Chapter 10

Collision (2)

got off the black vans parked on the vacant lot next to the road. The eyes of Secretary Kim, who saw their faces, turned fierce.

He immediately got ready for battle. When Secretary Kim subjected Mana on the ring he had been fiddling countless times today, the crude ring disappeared, and a sword made of an integrated blade and handle was held in his hand.

Secretary Kim thusly growled, wrapping the sword in Mana.

“People feed themselves by the swords must be aware of their surroundings to live long. You fellas are finished in that aspect.”

The men’s faces became more mischievous. The sense of death that had been boldly emanating pierced the air.

There were ten in total. I wondered how all of those big men managed to fit in that van. They slowly came out and surrounded Secretary Kim.

When there was no reply, Secretary Kim spoke again in a bitter manner.

“You didn’t even know the identity of the target when you took the job, right? You fellas would not have taken the job if you knew who you fellas were dealing with. Do you know who we are? We are part of the Celestial Dragon Guild.”

Secretary Kim brought out a Hunter certificate. The mark of the guild he belongs to shone clearly above the photo. A striking agitation appeared on the faces of the men who confirmed it.

As he said, they didn’t even seem to know who we were and took the job anyway.

Secretary Kim spoke, throwing his gaze at each of their weapons.

“Looking at your standards, you seem to do anything for a few big ones. Do you think you can mess with the Celestial Dragon Guild and have a good night’s sleep? Can’t you tell your situation just by looking at it?

The men exchanged glances with each other.

Confused emotions were visible in their faces. They took the job without knowing the details, and it was a target that couldn’t be messed with, now that they knew about our identities. Even if they succeeded in the mission, it was obvious that they would receive payback.

The status of the Celestial Dragon Guild in this era was that high.

Hesitation and anguish cast over their faces. Then, suddenly, the one who seemed to be the leader shouted as if to charge for battle.

“Damn, already too late to give up! Let it be the Celestial Dragon Guild or whatever; we will fix it after we’re done with them!”

Secretary Kim said in a low voice, threatening.

“You won’t be able to fix it.”

“Shut up!”

In the end, they chose the opposite option to that proposed by Secretary Kim.

Standing behind him, I compared the heart of Secretary Kim, precisely the Mana core’s vibration, and each of the men.

I could bet that they made the worst choice. The men ran into Secretary Kim with timing in unison without a signal to start an attack.

Secretary Kim lifted the sword. His weapon, which had no sheath and of the crude blade, amplified it from the moment he applied Mana and made violent vibrations.

He clicked his tongue and kicked.

Shh!

The next movement happened so fast that it was difficult to keep up with normal, physical eyes before the body awakened.

I couldn’t even follow his course. When he disappeared from my sight, Secretary Kim stood in front of the man with an ax.

The moment the man’s frozen facial expression turned into panic, Secretary Kim swung his sword.

Flash!

A blue line that sliced the space. At the same time, the sound of tearing air was heard, then the man fell to the floor, holding the ax in his hand.

“Ahhhhhhhhh!”

The man cried with his arm cut off. The screaming then stopped with an eerie crushing sound.

Whack!

A body with a decapitated head collapsed. Secretary Kim, who got rid of the blood from the blade, threw himself at the next opponent without even looking at the headless man.

The sound of the blade slicing through the wind continued over and over again. The sound of screaming, flesh cutting off, and breaking bones followed suit like background music. Blood splattered all over the place, and the severed limb rolled over. To the cruel music, Secretary Kim threw his body as if to dance on a bloody stage.

I knew it. No matter how he saw Seo Jin-wook as a tool or whatever, he was really good enough to be at the side of Seo Gyu-cheol, who had the potential.

“P-please… h-ahhhhhh!”

When one person was about to fall, another man screamed with his stomach split open. From all over the open wounds of their bodies, the men fell while bleeding out.

Clang! Clang Clang!

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It was rare to hear the friction between weapon to weapon. Once the blade of Secretary Kim crossed the others’ weapons, the opponent had already fallen. It was hard to see a proper counterattack.

“Damn it! Rush to them! Rush more!”

The barely conscious survivors growled and wielded weapons at the same time. They blocked the attacks around them and ran. While secretary Kim dealt with two people simultaneously, another man raised his sword and jumped behind him.

But in the next moment…

Splash!

It was too fast to see how Secretary Kim counterattacked. I just saw three people sprinkling blood and falling apart at the same time.

In that manner, Secretary Kim was slaughtering opponents without using a skill once.

“!!!”

While the rest of the people were dying, the leader, who was hiding at the back while standing at the side of the vehicle, turned his gaze toward me.

His eyes flash mixed with despair and malice. He seemed to be convinced this was going to end in annihilation.

He once again checked Secretary Kim’s situation with his colleagues, then suddenly changed direction and began to rush to me.

It seemed that he was convinced that I was non-awakened, whether he have judged from the situation or the information had been given in advance.

In that situation, his purpose was obvious. He was trying to take me as a hostage.

Secretary Kim did not miss his movement. He turned around as if he was trying to block the guy’s movement towards me.

However, I wasn’t waiting dumbly to get attacked.

Wheeeng!

I relocated a small amount of activated Mana that I placed aside to imprint myself to the bracelet.

The potential Mana overflowed, but the amount that could be used now was not enough to implement an attack that would even be considered a skill. To compare, it was a Mana worth picking up a grain of sand from the beach.

However, even a grain of sand could kill a person depending on how one could control it.

I face the guy rushing. As if he was underestimating against a non-awakened, he hadn’t even cast basic defense skills.

A very small needle-hole the size of a ball of Mana flowed on my finger.

Plock!

I flicked my finger.

Whoosh!

The hunter running towards me stumbled. He stopped his steps. Before he could even understand the situation, his pupils loosened, knees loosened, and he fell in the opposite direction he ran towards.

The eyes of Secretary Kim, who saw it, widened. However, he immediately regained his focus and turned his head to continue his enemies’ ruthless slaughter.

After a while, only two people were left standing in the vacant lot next to the road, and that was Secretary Kim and me.

“Are you okay?”

He came to me and checked my condition. I noticed that his well-pressed suit didn’t splatter a drop of blood. After all, he was well experienced.

Just because you have a lot of Mana in your core doesn’t make you a strong hunter. There is a thing called a sense of combat and talent. Secretary Kim showed outstanding skills in that part.

“It’s okay. Thanks to Secretary Kim.”

“It was fortunate that the enemies were insignificant.”

They had rushed without any information on the target, and they did not have enough strength to consider Secretary Kim’s skills. The person who commissioned this job must be in a hurry. If the person had enough time, he or she would have carried on a proper killer.

To prove that they were insignificant, they did not even prepare firearms as they came to deal with non-awakened.

From the standpoint of a non-awakened, a low-level hunter with a gun is far scarier than a low-level hunter that uses skills. Although it is an era in which each bullet is cast with tracking magic to prevent the worst situation of having possessed firearms outside of the dungeon, it would not be impossible with enough effort to find one.

After confirming that I was okay, Secretary Kim immediately turned and saw the man’s state that ran towards me. I also went to see it.

The man, who had fallen back, was lifeless, facing air.

It must have touched a cerebral artery. He died right away.

“Hmm.”

Secretary Kim made a strange sound.

I was convinced that the man was dead. The moment I bounced off the Mana, I confirmed that the Mana core embedded in his heart flickered and disappeared.

Updated from

Unlike the monsters in the dungeon, the core in the heart disappeared the moment a hunter dies, as if someone was harvesting it.

“This, isn’t it…”

Secretary Kim wiped a stalk of blood flowing from the body’s forehead. Then, in the middle of the forehead, a tiny opening, the size of a needle hole, appeared.

Secretary Kim’s eyes were wide open.

He took a turn looking at the hole in the forehead of the body and my face.

“Uh… how? No, what the hell?! What?”

After losing his words for a while, he started to open and close his mouth like that… and suddenly asked me in a screaming manner.

“Team Leader, have you awakened!? How? Why? In what way?”

I shook my head.

“You haven’t awakened yet?”

He pointed his finger toward the body and pointed it out, screaming.

“But what is this?!”

I responded as if nothing was wrong.

“You told me that when I lose control, I make a mess with telekinesis. I think it’s a similar case. Somehow, Mana shot out of my fingers…”

“Ah… no, the latent Mana rampage cannot be controllable that way.”

In this case, I had to be bold.

“As my life was on the brink, I think it just worked that way.”

“No!”

He pressed his temples with both hands as if his head hurts.

“No matter how close your birthday is, you shouldn’t be awakened legally…”

“I’m telling you I didn’t, alright? There is no seal of Awakening on my body. Do you want me to take my clothes off?”

“Very rarely, some cases have the seal inside their bodies.”

Many hunters didn’t know that fact yet in this era, but he seemed to know it quite well.

However, I had already seen it with [The Successor’s Eyes]. This body was not yet awakened.

“No, what are you going to do on your birthday? If you come into contact with the Awakening Stone and get rejected at the altar saying that you are a hunter who has already awakened, the Constitutional Office’s reaction must be…”

“I just have to say that I can’t awaken because I’m not qualified.”

“Who will believe those words? So far, there already have been a few accidents caused by your Mana rampage.”

He sighed deeply.

“That’s a big problem… You know what happens if you find yourself awakened before you turn 19, right? At the point of being caught, even adults are subject to punishment retroactively. You have to prove that you didn’t knowingly awaken, but it’s almost impossible. The guild and the Guild Master will receive the charge against the forced Awakening… It is a must that you must withdraw unconditionally from the guild, and future actions that benefit or are associated with the Celestial Dragon Guild will be impossible.”

Because of the popular belief that Awakening at a young age increases the speed of growth, a law that was purposely created to eradicate such parents or guilds who awaken children early and secretly train them is closer to abuse.

Since they aim to profit by eventually creating an excellent hunter who is minor, they mean to avoid the adults from seeing any benefit from the Awakening of a child.

When the first Awakened Hunter appeared, the government was concerned about how even talented people would deliberately avoid Awakening because of danger. But over time, such concerns weren’t needed.

Dungeon exploration became the driving force to lead the entire industry, and dungeons became the base to create most of the world’s wealth, and people were anxious because they could not awaken.

The governments of each country had severely underestimated human desire.

“Whew, I see. Even if you have lost your memory, you can’t be confused about whether you are awakened or not. I’ll believe you. I believe you, but I’m still worried.”

Even though he believed me, he mumbled like he kept complaining.

“Even if that’s the case… I don’t quite understand this mark.”

His gaze did not fall from the hole in the forehead of the body.

“It’s easier to go big, and I’ve never heard of a hunter that can aggregate Mana as small as that and shoot it like a bullet. Even if you try to control Mana like that, it’s impossible… Oh, I don’t know.”

In the end, Secretary Kim gave up, shook his head, and looked through the rest of the body. As expected, all fingerprints have been removed smoothly, and there were no belongings to identify identity.

“Even if there were insignificant, they were particular with those.”

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Still, he couldn’t give up identifying them, so Secretary Kim manipulated the device on his wrist to take a picture of each body’s face. Next, the hair sample was collected and packed for DNA analysis.

“I know, right. Team Leader, we should report this to the guild…”

As a person under the Celestial Dragon Guild, he mentioned reporting to the guild before considering taking it to the police, but I stopped him.

“Secretary Kim. For the time being, let’s just keep what happened today to ourselves.”

Then, Secretary Kim’s expression froze.

“Team Leader, it is true that I am the Team Leader’s assistant, but before that, I was a member of the Celestial Dragon Guild. It is a violation of the rules to cover up without reporting such incidents.”

“I don’t mean to hide it forever. I’m going to reveal it when I see it necessary. Until then, please do keep the silence.”

Secretary Kim’s eyes calmed down at this.

“Are you suspicious of someone doing this inside?”

“Don’t you think the same, Secretary Kim?”

He affirmed in silence. Coming to the black market today was not planned, but a schedule that was decided on the spot.

Unless the information did not leak from the inside, this could not be prepared at once.

“Seo-Gyu… When my father starts turning everything upside down, the guys who planned this will hide.”

“Then, how would the Team Leader find them without notifying the people of high up?”

“I have an idea.”

“Such a phrase is usually used by people with plans to get out of the situation.”

I laughed subtly. Looking at me like that, Secretary Kim spoke.

“Okay. Then, we will also verify the identity of these guys through an external company.”

“Good.”

“But if I don’t ask the guild to back up… how do I take care of the body? Are you expecting me to dig and bury them? The barrier will also soon disappear. Are we just leaving it like this?”

“We can’t.”

I put very little Mana into the bracelet on my wrist and then cycled it in a certain pattern.

There was something that people of this era don’t know about dungeons yet. Many creatures and items in the dungeon had been forcibly moved through spatial interference in a separate dimension like Earth.

This bracelet was also originally used by beings living in the dimension named Srozan.

They didn’t want anyone to use their stuff, and they made the key to get it working. That key was the mana wave I made right now.

Now, for the result…

“Eeeek!”

Secretary Kim was frightened and pointed at my wrist.

“That!”

A bracelet in the shape of entangled snakes wriggled and moved. And the snakes that looked like sculptures added volume to their bodies. Just as the bracelet was adjusted to fit my wrist the first time I put it on, the snakes, in reverse, extended the length of the body this time.

Shortly after that, five gray snakes the size of an anaconda were crawling slowly with their tongues flapping out. The body got thinner as it went to the tail, so it was still connected to my wrist.

I spoke up whilst glimpsing the body.

“These guys will take care of it all.”

Secretary Kim’s face turned even more horrified.

The common thing about the kids brought from the black market today is that, unfortunately, everyone was starving because they had met the wrong owner.

The owners who use the auto-heal without feeding them was bound to get feasted upon.

The amount that it feasted upon was not enough, so their healing level was also poor. Of course, things would be different from now on.

“Come on, eat.”

The snakes devoured every piece of flesh and every single drop of blood.

Crack! Rip!

The sound of snakes eating their bodies resonated in the vacant lot for a while.

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