103. All-Out War (4)

— Crunch!

His axe came down with everything he had and split the white bone clean in two. One after another, the bones propping up the five-meter Bone Tower of the Dead cracked apart, and with the pillars that bore its weight gone, the whole structure tilted to one side and collapsed in an instant.

“This thing’s some kind of magic gun-tower too, I’d guess?”
“It’s fascinating, Big Bro.”
“Don’t get too interested. We just do the job and that’s that.”

Min Sangjin gripped his axe. Two billion for a few swings of it. He’d been keeping his head down, quiet as a dead mouse, ever since trouble cropped up on a recent commission, but this job was about to loosen his pockets up nicely.

“Don’t go losing to those skeletons. It’d be embarrassing.”
“Sangjin, bro. I’m 4th Rank too, you know? I won’t lose to the likes of those.”

On paper, a Returner and a Skeleton Warrior rated around 3.5th Rank apiece. Their simple movements and limited skills dragged the practical figure lower still, but by any reckoning they came nowhere near threatening the Black Wolves.

“Let’s finish off the other two fast.”
“This fog. It feels ominous.”
“Right, bros. Let’s just smash the fixed emplacements and head back.”

Before setting out, they’d traced the direction the bone shells flew from and pinned down where the last two emplacements stood. The Black Wolves picked up the pace, and after some thirty seconds at a run the second Bone Tower of the Dead came into view atop a hill.

“That blood-red monster in front of the gun-tower — what’s that?”
“A golem. Made its body out of blood, did it.”
“Not going to be a walk in the park.”
“It’s a two-billion commission. The gun-tower’s got plenty of punch too, so let’s finish it before it even notices us—”

— Tang!

Min Sangjin’s axe flicked through the air. An arrow had come in at a strange angle, struck the blade, and ricocheted off. Behind him his teammates swatted the rest aside without much trouble, each with their own weapon.

“The angle’s weird.”
“The mana wavelength is faint. Not a Hunter, though.”

The arrows came in from blind spots. There wasn’t much force behind any single one, but each was aimed precisely at the gaps in the armor.

The Black Wolves pulled up short, eyes flicking left and right.

For an instant the muscles at the corner of Min Sangjin’s mouth twitched. Magic had manifested with no warning at all. That he, a 5th-Rank master at his peak, had missed the mana wavelength that realignment always gave off?

Surprise or no, a body honed in countless real battles answered the crisis on instinct. The aura sheathing his axe-blade tore through the net of lightning, then sheared clean through the Water Wall, raised to amplify the Lightning Web, leaving it in two pieces.

“Sangjin, bro. That just now?”
“I don’t know either.”

There’d been no counterattack when they smashed the first tower. Min Sangjin swept a glaring look around this one.

“There you are. You little rats!”

His blue-tinged axe-blade leveled toward the foot of the hill.

The thick killing intent rolled over them, and the Scraps, who had been lying camouflaged beneath their cover-cloth, flinched and scrambled to their feet.

“That’s why I told you, Senior. We’d get found out quick.”
“Ugh. A sharp old man, this one.”
“It’s just like Boss said. We’re fine.”

As the Scraps threw off their camouflage, the Blood Golem drew up beside them.

“Brats who haven’t even crossed the ‘wall’?”
“Wow. The Black Wolves have really gone as far down as they can go.”
“Big Bro. I’m in a bad mood, so let’s just kill them.”

Kang Minho swallowed hard at their bloodthirsty manner.

“The scavenger mercenary team, the Black Wolves. I heard their leader’s a 5th-Rank Hunter.”
“Hiek. Is that really true?”
“It’s fine. As long as we follow Boss’s instructions, we can hold them off.”

Kang Minho stole a sidelong glance at the Blood Golem, the powerful asset Yujin had handed them to defend the Bone Tower of the Dead.

— It has no judgment of its own, so you have to give it good commands. Otherwise it can’t manage much more than the role of a wall.

The golem was a token of his faith in the Scraps, and more than anything the three of them wanted to answer that faith with results.

“Everyone, loosen up and let’s do this.”
“You do you, Big Bro.”
“I, I don’t wanna kick the bucket in a place like this.”
“If we die here, won’t Bro bring us back as zombies at least?”

The Scraps shook off their tension. Across from them, thick veins bulged on the hand Min Sangjin had clamped around his axe-haft.

“You little shits. Sick of living, are you?!”

He kicked off the ground and lunged, and Kang Minho gave the Blood Golem its command.

The golem and the Hunter tangled together in midair, and in the same instant both sides, the Scraps and the Black Wolves, threw themselves into motion at once.

— Thud, thud.

Heavy footfalls swallowed every other scrap of noise spilling across the battlefield. A six-meter giant loomed out of the fog, a massive undead Brutal built on a frame of cured Troll bone and an Ogre’s corpse.

“Geriaak!!”

A spine-chilling shriek, like a sharpened awl dragged down a sheet of iron, hammered the eardrums of the massed-force Hunters.

Yujin swapped his stats over with the White Night talent.

He poured holy blessings into the Brutals.

“Go.”

The buffed Brutals surged forward, striding toward the Rakshasa host, and magic bolts of every color came rushing to meet them. At Oh Jeongsu’s command the magic-line Hunters realigned the mana they’d stockpiled and loosed it all at once, each firing a fraction apart so the bolts wouldn’t collide with one another.

A hexagonal shield winked into being in midair and caught the shower of bolts.

— Shing, shing.

Under the massed firepower of dozens of magic-line Hunters, the wall wrung from holy power shattered like a pane of glass.

One pair of hands can’t fend off ten. Without a flicker of alarm, Yujin spun out more holy power and cast the spell again.

‘You know what makes the Priest class group better than the magic-line?’

‘A single article of faith solves it.’

Holy spells weren’t tangled the way magic was. Magic worked by realigning mana, the force that makes up the world, and bending its providence and laws to the caster’s will. A holy spell, by contrast, drew its power from the blessing of the Constellation one served, or of the constellation-cluster that being belonged to.

‘With no realignment process, raise nothing but your proficiency at handling holy power and your spell-deployment speed gets faster too.’

Holy power: the stat he’d won back through regression. Only a Priest could normally wield it, but the White Night talent let Yujin command it just as freely, the energy falling into symmetry the moment it brushed against spirit-power. And so Yujin, who before his regression had already reached the realm of Transcendence, could deploy holy spells more deftly than any Priest alive.

“Seek, and it shall be given unto you.”

In under ten seconds he’d burned through half his holy-power reserves. Dozens of Hunters were firing at once, many of the same Stellar Rank as Yujin, and a few of them 4th Rank, said to have crossed the ‘wall.’ Even emptying every scrap of spirit-power he held, he could never have blocked that much fire outright.

‘This much is enough.’

These were undead raised on the frames of large monsters. A Brutal could take far more punishment than an ordinary corpse, but throwing them under that kind of barrage with no countermeasure was still dangerous.

“The magic bolts’ trajectories…?”
“That ward of his threw them off.”

The barrage should have come in a staggered sequence, each wave timed to wring out the most destruction. Yujin had used the Negation Shock Shield to soak up part of it and bend the trajectories of the rest.

The numbers were hopelessly lopsided. Even after spending half his holy power, the most he could do was interfere from the flank rather than block the bolts head-on.

‘The strategic objective’s been met.’

With its firepower bled down by Yujin’s interference, the barrage no longer had the force to halt the Brutals’ advance.

His holy power had run dry from spell after spell. Life Drain converted stamina into more of it, and when his breath snagged right at his throat, Marathon Spirit gave it back. The five Brutals closed to within reach of the host, taking only enough damage to leave their mobility untouched.

“Geriaaaak!!!”

The five Brutals fell on the tightly packed Hunters in a storm of fists and feet. A massive foot came crashing down toward the crown of someone’s head, and one Hunter threw his mana-reinforced shield up overhead.

“If I can just hold against this much—!”

— Crunch!

The Hunter was crushed flat before he’d held out even a single second. He lost his shape entirely, blood and ground gobbets of flesh oozing from between his armor plates to dye the ground red. The other Brutals broke loose with the same savagery, mashing the packed Hunters flat or swatting them aside with their arms.

“Deflect the attacks! Slough them off to the side, I said!”
“You’re crazy. You try it yourself. How are you supposed to parry that?!”

The difference in weight class was colossal. Block it? The gulf in strength was so vast they couldn’t weather a single blow. Parry? Slough the blow aside? Penned into a dense formation to take the undead’s charge, they couldn’t even manage that. There was no falling back so much as a step. How were they supposed to angle a weapon or shield and shrug the damage off to the side?

“Fuck! Stab first!”

A Rakshasa Hunter breathed materialized mana into his greatsword, aura keen enough to cut steel like paper. Using his long reach to the full, he swung the blade in a wide arc with his waist as the axis, and the edge raked across the Brutal’s Achilles tendon. Spirit-reinforced hide split, and the rigor-stiffened muscle ruptured.

“See. It work—”

— Puak.

The Brutal wrenched its right foot up, and the spikes bristling all over its torso ran the Hunter through the chest. Against a Brutal studded head to foot with sharpened protrusions, even the angles of attack narrowed. A greatsword was long, yet only by the measure of a human body, nowhere near long enough to reach a monster as tall as a two-story building.

“Cut them off!”

— Wuung!

Weapons crackling with blue current knocked the protrusions away, but within a few seconds, as though time were running backward, they grew right back.

Troll bone carried the concept of ‘regeneration’ within it, and fused with enough spirit-power, protrusions like those could be regrown at any time.

‘You know one thing and not the second.’

— Tsk, tsk.

Yujin clicked his tongue, not bothering to hide his contempt, and Kronos took offense.

‘It’s the dense formation that keeps them from coping.’

‘To take on a large monster, you have to avoid a head-on fight.’

A tank to hold the aggro. A dealer who can dump burst firepower in an instant. And a Priest on top of that to share the tanking load. A large monster’s specs ran far higher than its realm would suggest, so positions had to be held with absolute rigor.

‘Packed in tight, they can’t take up positions that could cope with a Brutal.’

‘In that case it’d have turned into a melee.’

If the fight tipped toward a war of attrition, that suited him well enough. A reinforced Skeleton Warrior and a Returner averaged out around the 3.5-Rank class, and dragged into a brawl they could force real damage onto the host.

‘It’s a good thing the Rakshasa Guild’s commander is decently capable.’

‘He prepped this battle’s strategy exactly as the intel he got from Arahan said he should.’

He’d swept the field carefully against the chance of corpse explosions. Reckoning too that Yujin might raise the dead, he’d rearranged his ranks the moment real fighting broke out, quick to adapt. That was why the hundreds of Skeleton Warriors and Returners Yujin had thrown in hadn’t done much damage.

‘And so they’ve ended up at the mercy of the Brutals.’

Ironically, in a loose melee the charge of five Brutals wouldn’t have cost them nearly this much; spread out, with room between one another, they could have weathered it. Had he been more capable, or failing that a fool brimming with nothing but zeal, he’d never have spent the whole battle dancing in the palm of Yujin’s hand.

“GODDAMMIT!!!!”

Oh Jeongsu’s curse rang out resounding, soaked through with rage and frustration.

‘See. Looks like he’s caught on now.’

‘My methods don’t suit your taste, your Constellation?’

Inscrutable as ever. That endless hero-prattle of his.

‘Well, he doesn’t hate it, so that’s something.’

Yujin gave a small snort of a laugh, and his army of the dead seeped into the gaps the five Brutals had torn open in the host’s ranks.

“Hey. Don’t push!”
“Hold the line, I said!”
“Get lost! Stand there dazed and that monster mashes you flat!!”

The Rakshasa Guild’s host was coming apart. The Bone Towers of the Dead had dwindled to two, but they were still spitting bone shells. The Brutals churned the ranks in every direction, and the shattered Hunters had nothing to set against an undead army that knew no fear. More than half of them were still alive, yet they had neither the will nor the room left to keep fighting.

‘I need souls to bind them in Unison.’

Here was a chance to claim the corpses of dozens of magic-line Hunters. Worked into undead, the whole lot of them would be a great help to the running of the Necropolis.

‘I take what’s there to be taken.’

But of course.

If I have to, I’ll pull the very ridgepole out of a burning house.

He was still binding the souls of the magic-line Hunters fast with the curse when it came.

“CHEON YUJIIIIN!!!!!”

A voice thick with rancor cut through the din of battle and found him. He’d drawn closer to the field to use Dark Calling, and Oh Jeongsu had spotted him, eyes stained with grudge where they showed between strands of disheveled hair.

“It was you? The commander.”
“You motherfucker. Are you even human! Doing something this wicked!”
“The one who got played is the idiot.”
“Even if I die here, I’ll at least kill you!!!”

Fifth-Rank magic came up short on both counts, slow to cast and hungry for mana. Oh Jeongsu tightened his grip on his staff and realigned mana fast.

‘I’ll use the magic I’m most confident in.’

The lightning gathered at the staff’s tip writhed, then came flying in a straight line.

Dodge? The instant Yujin shifted position, Oh Jeongsu would just twist the lightning’s path to follow. A measly 3rd Rank. Whatever means he used to control the undead, Yujin’s combat strength couldn’t be high.

“Die!!”

— Kwarrrng!

The deep-blue lightning bore down right before his eyes. Yujin let out a short breath and raised a long spear to meet it, a faint whitish energy winding around the Horn-of-Unicorn Spear.

— Spat!

The energy massed on the spear met the lightning in midair. The bolt, which should have driven on in a straight line, was ripped apart to either side.

“You — you cut lightning with a spear?!!”
“I’ve got a fair few tricks up my sleeve.”

An imperfect dark fighting-aura. Loosing the half-finished technique Fafnir had handed down to him sent the spirit-power he’d topped off with Life Drain plunging, and even knocking the lightning aside hadn’t come off cleanly. Part of the Chain Lightning’s charge seeped into his body, and numbness and pain came crawling up through his whole frame.

Even so.

“What’s wrong? You’re swaying on your feet, aren’t you.”

His tongue alone moved nimbler than ever, as though greased with oil.

“Is this even possible?!”

Oh Jeongsu stood at the 5th Rank. For more than ten years he’d cut down monster after monster, and on the enlightenment won in life-or-death battles he’d crossed the ‘wall’ not once but twice, until at last he’d completed his fifth Rank. The crystallization of all that toil. To be trampled now by a brat who’d been a Hunter for all of three months.

“This is a lie. There has to be someone backing you, no question!”

A power that held Busan’s underworld in the palm of its hand. A hundred and fifty Hunters, plus a hundred mercenaries levied from the Rakshasa Guild. More than two hundred Hunters in all, and of Hunters it was said that even a 3rd-Rank walked the field like a heavy tank, one past the ‘wall’ like a guided missile. A force like that, handled by a single first-year Hunter, alone? If anything, the assumption that he had a backer was the more reasonable one.

“Yeah. It is possible.”

At the cynical reply, Oh Jeongsu’s face twisted. And before long the main body of the Rakshasa host collapsed for good.