At the leader's roar, the eyes of every Leopard Wolf blazed crimson.
The Leopard Wolves that had been shrinking back charged as one and began hacking at the watchtower's pillars with their mantis-foreleg tentacles. Others threw themselves forward in a brute body charge, ramming the watchtower with their hard bodies.
THOOM, THUD, THUD, THUD.
Under the heavy impacts, the watchtower, densely stacked from ivory bricks, shook and rattled.
“No.”
Han-eol panicked.
Feeling the danger, Han-eol worked the full-color hand with everything he had.
In the blink of an eye, three more Leopard Wolves died.
In exchange, one corner of the watchtower crumbled.
“Emergency! Emergency! Please send reinforcements, you bast*rds.”
Han-eol sent distress signals toward the base camp like a madman.
But the area around the base camp was ringed by Leopard Wolves as well. Which meant the chance of reinforcements reaching here in short order was slim.
‘I have to do something. Anything.’
Han-eol clenched his teeth and cut down the Leopard Wolves' numbers like a madman.
A mere few minutes later, dozens of Leopard Wolf corpses were piled around the watchtower.
But each time, the booming roar sounded from far off.
Hearing that roar, the Leopard Wolves charged endlessly and rammed the watchtower like fearless immortals.
At last the watchtower collapsed.
“Aaargh. Damn it.”
Screaming at the top of his lungs, Han-eol pressed the emergency escape button.
The watchtower window clanked open.
Right after he escaped through it, the whole tower came crashing down. Thanks to his quick judgment, Han-eol avoided being crushed to death under the bricks.
Instead, he found himself ringed by thousands — no, tens of thousands — of Leopard Wolves.
“Aaah.”
Han-eol tore at his hair in despair.
HRRUNGH~.
At once a Leopard Wolf leapt at him from his left side and fell upon him.
Han-eol dove into the trench(?) formed by the dead Leopard Wolves' corpses, poked out only his head, and plucked out the soul of the beast leaping high at him with his full-color fingers.
Instant death in one stroke again.
The dead Leopard Wolf's corpse dropped beside him.
Then another beast charged him head-on.
Han-eol tore its soul out immediately.
Then four Leopard Wolves came at him at once, from front and back, left and right.
‘Ngghh.’
Han-eol swung the full-color hand like lightning and killed all four instantly. His back was soaked through with cold sweat.
As though declaring ‘let us see who wins,’ eight Leopard Wolves leapt at the same time.
Han-eol barely managed to finish seven of them.
The one that survived knocked him flat inside the trench.
GRRRRR, GRAOW!
Pinning him down with a thick paw, the Leopard Wolf swung the scythe-shaped tentacle jutting from its shoulder.
Before it landed, Han-eol seized and tore out its soul.
The dead Leopard Wolf collapsed heavily onto his body.
“Kek.”
Crushed under the beast's massive weight, Han-eol let out a stifled groan.
In the meantime, more and more Leopard Wolves fell on him.
And those Leopard Wolves died, and died again. Their corpses collapsed onto his body, and collapsed again, until they formed a mountain.
Now Han-eol was on the verge of being crushed to death under Leopard Wolf corpses.
‘Please stop. Please, somebody save me,’
Han-eol found himself wanting to give it all up.
Surrounded by tens of thousands of demon beasts, the situation was so terrifying, so exhausting, so hard that he wanted to let the thread of his life slip loose right there.
Frankly, Han-eol had no strength left to fight either.
Pinned under the dead beasts' corpses, he could not properly see the souls of the Leopard Wolves charging in anew.
If he could not see the enemy, he could not pull out the enemy's soul.
This was Han-eol's limit.
Han-eol had felt this limit keenly a few days ago, when the Twin-Headed Birds threatened his life.
So he had been wringing his brain for some way to shore up the weakness, but he had ended up like this before he could work out a solution.
At last his field of vision was blocked off by Leopard Wolf corpses.
Now Han-eol could no longer kill them instantly. His absolute weapon, the full-color hand, could only stir empty air.
In the midst of it, a Leopard Wolf's sharp tentacle bored through its kin's corpses and stabbed hard into his left shoulder blade.
“Gah.”
Thanks to the Flayed Skin, the shoulder was not torn away, but his left arm could no longer move.
Next another attack grazed his cheek and left a long wound on his face.
The third attack tore a long gash across the crown of his head.
Even so, crushed under layers upon layers of corpses, Han-eol could not move at all. A few more attacks and a hole would be punched through his face.
‘It's over.’
Han-eol closed his eyes.
Everything went black.
Even then, the full-color hand was clearly visible in his sight. He could even see distinctly the small eyeball that had sprouted on it.
This was not actually a real eyeball.
It was something like an eyeball-shaped pimple that had sprouted when the three-eyed, eight-tailed demon beast's soul was absorbed into the hand within his Image.
Naturally, this eyeball could not think independently. It could not judge for itself or hold a will of its own.
That was because the ‘psyche,’ the part of the three-eyed, eight-tailed beast's psyche and anima responsible for will and thought, had already been absorbed into the full-color hand and had ceased to exist.
Instead, the beast's ‘anima,’ retaining intact all the knowledge it had accumulated in life, had become the eyeball-shaped pimple.
That will-less eyeball rolled about. It looked this way, then that way, rolling ceaselessly.
‘What on earth is it looking at?’
Curiosity struck Han-eol.
Contemplating it quietly, he found the eyeball's shape resembled the three-eyed, eight-tailed demon beast's third eye, the one set between her brows.
‘!!!’
A lamp switched on in Han-eol's brain.
Through her third eye, the three-eyed, eight-tailed demon beast could read thousands of kilometers all at once.
Back when Han-eol was on his third Highland expedition, he had tried to dig the male Girit's corpse out of the wasteland.
And at that very moment, a chilling energy had begun beyond the horizon and swept over the place where he stood in the blink of an eye.
As Han-eol later realized, the female Girit had opened her third eye wide and read a vast region thousands of kilometers across in each direction in a single sweep.
Her reason for setting out to search in earnest was to find the male Girit's whereabouts. And Han-eol had been caught by that sense.
‘A Girit that has opened its third eye can catch the movement of every object within a region thousands of kilometers across with that wondrous eye.’
This was plain fact. Not a single insect, not a single blade of grass within thousands of kilometers could escape the Girit tribe's third eye.
‘So getting caught by the three-eyed, eight-tailed beast's senses back then was unavoidable.’
And now that fearsome Girit eye had sprouted on the hand inside his Image.
‘Then could it be?’
Han-eol squeezed his eyes shut and focused his consciousness on his Image.
And something came into view.
The small eyeball on the full-color hand was moving at a mad speed. And it was scanning the movements of the tens of thousands of Leopard Wolves spread across this area, missing not one.
FLICK-FLICK-FLICK-FLICK—.
Scene after scene that the eyeball was reading formed on Han-eol's retina like captured photo frames.
Then all those Leopard Wolf souls transformed into figures drawn on two-dimensional paper.
The figures did not drift apart from one another. They formed a scene like thousands, tens of thousands of two-dimensional figures drawn densely across one great sheet of drawing paper.
If he could not see the enemy, he could not pull out the enemy's soul.
That proposition was now a thing of the past. The Han-eol of this moment could catch sight of enemies as much as he liked, through the eyeball on the full-color hand.
So the proposition above changed to the following.
If he saw the enemy, he could pull out the enemy's soul.
Even in this very moment of great realization, the Leopard Wolf tribe were breaking the speed of sound as they charged him.
For all that, every one of their movements was being tracked by the eyeball on the full-color hand.
This was a speed no human dynamic vision could ever follow.
Not even an A-grade, or even an S-grade, ability-holder of the swiftness type could have matched the tracking speed the eyeball was displaying.
But the full-color hand cleared that limit with ease. Perhaps because it was a being of a higher dimension, or of the Image, it seemed to have no speed limit at all.
FWA-BA-BA-BA-BAK!
The full-color fingers surpassed physical limits and began ripping out Leopard Wolf souls at a speed to knock a person flat with shock.
Like an automatic thresher rattling the husks off rice grains to leave only the kernels, like a sewing machine's needle driving thread into cloth, the full-color hand left only Leopard Wolf corpses on the ground, plucking their souls out one after another and absorbing them in a single sweep.
In the blink of an eye, Leopard Wolves died instantly by the thousands.
Starting from near the distant horizon, the full-color hand scanned from east to west, then west to east again, killing Leopard Wolves in great clumps.
Its speed was such that the beasts along straight lines several kilometers long, running roughly east to west, toppled row by row, line by line.
KYEH-KYAENG! KYEH-KAENG!
Now the beasts too were consumed by a terror they could not hide.
The Leopard Wolf leader drove its subordinates on with a booming roar.
But it was no use. Appalled by an unprecedented phenomenon they had never met in their lives, the Leopard Wolves tucked their tails of their own accord.
The frightened pack scattered in every direction.
The small eyeball on the full-color hand caught every last one of the Leopard Wolves fleeing in all directions, missing not a single beast.
Once caught in that radar net, it was instant death. The moment the eyeball caught one, the full-color fingers flew in and harvested its soul.
Before long, well over tens of thousands of Leopard Wolf corpses lay strewn across the metal mine area.
Among them was the corpse of the Leopard Wolf leader.
Faced with a horrific scene one could not believe even while seeing it, even the sky seemed to blanch. Between the darkened clouds, thin sunlight kept showing and hiding.
“Ngghh. This is killing me.”
Only after a bleak silence settled over the battlefield did Han-eol manage to raise himself.
Blood running from the crown of his head and his cheek dripped down his chin.
Thanks to his high Vitality, the bleeding soon stopped. The bruises covering his whole body, shoulder blade included, eased noticeably.
In that state, Han-eol gazed at the countless demon beast corpses strewn about.
“What in the world…….”
He could not finish the sentence. His pupils trembled faintly at the hellish scene spread out before him.
It was right then.
With a SHWA-WA-WAK—, a group of people came flying in at tremendous speed.
ROLL, ROLL.
The eyeball embedded in the full-color hand caught each of those flying toward this place.
The visual information thus caught was relayed intact to Han-eol's retina.
Having seen them, he could also reap their souls.
‘What should I do?’
Han-eol narrowed his eyes.
If he set his mind to it, he could kill every one of those witnesses and shut their mouths.
But Han-eol did not.
‘That would be crossing a line.’
He had no wish to become a demon who craved death, or a murderer mad for slaughter.
Enduring the pain in his back, he turned around, and the ability-holders who had flown in from the distant base camp landed one after another before him.
They had come gripping glider-like craft in one hand and hanging from them, and unexpectedly, Han-eol had met some of them before.
‘It's the Commander and Vice-Commander of the Artemis Knights.’
Han-eol swallowed hard.