23. Snatching Someone Else's Fortuitous Encounter First — That's The Real Flavor (3)

“Grrrrrrr!”

A monster wearing a white mask let out an unearthly shriek, like something rasping phlegm up from its throat.

A Mask Beast.

The thing channeled every kind of curse through the mask that covered its face, and its raw physical power matched a 2nd-Rank Hunter’s.

Kang Minyeong recoiled in disgust.

“I don’t like exhibitionists, but that mask is even worse.”

The Fallen Worshipper. The Demon’s Eye. And last of all, the Mask Beast. Monsters rarely seen in an ordinary 2nd-Rank gate.

A sinister light flickered above the white mask. Black-red blotches bloomed across the scales of Fafnir, who stood at the front, and spread like mold.

“Grririri.”

A laugh seeped out from behind the mask. The curse of rot could only be scrubbed away by washing the afflicted area with a Priest’s blessing or holy water.

“Want me to drop a blessing on you?”

— No. As it happens, there’s something I wanted to test, so this works out.

Spirit-energy condensed in Fafnir’s hand. He shaped it into the form it took just before aura manifested, then pressed it firmly against the black-red blotches.

— Tssssss!

With a searing sound, the curse’s energy was drawn into the spirit-energy.

— Spirit-energy, when you get down to it, is a kind of mana too — so I figured I could draw it off with a stronger force.

Exactly as Fafnir said. Spirit-energy was the power that defied death; put another way, it ranked at the very top among the energies that carried the attributes of the negative dimension. Applied right, it could absorb most curses.

Did he figure it out on instinct?

This was high-level knowledge Yujin himself had come by only thanks to the Library of Knowledge, yet Fafnir had grasped it on instinct alone. Yujin had commanded the soul as a minion in his past life too, but a talent this monstrous was something he could never quite get used to.

Good thing I went to pay my respects the moment I regressed.

— I’ll have to get more accustomed to this body.

“Isn’t this enough already?”

— It’s not easy to concentrate energy anywhere but the hands. And you can’t exactly touch every spot when a curse lands.

“There’s a fitting opponent right there, so try fighting one. I’ll only step in when things get urgent.”

The Necromancer and his minion chatted on, calm as anything. A ways off, the Mask Beast flew into a rage.

“Grririt!”

Once again the curse crept in to corrode Fafnir’s body.

“Let me run a little experiment of my own.”

He cast Unholy Blessing over the cursed area, and true to a holy spell, it peeled the Mask Beast’s mana away.

— Crrk— crk!

A clean crack split the white mask, the curse’s medium. Exposed to the holy spell, the curse rebounded its recoil straight back onto the beast.

“Good. It’d be a problem if that thing broke.”

He loosed five Cursed Fangs at once, and they pierced the Mask Beast’s nape and heart. As its head drooped, Yujin peeled the white mask from its face.

I’ve got a use for it.

Starting to get a vague idea, are we?

And it wasn’t just the Mask Beast’s white mask.

This pattern surfaced every time the shrine rebuilt itself. Each symbol stood for the Fallen Worshipper’s horn, the Demon’s Eye’s pupil, and the Mask Beast’s mask.

It doesn’t just tell you which monster comes next.

Each symbol had its matching emblem, and gathering enough of the three would open the way down to the basement of the Forgotten Shrine, where the gate’s core sat.

Forty-nine of each, it said. In pristine condition.

The white mask lost durability fast whenever it cast a curse or took recoil the way it just had, and the Demon’s Eye was hard to keep intact while hunting it down. Nor was that all. He had to roam a building as large as dozens of soccer fields strung end to end and track down as many as forty-eight axis-pillars.

Which is exactly why it went nearly a year without being cleared.

How Jang Miseon ever discovered these conditions, I have no idea.

“Boss. The Phoenix Guild’s hunting nearby.”

He looked where Kang Minho was pointing. A few pillars away, a band bearing the firebird mark moved as one to hunt down a Mask Beast.

Speak of the devil.

A blade flashed. The sword in the hand of Jang Miseon, the woman they called the next Sword Saint, split the Mask Beast clean in two, from the crown of its head to its crotch. Blood spilled from the severed halves and soaked the floor.

It’s not aura or anything like that.

That was almost certainly a property of the Wind Sword in her grip, a blade that would sever anything, formed or formless, so long as the cut landed on the right instant.

Though if you don’t slice cleanly along the grain, it turns on you instead.

She was a talent who, but for dying in Arahan’s trap, would have surpassed the Sword Saint herself. The claim plainly hadn’t been idle.

Jang Miseon’s the originator of the Forgotten Shrine clear, after all.

Can’t let my guard down.

“We’re picking up the hunting pace a notch.”

— A contest? Hah. My heart hasn’t burned like this in ages.

Fafnir’s fighting spirit blazed up. The Scraps team behind him, by contrast, went pale as ash.

While Yujin stoked his own drive, guilty conscience and all (?), Jang Miseon, hunting a little way off, shot him a sidelong glance of her own.

“Something on your mind?”

“That team. Their hunting speed is no joke. And it’s strange — they command undead as familiars.”

“They won’t measure up to you, Hunter Miseon. No need to pay them too much heed.”

A Phoenix Hunter on the same team tossed the remark off lightly.

“If they were talented Hunters, a major guild would’ve scouted them, wouldn’t they?”

The Phoenix Hunter snickered.

Jang Miseon said nothing. Her eyes stayed fixed on Yujin as he hunted the Mask Beasts.

He’s no ordinary man.

Her finely honed instinct sounded an alarm. Even at this distance, a dangerous presence prickled at her senses. Somehow, she had a feeling she would cross paths with this man again, and not only here but in other gates as well.

Six days had passed since the clearing of the Forgotten Shrine began.

“This place is even worse than the borderlands, huh?”

“Monsters just keep coming, no end to ’em.”

The Scraps team strode up to the monsters their undead had felled and deftly pried out the mana stones.

“Listen to these guys — all they ever saw in the borderlands was Orcs.”

Heh.

Yujin let out a flabbergasted little cough. These kids. Outside the handful of gates that hid a fortuitous encounter, they’d be hunting mostly in the borderlands, and here they were already growing complacent.

I’ll have to give them a proper taste of what the borderlands can do one of these days.

— Bwahaha! Come at me, you lowly things!

Fafnir plunged headlong into the heart of a pack of Fallen Worshippers. He just kept getting bolder. His frame had been built atop a Draconian corpse, and he was throwing it around on purpose, claiming he meant to digest the insight he’d won in their sparring by forcing himself into spots he couldn’t block.

Dammit. I’m the one doing the healing here.

There was no middle ground with that one.

Since I haven’t split the soul and the dragon-race essence apart with a Life Force Vessel yet, it’ll be a problem if he takes a fatal wound.

“Go help him.”

He threw in an extra pack of Armored Zombies to keep the damage to a minimum.

When the monsters’ numbers thinned, he had the Armored Zombies or Fafnir pin one down and wrung the life force out of it.

The experience he raked in was staggering, too.

Isn’t this what they call clearing the ditch and catching the crayfish while you’re at it?

Heh heh.

One corner of Yujin’s cheek twitched.

Hey, don’t go meddling in how other people laugh.

Yes. Thank you for the wisdom, O useless Constellation.

After every hunt, he didn’t forget to quietly lay pieces of the monsters’ bodies on the emblem-carved pillars.

— Wuuuuung!

A blue light shimmered over the symbol.

That’s forty-eight now.

Even with a competitor pushing him to keep his pace up, it had taken a fair while. Finding the emblem-carved pillars was a chore in itself, and when he finally went to activate one, the emblem was sometimes too damaged to respond at all.

A few burst capillaries in an eyeball and it won’t react?

Even calling on the Cursed Fangs to keep each kill as close to whole as he could, he still failed to wake some of the pillars. It had eaten up plenty of time, but his preparations were complete at last.

“You lot go sell the mana stones.”

“And you, Boss?”

“I’ve got levels to grind, so I’ll keep hunting.”

“Understood.”

Having packed the Scraps team off out of the gate on the pretext of unloading the byproducts, he set off for the heart of the shrine.

How long had he walked? The ground beneath his feet began to tremble.

— This place doesn’t even pause to catch its breath. Let’s get out, quick.

“Not leaving this time.”

— Was being ground into mincemeat your dream?

“I’ve kept my eyes open while clearing the gate, you know.”

Fafnir caught his meaning at once.

— Ho-oh. You’re telling me you found the Forgotten Shrine’s secret.

“To confirm it, I’ll have to wager my life.”

Yujin laid the pattern out for him.

“We need to find the pillar at the shrine’s center carved with this shape.”

— A zombie has no intellect, so the only two who can pound the pavement are you and me, master.

“Run till your feet sweat.”

Combing back through his memory, Yujin sprinted to a nearby pillar.

— Bang! Bang bang!

Walls jutted out without warning and floors caved in; mid-reconstruction, the shrine heaved about however it liked. An Armored Zombie that failed to dodge a collapsing floor was swallowed whole.

Not even bones would be left behind. How many minutes had he been running through the shrine as it rebuilt itself?

— Master. Over here.

Spotting the forty-ninth pillar, the one that bore the shrine’s axis, he held out the emblems he’d stashed away in advance.

— Pajijijijik!

Along with a spark, a horn, an eye, and a mask seeped into the pillar. The instant that last pillar woke, the shrine’s ceaseless heaving went still.

“Phew. Thought I was a goner.”

— Gugugung—!

The floor right in front of the activated pillar fell away, opening a passage down to the basement. Without hesitation, Yujin descended into the cellar of the Forgotten Shrine.

— Step. Step.

Yujin’s footsteps scattered the hush of the underground passage.

— Awfully composed, for someone who cracked the secret of a long-uncleared gate.

“It’s not like I’ve cleared the gate completely.”

— True enough. We’ve got nothing on the boss monster.

Fafnir muttered, low.

The truth is, I know exactly what’s coming.

A good thing I remember Jang Miseon’s interview so vividly. If I’d judged the clear too steep for what I could do, I’d have had to round up more team members.

No need to split the reward.

How long had he walked? A twenty-meter iron door rose to bar Yujin’s way.

— This must be the boss zone.

“The air’s gone ominous.”

Beyond that door lay the core that kept the ‘Forgotten Shrine’ gate alive.

Death Gardius, the Masked Demon-Beast

Letters from no world of theirs, the demon-tongue, had been carved across the iron door.

Yujin set his right hand against the iron door.

— Creak.

The solid-iron door let out a heavy groan and slid apart to either side.

“Come on out.”

Through the gap in the parted door…

“Grooaaaah!!”

The Masked Demon-Beast, guardian of the Forgotten Shrine’s core, loosed a roar and welcomed its intruder.

Death Gardius, the Masked Demon-Beast, looked like the three monsters that haunted the Forgotten Shrine fused into a single body. It stood about five meters tall. Three heads sat atop its torso, each fitted with a white mask, and one of them held a single enormous eye that brought the Demon’s Eye to mind.

Below the three necks, dozens of tentacle bundles hung like strands of hair, and beneath them elastic muscle reminiscent of the Fallen Worshipper writhed in grotesque coils.

“Quit barking. It’s grating.”

At Yujin’s unruffled mutter, a sinister light swirled in the single-eyed mask.

— Kwakwakwakwa!

A purple ray as thick as a tree trunk gouged the ground as it tore toward the spot where Yujin stood, an eye-beam far stronger than the killing ray the Demon’s Eye let loose.

— Without my leave, you don’t get to touch my master.

— Wuuung—!

A black current surged up over Fafnir’s outthrust fist and blocked the killing ray. That current was Dark Fighting-Aura, spirit-power hardened into form by the intent loaded into it.

The first blow was blocked, but the Masked Demon-Beast paid it no mind and moved on to its next attack. Tears of blood streamed from the white mask. The instant-cast curse seized its target the moment it fired, leaving not even a breath to dodge.

“Kroooooo!”

“Kiiiit!”

The monsters Yujin had cut down in the Forgotten Shrine rose up as illusions and bewitched his eyes.

The Masked Demon-Beast’s curse was no simple illusion. It reproduced each monster’s particular bloodlust and presence so faithfully that, even knowing they were phantasms, he couldn’t help flinching.

“You. Food. I eat.”

The Masked Demon-Beast tilted the corners of its eyes up a fraction, a sneer certain of its victory.

“Hey. You laughing?”

— Crrk—!

A small crack carved itself across the Masked Demon-Beast’s mask. The medium had taken damage as the curse it had laid on Yujin shattered and rebounded.