novelraw Chapter 90
Chapter 90
Chapter 90
At my words, Han Sang-ah answered.
“Staying put in one spot without moving.”
“Right.”
It didn’t distort space, and it didn’t lift the terrain and whisk it elsewhere. In short, if you stayed fixed in one place and didn’t move, that was the end of it.
“I also know exactly where the two of you are right now. If you don’t move even a single step from there, I’ll break the magic circle and come back.”
At my words, Han Sang-ah and Jung Oh-hoon nodded.
“For the record, this isn’t easy.”
It sounded simple enough when said aloud, but holding out without being fooled by false senses was no ordinary task.
“You might see me dead, or you might see something you value thrown into a serious crisis.”
You might hear cries begging for help, or a voice imitating the operator telling you the situation is over and to proceed according to the guidance.
And… while you endure all of that, the ghosts keep trying to possess you.
“It’s even possible you see an illusion of me attacking you.”
And you have to ignore every last bit of it. People think illusions are like a street hustler’s sleight of hand, but illusion magic has always ranked among the most vicious kinds of magic.
“Do not move no matter what. If something tries to attack you, do not move, just block it where you stand.”
“If we’re attacked, won’t we be able to tell?”
Illusion is a false sensation. In other words, it deceives the five senses, sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste.
“If weapons clash, you’ll feel what seems like weapons clashing.”
If a sword slashes you, you’ll see a sword wound, you’ll smell blood, and you’ll feel pain. Falling properly into an illusion is exactly like that. Humans perceive and analyze the world through their five senses anyway.
Once those senses are deceived, you can’t perceive and analyze the world correctly.
“If it were the kind of illusion used by second-rate types, it wouldn’t be much….”
I was beginning to understand that this was the true power of the Jaun Valley. The wide-area illusion circle was delicate and refined, efficient and clean.
“Think of it like cultivating the Way, and hold out as best you can. Ah, and once I destroy one of the twenty-four hubs maintaining the circle, they probably won’t even try to hide anymore.”
Right now, they didn’t think we could break this magic circle. No, they probably didn’t even think we knew about it. But once I destroyed one of the hubs, things would change.
They wouldn’t hide. They would use every illusion at full power to torment people.
“Let’s meet back safely. We’ve known each other a while now, and getting a hole punched in the heart wouldn’t make any of us feel good.”
Of course, even so, if they fell to the illusions and the ghosts, I would have to kill them. There was no recovery from that anyway.
There was nothing more I could say now. I planned to move as fast as possible and smash the circle. Finishing my words, I left the two of them as they were and sprinted into the thick purple fog.
* * *
After Yoo Chan-seok hurried off, Han Sang-ah, who had been standing still, sat down on the ground without a word.
“…”
“Hey, Sang-ah. Come over here for a second.”
At Jung Oh-hoon’s voice, Han Sang-ah didn’t answer. If you couldn’t trust anything, then you trusted nothing. The order to stay still wasn’t actually difficult. You just had to stay still.
“Are you ignoring me? Hey!”
Jung Oh-hoon’s voice sounded, and cries for help followed. In front of her, a dying Hunter begged for his life.
Sitting quietly, Han Sang-ah felt pain like dozens of needles jabbing into her backside and twitched an eyebrow.
In the distance, a wave of flame surged toward her.
Heat flushed over her and her skin sizzled with pain. In an instant the flames engulfed Han Sang-ah’s body. Flesh burned, turned to charcoal, crumbled and scattered, and white bone hidden beneath showed through.
“It hurts.”
Murmuring that, Han Sang-ah simply watched the flames.
“Looks like he broke something.”
In the middle of a scene like being burned alive, Han Sang-ah muttered that. The voices and the wounded she had been seeing vanished, replaced by something else.
A stabbing pain made her look at her forearm. Something writhed under the skin. The things wriggling beneath the skin burst out through the flesh. They were wormlike, with teeth.
It wasn’t just her forearm. The toothed worms writhed beneath the skin all over her, crawling around and turning her body into a sheet of blood.
“Wow, disgusting.”
She said it in a curious tone, examining her body here and there. There was pain, but it wasn’t unbearable. Contrary to what her eyes saw, the pain itself was similar, only faint.
Even the pain when the wave of flame washed over her earlier wasn’t the same as real fire. Lucky, in a way.
Like showering with very hot water?
That was about the level of pain. Still, if you felt that kind of sensation while watching your body burn entirely, plenty of people would believe they were actually on fire.
Fishing in her pocket, Han Sang-ah pulled out a chocolate bar.
“Ah.”
She tore it open, and inside the wrapper a maggot as thick as her little finger wriggled. An appetite-killing sight. The stench of rotting food waste even tickled her nose.
With her appetite gone, she flicked the chocolate bar away. Water would probably be the same.
At that moment, she felt something in her mouth. Without thinking she spat, and half a cockroach popped out of her mouth and dropped to the ground.
“…”
As Yoo Chan-seok had said, it was a thoroughly unpleasant experience. But these illusions created sensory input, they didn’t erase real input entirely.
If that weren’t true, Yoo Chan-seok wouldn’t have been able to hear the operator’s real voice.
You heard real voices, and on top of that, voices conjured by illusion. Han Sang-ah picked the chocolate bar up off the ground, the one swarming with maggots, and bit into it.
There was the sensation of bugs bursting, the stench, and a vile taste. But at the same time, she tasted dirt.
“Ugh.”
She spat the chocolate out again. She had thought she picked up the one she had thrown, but apparently not. Looking carefully, several chocolate bars lay around her.
She had thrown one, but many lay on the ground. All but one of those were fakes.
“I want to kill them.”
If Yoo Chan-seok succeeded in breaking the circle and pinpointing the Erosion Core, the only thing left would be to assault the Erosion Core. Han Sang-ah, whose mood seldom swung, finally felt a hint of displeasure.
When they got back to Harbin and started the meeting, assuming it was feasible, she would ask to handle the finishing blow herself. With that thought, she clenched a light fist.
“…”
Even then, the ghosts tried several times to possess her body. They slipped into her and slipped back out again, letting out baffled groans as they went.
“I wonder how Jung Oh-hoon is doing.”
Flippant as he might be, he was still a Hunter she had ended up working with. His skill was growing steadily, just as Yoo Chan-seok had said. If things continued at this pace, he would be a real help in the next 1st-class Erosion Core sweep.
Letting him die here before they could even use him properly would waste human resources.
Unlike Han Sang-ah’s concern, Jung Oh-hoon was holding out in his own way.
“Uooooaaahhh—!”
Jung Oh-hoon locked shackles around his own ankles. They were restraints he could never escape by his own power. They were meant to restrain Hunters when needed, so their effect was outstanding.
He normally carried them for a different purpose. He hadn’t expected to use them like this.
“I’m sorry! Aaagh!”
He figured once Yoo Chan-seok arrived, that strange black flame would burn the shackles off, so he went through with it.
The effect was certain, and the price was harsh. He suffered pains like burning, freezing, and knives shaving his flesh.
“…What a shitty situation.”
He saw his parents, who had died in an accident.
And his ex-wife, paralyzed from the waist down. The screams he had been letting out stopped dead.
Human emotion was truly strange and delicate. Touch it right, and composure shatters in an instant. Touch it wrong, and instead of breaking, it could harden like a fortress.
Sensing an opening, spirits that had tried to enter and touch his soul began to fail and retreat faster and faster.
“Money.”
In the end, disabled people split into two kinds. Those with money, and those without. In a capitalist society people are always split into those with a lot and those with little.
But for the disabled, the gap existed on another level entirely.
So you needed money. He didn’t mean hospital bills.
It wasn’t just treatment that needed money. Inconveniences of the body could be blunted with money. Even if treatment held no hope, you could at least live comfortably.
A grinding sound came from Jung Oh-hoon’s mouth. And so he spent time within the illusion.
“Whoever is the head here, I take the last hit.”
Once Yoo Chan-seok broke the circle and located the Erosion Core, it seemed Han Sang-ah and Jung Oh-hoon would need to have a bit of a discussion about the rest.
* * *
I was running like sparks blown in the wind. The moment I wrecked one of the hubs maintaining the circle, its atmosphere changed. Now they looked like they had no intention of hiding.
As the circle poured out mana more intensely, the power of the illusions grew stronger and stronger.
“If I don’t hurry, they’ll almost all be dead.”
I drove power into my legs, the ground caved with thuds, and my body shot forward with a roar. A cliff spread out in front of me.
“It’s fake.”
I sprinted straight for the cliff without a care. At once my body fell. There was that lift in my gut like dropping, the rush of air scraping my skin, and my eyes saw the world plummeting.
It was all lies anyway. At this moment, I felt the circle’s mana interfering with my senses. All I had to do was keep running, legs pumping on empty air.
A wall appeared, and when I slammed into it I felt the impact. The ground below was bristling with sharp metal stakes. As I ran over them, my legs snapped and blood sprayed. Sulfurous fire poured down, and hideous vipers and beasts tore my limbs and clamped my neck.
“Pathetic bastards.”
Without a change in expression, I kept smashing the target points. After about an hour, half the hubs were rubble.
I was fine even in a real hell. Not the sensation of brimstone scorching flesh, but years walking places where brimstone actually scorched flesh.
And these things after experiencing all that? Even if my body were really going through it, I wouldn’t care. And this was an illusion on top of that. Not worth talking about.
The visions grew more intense. The stronger they got, the faster I moved.