74. Once You Know It's A Trap, It's No Longer A Trap (4)

— Kk.

The drain on his spirit-power was so brutal his focus reeled. Without his staff to lean on, he couldn’t even stand.

Less than 5% spirit-power left, huh.

It came close to the figure he’d worked out in advance. He triggered White Night at once, pouring the life force he’d stockpiled into his all-but-empty holy power, his spirit-power, and switched his stats back over to White Night once more.

“Ge-gel-gel.”
“Gwoooooo!!!”

The werewolves’ corpses rose as Returners. The vampires, magic-users in life, came back as Skeleton Mages.

“U-undead?!!”
“Team Leader. The enemy’s numbers have passed a hundred.”

The Arahan strike force’s faces darkened.

In this era, no one knew how a person became a Necromancer; the transition route was a blank. He’d commanded the undead back at Ground Zero, but the Madam had kept a lid on the rumors, so it had stayed all but unknown. Even the Phoenix and Arahan guilds had written Fafnir off as nothing more than a summon.

It’s not over yet. You little bastards.

Out of it rose a five-meter giant with blood for flesh, and an undead cloaked in pitch-black spirit-power like a robe.

— Glory to my great Master!

“Awaiting orders.”

Jang Miseon looked at the Blood Golem and Jo Seungcheol and let out a low hum.

Just how many abilities does this man have?

The golem used blood for its medium. At the savage surge of mana the MIS-4 engine threw off, raw instinct flashed danger through her. Jo Seungcheol was no different. The robe of spirit-power given physical form sent the same ominous chill through her, and before she knew it her grip had tightened on her sword hilt.

“Team Leader. We’re surrounded.”
“Wh-what should we do?”
“Goddammit. Quit asking me and do some thinking for once. You sons of bitches!”

Song Myeongseok’s face contorted past all recognition. Gone was the unfailingly courteous, kindly figure; what showed now was the true face he’d kept hidden beneath the mask, raw and bare.

“Sorry, Big Bro. The autograph I got — I’ll toss it the moment I’m out of here.”
“It’s bad luck. Burn it.”
“Got it.”

— Grnnk.

Grinding his teeth once more, Song Myeongseok stepped forward.

“You think you’ve already won?”
“Drop the polite act. It doesn’t suit you.”
“For someone like me to even trade words with the likes of you, you should be grateful.”
“Wow. I should treat it as an honor to my whole house, then.”

— Shhng.

The blade slid free of its sheath, scattering a cold blue light.

“You, above all — I’ll make sure to kill you with my own hands.”
“You’ve been thinking that since the moment you built this double gate. No need to wear your jaw out saying it out loud.”

Yujin crooked a finger.

“Stop fighting with your mouth and come at me. Mister Supernova of Arahan.”

“Kraaaaaah!!!”

Eyes bulging, Song Myeongseok tore out of the swarm and charged straight in, the Arahan strike force scrambling after him. A formation already coming apart.

“Leave Arahan to me. Hold out a little and I’ll join up with you soon.”
“I’ll take Mister Supernova.”
“The ones left over, we’ll cling to their trouser legs and drag ’em down.”

The Scraps wore grave expressions. They needn’t worry. This was no fight to the death; pinning the enemy’s feet down was well within their reach.

“My minions. Trample my enemies.”
“Gwuhk.”
“Gel-gel. Die.”

The instant Yujin’s order dropped, the undead army surged toward the monsters.

“Kong! Kong!”
“Nothing worth eating on these ones. Filthy — get lost.”

Werewolves and vampires met them head-on, and the curtain rose on the battle proper.

“Gwoooooo.”

A Returner raised from a werewolf’s corpse tore into its own living kin, blood spraying through the air. The monster it bit didn’t simply take it, either.

— Sssrk!

With claws as keen as a whetted blade, it shredded the dead thing to ribbons. Undead and monster locked onto each other and wrung out every last ounce of strength until one of them died.

…

The Skeleton Mages held the swarm in check with long-range bombardment. The vampires, freshly risen into the air, drew their own blood and unfurled defensive barriers.

“Kihahat. Cheap tricks won’t kill me.”

One vampire moved fast, threading the rain of projectiles by a hair to fix its sights on the Skeleton Mages at the rear.

— Kwaaaaang!

An impact loud enough to burst an eardrum. A fireball erupted from the staff he’d won in the spider hunt, the GB (Greybase) R5-type, and annihilated the vampire in a single blow.

— By order of my great Master. There is no escape for you.

Jo Seungcheol worked his jawbone. His mana stat rivaled that of a Hunter at the peak of the 4th Rank, and with the Mana Circulation trait and decent gear stacked on top, he could put out enough power to blow a vampire or the like away in a single shot.

— Kwajik— kung!

The two hordes slammed together in earnest, tangling into a melee where friend and foe blurred past telling apart.

— Kkudeudeuk.

A werewolf bit into a Returner’s neck and tore the whole head clean off. The undead had the numbers, but one on one the monsters ran stronger.

Raising the reinforcement value of every corpse one by one — there are simply too many for that.

That was why the undead’s completion ran lower than usual. Even so, Yujin didn’t care.

“Answer my call.”

A werewolf, its neck wrenched askew in the Returners’ stubborn grip. A vampire downed by magic that landed blow after blow. And the corpses of the very monsters Song Myeongseok had parceled out to wear the group down. Every one of them lay scattered across the field, fresh catalysts waiting to be raised.

Let me show you what happens when you wage a war of attrition against a Necromancer.

The double gate’s boss monsters couldn’t escape a hard fight either.

“You. Shall not pass.”

The Blood Golem didn’t waver in the slightest, even under the combined assault of the quasi-4th-Rank monsters. Having absorbed Reric’s blood, it had been reinforced to the peak of the 4th Rank. No, closer to quasi-5th-Rank.

“Wryyyyy!!!”
“Kruhuhng!”

Song Myeongseok, who should have been directing the two boss monsters, had gone blind with rage and hurled himself into the enemy ranks. Left to the Blood Golem, the two bosses were locked in a grueling fight.

The monsters are handled, then.

Yujin’s gaze shifted to somewhere close at hand.

— Chaeng! Chaeng!

Three blades clashed in midair. The next Sword Saint and Arahan’s Supernova, two names built on their own renown, were locked together. And in his eyes, the Scraps, lesser in name though they were, held their own against hunters the country’s top guild touted as its most promising prospects.

“Move aside. If you don’t want to die!”
“I’ll die even if I don’t move. So I’ve got no reason to listen to you.”
“I’ll say it once more. If you want a comfortable death…”
“Oh, come on. Just like Master Yujin said — are you really going to fight with nothing but your mouth?”

— Hwuuung!

A whirling gale tore through. Drawing on the Wind Sword’s power, Jang Miseon bent the flow of the air and loosed it at Song Myeongseok. Mana rode along every strand of wind. Not quite aura, but nothing bare flesh could take head-on.

Song Myeongseok cut through the gale with his twin swords and snarled.

“You dog! Why the hell are you blocking my way!”
“You, though. Aren’t you being a little too shameless?”

Jang Miseon shot back in a sharp, exasperated voice and unfurled the Meteor Sword.

“You set all this up to kill me. What’ve you got to feel wronged about?”
“How could a mediocrity like you, or like those down there, ever understand the heart of a genius?”
“If you’re a genius at talking nonsense, I’ll grant you that one.”

As the two geniuses traded blow for blow with not an inch of give between them, the Scraps wrung out every bit of skill they had and held the Arahan strike force fast.

— Peoong!

A shockwave ripped out, Movable Fortress and Power Strike triggered in the same instant. It didn’t do the four-man Arahan strike force much real damage, but the jolt was enough to throw their ranks into disarray.

“How long do you think you can hold out against us!”

A powerful charge skill that fired the user’s own body like an arrow. The recoil drove part of the impact back into the body, but it cancelled out tanking skills and was fast besides, which made it well worth using.

A Martial-line Hunter closed the distance in an instant with an afterimage, slipped past Kang Minho, and bored inward.

“You’re all going to di——”

Yujin had taught them yet another use for the sub-space trait. Store a magic scroll inside the sub-space already primed to fire, then release it the instant it was needed. Its rearrangement complete, the scroll triggered at once.

The ground dropped away in a sudden collapse, with no sign of any spell being cast first. The Hunter who’d come barreling in on Rapid Charge lost his footing and pitched five meters down.

Three crossbows rose into the air and loosed all at once. The bolts drove straight down, biting into the seams of his armor. One glanced away, turned aside by the thrashing Hunter’s plate.

— thunk.

The remaining two lodged in his Achilles tendon and his armpit.

The Martial-line Hunter went down screaming. The stat correction from the Stellar-Rank gap spared him a fatal wound, but with his Achilles tendon severed, he no longer had the strength to spring back out of the pit.

“Seongin!”
“You sons of bitches. Pulling such cowardly tricks!”

The Arahan strike force shook with small shudders of rage. Kang Minyeong gave a snorting laugh.

“So when full-on 3rd-Rankers gang up on the likes of 2nd-Rankers, that’s fair play, I take it?”
“Senior. People like that always go heavy on the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do, y’know.”
“What can you do. When you’re short on skill, you’ve at least gotta talk a good game.”

Somewhere along the way, the Scraps had picked up Yujin’s mouth, trading barbs even mid-fight. The strike force might not be on Song Myeongseok’s level, but the guild still called them its prospects, the ones it had lavished every kind of backing on.

“I’m really going to kill you!”
“We won’t forgive you!”

The Arahan strike force gave themselves over to fury in place of their drilled positioning and charged in blindly.

— Taeng! Taeng!

The three of them ran their skills exactly as Yujin and Fafnir had drilled into them. One slip from any one of them and it would be over. The strike force might have lost their composure, but their specs were still far and away superior.

I have to time the mana discharge precisely. Off by even a little and it’s over.
We have to harry them from every angle to open a gap for Big Bro’s shockwave.
If it gets dicey, gotta whip out a scroll right away.

The handful of days out in the borderlands. Squaring off against Fafnir at the Paju workshop. And every moment since, moving on Yujin’s orders once they’d entered the double gate. All of it had built to this, drawing the Scraps’ latent ability out to its absolute limit, and each of them brought everything they had to bear, answering flawlessly without a single mistake.

They held the Arahan strike force’s feet down.

“Shit, how — against mere 2nd-Rank Hunters!”
“Your defensive spell’s too slow. How am I supposed to prep magic in a situation like this!”
“It’s because you can’t keep them in check properly that we’re in this mess.”

The longer the fight dragged on, by contrast, the more the Arahan strike force’s teamwork unraveled. Panic creeping in, they’d started snapping at one another.

In that moment.

“You held out well.”

A few corpses, run through with cursed fangs, dropped into the midst of the Arahan strike force.

— Kuaaaang!!

Bone, blood, and gobbets of flesh, each crammed with spirit-power to the very limit, washed over the three strike-force members. There wasn’t even time to scream. The defensive spells they’d thrown up in advance ripped apart like paper, and even the Rare-grade items the Arahan Guild had issued them were useless against the blast.

“Saved by you, Boss.”
“Wow. That was genuinely rough.”
“Was hard to hold out any longer with the scrolls running dry too.”

The tension drained out of them, and the three slumped straight to the ground. A fight across a full Stellar-Rank gap, outnumbered four to three on top of it, and the Scraps had still pulled off more than their share.

“Goddammit!!”

Song Myeongseok spat a curse. The tide had tipped hard. While Jang Miseon kept him pinned, the monsters’ numbers had fallen off sharply, and the strike force, caught in that last blast, were in no state to fight on either.

I’m going to die?

Unacceptable. Did they really think he’d accept a fate like this, falling for nothing in a place this paltry?

Song Myeongseok crossed his twin swords in an X and poured out all his strength. Jang Miseon gave a step backward before the savage force.

“Ha, hahaha. Simple. All I have to do is clear the gate!”

He drew the red crystal from his pocket, clutched it, and laughed out loud. The gate core, pulled from the boss monsters. One squeeze of his right hand and the power holding the double gate shut would vanish, opening an exit.

I can live!

Once he was out of here, his chance was bound to come again. Chanting it to himself, Song Myeongseok began to tighten his grip.

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

His stomach churned, and every sound reaching his ears warped into an echo. A beat too late, he realized he’d become the target of a curse, and Song Myeongseok triggered his armor’s option. It snuffed out the curse clinging to him completely.

— Ssugeogeok!

But Jang Miseon didn’t let the single instant of opening Yujin had carved out for her slip past. She lunged and cleaved through Song Myeongseok’s right arm with the Meteor Sword.

“Huh?”

Song Myeongseok stared blankly at the right arm lying on the floor. The searing agony from the stump. The gate core rolling loose across the ground. None of it felt real, and a laugh spilled out of him.

“It was foul being with you, and let’s never meet again so long as we live.”

Cursed fangs buried themselves in the nape of Song Myeongseok’s neck as he stood there blankly.

Arahan’s Supernova toppled to the ground without leaving so much as a final word.