Chapter 565

After Magic Johnson left, I texted Team Leader Choi, who still wasn’t answering his phone, then headed straight for my private office on the top floor of the Guild House.

Bang.

Hearing the door slam shut behind me, I dropped heavily onto the floor.

The place was over a hundred pyeong, but all it held was a small desk and a single chair.¹ It was called an office. Really, it was a training ground.

I immediately took out my smartphone and inserted the chip.

Click.

The latest model I’d bought recently had every feature imaginable, including holographic video playback, which had become common over the past decade or so.

Bzzzz.

Light spilled from the phone’s projector with a faint hum. I quickly used Seizing an Object Through Empty Space to draw the blackout curtains, then focused on the footage filling the dark office.

Crackle. Crackle.

Static.

Boom! Kraaang!

A deafening roar.

Shrieeeek!

A monster’s cry.

“Aaaah!”

A human scream.

It all mingled before my eyes, then scattered. The place, lined with tents and buildings of every size, had become a horrific battlefield.

Mutated Gate.

The words flashed through my mind.

Then—

“In the name of Allah!”

“Waaaaah!”

A group in military caps and turbans charged forward, shouting at the top of their lungs. They looked Arab, and their bodies were soaked in someone else’s blood.

There was even a child among them, no older than an elementary school student.

A child…

There was no way these people were regular soldiers. Their mismatched clothing had already told me as much. They had to be Arab rebels—the kind who had stained the Middle East with blood even before the Great Cataclysm.

Then, the next moment—

“Aaaah! G-God is great!”

Along with the terrified cry of a little boy, countless firearms in their hands opened fire.

Rat-tat-tat-tat!

Whoosh! Boom!

Enough firepower to riddle ordinary humans with holes poured out at once. But their enemies were neither ordinary nor human.

Kraaang!

A huge blaze rose from the explosion. The rebels stood panting as black smoke filled the area. Then the smoke parted, and a flash of light cut through it.

Whoosh. Shing!

One strike was enough. Dark red magical power swept outward in a crescent, cutting through everything in its path.

Necks, waists, chests. The wounds differed, but the result was the same.

Death.

Splaaash!

A beat later, fountains of blood stained the sand red.

The surviving rebels stared wide-eyed at the grisly deaths of nearly twenty comrades.

“M-Masoud!”

“My God…”

But their god neither appeared nor answered his followers. In his place came a monster clad from head to toe in green armor.

Chirr. Chiriririk.

A triangular head. Two quivering antennae. Forelegs curved like scythes.

It was a mantis, enormous enough to look down at a grown man. Powerful magical power radiated from its body, which bore not a scratch from the rebels’ attack.

“G-Giant Mantis…”

Someone groaned the name. The huge foreleg swept through the air again.

Whoom. Shing!

A rebel frozen in place split down the middle. Magical power shot from the foreleg like an arrow, tearing through everything around it.

Shing! Shing! Kraaang!

People. Weapons. Even the tanks hastily sent into battle could not stop it.

Explosions and screams rang out as the attacks cut in every direction. Before long, there were five Giant Mantises, and they leaped among the humans.

Chit-chit-chit!

Chiriiit!

Crack! Splaaash!

With every strange cry, limbs flew from the roughly hundred rebels, and blood sprayed across the sand.

Those who fought while calling on their god and those who fled in terror alike fell in the desert, never to rise again.

“Aaah! Aaaaah!”

Shunk!

A scythe-like foreleg slashed through the rebel’s back and shattered his breastbone.

Having struck down the last rebel still resisting, the Giant Mantis suddenly turned. A red eye protruding from the side of its head fixed on the camera.

It found the camera.

It saw the camera, and I saw it.

Then, just as the Giant Mantis sensed something strange and cautiously began approaching the camera—

“May the flames of God descend upon this place. Fire Rain!”

Fwoosh!

An aged voice rang out. At the same instant, dozens of fireballs formed from mana came hurtling over the Giant Mantis’s shoulder like meteors.

Chiririririt!

It shrieked and swung a foreleg at them.

Boom!

The impact dyed the screen—no, everything around it—red. Dozens of Hunters appeared in the distance and raced across the battlefield through the bursting fireballs.

“Allahu Akbar!”

“God is great! Kill every one of those devils!”

Krrk, chiiit!

Humans and monsters. Monsters and humans.

The two sides began killing each other again. But I couldn’t watch the battle to its end.

Crackle. Crackle. Pop!

In an instant, the hologram filling the room vanished amid a burst of heavy static.

“…Whew.”

I let out the breath I’d been holding and picked up the phone I’d set aside. The list on the chip held more than twenty videos I hadn’t watched yet.

Fuck. How long has it been since the last batch? And there’s already more.

Worldwide magical power readings had risen seven percent over the previous year.

Some idiots might call that only seven percent. But a drop of even a few percentage points in the air’s oxygen concentration would cause an uproar. This was proof that things were going to hell.

No. Maybe…

This could be the beginning of the second Great Cataclysm.

As I watched the remaining videos one by one, my fears began to take shape.

Europe. The Middle East. West Africa. Southeast Asia… What is this, some kind of worldwide festival?

Changes were already happening all over the world at once.

A new Gate appeared among the green hills of Switzerland, where I could picture Patrache running around with a dog biscuit in his mouth.² Elsewhere, rebels and regular soldiers rained shells on each other while monsters poured from low-rank Gates left unattended.

A few places had been prepared well enough to suppress the outbreaks early. In more than half the videos, though, the monsters were defeated only after causing considerable damage.

This…

I kept replaying the footage, my brow furrowing. The damage wasn’t simply due to poor Gate defenses.

But insight wasn’t the only thing that came to me then.

Ding.

I heard the faint chime of the elevator, followed by the presence of two people drawing closer. Recognizing my uninvited guests, I reached out.

Fwoosh.

A warm breeze swept through the room. Qi flowed from my palm and gently pushed the door open, revealing familiar faces.

“What took you so long? I texted you ages ago.”

“I’m sorry. I couldn’t be reached for a while.”

I’d been about to lay into the latecomers, but I tilted my head.

“Couldn’t be reached? Did you go into a Gate or something?”

“Something like that.”

“…Either you did or you didn’t. What’s ‘something like that’ supposed to mean?”

“Butler Kim and I had somewhere to stop. It was important, so it couldn’t be helped.”

Team Leader Choi stepped inside as he answered. Butler Kim followed, closed the door, and gave me a slight nod.

Haven’t seen him in a while.

Butler Kim had hardly shown his face at the Guild lately. What important business had the two of them been handling?

It had been about a week since I’d seen him, and the question lingered. But something more urgent needed our attention. Team Leader Choi knew it too.

“We can discuss this later. For now, we should check the information Mr. Johnson gave us.”

“Oh. Here.”

I played the footage again. By the time they’d gone through every video and the attached materials, both their faces had hardened.

“Worldwide magical power readings up seven percent?”

Butler Kim’s usually gentle voice came out cracked.

“Young Master.”

“Yes. It’s progressing faster than we expected. This is serious.”

Seven percent wasn’t merely a rise. Surge was closer to the mark.

And that sharp change in magical power levels was especially obvious in the footage.

“The monsters…”

I nodded and finished Team Leader Choi’s thought.

“Yeah. They’ve gotten fucking strong.”

Rising magical power readings meant stronger monsters. The Giant Mantis in the first video had held its own even after taking a hit from Fire Rain.

It was like watching Chikorita get a tan from Charizard’s flames.³

Type advantages were supposed to mean something. But as magical power readings climbed, the monsters were growing strong enough to shrug those advantages off.

In a situation this fucked, places that kept their precious Hunters deployed in minimal numbers as a precaution were bound to be overwhelmed.

To sum it up…

“We’re fucked. It’s five minutes to a complete shitshow.”

Things were moving at a ridiculous pace. Keep this up, and monsters might be part of the weather forecast by the end of the year.

A pretty weathercaster would point to a map of the Korean Peninsula no bigger than a booger and explain it all:

“Tomorrow, goblins are expected to fall in Cheorwon, Gangwon Province, instead of heavy snow. They’re expected to pile up to a height of twenty meters, so residents should grab their shields and antidotes and evacuate immediately.”⁴

“…”

Fuck. Heavy snow is annoying enough. Now monsterfall? Seriously?

Just imagining monsters pouring down from the sky made my heart shrivel.

Of course, I wasn’t going to sit around twiddling my thumbs until then. I had to stop Korea from turning into Hell Peninsula, whatever it took.⁵

I’d kept this possibility in mind, but… it’s definitely happening too fast.

I’d thought we had a little more time. The prospect of bringing forward that thing—the plan I’d been working on little by little since Murim—weighed on me.

That was when Team Leader Choi spoke.

“At this point, we can’t keep it hidden any longer.”

He turned off the hologram. His voice was low.

“It’s already beyond what can be concealed at a national level. The longer we wait to tell people, the worse the confusion will be.”

This wasn’t a wave that would pass. It was a tsunami that might sweep whole cities away.

“What are you planning to do, Team Leader Choi?”

“Gate defenses come first right now. We need a breakwater before the tsunami hits.”

“Strengthen the Gate defenses?”

“That will leave us with fewer Hunters for raids, and we won’t be able to make full use of all the Gates Peace Guild owns. But I know which matters more.”

“That’s a relief.”

I let out a quiet laugh. Team Leader Choi knew where to draw the line. He had grand ambitions of swallowing Ares Guild, but he also knew when to push forward and when to stop.

That’s the biggest difference between him and Lee Jungryong.

“Then we should focus on the Gates for now. It’s unfortunate, but we’ll have to put matters concerning Ares Guild on hold for a while…”

“Mr. Jin Taekyung.”

“Yes?”

Team Leader Choi’s clear eyes were fixed on me.

“I said that I would make Gate defenses my top priority. I never said I would put matters concerning Ares Guild on hold.”

“…!”

What?

My eyes widened. Team Leader Choi went on.

“I told you I had important business to take care of.”

“Then that important business was…?”

“A major figure in Ares Guild. A war hero who helped my maternal grandfather bring the Great Cataclysm to an end. Once the friend Lee Jungryong trusted most. And now the leader of the largest faction within Ares threatening Go Jun.”

His voice was gentler than ever, with thorns hidden beneath it.

“Everything crumbles from the inside.”