novelraw Chapter 81
Chapter 81
Chapter 81
Living corpses swarmed through the city like cockroaches.
Corpses here, corpses there. It was harder to find a place without them.
Jung Oh-hoon and I watched their procession in silence from a rooftop.
"Even if the Pope visited Korea, it wouldn’t look like this."
It was a memorable sight, that much was certain. Countless corpses twisted and staggered like people high on something.
"But do those things not rot?"
"They aren’t just ordinary corpses."
If their bodies decayed like normal, Harbin would’ve been littered with white bone fragments by now. A body left at room temperature didn’t need long to rot.
"They really didn’t seem to have any proper reason or intellect."
I answered him briefly.
"There might be ones Nanami’s radar didn’t pi—"
As I kept talking, I spotted a corpse in the distance at the edge of a sidewalk, shaking as it let out a long, guttural "Guaaaaaah!"
It shuddered like it’d been electrocuted, then went boom, scattering razor bone shards and rotten meat in every direction.
"It pops."
"Yeah."
The blast cleared roughly a five-meter radius from the epicenter. Think of it as the power of a walking grenade.
"If we’d tried to just fight them head on…"
"If I had to compare, this place is the beehive, and we’re the hornets."
I could handle thousands of these things. But we had a problem.
"It’s bad if they explode."
If they just rushed us and kept popping, it would be extremely dangerous. The bone shrapnel was one thing, but the slopping chunks of rotten flesh carried a plague energy that was just as bad.
"We need to figure out what triggers the explosion."
For now, seeing one go off on its own suggested the corpses themselves were unstable.
Like nitroglycerin that went off from the slightest shock.
I said that, then raised a hand toward Jung Oh-hoon for a moment. He shut his mouth mid-sentence.
I felt mana. Damp, clammy mana. The kind that was perfect for handling these corpses.
It was searching for us. Much subtler and finer than Nanami’s radar magic.
"Still, fooling it isn’t hard."
I analyzed the spell faster than it could find us.
"It’s searching by body heat."
I wasn’t doing an academic analysis. I wasn’t a mage after all. But you didn’t need to understand programming to play a game, right?
At once, Paradoxical Flame clung to my body and to Jung Oh-hoon’s, burning away the heat bleeding off our skin.
At the same time, I traced the enemy spell’s flow back to its source.
"Underground huh."
I muttered that and looked down through the earth. I didn’t know who it was, but they were operating below ground.
Why did the types who played with corpses love basements and cemeteries so much?
If your magic is gloomy, you should at least cast it somewhere bright and cheerful so you don’t go completely mad.
It wasn’t like raising undead in a luxury hotel suite made them disobey their master.
"At least it’s good news that they’re off guard."
I’d felt it while dealing with whatever had invaded Sohwi before. Among these monsters, the ones with some intellect tended to underestimate humanity.
They assumed our understanding of mana was low.
And that judgment was true to a point. Why else would I have compared the shield generator I ferried across Siberia to a comb-patterned earthenware pot.
But me, here and now, I was someone who’d survived a trash world that solved everything with mana alone, after going through every kind of job for years.
I’d bet my understanding of mana was higher than that of most so-called intelligent monsters. I looked at Jung Oh-hoon.
"So, that gear. You’re sure about its performance, right?"
He glanced at his bracelet and nodded.
"It’s reliable. I’ve killed people with this, and it’s saved my life more than once."
The bracelet he wore gave its user a bird’s-eye sense. Even if an enemy hid behind cover, the bracelet’s overview let Jung Oh-hoon see them clearly beyond it.
"This time, you’re the key."
Set up at Harbin Long Ta, he would use those eyes and the bracelet to act as our control tower.
"I know. I won’t get spotted."
"It’ll be rough, but good luck."
If the enemy wasn’t stupid, time would make our movements look too systematic.
I didn’t know how smart the thing skulking under Harbin was, but if it sensed something off, it might sweep the city for intruders.
We moved out again. The roads were clogged with zombies like clogged arteries, so we had to run from building to building.
"Looks like a straightforward brute-force type."
I didn’t see a single carefully crafted undead. Everything here was disposable, one-and-done.
Probably, only the guards around its underground base would be exceptions.
"Chan-seok. What do you think our opponent is?"
"How would I know?"
"You know a lot."
"That’s the problem."
The more you knew, the more possibilities you could imagine.
It could be a lich, or just a necromancer. Maybe a demon…
"Sometimes I’m curious about you… but money matters more to me, so I keep going without asking."
Han Sang-ah simply wasn’t the type to care much about others. I really did pick good companions.
After failing to detect us with its magic, the thing in the city’s underbelly made no further moves. Jung Oh-hoon and I reached our destination, Harbin Long Ta, without trouble.
"It’s high."
At the top, I scanned the surroundings. Even I could see this clearly.
With his eyesight and that bracelet, Jung Oh-hoon would literally have no blind spots in Harbin.
"If every undead in this city is under control by something."
Then while we drew eyes outside, slipping underground fast to eliminate the controller would likely work.
Of course, taking out the controller wouldn’t turn the swarming undead to ash.
But they wouldn’t move in formation anymore. No matter how many there were, they were bargain-bin undead thrown together in a rush. If no one issued orders, sweeping them would be much easier.
Then, as planned, we could set a forward base in Harbin to push toward Jaungok.
"The follow-up team arrives tomorrow. Until then, hang in there, hidden camera."
"What’s with that phrase?"
We had to avoid detection. So, he was basically a hidden camera. Jung Oh-hoon started camouflaging at once. He probably wouldn’t sleep for days.
I coated him with Paradoxical Flame to erase his presence, then hurried to pull out of Harbin.
— I finally found you. I knew something was off.
I’d left Long Ta behind and was crossing a river bridge on Harbin’s outskirts when I heard that voice.
I turned, and a massive forearm filled my vision. I leaned back to evade and slid a step away.
"What is that? A fiddler crab?"
The corpse that attacked me had a grotesquely overgrown right arm. The limb was bigger than its entire body.
It looked like a fiddler crab, famous for a single oversized claw.
"Not the main body huh."
— No reason to take risks.
I snorted. Risk or no risk…
The undead’s build quality was sloppy. If this was its best work, the enemy wasn’t that strong.
Good news. At least, it meant there was nothing in Harbin that warranted us being on edge.
— I research the end of life.
"I’m sure you do."
Not at any impressive level, though. Being able to command lots of undead didn’t make you skilled.
I’d seen too many fools with lots of mana. And the thing mouthing off through the corpse in front of me was the same kind.
Research, was it. More like a pseudo-scholar who pasted on footnotes picked up from somewhere and churned out trash you couldn’t call a real paper.
The stitched-up fiddler-crab-lookalike in front of me was exactly that tier. But there was no reason to fight hard here and make it wary.
Once the follow-up team arrived, we would enter Harbin anyway. We could go all out after that.
So…
"Nice weather. I’ll be going now."
Time to bail. I finished my greeting and started running. I didn’t even sprint flat out. Just enough to barely shake that slapdash patchwork off.
I escaped at an easy pace, and as I expected, it eventually had to let me go. Taking Harbin would be easier than I thought.
"That should make things safer for Jung Oh-hoon too."
I checked in over the in-ear and gave him a quick rundown.
— That’s good. Then it’ll think it completely drove off the suspicious guy.
"Sure. Relax if you want. You’re the one who dies anyway."
— You talk so nicely. I might fall for you, you bastard.
He cut the line. From now on, he’d report his survival to the Seagull team at set intervals.
I rejoined the advance party near Harbin and spoke to Han Sang-ah.
"The follow-up team?"
"They plan to link up before dawn tomorrow."
"Good. Let’s wrap this up quickly."
Nanami spoke after hearing me.
"Do you think it’ll be easier than you expected?"
I nodded.
"The undead headcount is high, and the explosions are a problem, but the build quality is laughably crude."
On the premise that we moved with the follow-up team, it would be like tossing dry twigs onto a campfire, a clean sweep.
"There could still be variables."
I nodded. Fights always had variables.
"If it isn’t an external factor, there aren’t any variables in the hand in front of us."
"External factor huh. Like what?"
Only one came to mind.
"The Undying Legion."
Nanami’s expression turned uncertain.
"We do know the Undying Legion is roaming this region, but… China’s big, you know."
The odds weren’t sky-high. But not zero.
"Truth is, we still don’t know why undead that ought to be napping in Beijing are drifting around here."
If Harbin was part of the reason, we wouldn’t just be unlucky and get blindsided by a truck. We’d inevitably run into the Undying Legion.
"So we need to secure a fallback route, just in case."
Finishing an enemy when you held the advantage wasn’t hard. But retreating from a losing battle while minimizing losses was filthy work, the kind that defied easy description.
If the Undying Legion showed up, the number of people who could engage it would be limited. Me, Han Sang-ah, Jung Oh-hoon… and on top of that, we’d better count only on Nanami for long-range bombardment support.