28. Crimson Camouflage (1)

Thick darkness swallowed the burrow whole; not a single mote of light reached it.

— Master. You all right?

“This much is nothing.”

Even sunk in the pitch-black burrow, Yujin looked around without a trace of alarm. A faint, whitish energy flickered at the edge of his vision, and he coated his retinas with a thin film of spirit-power, draping it over his eyes to peer out into the dark.

— Twang!

A Skeleton sprang out of the Ring of Black Darkness. Crafted from the Orc chieftain’s corpse, the defense-specialized undead was seeing its first battle.

“Got to earn its keep.”

“Ge-gel-gel-gel.”

The Skeleton Guard worked its jawbone in reply.

— I’ll take the vanguard.

“I’m counting on you. Great warrior.”

— Thud. Thud.

Fafnir’s footsteps boomed through the burrow, and the tremors stirred a monster into view from the far side.

Its body was nothing but bright-red mucus, a creature driven by pure appetite, the urge to swallow and dissolve. The slime slid across the floor and crept slowly closer.

— Never seen that color before.

“It melts even steel.”

Its danger rating was Third Rank. Physical attacks without mana behind them barely worked on it, and any armor not engraved with a reinforcement circuit melted within seconds of mere contact.

— So we’re supposed to just sit on our hands with an enemy right in front of us?

“It does have one more weak point.”

Yujin extended his index finger, pointing straight at the Red Slime’s body. A sphere a little bigger than a ping-pong ball sat buried in the center of the bright-red liquid.

“When it goes to hunt, it spreads out all of its mucus.”

— Meaning that’s the moment to destroy the core.

“The Red Slime exposes its weak point for exactly 0.1 seconds.”

— That’s no hard task.

Fafnir approached the Red Slime without a sliver of hesitation.

— Schlurrrp.

The instant the Red Slime, balled up into a hemisphere, stretched flat like a sheet of cloth spread wide…

— Haaap!

His outstretched hand drove into the bright-red mucus.

— Whoom!

With a sound like a heavy stone dropped into a lake, the Red Slime’s body burst apart. Red liquid splashed in every direction; part of the burrow melted away, and acrid smoke hissed up into the air.

“You nailed that timing perfectly.”

— I told you. Said it wouldn’t be hard.

Fafnir’s smirking eyes suddenly wavered, unsteady.

— A slime doesn’t leave a corpse, does it.

“Right?”

— At this rate even your necromancy is useless.

“There’s no managing it with a slime’s remains.”

If corpse supply were the problem, I’d have raised the ones I killed before entering the gate.

— Then why did you come in empty-handed?

“Because I don’t need them.”

-Zombie
-Plague Zombie
-Skeleton
-Armored Zombie

That was the list of undead Yujin could craft without prior preparation.

A Skeleton? Thrown into a Red Slime, it would melt in a matter of seconds. A zombie might hold out for ten, an Armored Zombie reinforced with Bone Armor maybe thirty.

Yujin pulled off the Shadow Mask, snickering.

He erased the curse already engraved on it, then gathered the whitish energy at his fingertips and carved a different one in its place.

“Come to me.”

At his forceful command, the slime’s spirit came flying to Yujin’s side. The whitish energy encroached on the translucent spirit-body, and stained by spirit-power, it slowly turned pitch-black.

“Kihihihit!”

The laugh brimmed with an eerie, gloomy energy. The slime’s spirit, seized by Dark Calling, had become a wraith.

— And what exactly do you mean to use this wraith for?

“Debuffs and damage over time.”

Sleeping above an underground water vein left a person with sleep paralysis or a stiff shoulder, and a wraith worked much the same way. It clung to a living creature and injected yin energy, stiffening the body, scrambling the senses, or dealing damage through sheer physical force.

— For a lowly spirit, it’s quite the jack-of-all-trades.

Yujin didn’t answer, only twisting his cheek into a grin.

When he pushed a little deeper inside, three Red Slimes abruptly appeared at once.

“Kihihihi!”

Without being ordered, the wraith darted out and seeped into the red mucus.

Fafnir’s mouth dropped wide open.

— This piddly thing is… a debuff?

“More jack-of-no-trades than jack-of-all-trades.”

— What a waste of spirit-power.

“It does have one upside — the debuffs stack.”

Yujin could command twenty undead at once, and a roster filled out with wraiths turned surprisingly useful.

“Until the wraith count goes up, I’ll have to ask you to put in some work.”

— Pow! Whoom!

With every punch he threw, a Red Slime burst apart, one at a time.

“Come to me.”

One by one, the Red Slimes’ souls bowed to Yujin’s power and turned into wraiths.

— Now they’ve gotten a bit more useful.

Fafnir easily hunted down the Red Slimes, which couldn’t find their footing even with an enemy right in front of them.

Yujin’s party pressed deeper into the burrow without faltering. The path ran on, single and unbranching, and to finish clearing the gate they had to break through the Red Spider crew that had gone on ahead.

— Slipping out after just clearing the gate is going to be hard.

“Well, we expected that.”

After advancing for about two hours, a light the color of a flickering fluorescent lamp glimmered from the far side, conjured by magic.

— A bent passage, huh. That’s a bit of a bother.

Fafnir grumbled in a vexed voice.

The light’s source lay deeper in the burrow, where the passage angled into an L. There was no telling how large the Red Spider crew mining the blood-stone might be.

Kronos, who had been watching the situation all the while, burst into uproarious laughter.

Regression doesn’t mean I know everything.

Yujin sent five wraiths toward the place where the light flickered.

The moment the band of whitish spirit-bodies rounded the corner, an orange light surged.

— Kaboom!

A thunderous blast shook the entire length of the burrow.

The souls were annihilated all at once, three seconds after rounding the corner. One survived, but the orange light flared again and it met the same end as the rest.

The distance is about 100 meters. Four magic-line Hunters.

Judging by the explosive firepower, the tail end of Third Rank. Even Fafnir, an undead past Third Rank, would be in danger from three or more direct hits head-on; if the Red Spider crew’s tank line held firm, he could go down before he ever closed the gap.

Then I’ll need to create a new variable.

As it happened, slaughtering the Red Slimes had pushed him to level 30.

Time to draw out the knowledge I need for this.

“Ngh.”

Yujin clutched his head, spitting out a curse.

— You all right?

“Apart from it hurting like hell.”

With a long, deep breath, Yujin drove out the pain.

Bone Spear and the wraith pack, with Fafnir on top of it all, came to force enough to take on the Red Spider crew.

Having mapped out the battle in his head, Yujin wore a satisfied smile.

The Red Spider called the mined-out heart of the Ant Nest gate the crimson camouflage. Inside it, their crew encamped before the boss room had finished battle preparations.

“Which bastard came barging in?”

Jo Seungcheol, the Hunter in charge of the blood-stone mining, muttered in a voice laced with killing intent.

The Red Spider had deployed ten people to gather the blood-stone, every one of them Third Rank, the threshold commonly called the ceiling of an ordinary Hunter’s growth.

His own powerful unique ability and mana control had earned him recognition and heavy investment from the Red Spider. Factor in the synergy of his gear, and he could briefly put out firepower on par with a Fourth-Rank magic-line Hunter.

“Try hailing them.”

“There’s no response.”

One hour earlier, when the anomaly first occurred, the communications that passed back and forth on schedule had gone dead.

Some fearless bastard’s stuck his head into the Red Spider’s turf — why am I the one stuck dealing with it?

Blood-stone was a powerful catalyst that amplified mana. Ever since the alchemists’ class-change route had come to light, its value had been climbing steeply: roughly 12 million won per 100 grams. The red rocks scattered across the crimson camouflage were worth more than gold.

He’d been skimming a tidy bit of side income off it too, and now that a variable had cropped up, Jo Seungcheol’s mood sank through the floor.

“Whatever pops out, smash it to pieces.”

When Jo Seungcheol snarled like a wild beast, the Red Spider Hunters tightened their fighting spirit.

And in that moment, a Skeleton holding a shield of bone came into the Red Spider crew’s field of view.

“Ge-gel-gel-gel!”

Whitish spirit-bodies flickered behind the Skeleton Guard. Several wraiths fanned out, throwing the crew’s vision into disarray.

“A Skeleton?”

“That, and wraiths. What’s with all the undead popping out.”

The magic-line Hunters realigned their mana without panic. Whatever came crawling out of the burrow, one fact held: everything that wasn’t Red Spider was an enemy.

A volley of flame, split into fragments, blocked the wraiths’ approach. A bright-red streak of fire coiled around the Skeleton Guard’s ankle, and from the front a ball of flame condensed to the size of a soccer ball came rushing in.

“There’s nowhere to run, you bony bastard!”

Jo Seungcheol bellowed.

— Thud!

The Skeleton drove its shield into the ground with all its might and triggered its defensive skills. A green light wrenched the fire spells off course; they slammed head-on into the bone shield, and the great explosion sent a blast of hot wind searing down the passage.

“G-ge-gel.”

The Skeleton Guard had taken the full baptism of magic in the narrow passage. More than half of its great shield had melted away, and part of the blast must have caught its body, knocking its jawbone askew; even so, it weathered the attack without being annihilated.

— Well done. Warrior of bare bones.

A large silhouette burst out, vaulting clean over the Skeleton Guard. The moment he came down, Fafnir kicked off the ground and rapidly closed the distance to the Red Spider crew.

“A rotten-stinking undead, and it’s got the nerve—!”

Killing intent glistened in the corners of Jo Seungcheol’s eyes. He’d already caught on that the shield-bearing Skeleton was bait.

The unique trait doubled his mana cost but slashed the post-cast delay and sped his realignment.

While the rest of the magic-line Hunters were still regathering their released mana, Jo Seungcheol was already moving.

“Eat this and drop dead!”

He could loose a second fireball within a single second.

A blazing fireball, boosted by his assorted gear, carried power approaching quasi-Fourth-Rank.

In a cramped space like the crimson camouflage, even a Fourth-Rank Hunter who could project aura past a wall would take severe burns; there was nowhere for the explosive energy to escape.

“So that’s why the wraiths died with hardly any gap between them.”

A human voice spilled out from the far side of the burrow. Yujin, who’d been hiding behind the bone shield, parted his lips.

Something wrapped in whitish energy shot in from the far end of the passage and slammed head-on into the fireball, several times faster than Bone Control. Even though Jo Seungcheol had timed his shot to the very instant his realigned mana released, the thing flew faster still and intercepted it.

— Kaboooom!

The fireball burst short of its target. True to a spell built for sheer destruction, it scattered its explosive energy in every direction and tried to swallow Fafnir along with it…

— Shhhwiiing!

Yujin spun the spirit-power loaded into the Bone Spear, shoving the explosive energy out to the edges.

“You completely pushed away a Fire Ball’s explosive energy?!”

Jo Seungcheol was aghast. What would his reaction have been if he’d known Yujin was nothing but First Rank?

One Cursed Fang shattered as the price, but he’d closed the one thing that mattered most of all: the distance.

— Splendid. Master.

Fafnir’s cheek, which should have been locked stiff with rigor mortis, twitched into a single streak of mockery, the very likeness of Yujin’s own.

Sparks flickered in the corners of the Red Spider crew’s eyes.

“You take us for scarecrows?”

“Kill him!”

Five Martial-line Hunters, the tank among them, gripped their weapons and barred Fafnir’s path. Every piece of the Red Spider crew’s gear was Rare grade; they looked fully prepared, sparing nothing to defend the crimson camouflage.

The gate admitted only up to Third Rank. Any run-of-the-mill Hunter would be cut down by the Martial-line blades long before he ever broke through the defensive net to reach the magic-line ranks behind it.

— Vwooong!

Fafnir’s spirit-power rang out, deep and sonorous, like the exhaust note of a high-output bike. This was aura made manifest: intent poured into energy until it turned tangible, and fists clad in that other form of power rained down on the Martial-line Hunters.

— Pow! Pa-pa-pow!

The dark fighting-aura layered over the fists, pouring down in a fierce torrent, snapped the Hunters’ weapons and crumpled their steel armor.

“It’s aura!”

“F-Fourth Rank?!”

“It’s not even a Death Knight — what aura is that?!”

In a flash, two were sent flying. The remaining three Martial-line Hunters held back, sizing Fafnir up warily.

“Something not going your way?”

Yujin’s voice came jeering.

A single thought flickered through the Red Spider crew’s minds: something’s gone wrong.