novelraw Chapter 71
Chapter 71
Chapter 71
If you summon something to fight for you, you always choose one of two paths.
You either crush the enemy with numbers, or you field a very small count of incredibly powerful summons.
The rotting corpse in front of me was the former. An absolutely terrifying flood of bodies. Its flesh had become a house for maggots and flies, and its yawning abdomen kept vomiting up every kind of disgusting insect.
Some were abnormally huge, others were the size of ordinary bugs.
“It’s charging in like some sandstorm.”
From far away, anyone would have mistaken the stage for a black storm cloud rolling overhead. But this cloud wasn’t a cloud at all, it was a mass of insects clumped together.
It wrapped the entire outdoor stage in a dome of countless swarms. Every winged thing in there was desperate to chew my flesh and lay eggs under my skin.
“Damn.”
And out of that rabid storm of insects, people staggered toward me. Their bodies were riddled with holes, and from those holes, tiny insect eggs popped and fell.
These were the corpses of people who failed to evacuate. They had become nests. The eggs under their skin hatched, tore through the flesh, and launched themselves at me.
— Great victories are born of great numbers.
“Hard to argue with that.”
If you wanted to win, the simplest thing was to bury them in numbers. I walked toward the thing while burning away the swarming bugs’ vitality with the Paradoxical Flame.
“Ugh… aaah! Help… me.”
The people turned into nests were still alive. I guess it thought that would trouble me.
No chance. I quickly cut off the breath of those who had become hives.
— Cruel.
“Yeah. In a situation like this, people turn merciless.”
There was no returning them to normal. Better to die now than to keep living as a factory that never stopped producing insects.
Pity came second. With this many bugs already, I had zero desire to let the numbers keep climbing.
— You are a strange one.
In the cloud where uncountable insects raged, the monster muttered.
It all came down to flow. Read the flow of the surging swarm and move with it. No different from a leaf drifting on water.
The blue tracers flaring around me vibrated the mana in the air, shaving away the enemy’s mana. The Paradoxical Flame I controlled on all sides burned the stamina of the bugs pressing in.
“What’s your goal?”
It answered.
— I am the reverse face of victory. The ugliness that inevitably follows every triumph.
“Not that.”
When I spoke, it raised a hand and clenched a fist. The storm-cloud of insects lumped together in one place, shaping into a massive spear.
— We enforce inevitability. Attendants of birth, nurses of fate, the proclamation of an ending to an imperfect world. You struggle, we remove. The masses name me Ballea, and they fear.
The spear woven from interlocked insects screamed through the air like a jet taking off.
Black fire-clotted spear and blue tracers hacked at it again and again. My strikes came so fast it looked like there were several of me, and they shattered the incoming insect spear.
Wings, broken shells, bug ichor splattered everywhere. Riding the opening I’d made, I drove forward and thrust my spear straight into the monster’s chest, the thing that called itself Ballea.
With a shrill note, the point sank into its heart.
“Speak in plain words. Say something I can actually understand, you bastard.”
As it reeled back, the insects swarmed me again, a hateful storm of wings screaming in my ears. I fixed on Ballea past the limited sightline.
How many of these things were there, what exactly was their purpose, and what did they have to do with the Descendants of Dangun. I knew nothing.
Sparks skittered across the area, and the flying insects all dropped to the ground at once and kicked their legs.
“I finished leading the civilians out. Within five kilometers, there probably aren’t any left.”
Han Sang-ah stood beside me with her sword. Electricity was poison to bugs. Pokémon and electric flyswatters had already proved that. Pale sparks crackled murderously along Han Sang-ah’s blade.
“Where’s Jung Oh-hoon?”
“He took position on a nearby rooftop.”
Good, he wasn’t cut out for close-quarters anyway. No sooner had Han Sang-ah answered than, as if to prove she was helping, a few bullets snapped in and detonated, sweeping heaps of insects away.
“Is everyone else just napping? This is in the middle of Seoul.”
No way the Association was doing nothing.
“The Association decided they can’t recklessly send in unvetted Hunters. They issued an emergency cooperation request to Hunters above a certain level.”
So we’d be waiting about thirty minutes.
“Let’s end it before then.”
“Think you can?”
I swung my spear, burning the swarm’s muscle with Paradoxical Flame, and answered.
“Probably?”
If Jung Oh-hoon kept good ranged support and Han Sang-ah and I pinched it like we had many times before, we could handle it. We didn’t need to break the insects spinning around us.
We needed to break Sohwi’s rotten body, the core controlling all of them.
“Most of those bugs can’t get through my coat.”
Han Sang-ah’s coat was a special piece we got after cleaning up Bratsk’s Refrigerator. It seemed a large portion of the bugs Ballea spewed couldn’t hurt her while she was under the coat’s protection.
That made things easy.
“You thin the swarms then.”
Defense that nullified their attacks, and the power to command electricity, which was a hard counter to insects.
For this job, Han Sang-ah was way more efficient than me.
“Fine. Then while I’m cutting numbers—”
I’d pound that thing’s true body. And anything she couldn’t reach, Jung Oh-hoon could finish from range.
Let’s do this.
“It’s easier than the Refrigerator, right?”
“Yeah.”
Answer given, Han Sang-ah led by example. She rushed straight into the mass and swept her lightning-laden sword in clean arcs. Each strike hit hard enough that any bug that touched the bolt collapsed at once.
“There are people too. Still alive.”
“Any chance we can save them?”
Right after I explained, Han Sang-ah asked the question.
“No. There’s no undoing it. They either live as hives for the rest of their lives, or they die.”
One of the two. Hearing that, Han Sang-ah’s sword flashed cold and sharp. The people stumbling toward her lost their heads in clean cuts and rolled across the ground.
“I could be wrong, you know.”
“Even if there were a way to bring them back, I swung after hearing you out. It’s on me, so you don’t have to carry the responsibility.”
With that, she kept carving through the endless surge. As she drew off a big chunk of the swarm, the number of insects hovering close around the core, the part I had to fight, thinned out.
“Let’s not call this cowardly. You’ve been mouthing off since earlier about how numbers win.”
You wouldn’t go back on your own proud words now. That would be a bad look.
With a wet cracking sound, mold-slimed meat dotted with mushrooms sloughed off and plopped to the ground. Dozens of insects bit one another’s jaws and made a lattice, then strips of ragged, rotten flesh oozing pus and foul blood draped over it to form something like a club.
It picked the club up and leveled it at me. At the same time, a surge of mana so strong it raised my arm hair burst from its body again.
Even with resonance shaving at it and my constant attrition of its mana, it still had that much to give.
— Come.
It flicked the club, and filthy spores scattered. I planted my feet and watched it, then stepped in. The club came down for my crown.
When the shaft of my spear and the club collided, I bled off the force and twisted the trajectory with everything I had.
The ground shattered. Mana shockwaves rippled outward. The stage collapsed in a slab and the blast rolled out. Of course I was right next to it. I got caught in it too.
“What a psycho.”
Not a shockwave, but it felt like a truck hit me. Its attack didn’t end in one stroke. At point-blank, we never stopped swinging, me and Ballea.
Defense, evasion, counterattack, all blurred together as we fought like mad.
‘This is bad. This is going sideways.’
The speed and ferocity were so vicious that I kept losing the thread of its movements. In a melee like this, you were forced to move on pure instinct.
And why was it so good at fighting? It was ridiculous. Summoners like this usually had weaker true bodies.
“Kgh.”
With a heavy thud, its club finally smashed into my flank. The impact punched through muscle into bone, then deeper into my organs. I flew at insane speed and cratered a wall.
I spat a handful of blood, then unzipped the hem of my jacket. A rain of shattered plates clattered out of the suit lining.
“Special… alloy my ass.”
Smashed in one go. Unreal. But at least thanks to it, I’d avoided having my bones and meat pulverized. Still, I didn’t feel like calling it that lucky.
I couldn’t dodge it, couldn’t block it, so I ate the hit. Which meant I’d see more of the same in the next exchanges.
— Now do you realize your level?
“How could I not? One hit and I’m like this.”
No matter how stubborn I got, right now I was losing. It felt stronger than Lee Se-eun.
I staggered up and wiped my mouth.
“You… huff, you can’t stay here much longer, can you?”
It didn’t answer. To pour out this kind of power while borrowing a body like Sohwi’s, the flesh wouldn’t hold.
This was different from a moment ago. That much force had been within what Sohwi’s body could manage. But the moment Han Sang-ah and Jung Oh-hoon joined, the mana it spewed grew several times stronger.
This output would destroy Sohwi’s flesh. I steadied my spear after a brief sway.
— Before this body breaks, something like you is easy to erase.
“And even if you die, nothing happens to the real you. If you get to take out a nuisance while you’re here, that’s profit for you too huh.”
It had obtained the flesh by contract and possessed it. Even if I killed it here, it could just discard the corpse.
— You know too much. Strangely too much. By your kind’s knowledge, you shouldn’t be able to grasp these things.
It said that, then gripped that revolting club with both hands.
“Guess I’m breaking a few more bones today. My poor body, always suffering because it met the wrong owner.”
At the very least I’ll have to feed it beef when I get back. I coughed, spat more blood, then spoke.
“Han Sang-ah, I’m turning the lights off. You and Jung Oh-hoon will have to deal with it.”
I snuffed out the Paradoxical Flame burning around us. Then I lit it again, this time along the spear. Paradoxical Flame rolled along the shaft like a black sun.
— That flame is inscrutable as expected.
“You can’t tell what it is even after this much time, right? Then no need to understand it.”
I’d accelerate the collapse of Sohwi’s flesh. If I get beaten to death before the body fails, then I would lose. If that body breaks first, I win.