The orcs’ eyes seemed to turn red, and then they shouted at the tops of their lungs. Regardless, there were still plenty of Skeleton Beasts left.
TATATATAT! WHOOSH! KABOOM!
The barricade continued to be smashed apart. In the meantime, the orcs pulled out weapons from the walls they had built on both sides of the barricade.
Park Il-sang, who was watching it through the Drone footage, was dumbfounded.
“No. What kind of orcs use guns? Where did they even get those?”
TATATATATATANG!
The bastards opened fire. However, Skeleton Beasts were made of bone to begin with, so the bullets’ accuracy against them was dreadful!
At that, orcs holding thick blades poured out from both sides of the barricade this time. But that was an act of the orcs rushing toward death by their own choice.
KABOOM! KAKAKABOOM! RUMBLE! BOOM, BOOM, BOOM!
“Graaagh!”
The Skeleton Beasts that collided with the orcs exploded on the spot. The orcs’ bodies were blown to pieces. Moreover, the explosions did not have only blast force.
The shattered bone fragments that sprayed in every direction upon explosion created a buckshot effect, literally turning the orcs into rags!
A hellish pandemonium! Mountains of corpses and seas of blood!
And after a short while, the entire barricade was smashed to pieces, leaving debris piled and scattered here and there.
And.
The companions watching the footage broadcast through the Drone were reacting as though they had become viewers watching National-Pride TV.
-This is E-Grade? Do not lie! You are B-Grade, are you not?
-I thought my own Job was rather unique, but Park Il-sang, you are amazing! This is practically a one-man army. A one-man army. I wish I could change my Job to Necromancer too.
The shooting Damage Dealer, Kim Ye-rin. The Barbarian Warrior melee Damage Dealer, Kim Dong-su.
The two of them made a fuss like that.
Of course they would. The exchange ratio was overwhelmingly in his favor!
-We are departing.
Along with the Team Leader’s voice, the Combat Truck set off. It accelerated in an instant and reached its maximum speed.
It charged straight toward the ruined orc position.
THUD! KABOOM!
It broke through by ramming the orcs blocking its path with the body of the vehicle.
Behind it, Kitty followed!
“Kahahahahaha! Now this is satisfying!”
Mr. Kim Dong-su shouted and cheered. Like that, the party left behind the orc position blocking the road and began to race away.
That was when it happened.
“KRAAAAAAAAH!”
An enormous roar that made the fine hairs on their bodies stand on end rang out.
‘An Orc Chieftain!’
-It is an Orc Chieftain!
-Hit the gas! Hit the gas!
-Huh. Is that the Orc Chieftain I heard rumors about? My body is trembling terribly.
It seemed that everyone’s bodies had reacted immediately to the Orc Chieftain’s roar.
‘Its Fear Roar is quite something, is it not? To think it can make even me, a Necromancer, react like this…’
An Orc Chieftain was a heavyweight positioned at A-Grade.
It seemed to have come out after hearing the sounds of the attack, but the party had already gotten quite far from the orcs’ position.
Whether the bastard exploded with rage or not, it would likely not be a problem.
However, Park Il-sang was still slightly surprised.
That was because a Necromancer was, by nature, a Mage who handled death, and therefore possessed considerable resistance to mental-type attacks.
If one later transformed into an Undead such as a Lich, mental-type attacks would reach a point where they did not work at all.
‘If I catch an Orc Chieftain later and turn it into an Undead, it will be extremely useful, will it not?’
Park Il-sang smacked his lips as he thought of the Orc Chieftain roaring behind them.
***
Daebudo City.
It was a city that sat upon a fairly large island called Daebudo.
It was also connected to islands called Seonjaedo and Yeongheungdo, and in the past, it had apparently been quite famous as a tourist destination.
By making use of its characteristic as an island on the sea, it had now become a single city, and quite a large population lived there.
‘Was the Korean population around twenty million now…?’
Twenty million people across twelve major cities.
Of course, the largest city among them was Seoul, and supposedly six million people lived there.
Frankly, the fact that Seoul still had as many as six million people in this half-ruined world was surprising, but it was not unbelievable.
By using the Han River as a defensive line to block the Monsters from the north from moving south, Monster resources were bound to overflow. On top of that, a considerable amount of past infrastructure and the like still remained.
As far as Park Il-sang knew, Gwangmyeong City, Seongnam City, and Hanam City, which had originally not been part of Seoul, had been absorbed and merged into it.
Since northern Seoul had been abandoned, it was only natural that Seoul had expanded southward.
However.
The other regions had been abandoned.
The Great Wall had been built while cutting roughly halfway through Gwangmyeong City, Seongnam City, and Hanam City.
In other words, the regions the party had passed through this time were actually the areas around Gunpo, Siheung, Anyang, and Ansan.
Those areas were lined with ruined buildings, as well as apartment complexes and office buildings that had somehow not yet collapsed.
The entrance to Daebudo City.
They arrived at the Tando Port Seawall.
Originally, Daebudo had the Sihwa Seawall as its entrance in the north and two Tando Port Seawalls below, but apparently the upper one had been completely closed.
That was also why it had taken them as long as eight hours. The orcs were said to be an especially serious problem. The fact that they sometimes blocked the road like that truly made the world feel as though it was in its last days.
In any case, Daebudo City was a fairly prosperous city. It operated a large port and used it to trade with foreign countries.
In a world overrun by Monsters, the sea was far more dangerous than land, but there was a reason maritime trade was still conducted despite that.
It was because, if one received the Blessing of a Constellation whose domain was the sea, one would not be attacked by sea Monsters.
Thanks to that, the world was still organically connected.
‘If even this Blessing had not existed, this would not have been a dystopian world. It would have been an apocalyptic world.’
In any case, the party first stopped at the entrance of the Tando Port Seawall.
A very thick structure resembling a castle wall had been built on the seawall.
‘In any case, they built this entrance extremely solidly.’
The world was in the era of the Great System and Constellations.
As a result, things made by those who became Hunters through the System came to possess special abilities.
Mana was infused into them, and one might say System-like functions dwelled within them.
The Tando Port Seawall Fortress Entrance was also like that.
He could feel powerful Mana.
At this level, even an A-Grade Monster seemed incapable of breaking through it. Seoul’s Great Wall had been made in the same way, so it was not particularly surprising.
“Stop! Where have you come from?”
“You should have been contacted in advance. I am Kim Sang-in of Shadow Transport.”
“Please state your identification number!”
“98713#2871.”
“Confirmed!”
RUMBLE!
The gate opened.
“This is my first time visiting another city, so is this common?”
The one who answered him was Kim Ye-rin.
-There are Monsters that disguise themselves as humans, you see. It is a kind of security measure. When visiting from one city to another, people contact the destination by comms first and receive an authentication code. Of course, aside from that, they also inspect people with something like an Identification Skill.
“I see. Thank you for answering.”
-Not at all.
Like that, the truck was able to arrive in the thriving city of Daebudo City.
***
“The ingredients are cheap here. There are many fresh ones too.”
He had heard that Daebudo City had become a medium-sized city with a population of over five hundred thousand. In the old days, Daebudo had apparently been a tourist destination, a place where the resident population had not even reached fifty thousand.
And yet it had prospered like this.
They said it was because it had the advantage of being a moderately sized island, making it easy to defend. Even so, he thought it was certainly an unusual place.
Jeju Island had supposedly fallen long ago and become a Demon Den.
Yet Daebudo had somehow survived.
That Daebudo had the coast of the entire island surrounded by concrete walls of moderate height, though they were not quite as large as the Great Wall.
Apparently, it was because of amphibious marine Monsters.
They said not many dangerous ones of that type appeared, but if they simply allowed them to crawl onto bare land, a catastrophe would occur.
Since Park Il-sang had lived in Seoul all his life, Daebudo seemed quite fascinating to him.
‘This really is… a little different from my previous life.’
In his previous life, the world had been destroyed.
Because of the Demon King’s Army’s invasion.
The ones called the Demon King’s Army were not Demon Kings of the sort that appeared in modern Earth’s subculture anime, novels, or comics.
One could say they were something incomprehensible from the start.
Even the Demonkin who belonged to the Demon King’s Army were all beings with thought structures completely different from the sentient beings Park Il-sang had known in his previous life.
First of all, they had no fear whatsoever of the concept of death, and they had no notion of pain either. Rather, one might say they were madmen driven by compulsions.
If he had to find something at least similar to their behavior…
‘They are similar to the things that appear in the supernatural-horror fiction popular in recent web novels, are they not?’
They had no reason, no logic, and no proper thoughts.
That did not mean, however, that they were like the anomalies in supernatural-horror fiction, unable to be destroyed unless certain conditions were met.
If one struck them with powerful firepower, they died.
It was just that their principles of action were similar to those anomalies from supernatural-horror fiction.
There were ones that collected eyeballs and attached them to their own bodies, ones that devoured only brains, and even one that gathered souls and stitched them onto its own soul.
As he thought about his previous life like that, Park Il-sang brought his mind back to reality.
The reason his thoughts often drifted off on tangents like this was probably because he had lived far too long.
“You have tomatoes?”
“What is there that Smart Farms cannot make these days? Seoul has Smart Farms too, does it not?”
“In Seoul, they charge about three times this for these.”
“Well, I have heard that Seoul is short on land.”
When he asked the price at a vegetable shop he saw along the road, he was surprised to find that it was cheaper than he had expected. Park Il-sang bought a bag containing five tomatoes.
The bag was made of paper. In the old days, they apparently used plastic bags, but these days, they could not even make plastic bags.
Of course.
Since Korea had no oil, it was only natural that they could not make related products. Paper was apparently possible because they used recycled paper made with recycling technology that had been pushed to the extreme.
Park Il-sang took a tomato out of the bag and bit into it.
Then he was startled.
“This is…!”