Chapter 28 - Episode 5. The Dead (3)
Chapter 28: Episode 5. The Dead (3)
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Ever since he had stood with Mino at the fork in the road, Jaehwan had already known everything.
[You would do well not to entertain any foolish thoughts, Witch.]
[If you do not keep your promise, your Companion dies.]
[If you keep your promise, you will be rewarded well.]
......
Threatening Pushes had been flying at Mino without pause.
Jaehwan had quickly realized what was going on. Someone had threatened Mino. They were holding a hostage. And the culprit wanted Jaehwan.
Naturally, Jaehwan had assumed Mino would sell him out.
The world he had come to Understand through endless 「Doubt」 was a place where numbers and data ruled all.
Jaehwan's 「Doubt」, which had never once been wrong, was certain Mino would betray him.
That was why he had not been listening to Mino at all.
“A being with no grand dream or conviction, yet one that is satisfied and happy so long as it survives safely through another day. That is what the ‘humans’ I know are like.”
Jaehwan came to his senses only near the end of Mino's speech.
“In that respect, you do not look ‘human.’”
Mino left him behind at the fork in the road.
Without the slightest hesitation, and without any betrayal.
As if mocking his Doubt.
Jaehwan blankly watched Mino's back grow distant.
Then all words vanished from his head.
「Doubt」, which had been burrowing into the world, suddenly lost its strength. The sounds that had been coming from every direction died away, and the world was swallowed by silence. One side of his chest tightened.
Why did that woman look ‘human’?
Watching Mino walk away, Jaehwan shook his head.
Something similar had happened before.
Mino, when she answered that she would not return to the past.
Meikal, when he had made the scabbard together with Jaehwan.
At that time, they had briefly become human.
But only briefly.
For an instant, they had looked “human,” yet before long they were wearing the faces of corpses again, as though nothing had happened. Jaehwan had no idea what that meant.
There was only one thing he knew, one thing he had learned while climbing the Tower alone through those arduous years.
If he became attached to people one by one, he would never be able to change this world.
No matter how many times he saved them, they could not become human on their own.
Jaehwan turned away from the retreating Mino.
Then 「Doubt」 activated again, and voices began reaching him once more.
[Dammit, the Witch betrayed us! Send out the Messenger Hawk!]
[......That dream demon we brought all this way was wasted.]
......A dream demon?
* * *
That was how Jaehwan had ended up here.
Mino, staring blankly up at Jaehwan, asked,
“......Because the size did not fit? You really came here for a reason like that?”
Jaehwan did not answer.
Meanwhile, Janya was crowing in delight at Jaehwan's appearance.
“I see. Then you have spared me the trouble of looking.”
Judging by the faint aura he could sense, the man was undoubtedly the one carrying the Soulstone Janya had been seeking. Still, which side had truly been spared the trouble remained to be seen.
“You have a dream demon with you?”
Janya's complexion changed. Even within Geumcheon Hall, the fact that they had a dream demon counted as top-secret information.
Janya called over Geumcheon Hall's secret envoys, who were maintaining a soundproof barrier outside the tavern.
[He knows about the dream demon. How did that happen?]
[That should be impossible...]
The Geumcheon Hall secret envoys looked flustered as well.
Without giving them time to think, Jaehwan asked again.
“Where is the dream demon?”
“......I cannot tell you.”
Janya answered without thinking.
Only afterward did he realize his mistake, but it was too late. It was little different from admitting outright that they had a dream demon.
Jaehwan nodded and said,
“Bring the dream demon here.”
At those words, Janya's brows twitched sharply.
Was this bastard insane?
He had suddenly appeared, asked about the dream demon, and now, instead of asking to be taken there, he was ordering them to bring it here.
Did he even know what a dream demon was to be saying something so absurd? No, before that......why was he even wasting words on a man like this?
Janya slowly began to grow angry.
He was Janya, eldest of the Janya Brothers. The shadow of the Forest Zone, the massacrer of the Black Jungle.
“So the rumors were true. I heard you tried to oppose the Fortress, but you really are out of your mind.”
Mino swallowed as she watched Janya draw both swords.
“Be careful. Those bastards are Fourth Adapters.”
From fighting them herself, Mino knew Janmyung and Janmang were both nearly at the level of a Fourth Adapter.
The real problem was Janya, who had already reached the seasoned realm of a Fourth Adapter.
The difference between the third stage and the fourth was like the difference between heaven and earth, since it marked the boundary into the higher stages. A Fourth Adapter was the equivalent of an elder in any respectable faction.
“You think I am going to lose?”
“......No.”
Mino found it strange how easily those words came out of her mouth. No matter what, they were Fourth Adapters. Worse, they were the Janya Brothers, said to be able to stand against Garnak, the Five-Horned Beast, with their combination technique.
Even the Red Fox Clan Jaehwan had wiped out would have been nothing more than light exercise after a meal for them.
So why was she not worried at all?
The ones who moved first were the Janya Brothers.
「Shadow Secret Art」
Waves of shadow shot out in dozens of branching paths. There was no telling which were real and which were fake.
Jaehwan immediately used 「Selflessness」. To his surprise, Janya could follow Jaehwan's movements to some degree even while Jaehwan was using 「Selflessness」. Jaehwan slipped past the shadow blades by the slimmest margin.
So this is why they start calling it the higher stages from the fourth onward.
The skill Janya used, 「Shadow Secret Art」, was no simple thing either.
Jaehwan had planned to use 「Doubt」 to pick out only the real blades and knock them away, but even as a higher-grade skill, its spiritual power pattern was far from simple.
Irritated, Jaehwan decided to simply knock away all the shadow blades.
A white flash shot forward from the scabbard and laced the air. He had unleashed 「Light Stab」 in rapid succession. He had thrown out so many Stabs in that instant that the afterimages alone were enough to muddy the eye.
Janya's expression twisted.
“That is impossible.”
As if knocking away every shadow blade were not enough, Jaehwan went on to aim for Janya's head as well. Yet Janya gave up one of his ears and slipped past the Stab.
......He dodged it?
Jaehwan's expression shifted with interest. Until now, no one had ever dodged 「Light Stab」.
No, that was not quite right. There had been one. That bastard had taken a 「Normal Stab」, and now served as the scabbard of Dokbul.
“Big brother......!”
Amid the unexpected chaos, Janmyung rose while supporting Janmang. Janmang was groaning, wounded in the thigh and right arm by the earlier Stab.
Janya let out a low groan, his face hardening as he retreated while shielding his brothers.
Janya could not believe what he had just seen.
The man before him had blocked all of 「Shadow Secret Art」 with only three Stabs, and in the opening that created, he had even gone for Janya's head.
The only reason Janya had been able to evade that Stab was pure luck.
If the battle-honed instinct he had gained through countless battlefields had not warned him, Janya would already have become nutrients for the Tree of Illusion.
He urgently contacted the secret envoys.
[Did you not say he was a Non-Adapter?]
[......There is no mistake. He is a Non-Adapter.]
If Geumcheon Hall said so, then it was fact. In that case, how was this strength supposed to be explained?
Could he be......an Abyss powerhouse?
No. That could not be. At a glance he gave off a somewhat similar impression, but among the Abyss powerhouses Janya had seen, not one had been a Non-Adapter.
Then what in the world was this bastard?
Janya steadied himself once more. A man whose outward spiritual power was nothing impressive, and who used nothing but Stab. Yet somehow he was stronger than all three brothers combined.
[It is hard to believe, but he is stronger than us.]
[B-Big brother. Then...]
[We change the plan.]
Janya was quick to accept reality. If the enemy was abnormally strong, then their way of fighting had to go beyond common sense as well.
Jaehwan frowned as he watched the Janya Brothers' abruptly changed tactics. They had suddenly broken formation and begun using Shadow Secret Art one by one while holding hostages up as shields.
It was a tactic that had read Jaehwan's Stab-only attack pattern with precision.
Stab was fast, but its pattern was simple. If one could read the direction before the attack came and reduce its possible range, dealing with it was not difficult.
So the Janya Brothers chose to use the hostages as shields, blocking off every route through which a Stab could fly. In practice, the method was fairly effective, and Jaehwan's Stabs were gradually taking up less and less space.
But there was one thing the Janya Brothers had overlooked.
“What the......?”
A terrifying gale of pressure was gathering into Jaehwan's right hand. The force building there was so tremendous that nearby furnishings were on the verge of being blown apart.
It was the preparatory stance for Normal Stab.
From the start, hostages meant nothing to Jaehwan.
The Janya Brothers, the Geumcheon Hall criminals, the hostages.
All he had to do was blow away whatever got in his way.
Because in his eyes, they were all nothing but dead corpses.
Yet just as he was about to use Normal Stab, a sharp throb ran through the area around Jaehwan's heart. His vision wavered for an instant, and something like an afterimage flickered across the faces of the hostages.
......What was that?
Ignoring it, Jaehwan tried again to use Normal Stab. At that moment, someone's voice brushed past him.
“I am human too. I may not be as strong as you, and not as steadfast either, but I am still clearly ‘human.’”
Confusion rose in him. Why did the faces of those corpses now look ‘human’ to him?
For reasons he could not understand, his body was refusing to attack. It was telling him that he must not use 「Normal Stab」 on them. This had never happened before.
When Jaehwan's attack faltered, the Janya Brothers began rampaging again. Jaehwan frowned.
His 「Doubt」 was wavering.
As 「Doubt」 wavered, 「Understanding」 wavered, and as 「Understanding」 wavered, 「Selflessness」 wavered as well.
I have to kill the hostages.
Jaehwan tried once more to use 「Normal Stab」, but he could not concentrate. Worse, his own 「Doubt」 was interfering with his focus. Instead of Doubting the world, 「Doubt」 had begun to Doubt itself.
A change was occurring within his soul. A powerful, warm energy, wholly different in nature from 「Selflessness」, was trying to be born from deep within him.
It was an energy that felt ancient and deeply familiar. In an altogether different sense from 「Selflessness」, it was some power he had lost long ago......
The problem was that this power was not useful in the slightest right now.
Damn it.
As the situation grew more and more tangled, Jaehwan found himself resenting, for the first time, the fact that the only thing he knew how to do was Stab. If only he had known how to slash, or throw, or at least use some kind of grappling move to subdue them......
A grappling move.
At that instant, for some reason, Jaehwan began firing 「Light Stab」 all throughout the tavern.
Some of the attacks were directed at the Janya Brothers, while others were aimed at the tavern ceiling. The indiscriminate Stabs were turning the tavern into a beehive.
“That lunatic has finally snapped!”
Janya grinned, apparently believing victory was his. At this rate, the bastard would run out of spiritual power and destroy himself.
Jaehwan did not stop attacking until another thirty seconds had passed. He had unleashed so many Stabs that the vast sky was now visible through the riddled holes in the tavern roof.
Jaehwan looked up at the sky through those holes, then suddenly lowered his sword.
This should be enough.
When he turned his back on the Janya Brothers, Mino looked thoroughly bewildered.
“W-Why are you suddenly doing that?”
“I am leaving those bastards to someone else now.”
“......Someone else? Who are you talking about?”
“A stubborn loudmouth.”
A stubborn loudmouth?
An image flashed through Mino's mind.
But surely not...... No, how?
At that moment, one of the Geumcheon Hall criminals cried out in alarm.
“Lord Janya! The soundproof barrier has been broken!”
“What?”
Janya's face changed.
He tried sending a Push to Geumcheon Hall's secret envoys. But he could not sense their Spiritual Pressure at all.
Suddenly, Janya flinched and looked around the tavern. Jaehwan's Stabs had punched holes through everything in sight.
Could those attacks from earlier have been......?
A moment later, everyone inside the tavern sensed a powerful aura. It was rapidly drawing closer, with enough force to overpower a Fourth Adapter.
The expressions of the Janya Brothers stiffened at once.
It was a bright, majestic Spiritual Pressure. Within this Fortress, there was only one person who possessed Spiritual Pressure like that.
The tavern door burst open, and figures clad in silver-white plate appeared. Guards from the northern checkpoint. And then.
“What do you think you are doing?”
A brilliant silver radiance flooded the tavern and sent a shiver through the room. The aura of a Celestial rose from his shoulders like wings. Golden hair fluttered above his head. The most stubborn, most insufferable checkpoint chief in the entire Fortress.
Karlton of Silver Restraint.
Mino swallowed. She had never imagined a day would come when that man could look this reliable.
Having spotted Jaehwan, Karlton narrowed his eyes and asked,
“Mr. Jaehwan? What in the world is this......?”
Jaehwan nodded and said,
“Some people have broken laws you like so much. Probably something around Article 276, Clause 4 of the Gorgon Criminal Code.”
At those words, Karlton's eyes widened.
“The Gorgon Criminal Code does not have that many articles...... Who are you referring to?”
“Those bastards.”
At Jaehwan's nod, Karlton looked into the tavern.
A gang of villains was causing havoc while holding the waitresses hostage.
“I am not entirely sure, but it seemed they were plotting to destroy the world, using this tavern as a stepping stone.”
Mino's mouth fell open at that shameless lie.
A massive halberd radiating silver light appeared in Karlton's grasp.
“Destroy the world...... A charge that cannot possibly be overlooked.”
Karlton's cold gaze turned toward the Janya Brothers.
“Under Article 174, Clause 4 and Article 124, Clause 6 of the Gorgon Criminal Code, I am placing you under emergency arrest for the unlawful destruction of private property within the Fortress and for assaulting its residents.”
The faces of the Janya Brothers, along with Geumcheon Hall's people, went deathly pale.
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