45. Spider Hunt (2)

“Forty-three missing.”

Choi Hyeongtae, the organization’s number two, went wide-eyed.

“These pieces of shit. What the hell were they doing, all dropping dead!”

The Kaesong–Paju borderlands had once been the Demilitarized Zone, dense forest barely touched by human hands, without so much as a proper road. Mobilizing large numbers here was hard, and so even the man-hunters’ chief advantage, their numbers, lost its edge.

“They’re bastards who only trust in their monster headcount! Is firing a signal flare the second they spot something really that hard?”

A sizable movement of man-hunters always left signs beforehand, yet so far not one such sign had turned up. The few man-hunters loitering around the Black Herb farm were a small lot. He’d handed each band a signal flare and a communication scroll, with orders to use them the instant they spotted a man-hunter.

“How is it that not one of them could manage that, and they all just up and died?!”

Choi Hyeongtae spat curses like a machine gun.

The Red Spider numbered in the hundreds, though not all were Hunters; the proportion came to about half. And forty-three of them had been taken down?

If the boss finds out, I’m a dead man.

The last time they’d clashed with a band of man-hunters, the dead had come to a little over twenty, and that hadn’t even been from guarding the Black Herb farm. This time they’d done nothing but search for the man-hunters’ traces, and the casualties were nearly double.

I can still salvage this.

The boss was busy stamping out the organizations that had raised the banner of revolt in Ground Zero, so he had no idea of the current situation. Which meant Choi Hyeongtae had to catch the man-hunters and make up the losses before the damage grew any worse.

“So how did their traces look?”
“It’s not ‘them,’ boss.”

The Hunter who’d investigated the marks of battle kept his eyes lowered as he went on.

“One person. And two mid-sized monsters, by our reckoning.”

“Heh. A search party of seven couldn’t fire off a single flare and got taken out by just one guy?”

Hard to believe, but he had to accept it. Forty-three people had already gone missing in the borderlands, after all.

“Damn it. ‘Missing’ is just the polite word for it.”

Choi Hyeongtae ground his teeth.

Hunters gone without leaving so much as a corpse. Going by how the footprints trailed off into the fog, they’d been subdued, hauled away, and thrown to the monsters as feed.

“Call up everyone except the ones the boss took with him.”
“Sorry?”

— Whack!

“Just do what you’re told. Who asked you to question it!”
“S-sorry, boss!”
“Grab your gear. We’re going to wreck those man-hunter sons of bitches.”

There was only one man-hunter loitering around the Black Herb farm. The bastard had jammed the scrolls by some means and picked off the Red Spider’s search parties one by one. They’d assumed no man-hunter would ever move with so few, and that blind spot was exactly where he’d struck.

“Throw up an encirclement and even he won’t have a choice.”

The outcome was already decided. To spare himself the worst of Kim Jaewoo’s tongue-lashing, he had to come away with at least some results. Otherwise an enraged boss might be the death of him.

“B-boss. What do we do if he runs?”
“Use your head. Damn it! Just keep a reasonable distance and lure the bastard in!”
“Ah. I’ll pass that along.”
“Useless lot, all of you. Without me you can’t do a thing.”

Choi Hyeongtae growled as he gathered his equipment.

“Phew. Finally I can rest a bit.”

Yujin perched on a conspicuous boulder. He hadn’t had any proper rest in days, and his eyes ached as if they might pop out of his skull.

Moving your body isn’t the only thing that counts as labor, you know.

He’d been the one gathering intelligence through the wraiths scattered around the farm, the one hunting down the Red Spider’s Hunters.

Jamming their comms means positioning matters, you know?

There wasn’t just one road leading to the Black Herb farm, after all. Unless they entered the fog he couldn’t block their communication scrolls or signal flares, so where he chose to pick the fight mattered as well.

And are the monsters just sitting still again?

He couldn’t forget where he was. This was the borderlands, the monsters’ territory. He’d made Armored Skeletons to guard the Black Obelisk, but left undirected they’d charge in recklessly and the losses would mount, so he couldn’t simply sit back and watch.

To a backwater goblin’s eyes, I suppose that’s how it looks. It’s all work.

It’s not over yet.

He had to rest as much as he could while the chance lasted. Life Drain kept his stamina pinned at maximum at all times, but even that did nothing for his mental fatigue.

I need to hurry up and raise my Stellar Rank.

Yujin had once been a transcendent who reached the 9th Stellar Rank, but he no longer possessed the mental fortitude he’d had back then. Imaging-realization: the higher a Hunter climbed in Stellar Rank, the stronger his will became, strong enough to stamp his own mental image onto the world. That old “sense” was still alive in him, but the mental image he’d built before his regression was gone.

He sat perched on the boulder, dozing in snatches.

“Kihihihiii!”

A wraith’s cry roused his sunken mind. The instant he moved to use Ghost Eye, a notice surfaced.

“Oho.”

Quick reaction.

Until now, the Hunters approaching the farm hadn’t noticed the wraiths right away. Unless something radiated killing intent, a spirit was hard to spot, after all.

“Good instincts.”

— They don’t tire out, do they. These Red Spider bastards.

“This time seems a little different.”

The wraiths under Yujin’s command numbered ten in all, creatures he’d made by going so far as to turn ten Armored Skeletons back into dirt.

To win a fight, intelligence comes first, you know.

A wraith inflicted only minor debuffs and had zero direct combat power. Even so, as long as it didn’t reveal its killing intent first, it stayed hard to notice, which made it the ideal minion for surveying the whole battlefield at a glance.

— How many have swarmed in?

“Hold on. Let me count.”

— Heh. So there are enough that you have to tally the enemy’s numbers.

“That’s part of it. And they’re spread thin too.”

The enemy revealed through the wraiths’ eyes was a considerable force. At a glance the exposed Hunters looked to number five or six, but groups of similar size were closing on the fog at intervals of roughly a hundred meters. Had he not relayed vision back and forth across several wraiths, he’d never have grasped the true scale.

“Finally bit the bait.”

— Hoo. Then has this Kim Jaewoo fellow come too?

“Doesn’t seem like it.”

He’d already confirmed the description of Kim Jaewoo, the Red Spider boss. A 6th-Rank Martial-line Hunter would be a burdensome foe even for Yujin; he’d been ready to abandon the Black Obelisk and pull back if it came to that. Fortunately, the boss wasn’t mixed in among the crowd.

— A pity. I was curious how strong this era’s 6th-Rank Hunters are.

“You’d be lucky to last even a minute.”

— Tch.

Maybe because he’d broken through the wall of the 6th Rank in his own lifetime, Fafnir burned with a misplaced fighting spirit.

“In his place, the deputy boss Choi Hyeongtae has come.”

— A 5th Rank, you said?

“And besides him, there’s one magic-line officer too.”

Two 5th Ranks, then. A stretch at his current level, but if he wrung out every trick he had, it was worth a shot.

— You don’t need to go out and greet them?

“They’ve swarmed in this far. They mean to settle the matter.”

Forty-three.

He’d shaved a sizable chunk off the Red Spider’s fighting strength. The Hunters who’d died had been 3rd Rank at the very least, and some among them had crossed the wall of the 4th Rank. Given how dangerous the borderlands were, that was only natural for the personnel they’d send.

“They can’t commit their full force because of the Madam, but they’ll have dragged out most of what they can spare.”

He’d entered the borderlands and had no way of knowing the situation back inside Ground Zero, and yet Yujin read Choi Hyeongtae’s mind as easily as if he were peering into his palm.

So the guests had taken their seats, then.

Hey. Backwater goblin.

The scribbles. I’m about to show you why I made them.

Yujin used Ghost Eye, then laid his palm on the ground.

Around there… this circuit.

— Pajik!

Sparks burst from the point of contact, and a faint current raced across the ground.

My vision. You’re sharing it too, right?

Cut the chatter and just watch.

The spark raced several hundred meters and reached the band of Hunters who’d entered the fog.

“Huh? Something just flashed—”

— KWAAANG!!!

The corpse he’d buried in the ground detonated beneath the Hunters’ feet, and bone and chunks of flesh burst up through the heaped earth. Each scrap, infused with spirit-power, was as deadly as a honed blade. The Hunter standing at the epicenter died instantly; the rest were left with wounds large and small.

“Sh-shit!”
“The hell, why’s the ground blowing up?!”

Sharing vision with a wraith, Yujin clicked his tongue.

Should’ve set it off a touch faster.

What? I’m busy, so get to the point.

It’s Corpse Explosion.

Even while hunting the Red Spider’s Hunters, Yujin had spent his spare moments burying their corpses in the ground and pouring spirit-power into them, so he could trigger Corpse Explosion whenever he pleased.

So even the backwater goblin’s catching on now?

I really do have to show you before you get it.

The Ignition Circuit answered only to a specific mana wavelength, which made it hard to detect. He’d wired the corpses buried here and there across the Necropolis into it, running the line all the way up to the boulder he was perched on.

— The sound of an explosion?

“Ah. You can’t see it, of course.”

— Seems it’s got something to do with what you’ve been working on this whole time.

And there it was. Fafnir hadn’t even watched it directly, yet a few words were enough for him to catch on. This was exactly the sort of thing that made the backwater goblin hopeless.

Ah. So that’s why I’m telling you — if you don’t get it, kindly stay quiet.

Yujin needled Kronos as he tapped the Ignition Circuit at intervals.

— KWANG! KWANG!

Explosions went off at regular intervals, and the stench of rotting corpses mingled with burning flesh coiled through the forest.

If I’d opened the poison field, I could’ve gotten a synergy effect.

The regret lasted only a moment. There was no point dwelling on what he didn’t have right now, and at this rate he’d soon be inheriting knowledge from a new field anyway.

Cleared out two-thirds of them.

Between the ones who’d died on the spot or soon would and the ones who’d lost an arm or a leg and could no longer fight, the enemy was as good as routed. In an ordinary fight, anyway.

“Fafnir.”

— I’m already finished with my preparations.

Two of them had taken no damage even from the point-blank explosions. Bringing down those two, the 5th-Rank Hunters who served as the Red Spider’s officers, would be the real victory.

“The enemy you’re facing this time is a Hunter who’s reached the peak of the 5th Rank. Don’t take him lightly.”

— Hu hu. Trust your master’s champion.

True, the 5th-Rank specs Fafnir had been granted were real enough, but objectively the gap was wide enough that the fight itself shouldn’t even hold together.

“Take this.”

— Charrrk!

— That’s the master’s armor. Why give it to me?

“Better it’s worn by someone it suits more than me.”

The Dragon-Scale Armor was a Transcendent-grade artifact he’d won from a long-uncleared gate, the Forgotten Shrine. It had served him well during the crimson camouflage clear.

Even the close combat that doesn’t suit me was coverable thanks to the Dragon-Scale Armor.

There’d been no occasion since to swing a spear on the front line, but he’d always worn it in case of the unexpected.

— Considering the off chance, it’d be better for the master to wear it—

“If you die, I’m finished too.”

Choi Hyeongtae was a Martial-line Hunter at the peak of the 5th Rank. If a man like that came at him in earnest, even Yujin had no answer for it. And even if he tried to flee now, where would he find the means to shake off a Martial-line Hunter?

“Even if you can’t win, you have to at least pin his feet down.”

Fafnir was the greatest fighting strength Yujin could field. The more his combat power rose, the higher their chances of victory.

— Charak!

“…Huh?”

— Power’s overflowing!

Hold on. The Dragon-Scale Armor had a function like this?

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

— What is it, master?

“If I’d known it’d be like this, I’d have given it to you long ago.”

Between a Draconian’s potential and the [Martial-Mage] trait, Fafnir already carried stats above his Stellar Rank. And now another twenty percent on top of all of them?

This really might be worth a shot.

“Handle Choi Hyeongtae. The rest of the Hunters I’ll deal with on my end.”

— Then let me have a go at it.

Fafnir worked his lips, a habit left over from his living days.