Chapter 304

Inside the office, every source of light had been blocked out. When a holographic video began playing in the darkness, I was suddenly overcome by the sensation that I was there at the scene myself.

This place is…

Everything was gray. I couldn’t see even an inch ahead of me.

Only after I saw the massive wings of an eagle skim past dangerously close did I realize where the video had begun.

The sky.

The drone capturing the entire scene descended rapidly to avoid the fine dust filling the atmosphere.

Whoooosh.

After descending through the fierce wind for some time, what finally emerged was a city engulfed in flames.

Boom! Rumble-rumble-rumble!

“Eeeeeek!”

“Aaaaaah!”

The factories belching smoke exploded one after another. Massive buildings collapsed like dominoes, while people who looked like tiny dots screamed and fled in every direction.

It was pandemonium.

There were too many people to count individually.

Thousands were visible at a glance. If the people the camera had failed to capture were included, there had to be tens of thousands.

“What the hell is this…?”

A lament escaped me before I could stop it. Was this because of a factory explosion?

No. It was because I had discovered creatures racing through the maze-like city, wreaking destruction and slaughter.

“Grrrrrrr!”

“Graaah!”

Massive bodies. Strength and Agility that could only belong to monsters.

Their eyes gleamed with killing intent as they swept across their surroundings. Then, with a series of hideous roars, they began moving in search of targets.

Why are there monsters there?

The question lasted only a moment before I realized the answer myself.

There was only one possibility in a situation like this.

Monster Wave.

During the Great Cataclysm, Gates had been passageways connecting Earth to another world known as the Demon Realm.

But after the Demon King Asmodeus disappeared, the monsters’ power weakened, and Gates became doors that only humans could freely pass through.

There was one exception.

If the mana inside a Gate exceeded its capacity, everything changed.

When a dam breaks, the water comes rushing out.

That was a Monster Wave, and the result was the scene the holographic video was showing us now.

“Kyaaaaaa!”

“P-please, save me…!”

Squish!

The zoomed-in camera showed the urban center where a massacre was taking place.

Monsters slaughtered and destroyed without restraint while humans died helplessly around them.

Some were impaled on monster claws. Others were trampled to death beneath the feet of the fleeing crowd.

Amid that pit of chaos, a mother and daughter running for their lives caught my eye.

“Bingbing! Hold Mommy’s hand tight!”

That was when the woman shouted urgently.

Whoosh! Thunk!

A spear flew from a dark alley, pierced the woman through the chest, and embedded itself in the ground.

She vomited up a mouthful of blood, then her body went limp.

The child, who had witnessed her mother’s death right before her eyes, burst into tears.

“Mommy!”

But it wasn’t over yet. More than a hundred Orcs poured out of the dark alley and advanced toward the child.

They had taken up ideal positions to block the fleeing civilians’ escape routes.

One Orc who appeared to be their leader raised an axe and brought it down toward the crying child.

Whish! Slice!

“Krk?”

The leader stared down at his arm with bewilderment.

The thick arm that had been holding the axe had been cleanly severed below the elbow. A man was standing before him now, though the Orc hadn’t noticed him arrive.

“How dare you monsters lay hands on the people of China?”

A dazzling aura flashed.

Slice!

The leader’s head was severed. Before it could even hit the ground, a thunderous cry burst from the man’s mouth.

“Public Security Armed Forces Division!”

“Yes!”

The answer rang out loudly.

The man was not alone. Even now, Hunters belonging to the Public Security Armed Forces, their armor emblazoned with China’s Five-Starred Red Flag, were steadily joining the battlefield.

The man shouted, his eyes burning.

“Kill every last one of those stinking bastards!”

“For the people!”

Sh-sh-sh-shk!

With a tremendous roar, more than a thousand Hunters charged forward.

China still had a population of well over a billion despite suffering enormous losses during the Great Cataclysm.

The strength of each individual was unknown, but it would not be an exaggeration to say that China could mobilize more Hunters than any other country in the world.

“Wipe them all out!”

“Waaah! Long live the People’s Republic of China!”

A thousand Hunters charged as one.

The monsters rampaging through the city had no intention of simply standing by and watching. When every kind of monster gathered in one place, their numbers easily surpassed a thousand as well.

“Gwoooooo!”

“Kya-woo!”

Thud-thud-thud-thud-thud!

Monsters and humans. Humans and monsters.

Two waves that could never coexist rushed toward each other.

Eyes shining with resolve, and killing intent directed at the enemy.

The incredible force of the scene filled the office, so intense that it was hard to believe we were watching a holographic video.

The drone captured the two groups rapidly closing the distance between them from high above.

Five hundred meters. Three hundred. One hundred…

Just as the deafening noise reached its peak and the two sides were about to collide—

“Perish in the flames of the inferno. Fire Rain.”

A cold, lifeless voice.

At the same time, the gray sky split open.

Kiiiiing.

It was a sight I had never seen before.

About thirty meters above the ground, not far from the drone, the air peeled open as though something had sliced through it.

A massive ball of flame emerged from a vortex writhing with black energy.

Whoooosh!

The Chinese Hunters stopped without realizing it and stared blankly at the sight.

“This can’t be.”

“This is… a dream.”

Sadly, it was all real.

Crack!

A sphere of flame dozens of meters in diameter split into four pieces. Each of the four pieces split into dozens more, and those dozens became hundreds of fragments.

A rain of fire slammed into the ground.

Whoooom! KABOOM!

Rrrrrumble!

The surroundings were dyed red by the deafening explosions.

The drone was thrown off balance by the aftershock. When it finally steadied itself, the being responsible for creating that spectacular scene was staring directly at it.

“A human device, I see.”

The voice had no inflection or vitality.

The figure had pulled a robe marked with strange patterns low over his head. He extended one finger and pointed at the drone.

“I shall kill you all and take everything. Anyone who sets foot on my territory will pay for it with their life.”

Bzzzzzt!

The instant that finger, twisted like the root of an ancient tree, moved, the video cut out amid a burst of static.

The gray sky filled with fine dust disappeared. So did the scene on the ground, one that deserved to be called the end of the world.

The hologram vanished, and a heavy silence descended over the office.

I was the first to speak.

“What the hell is that bastard?”

“He’s the man behind this Monster Wave. No—he isn’t a man, so I suppose that phrase isn’t quite right.”

Team Leader Choi continued in a subdued voice.

“The Named Monster Lich. That is what he is.”

A Lich.

A fallen archmage. An apex monster reigning at the top of the pyramid of countless undead.

The Lich that had supposedly vanished after the Great Cataclysm had appeared. It had caused an enormous catastrophe, as though celebrating its return after several decades.

Team Leader Choi pulled out the USB drive and spoke.

“November fifth. This footage was taken exactly ten days ago by a reconnaissance drone belonging to Chinese intelligence. It shows a small city near Nanchong, Sichuan Province. The estimated casualties so far are approximately three hundred thousand. We still don’t have an accurate tally.”

Sichuan.

I was more familiar with it as the region where Qingcheng and Emei of the Nine Sects and One Gang were located, along with the Tang Clan, one of the Five Great Families.

Of course, the Murim was an entirely different world that merely resembled China, and what the hologram had shown us was a massive catastrophe.

“Three hundred thousand?”

“Yes.”

“That’s fucking insane…”

“And that is only the record from the first twenty-four hours after the Wave began.”

A chill ran down my spine.

The estimated casualties for a single day alone were three hundred thousand. Had humanity ever suffered this much damage from a Monster Wave since the Great Cataclysm?

“Are Liches normally this powerful?”

I directed the question not at Team Leader Choi, but at Butler Kim—the only living witness among us who had experienced the Great Cataclysm firsthand.

His eyes trembled like ripples on water.

“Could that possibly be the case? The Liches I saw with my own eyes during the Great Cataclysm were all powerful beings, certainly… but that one is on an entirely different level. Its fire magic was enough to give me goose bumps just watching it.”

Butler Kim was an A-rank mage whose specialty was fire magic.

If someone who had experienced every kind of hardship during the Great Cataclysm spoke like that, it was easy to understand just how powerful the Lich that had appeared this time was.

Where the hell did something like that come from?

The burning city and the people collapsing in pools of blood flickered before my eyes. The enormous rain of fire striking the earth had been a disaster in the truest sense of the word.

At the very end, I remembered the declaration the creature had made toward the camera.

I shall kill you all and take everything. Anyone who sets foot on my territory will pay for it with their life.

No one else could have understood what it said, but I could.

Thanks to the Integrated Language Pack, part of the System, I had heard its words clearly and understood what they meant.

That merciless undead monster would never be satisfied with a single small city.

Three hundred thousand people in one day? With the power it had displayed, the number of casualties might already be ten times higher by now.

“Goddamn it…”

I didn’t particularly like China, but no sane person would see such a terrible disaster and laugh, saying that they had gotten what they deserved.

A bitter taste filled my mouth as I thought of the people who had died helplessly and the little girl crying after losing her mother. That was when a thought suddenly occurred to me.

Wait.

As I recovered somewhat from the shock, something strange struck me.

It had been ten days since a catastrophe of this magnitude had occurred, yet the world was peaceful.

And more importantly…

Where had Team Leader Choi gotten this information?

If it had been the Ares Guild—or Lee Jungryong—I could have understood. They were one of the most prominent Guilds in the world, and their intelligence network was excellent.

But Team Leader Choi was merely the leader of a team in an ordinary mid-sized Guild. If he knew about it, news of the Sichuan disaster should already have been broadcasting around the world.

There’s something going on.

I wasn’t the only one who had reached that conclusion.

Everyone was looking at Team Leader Choi, demanding an explanation with their eyes.

He was not the kind of person who would fail to notice that atmosphere.

“One week ago, I received an unexpected message.”

That was the day Hayeon finished her college entrance exam.

That day, Team Leader Choi had spent a long time staring at his phone before leaving, saying that something important had come up.

“It was a message from China, wasn’t it?”

Team Leader Choi nodded.

“Yes. More precisely, they were courting one particular person, asking him to take part in this crisis.”

“Putting everything else aside, they specifically asked for me? From China?”

“Yes. ‘He’ wanted you.”

“Who is he?”

A name slipped from Team Leader Choi’s lips.

“Xiao Yang.”

“Gah!”

“Xiao Yang?”

“Young Master. Is that true?”

The moment they heard that name, everyone in the room widened their eyes. Naturally, I did the same.

I stared at Team Leader Choi with my mouth hanging open, then finally managed to speak.

“X-Xiao Yang requested me?”

“Yes.”

“But who is Xiao Yang?”

“……”

Why did they all look like that? It was possible that I didn’t know.

Team Leader Choi’s eyelids trembled for a long moment before he finally opened his mouth.

“Xiao Yang is the General Secretary of China’s Central Committee.”

“Jongseok?”¹

“The General Secretary! The President—the President of the country!”

“Holy shit.”