Chapter 298

Chapter 298

Naturally, there was not a single survivor in the underground village that had been attacked by Scavengers.

When they searched underground, they found ten corpses.

Every one of them was an old person who clearly looked ill.

Zeon knelt on one knee and looked at the old people’s bodies.

At a glance, they looked to be over seventy. But Zeon knew the truth.

They had not even passed fifty.

People who lived in cities that enjoyed the benefits of civilization, like Neo Seoul, looked younger than their actual age.

Conversely, those who lived in underground villages like this, where everything existed only for survival, aged rapidly and looked at least ten or twenty years older than their true age.

At a glance, it was a crude village.

They had somehow made a village underground in order to survive monsters, but everything was lacking.

Water, food—there had not been a single thing they could eat or drink freely. They must have lived by saving as much as possible.

A body that could not receive sufficient nutrition aged easily beneath the storms of time. Naturally, its immunity vanished as well, making it easy to fall ill.

Just like them.

This was the reality of people living in survivor villages.

Briel asked in a trembling voice,

“Why didn’t they come to Neo Seoul? They could’ve lived in the slums.”

“More precisely, they couldn’t come.”

“What do you mean, they couldn’t?”

“You know too. The desert is crawling with monsters. For ordinary people to avoid every monster and come to Neo Seoul is close to a miracle.”

Even for Awakened, crossing the desert was a matter of risking one’s life. Ordinary people went without saying.

“For you and me, several hundred kilometers isn’t much of a distance, but to them, it’s a road to death. They probably would’ve been caught by monsters and become prey before they even traveled several dozen kilometers.”

“I...... guess so.”

Squee!

Briel bit her lip hard enough to draw blood.

Her eyes were bloodshot red, as if tears might fall at any moment.

The survivor village was miserable.

It was barely the size of three or four houses, and crude handmade household goods were scattered everywhere.

They were tools closer to the primitive age than the medieval era.

Thinking of people gathering and living in this place, where there was no proper ventilation and no light, brought tears to her eyes on its own.

Compared to this, her room in the slums was no different from heaven.

“Haa!”

While she shed tears from pity, Zeon was examining the walls of the survivor village.

“This is interesting.”

Sand had no cohesion.

Naturally, if one dug beneath it, it would flow down or collapse.

Unless it was a place made of sandstone, like Steel Fortress.

But this place was not a sandstone region.

It was made purely of sand.

Naturally, making an underground space like this should have been impossible. And yet these people had created a livable space inside soft sand.

Zeon was curious about that secret.

Thump, thump!

When he tapped the wall, a solid resonance came from the sand.

It clearly looked like sand on the outside, yet it had hardened. That was why the village had been able to endure without collapsing.

“It seems they had a special method for hardening sand.”

“Why does that matter?”

Briel, who had barely composed herself, asked with a puzzled expression.

“Think about it. What’s Neo Seoul’s biggest problem?”

“Aren’t there too many?”

“There are. But among them, the biggest problem is that people’s living space is desperately lacking. They need to raise buildings for people to move in, but they don’t have enough building materials.”

“Ah!”

“Stone can be mined from the existing Mana Stone Mine, but it’s nowhere near enough. There’s also not enough land to build on, but with no materials either, new buildings have stopped going up at some point. But what if we could easily harden sand and build structures?”

“Ah!”

“I don’t know about Neo Seoul, but outside the slums, there’s enough space to build houses. There, the one thing they have too much of is land. Then even if survivors came, we could give them enough homes.”

Only Neo Seoul dismissed the slums as the slums. To those surviving barehanded in the desert, even that place was something they would be grateful for.

Once they were in the slums, they did not have to worry about monster attacks.

That was because Neo Seoul’s anti-monster force protected them. So they would not have to dig into the ground and hide like this.

“It’s a shame. Someone who knew the secret to hardening sand could’ve been treated very well even in Neo Seoul.”

“Isn’t it strange?”

“What is?”

At Briel’s sudden words, Zeon looked at her.

“If this was a village, then of course there should’ve been young people or children too, right? But the bodies here are all old people. Where did the others go?”

“That’s true!”

At Briel’s question, Zeon felt his mind snap awake.

Because Scavengers had attacked, he had naturally thought they had killed everyone. But there was no rule saying Scavengers always killed everyone.

If they were young adults or children, they could have kidnapped them and sold them somewhere else.

Briel said,

“They took them, didn’t they?”

“They probably did.”

“What are you going to do?”

Briel asked while watching Zeon’s expression.

“We have to save them.”

“Really?”

“If we didn’t know, that would be one thing. But now that we know, we can’t just pass by.”

The desert had its own way of surviving.

A cruel law of survival unimaginable in a civilized world like Neo Seoul.

Zeon did not deny that law.

It was only natural for the strong to devour the weak and survive.

Even if that violated human morality.

That was the kind of era it was.

A barbaric era where everything was lacking.

The very existence of an ultra-advanced civilization like Neo Seoul in such an era was almost a cheat.

But even a place like Neo Seoul could not exert its influence widely.

That was how hostile Earth’s current environment was toward humanity and living creatures.

In such a harsh environment, it was impossible to protect everyone.

No matter how extraordinary Zeon’s abilities were.

That was reality. So Zeon did not think of saving every person scattered across the desert, struggling to survive.

But his emotions were not so dried up that he could indifferently walk past something that had happened where he was.

Zeon, Briel, and Gaia first came outside.

In the meantime, the world had grown dark.

The sun had set, and night had fallen.

“We’ll track them as soon as the sun rises tomorrow.”

“Not right away?”

“It’s dark, so it’ll be hard to find their traces. We might search the wrong place. It’s better to track them once daylight comes.”

“Ah! That makes sense.”

Briel nodded.

In the desert, no one could avoid Zeon’s tracking.

Even if they were Scavengers who had lived their entire lives in the desert.

Zeon and Briel settled down a short distance away from the survivor village and rested.

Normally, Briel would have been chattering excitedly, but perhaps because her heart felt heavy from the tragedy in the survivor village, she remained silent.

Squee!

Gaia comforted Briel.

Briel silently hugged Gaia tightly.

---

Men wearing turbans around their heads and white robes called deshada sat gathered in the middle of the desert, tearing into meat.

Crunch! Crunch!

The men, greedily tearing at the meat with oil staining their hands, were the Helbrin Mercenary Corps.

They called themselves a mercenary corps, but in truth, they were no different from Scavengers.

They wandered the desert, attacking survivor villages or carrying out missions at someone’s request.

The Captain of the Helbrin Mercenary Corps was Hassim, who sat in the center.

Hassim was a man in his early fifties.

As befitted someone of Arab descent, his skin was dark, and he had grown a stylish mustache.

His eyebrows were thick and bushy like pine caterpillars, while his eyelids were sunken deep, giving him a very intense impression.

Gnawing on a bone, Hassim said,

“This haul is poor. We robbed beggars.”

His gaze turned toward a place where about a dozen people were tied together with rope and crouching.

They were the survivors of the survivor village they had attacked this time.

If they had been ill and old, he would have killed them all, but they were still young and lively enough, so he had kidnapped them.

The oldest looked to be in his early thirties, and the youngest child looked about seven.

All of them were trembling in terror.

They had been living peacefully just that morning.

Although everything was lacking, they had still banded together and survived in the desert.

They had thought today would be another day like that. But somehow, the Helbrin Mercenary Corps had found out, attacked, killed the old people, and kidnapped them.

There had been two Awakened in the survivor village.

The oldest elder in the village had been one of them, and the other was a man in his early thirties.

The elder had been a Grade D martial-type Awakened.

In his youth, he had been quite strong, but with age and illness, he had weakened.

The elder, who had been the village’s reliable guardian, had lost his life brutally to Hassim’s blade.

The captured Awakened was a magic-type Awakened.

But not every magic-type Awakened possessed combat ability.

The man was a Grade F alchemist.

If he had been in Neo Seoul, he would have somehow developed his ability, but in the empty desert, his ability had almost no use.

He needed materials to study alchemy and improve his skill, but he could not obtain them at all, so he had stagnated.

The result he had barely managed to create with the materials he did not have was the sand hardener.

Thanks to the sand hardener he had made, the survivor village had endured without collapsing.

‘What good does that do? I couldn’t protect the village.’

When the Helbrin Mercenary Corps attacked, he had hidden in a corner, trembling, and watched the villagers die.

After all the slaughter finally ended, he was dragged here with the other survivors.

“Ghk!”

“Hic!”

The people captured with him sobbed.

No matter how hard they tried to hold back their tears, they could not stop them from escaping.

They were people who had hidden underground because they feared monsters and Scavengers. For safety, they had chosen a life less than human, but the result had been this miserable.

They did not know what kind of even more miserable life awaited them from now on, so their fear could only grow greater.

At that moment, Hassim threw away the bone he had been holding and said,

“Ptooey! Too tough to eat.”

“That’s monster meat for you.”

The subordinate beside him answered with a grimace.

That was because the meat in his mouth was so tough he could barely chew it.

Hassim’s gaze turned toward the captured people.

His eyes did not look at humans, but at cattle and pigs.

“Should we just butcher one?”

“Hehe! Shall we?”

The subordinate forced down the monster meat, which was tough as a tire, and answered.

It was certain that tender human meat tasted better than tough monster meat.

They already knew the taste of human flesh.

At Hassim’s words, his subordinates’ eyes gleamed.

One of the subordinates rose while pulling out a large knife.

“I’ll butcher one.”

The village survivors trembled at their conversation.

Squeeeee!

Suddenly, a high-frequency sound burst from Hassim’s necklace.

Hassim raised his hand and stopped his subordinate.

“Wait a moment.”

“Yes!”

The subordinate put away his knife with a regretful expression.

When Hassim infused mana into the necklace, someone’s voice could be heard.

—Captain! It’s Etli.

Etli’s voice flowed from the necklace.

It was not an ordinary necklace, but an item discovered in a dungeon.

It was a communication that had come from hundreds of kilometers away.

It was the only unique item in the world, one that perfectly solved the communication disruption even Neo Seoul had failed to resolve.

“Right! What happened with the job you entered Neo Seoul for?”

—The Spider Queen asked us to secure only one hundred slaves within ten days.

“The survivor villages have dried up, and she wants a hundred? You accepted that?”

Hassim’s voice turned cold. Etli hurriedly spoke.

—She said she’d pay enough......

“What payment?”

—Weapons made by Neo Seoul.

“Then that changes things.”

Hassim’s eyes gleamed with madness.

Because Steel Fortress was sucking in survivors, Scavengers like him had been sitting around sucking their fingers lately.

If he obtained the weapons used by Neo Seoul, he might be able to attack Steel Fortress, the thorn in his eye.

Hassim cut off the communication and said to his subordinate,

“From now on, treat the slaves carefully. They’ll all turn into weapons.”