***
How long had he walked after leaving the inn?
At last, the message he had been waiting for appeared.
-You have entered the imperial capital’s “slum district.” Please continue exploration.
There had been truly many hardships before he reached the area called the slum.
‘Damn it, I’m too popular.’
It was because people recognized him far too easily.
Only after finding a robe and hood large enough to hide his body, throwing them over himself, and running away for quite a while was he able to shake off his followers.
‘From now on, I’ll have to hide my identity when I move around. What is this……?’
The process of preparing weapons at the blacksmith’s had not been smooth either.
He had been completely taken in by the blacksmith’s flowery tongue and ended up buying all kinds of combat gear and even survival equipment as extras.
‘It’s not like I’m going into a jungle.’
Min-jun smiled bitterly as he looked at the leather bands wrapped around his upper and lower body.
Even excluding the longsword at his waist, he had everything from various daggers to flint, a hand axe, and a waterskin.
‘This is as much of a ripoff as ripoffs get.’
Feeling the lightened weight of his silver-coin pouch, Min-jun entered the dark alley of the slum.
The slum at sunset was thickly covered in darkness.
‘What a mess of urban planning.’
Min-jun looked around and felt overwhelmed.
Houses made by roughly tying wooden planks together lined up one after another, forming something like a maze. As someone who had lived in modern society, he could hardly imagine that people actually lived here.
“Dogshit……!”
“Get…… out right now!”
“……brat……!”
The violent sounds that burst out intermittently became familiar only minutes after he entered.
Dogs barking, something breaking, screams, crying.
Every single one was an unpleasant noise.
-Year 11 of the Rivelhardt Empire
“You startled me.”
A notification window appeared with an opening line boring enough to make him yawn.
It really did come and go without so much as a turn signal.
-The people robbed of everything by endless war are slowly withering to death.
-The slums of the imperial capital have expanded on an unprecedented scale, accelerating slumification more than ever before.
Min-jun read it to the end and tilted his head.
‘……That’s it?’
-Please continue exploring.
Min-jun nodded without saying anything.
It told him to do it, so what else could he do?
‘Just exploring searches for information for me……. It is convenient.’
He did not know how necessary the information would be for clearing the test.
Still, it was better than not knowing.
‘It’s much better than when they told me nothing.’
How long had he walked?
“Ptoo! Just my luck, running into some beggar bastard…… Hey, let’s get out of here.”
At the mouth of an alley, a sharp-looking man swaggered out.
Behind him followed five or six people.
‘Bloodstains.’
There were traces of blood on their arms and legs.
Normally, he would have missed them, but they could not escape his eyesight, which had developed as his Hero Level rose.
<Hero Request(Sub): Crime Suppression>
-You have discovered “Seiren,” a criminal organization involved in every evil act in the slums. They are feared by the slum residents more than the emperor himself.
-Defeat: Acquire Level Points.
-Suppression: Acquire Random Reward.
What stood out was that defeat and suppression each had different rewards.
Defeat probably meant subduing each individual one by one.
Suppression meant uprooting the entire force, perhaps?
‘I’ll do it. If it helps me pass this test…… I can do it as much as needed.’
Min-jun pulled his hood down deep.
He had always thought the best policy was to avoid shady people on the street, but this time was different.
‘Still, I don’t feel like killing.’
After briefly furrowing his brows, Min-jun walked straight toward them.
“Kuhuuuk…….”
It was a voice that came from a person thrown onto the roadside.
A skinny man was groaning while clutching his stomach, from which blood poured.
Something like an iron skewer had been driven in so deeply that only the handle was visible.
-Seiren kills those who do not obey them by skewering them, then leaves them behind.
He could guess why they did this.
‘To create fear. Is this how these people control the slum?’
Min-jun pulled the skewer from the man’s stomach in one motion.
Blood surged up.
“Ghhhh!”
It was a fairly loud scream.
Loud enough for the Seiren members disappearing in the distance to turn their heads this way.
“What?”
Seven in total.
With expressions nothing short of vicious, they began slowly approaching Min-jun.
“What kind of bastard are you, being that tall?”
“Hey, what are you doing, pulling that out? Do you even know what that is?”
Min-jun pulled his hood down deep and silently faced them.
“Say something, friend. What did you smear on your mouth that you won’t talk?”
“Hey, beanpole. Don’t you know who we are?”
They each drew their swords and drew closer.
They acted as though there was nothing in the world they feared.
“What kind of bastard are you? You mute bastard.”
Min-jun looked at them from beneath his hood.
“A Hero.”
“What?”
Saying it with his own mouth was unbearably embarrassing, but Min-jun repeated it once more.
“Just call me a Hero.”
The men looked at one another with dumbfounded expressions.
“What’s this bastard saying?”
“Enough, enough. He looks like he isn’t right in the head. Let’s just cut off one arm and send him on his way.”
The man who said that was pretending to look elsewhere to make Min-jun lower his guard.
When Min-jun deliberately relaxed his posture for him to see, the man’s eyes flashed for an instant.
“Die!”
CLANG—!
The blade flying at his temple sparked and bounced away right in front of Min-jun’s nose.
He had raised his gauntlet and calmly deflected the attack.
“Wh……!”
Their expressions changed completely.
They probably had not expected him to block a blade sent flying like lightning this easily, without even blinking.
“Hmm. Am I strong? Or are you people weak?”
He shook out his arm and cracked his neck.
It was a sword strike that an ordinary person would have been hit by before they could even blink, but to Min-jun, the approaching blade had been clearly visible.
“Y-You bas……!”
His fist slammed into the jaw of the panicking man.
Thwack. A satisfying impact rang out. The man toppled stiffly backward like a log.
He had fainted without even screaming.
-Defeat complete.
So even knocking them unconscious counted as defeating them.
That was welcome news. It did not seem necessary to commit murder and ruin his night for no reason.
If necessary, he would have to do it, though.
“K-K-Kill him!”
“Y-Youuu……!”
The remaining six rushed in all at once.
Min-jun did not step back. Facing them head-on, he swung his scabbard wide.
CLANG—!
“Urgh!”
Two of them fell over at the same time.
Min-jun’s targets were the ones standing clumsily in the back. He put strength into his arm and uppercut one in the face.
“Kuh……!”
Thwack. Blood sprayed with a dull sound.
At the same time, he sensed a presence rushing at his back.
Min-jun reached behind him and blindly grabbed it.
“Aaaaak!”
He seized the man by the hair and threw him forward without mercy. The body of an adult man literally flew through the air.
“Kuh!”
The sound of his face crashing into the wall was anything but ordinary. A pained scream burst from the man’s mouth as he clutched his collapsed nose bridge.
When Min-jun slowly looked back, the remaining three were inching backward.
Every time he swung a hand, one person fell. They looked as if they had seen a monster.
Delayed fear rose in their eyes.
“D-Do you know who we are?! We’re Seiren! You think you’ll be safe after doing this?! Our law is to chase a grudge even to the end of hell and repay it!”
Min-jun grabbed the collar of the man who said that.
“Ghk! Kuhuuuk! Ghhhh!”
When Min-jun put strength into his arm and lifted him, the man kicked his feet in the air and struggled desperately to escape.
Min-jun kept him like that until the man’s breath was about to stop, then released him the moment his eyes rolled back.
“Kuhuuuuk! Kuhak! Cough!”
Without giving him time to gasp for breath, Min-jun kicked him in the face.
The ones who had been inching backward were the same.
When he swung the scabbard and struck their temples, they went silent as dead mice.
“Hoo.”
At the scene where all seven had collapsed, Min-jun stretched his stiff body.
-All targets defeated.
-Hero Level: 7(85% → 99%)
‘So it rose about 14% in total. I guess the increase will get lower as my level goes up.’
Still, it was fine.
The fact that he could raise his level through this level of fighting alone had meaning.
As long as he could accumulate strength before the next match, that was enough.
“Seiren…….”
Min-jun looked at the tattoos on the shoulders of the collapsed men.
It was a mermaid pattern that reminded him of the famous coffee-shop brand he had often heard of in his original world.
Seiren…….
“For my sake too, I guess you people are fated to disappear.”
After that, for two whole days, Min-jun wandered the back alleys of the slum every night.
Whenever he found someone with a mermaid mark, he thoroughly beat them down and busily moved around for two days.
-Hero Level: 9(77%)
Before he knew it, he was right before his target of Level 10.
He only needed to accumulate a little more Level Points to achieve his first result.
Just as he thought that.
Min-jun ran into a completely unexpected problem.
“Th-Th-The Black Hunter!”
“Hiiiiiik!”
“W-We’re dead!”
His existence had become far too well known within the slum.
Now, people panicked and fled just from seeing the shadow of “a man wearing a black hood.”
‘The next match isn’t far away either. How do I subjugate all of these guys before then?’
Min-jun sat in a dark corner of a slum alley and agonized. He was wrapping bandages around wounds all over his body.
His body was covered in wounds he had received while catching the Seiren bastards.
No matter how strong he had become, defeating them without spilling a single drop of blood was difficult.
‘If Lapis were here at a time like this.’
Min-jun regretted that.
When he had first passed the third stage and come out, he had hoped Lapis would welcome him, but for some reason, there had still been no news of her.
‘Did something happen to her?’
It could not be helped.
This was a world where danger existed in every direction.
There was no guarantee she was safe either.
‘If something went wrong, I’m really sorry.’
His chest ached, and his mouth tasted bitter.
What if, because of his unnecessary meddling, she had been caught by some criminal organization and harmed?
It was not something he could dismiss as groundless fear. This imperial capital was a lawless zone with danger lurking everywhere.
Even Seiren had spread through the entire slum like termites.
If Lapis had been caught by those inhuman bastards…….
‘No.’
Min-jun tried hard to turn his eyes away from that possibility.
Still, she had the body of a Hero. She would be alive somehow.
She had not gone out alone, had she?
“Black…… Hunter……?”
Flinch.
Startled, Min-jun grabbed the hilt of his sword.
He stared toward where the voice had come from. While he had been lost in deep thought for a moment, he had not even noticed someone approaching.
‘That scared me. It’s a kid.’
Fortunately, the one who had called him was a little girl who looked barely ten years old.
“Are you the Black Hunter?”
What was he supposed to say to this?
“……That isn’t my name, but I have been called that lately.”
“Wow!”
The child covered her mouth and her eyes sparkled.
“Are you punishing bad people today too?”
Min-jun chuckled and nodded.
“Wow!”
He had only done it to raise his level, but if it looked that way from a child’s perspective, it did not feel bad.
“Mr. Hunter, does that hurt?”
The girl looked at Min-jun’s forearm.
His forearm was wrapped tightly in bandages, but blood kept spreading through them.
He had been grazed by a dagger coated in nerve poison, and the wound had opened fairly wide while he pulled it out.
“No, I’m fine. When you punish bad people, wounds like this happen sometimes.”
“Hunter, you’re so cool!”
The child smiled, showing her teeth.
When he roughly stroked her messy hair.
“Ah!”
Her eyes flashed open as if a good thought had come to her, and she looked at him.
“Then, because you’re a good person, Hunter…… um…… should I tell you where the Saintess is?”
“Saintess?”
“I’m not supposed to tell people, but, uuuum…….”
Even as she spoke, the girl hesitated several times.
‘Saintess? Is it some religious title, like a pastor of a church or a priest of a cathedral?’
Min-jun scratched his chin without feeling much.
‘I thought she was cute because she was a kid, but she’s a high-level evangelist.’
Getting entangled with that side for no reason seemed like it would only steal his time.
Min-jun stroked the girl’s hair and shrugged.
“Really? Then won’t you be in trouble if you carelessly tell me? You shouldn’t get scolded because you told me.”
“But you’re a good person, Hunter…… right?”
At that innocent smile that seemed to test, “You’re a good person, aren’t you?” Min-jun shook his head.
“Probably not. I may look like this, but I’m an incredibly bad person. I only think about myself, I’m ignorant, I only have strength, I’m pathetic…… and as you can see, I have no self-esteem either.”
Min-jun thought the child would be disappointed by his words, but the result was the opposite.
“Then you’re a good person!”
Instead, the girl wore a huge smile.
“……Huh?”
How did that happen?
“The Saintess said so. A good person never says they’re a good person! So the Black Hunter passes!”
Damn it, she got me.
At the girl’s shamelessness, Min-jun chuckled and sighed.
“Fine, I lose. I’ll only take a look, then. But I’m not staying long.”
“Whyyy! Stay a long time! Live with me!”
What was this slum girl’s girl-crush energy?
At the words asking him to live with her, Min-jun barely calmed the expression that almost burst into laughter.
“I don’t have time if I’m going to catch even one more bad person.”
“Ah, then I guess there’s nothing we can do…… Now, this way!”
Min-jun leisurely walked behind the girl as she ran ahead.
After walking for quite a while, the place they reached was a shabby wooden house.
It was at the far end of the slum, difficult for people who did not know about it to find.
“Saintess! Saintess!”
The girl cheerfully ran over and flung the door wide open.
“Saint……ess……?”
At that moment, the child’s pupils contracted and shook uncontrollably.
As if she could not believe the sight before her eyes, she began trembling from shoulders to feet.
“Why? What happened?”
Sensing something unusual, Min-jun quickly ran over.
Before he even came close, a fishy smell strong enough to numb his nose rushed in.
“This is insane…….”
The inside of the building was completely overturned, perfectly fitting the words “a disaster,” and pools of blood and corpses lay scattered everywhere.
Min-jun stared at the chests of those corpses.
Every one of them had something like an iron skewer driven into them.
“……Seiren.”
It was the moment Min-jun’s eyes sharpened like a single-edged blade.