The hunting parties returned with Carlo and the others.
Two hunting parties had come back.
If just one more hunting party returned, then all the hunting parties would be safe.
But the remaining hunting party did not return by that night.
That hunting party included the two special forces soldiers who had come with Master Sergeant Woo—Sergeant Han and Sergeant Kim.
The person leading that hunting party was someone I knew well.
She was Kim Huiwon, a Korean advance team member.
The last hunting party did not return by morning.
In the chilly morning,
David came to the front of the cave.
“I’d like the expedition team to go look for the hunting party that hasn’t returned.”
David made the request of me.
“I know we received a great deal of help from you, and I know you only barely made it back yesterday, but to find that hunting party, we need your expedition team.”
Many people had died or been injured yesterday.
There were people who hadn’t been hurt but were terrified, and many who were so exhausted they still hadn’t managed to get up.
Naturally, the mood at the base was not good.
Even so, those who were relatively fine were moving busily despite the gloomy atmosphere.
They were building the wall, dismantling monster corpses, and treating the injured.
It seemed as if they were deliberately working even harder.
“There’s no one useful besides us, then.”
At my words, David nodded with a somber face.
The advance team had also suffered deaths and injuries.
Many of the advance team members had collapsed after exhausting their energy.
Carlo was among them.
After finishing his reconnaissance, he had collapsed as if fainting.
With both his stamina and energy drained, it seemed unlikely he would get up all day.
The hunting parties that returned in the evening had only avoided losing anyone.
Because there had been more monsters than expected, some had been injured, and the rest were so exhausted they couldn’t move.
Right now, the only people at the base who could move properly were us, who had only been suffering from muscle pain.
We had brought all the materials for building the wall yesterday as well.
The items we had set aside had also been hidden among the materials, brought back, and placed in boxes again.
There was no need to go to the warehouse ruins for the time being.
“I’ll talk it over with the team.”
“Please do.”
At my answer, David asked again.
This time, it was not an order but a request.
It meant I could decide.
[What will you do?]
“We should go.”
Even if they had been strangers, I would have hesitated, but someone I knew was among them.
[Be careful.]
Unlike usual, Soph spoke in a grave voice.
There was no opposition from the team.
“They’re people I ran an operation with. I’ll participate.”
Even if they weren’t from the same unit, it wasn’t easy to abandon comrades who had gone through an operation together.
Master Sergeant Woo said he would go immediately.
“Hyun oppa, you’re going too, right? I’ll go too.”
There was no need to ask Hanna separately.
“I’ll go as well.”
Perhaps because he had been an emergency responder, Tom also joined us.
There wasn’t much to prepare.
We quickly wolfed down breakfast with the combat rations we had set aside and set out.
Before we left, David told us the direction the hunting party had gone.
We didn’t know the exact location, but this was better than charging in blindly.
Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.
As I looked back while leaving the base, the wall was rising quickly.
Perhaps because everyone had thrown themselves into the work, the stones were being piled at an incredible speed.
Smith the blacksmith and Mr. Yeomseok, the heat ability user, were also reinforcing the wall with them.
Smith was reshaping iron rods that Mr. Yeomseok had heated and driving them into the middle of the wall one after another.
A stone wall reinforced with iron rods.
It looked far sturdier than one built only with stones.
I asked Soph.
[Wouldn’t that be enough to stop an Akzar monster?]
Soph did not agree with me.
[It would be hard to stop even an Akzar scout.]
It was a firm answer. But it did not end there.
[We didn’t build every base underground for no reason. Surface structures could not stop the Akzar. Even scouts were not easy to stop, and scouts were not the end of it.]
I felt as if I had asked for nothing.
I pushed Soph’s answer deep into my mind and hastened on.
According to David, the missing hunting party had headed south.
It seemed they had gone to a region with many rocks and hills beyond the terraforming ruins.
“We’ll have to go quite a bit farther in from where we hunted. I heard the environment is better than around here, but it was too far, so we never went that far.”
Fortunately, Hanna knew the way up to the halfway point.
It was not much different from the road to the terraforming ruins.
We hurried onward in silence.
Before noon, we were able to arrive at the place where Hanna had hunted.
It was as desolate as the area near the base, but there were far more stones and rocks here.
Hanna looked around and tilted her head.
“There were quite a few monsters before, but I don’t see any now.”
Back then, there had been so many monsters that the hunting party Hanna belonged to had almost been wiped out.
At that time, Hanna and Master Sergeant An had drawn the monsters that barged in toward the desert region where the terraforming ruins were.
But now, there was not even a trace of monsters.
“Did the monsters here also swarm toward the base?”
I could not find an answer to Tom’s question.
Until now, we had only seen the monsters heading east.
Then why had the monsters here fled north?
What on earth was there to the south?
One reason came to mind, but I could not be certain right away.
I couldn’t disrupt the operation with a baseless suspicion.
I had to confirm it properly before making a decision.
At that moment, Master Sergeant Woo looked at the western sky and said,
“Is that the sandstorm? You can see it well even from here.”
Master Sergeant Woo seemed happy to see something new again.
I also turned my head in the direction he was looking.
A gigantic pillar of sand blocked the center of my vision.
It was the sandstorm in the desert region.
At the center of that storm were the terraforming ruins.
Seeing it from here made it even clearer that the sandstorm was unnatural.
“It really is fascinating. Even the tornadoes I saw in America didn’t look like such a vertical pillar.”
Master Sergeant Woo, seeing it for the first time, thought the same as I did.
After that, we continued onward.
The farther south we went, the more stones and rocks there were.
It could no longer be called a wasteland.
Living grass and trees began to appear here and there.
There were no insects or animals, but compared to the wasteland near the base, this place seemed to have living nature.
[It’s partly because the south is warmer, and partly because the terraforming facility is nearby.]
As I listened to Soph’s explanation, I kept walking, and soon the sandstorm was no longer visible.
I stopped.
There were still two or three hours left before sunset.
The others looked at me with puzzled faces.
I said to the team,
“I found them.”
I had finally found the traces of the missing hunting party.
I had not been leading everyone here thoughtlessly.
As we walked, I had kept searching for traces the hunting party might have left behind.
I had been worried we might have taken the wrong path because I had found no traces on the way here, but I had finally found some.
I did not need Soph’s help to find them.
My senses informed me of the traces the hunting party had left on the ground.
There was overturned soil and broken grass, but traces more precise than those remained there.
Residual echoes of energy left on the ground.
Among them was an energy I could recognize.
It was the energy of Kim Huiwon.
“Let’s hurry. Once the sun sets, it’ll be hard to find them.”
I urged the party on.
Everyone must have been tired from walking all day, but the team followed me without a word.
We continued walking along the traces like that, and before the sun set, we found people.
A plain filled with stones.
In a plain where piles of rock that could be called rocky hills were spread here and there, we found survivors.
The first to find the survivors was Master Sergeant Woo.
He stared at one pile of rocks, then said something unexpected.
“They’re alive. Two of them. But one seems to be wounded. We need to go quickly.”
The place he was looking at was so far away that I could barely make out a large rock.
Seeing him act like this out of nowhere, it seemed Master Sergeant Woo had already acquired a personal ability.
It was a good thing, but I felt a little disappointed.
It was merely an ability to see far away.
It was no different from using binoculars.
In any case, we had found survivors.
When Hanna and Tom tried to move at Master Sergeant Woo’s words, I raised my hand and stopped them.
Trying to move before the leader had given an order.
Since they were civilians, I could understand it, but both of them still had a lot to learn.
“Everyone, stand by. Master Sergeant Woo, check the surroundings.”
At my words, Master Sergeant Woo narrowed his eyes and scanned the area.
I also spread my senses as far as I could.
Something was strange.
Survivors had stayed here for more than a day.
Even if there was an injured person, it was a situation I couldn’t understand.
**
Kim Huiwon and Sergeant Kim.
What Master Sergeant Woo had seen on the rocky hill were those two.
No one else was visible, and only the two of them remained on the rocky hill.
The reason only the two of them were on this rocky hill was that everyone else had died.
As everyone expected, they had died due to a monster attack.
In the end, only the two of them survived, and they had spent more than a day inside this rocky hill.
There was one reason the two had not returned and had instead held out on this small rocky hill.
“It wants us to return to the base. If we head for the base, the monster will follow behind us.”
Sergeant Kim said as he rewrapped the bandage on Huiwon’s arm.
Even while grimacing in pain, Huiwon pouted.
“Isn’t that just an excuse because you don’t want to leave me behind?”
At Huiwon’s words, Sergeant Kim slowly shook his head.
“We’ve become comrades who crossed the line of death together, so I have no intention of leaving you behind. If that were the reason, there would be no need to make excuses.”
“That’s such an unromantic answer.”
Even at Huiwon’s teasing, he continued speaking.
“It was as strong as it looked, but it was smart too. I heard the monsters on this planet weren’t intelligent, but that wasn’t true at all.”
“That was the first time I’d seen a monster like that too. The other monsters resembled animals on Earth, but… that thing was just frightening.”
Remembering what had happened yesterday, Huiwon shuddered.
It had been around noon yesterday when the hunting party, wandering around after finding nothing, encountered it.
A black monster that appeared out of nowhere.
At the sight of the monster with a black body and several tentacles, the hunting party was terrified.
Huiwon also gave up on the hunt because of the monster’s appearance.
She told the team members to fall back, but it was useless.
Before the team members could retreat, the monster charged in.
The tentacles moved, and people’s bodies were torn apart.
The team members lost their lives one after another, and Sergeant Han, who was said to be a special forces soldier, died before he could run.
Huiwon and Sergeant Kim were no different in that they had been unable to flee.
Just when they had steeled themselves for death, the monster wounded Huiwon’s arm and left.
The monster had killed the team members like a storm and vanished.
Huiwon, barely coming back to her senses, tried to return to the base, but Sergeant Kim blocked her.
“There’s only one reason it left us alive. To find out where the base is. We must not go to the base.”
After hearing Sergeant Kim’s words, Huiwon ended up staying on this rocky hill with him.
“But there’s no way out if we just keep staying here. The monster hasn’t been seen since yesterday either… Maybe it went somewhere else?”
At Huiwon’s tearful words, Sergeant Kim scratched his head.
He knew that wasn’t the case, but he had no way to explain it to her.
Moreover, the two of them currently had no medicine to treat the injury.
They had torn cloth and wrapped the wound, but at this rate, the wound would only worsen.
“It’s a battle of endurance. The first one to give up loses.”
He could not say it to Huiwon, but this was not a battle they could win.
The only people left were him and one former civil servant who knew nothing of war.
The creature had been vicious enough to injure the woman.
And it had left her legs intact so she could move.
“That thing is as smart as a person.”
It was surely watching from somewhere.
The situation was the worst, but Sergeant Kim had not given up yet.
If the rumors he had heard were true, a rescue team would come.
Because of that trash general and the deputy director of the National Intelligence Service, he had misjudged someone, but he too had heard the rumors.
A one-hundred-percent operation success rate.
The story of an incredible ordinary corporal who ground down any enemy and rescued anyone.
To think he had tried to mess with someone like that.
If even half the rumors were true, then being beaten unconscious by that little girl was actually fortunate.
Thinking that, he looked around once more.
As expected, the monster was nowhere to be seen.
Time passed, and now long shadows of rocks lay across the plain.
It was then.
Whoosh.
He saw someone moving swiftly between the shadows.
Huiwon’s voice came from beside him.
“Mr. Hyun Myeonghan?”
What he had seen was correct.
The slaughterer corporal was coming to rescue them.
“As expected, the rumors were true.”
Just as Sergeant Kim let out a sigh of relief—
Papapapak!
With the sound of spikes striking rock, a large black form burst out from the rocky hill beside them.
A huge shadow overlaid the shadows of the rocks.
Long tentacles shot out from the swiftly moving shadow.
A black monster.
It was the monster that had killed the hunting party.
The monster rushed quickly toward the human approaching quietly, Team Leader Hyun.
Sergeant Kim was horrified at the sight.
“Shit! We were bait?”
The monster was far smarter than he had expected.
There had not been only one reason it kept the two of them alive.
It didn’t matter even if the two of them did not go to the base.
If someone came to rescue them, it could make those people do it instead.
It was a method it had used long ago as well, and it had worked well then too.
This time, only one had come, but it could capture this human and wait again.
Just as the monster, the Akzar scout, was thinking that—
The monster saw the human holding a spear smile.
He aimed the shining spear at the monster, and the mage cast a spell.
Fwoosh!
The black stone attached to the spear shone brilliantly.