the man tumbled down the slope, and the lackey of the traitors closed his eyes as if savoring the painful scream the man spat out, slowly moving his feet.
‘He rolled pretty far.’
He let out a snort of laughter and slowly walked toward the bastard who had slid all the way to the edge of the forest.
But at that moment.
“……Damn.”
Spotting a black pickup truck racing in the distance, he sent a bitter smile inside his mask and spoke into the radio.
“We’ll need six more sacks.”
It was a single line that reeked thickly of conspiracy.